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 movement was the direct result of 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 lien-discharge proceeding, because that defense is available only in a municipal civil action to recover relocation expenses. The court therefore reversed and directed denial of the application to discharge the lien. Justice Ecker concurred in the result but would have found the statutory scheme ambiguous and relied on legislative history and the more plausible statutory construction.