PPC Realty, LLC v. Hartford

Summary

The court held that tenants displaced after a fire became uninhabitable and the city ordered them to vacate were displaced persons because their displacement directly resulted from municipal code enforcement, regardless of who caused the fire. It also held that the landlord could not use the statutory affirmative defense concerning lack of fault to invalidate a lien in a proceeding to discharge the lien, because that defense is available only in a civil action brought to recover relocation payments. The judgment was reversed and the trial court was directed to deny the application to discharge the lien. Justice Ecker, concurring, agreed with the result but would have treated the statutory scheme as ambiguous and relied on legislative history to resolve the ambiguity.