New Haven Independent

Tracey was in beaming form for the cameras at a photo op at her new home on Frances Hunter Drive, a new street of homes also known as Eaton Row built with working- and middle-class New Haveners in mind. The street is a block from the new Yale police substation and the attractive Monterey Homes which replaced the demolished Elm Haven housing project.

Tracey, a native of Jamaica, has worked at Yale for 23 years. Her unofficial title is the Berkeley “Bouncer.” She checks in students at Yale’s Berkeley College Dining Hall, the most popular eating spot on campus because it gets its food from Yale’s organic “sustainable food” garden on Edwards Street. That means students from other residential colleges regularly try to cajole their way in. “I am politely rude. I turn them away politely,” she says. “You can’t let everyone in.”

Yale’s New Haven Homebuyer Program is designed to let a lot more people in, to the club of homeownership. Of all Yale’s efforts to win good p.r. in New Haven, the homebuyer program has earned probably the most goodwill even among citydwellers often critical of the university. The program stabilizes neighborhoods by enabling Yale workers to buy rather than rent, by giving them $2,000 a year for ten years plus $5,000 up front to help with the downpayment. Unlike grander community-development programs, this one built on the idea of strengthening blocks, and families, one at a time with modest amounts of money that could make the difference in being able to buy a home. A similar new modest community with great potential is Yale’s urban teaching program; it offers free tuition plus $18,000 for aspiring teachers to earn a master’s and teacher certification in return for a promise to teach in city public schools for at least three years.

The one criticism of the homebuyer program was that the program didn’t target enough poorer areas. So Yale expanded it this year to all Empowerment Zone neighborhoods. And it upped the amount of money offered to employees buying in Dixwell, the neighborhood closest to campus. That has helped blue-collar workers like Annette Tracey stake their claim to the newly-built Frances Hunter Drive. Annette Tracey and her Yale neighbors will each receive $30,000 over 10 years.

Tracey’s new home—which happens to be directly behind the Bristol Street home of another Yale employee, James Bradley, who made use of the program—has four bedrooms. And she has no kids. She does have lots of nieces and nephews; they’re moving in soon.