Newhallville Boards The Transition Express

Three Newhallville advocates rode a school bus from Lincoln Bassett to High School in the Community — not to attend classes, but to join 300 fellow city residents looking to have their voices heard and earn ​“a seat at the table” with the new incoming mayoral administration.

Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris, Secretary Cynthia Spears, and Treasurer Nina Fawcett boarded the long, yellow First Student bus Sunday afternoon at the corner of Butler Street and Lilac Street.

With the help of Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn, the team had rented the bus to ferry neighbors to and from the second meeting of Mayor-Elect Justin Elicker’s transition team in the cafeteria of High School in the Community at 175 Water St. in Wooster Square.

Around a dozen other Newhallville neighbors and management team regulars made it to the transition team meeting via their own rides.

Around 300 New Haveners turned out to the meeting in total — a full 100 more than had shown up to the bustling first transition team brainstorming session in mid-November.

Facilitated by Kia Levey-Burden and Elizabeth Nearing, Sunday afternoon’s meeting saw attendees break out into a dozen small groups to discuss a broad range of local hot-button topics such as housing, economic development, the environment, education, public safety, and the arts — all over the course of two hours.

Transition Team Co-Chair Sarah Miller said all of the ideas and notes collected at the meeting will be incorporated into a final mayoral transition document, to be published soon after Elicker takes office on Jan. 1, that will outline the mayor-elect’s policy priorities for his administration’s first 100 days.

“The goal of this process is that we get input from so many people,” Elicker said at the start of the meeting. ​“As many people as we possibly can from throughout the community. This is one of the ways that we’re doing that.” The transition team has also collected responses through an online survey, email recommendations, and in-person coffee hours.

“This process is not just about today, but about many, many day into the future.”

On the bus on the way to the meeting, Harris stressed that the team had chartered the shared transit and had encouraged neighbors to turn out Sunday for a simple reason: ​“We need to make sure that we’re at the table even when it’s uncomfortable for us to be there.”

A member of Elicker’s transition team herself, Harris said she felt like she was one of the few Mayor Toni Harp supporters in the room during the last transition meeting. She praised Elicker for reaching out to the neighborhood, for showing up to their latest management team meeting, for being open to hearing directly from a neighborhood that overwhelmingly supported Harp (though not by as much as it did in 2013).

“I just really see this as an opportunity to voice who we are, where we want to go, and what we’re not going to stand for anymore,” Harris said.

The Harp administration has treated Newhallville well, she said. ​“I believe that Justin understands that we don’t want to go back to where we were. I believe he has a call to action to not leave people behind.”

“We’re Praying For Him”

Spears (pictured), a Newhallville native, Clifford Beers social worker, and Huntington Street resident, said she took time out of her Sunday afternoon to ride the bus down to Wooster Square and participate in the mayoral transition team meeting for exactly the same reason as Harris.

“I want to be able to make sure that Newhallvile has some input,” she said. ​“I think it’s good to form a relationship with the mayor, and to show that we’re interested in working together.”

She said she sees the top issue facing the neighborhood and the city as a whole right now is the dearth of safe, stable, affordable housing. The city also needs more homeless shelter beds and more homeless warming centers, she said.

“Perhaps if they could find a way to get federal funds to build affordable housing,” she added, then the many vacant lots that plague Newhallville could be put to better use.

She praised the mayor-elect for convening the transition team and encouraging such a wide range of public participation.

“He makes us feel as if he’s concerned about how we feel,” Spears said. ​“We can’t expect him to create miracles, but he’s trying.”

Fawcett (pictured at right, with Jayuan Carter), who runs her own financial accounting business and also lives on Huntington Street, said she sees these transition team meetings as akin to voting — if you come out and participate, you can influence the outcome. ​“If you don’t say what you want, then you can’t complain about what happens. You’ve got to put your opinion in.”

“What I would like to see is real transparency,” she continued.

Not just in regards to city credit card payments and a municipal online check register that documents all city spending, but in regards to why certain contracts are awarded to certain vendors.

“What are these contracts really doing?” she asked. ​“They’re all written in double- and triple-speak” and are often too cumbersome and too needlessly complex for many small local businesses to qualify for.

City government needs to be more efficient and accessible, she said. How does one get there? She’s not exactly sure. But someone’s got to try.

Harris (pictured) runs the Harris and Tucker School preschool and childcare center on Newhall Street and is the founder of the One City initiative, which brought people from all neighborhoods together for a summer full of events.

As the bus wound its way over to Amistad High School on Dixwell Avenue and then over to ConnCAT at Science Park before heading down to Wooster Square, Harris said her top issue for the neighborhood is inclusive economic development.

“The goal is development without displacement,” she said.

The neighborhood is on the cusp of transformation, she said, with the massive 201 Munson project in the works and the Yale-heavy lab spaces at Science Park always expanding.

She said she would like to see the city’s zoning code updated to allow for Newhallville homeowners to leverage their own skills and assets into small businesses — by turning their home kitchen into a small commercial cooking and catering hub, for example.

“In Newhallville, we have a plethora of people with so much talent,” she said. ​“How do we formalize that?”

She said she’d like to see locally owned businesses up and down Dixwell Avenue and Shelton Avenue. The neighborhood needs youth centers, park benches, more robust and comprehensive internet access. She added that she has applied for Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to set up ​“One City” hubs in the neighborhood’s many vacant lots with the goal of converting blighted and empty space into places for gardening, afterschool activities, job training, and safe, positive hangout spots.

“Justin has a lot of work before him,” she said about the mayor-elect’s stated goal of serving not just downtown but every neighborhood’s needs. ​“We’re praying for him.”

“They Don’t Fix Things Up”

After arriving at HSC, Harris, Fawcett, and Spears met up with a handful of other Newhallville management team regulars, including Sherpard Street blockwatch captain Addie Kimbrough, management team Co-Chair Shirley Lawrence, Sherman Parkway resident Lillie Chambers, and Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winter. They divided themselves up amongst the cafeteria’s many circular tables.

After a late start and 20 minutes of introductions, the event featured an initial 40-minute session that saw the audience divided up into two large groups. One focused on economic development, the other on education. The attendees spent the rest of the meeting in smaller focus groups.

Fawcett and Spears sat in on the finance and budget group. Harris went to the one on community engagement. And Lawrence found a seat at the one on housing and health, as facilitated by Housing Authority of New Haven/Elm City Communities Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton, who is also a member of Elicker’s transition team.

DuBois-Walton (pictured above, standing) kicked off the discussion by handing out a 13-point list of housing policy priorities that the transition team had put together based on the previous community brainstorming session and other conversations amongst themselves and concerned city residents.

The recommendations on that list included:

• Address health and the social determinants of health as they relate to safe and affordable housing options;
• Work to develop housing options across the full range of affordability and market rate;
• Create 5,500 more affordable units in New Haven and 2,000 units in the surrounding towns;
• Establish a moratorium on the development of market-rate housing that includes no affordable housing component;
• Create resident informed processes that promote inclusive community involvement in community planning and development;
• Increase LCI’s ability to engage property owners, conduct inspections, issue licenses, and conduct code enforcement by appropriately staffing and resourcing the effort.
• Create a lead-safe city by becoming a model city for the reduction of lead hazards in city housing stock;
• Develop a registry system for absentee landlords and increase oversight to ensure responsiveness to tenant concerns;
• Appoint senior city staff to work on and advocate for regional investment in affordable housing to alleviate the strain on city resources and create equity for families needing affordable housing;
• Reform Livable City Initiative to focus on support to property owners and code enforcement and reduce the emphasis on a housing development or restructure and separate these;
• Create a searchable online database of landlord registry, property code violations, inspections and an online system to file housing code complaints;
• Shift allocation of CDBG and other federal dollars to incentivize the development of affordable housing options and preservation of affordable housing throughout the city;
• Engage anchor institutions to revamp and expand homeownership programs (e.g. Yale University, and others).

“I’m a property owner,” said Amity resident Andrea Atkinson (pictured, with the Hill’s Ann Boyd), ​“and I see that there are a lot of absentee landlords that come into our neighborhoods” and buy up a lot of the privately-owned housing stock.

Neighbors complain about the lack of maintenance of those properties, she said. But, from what she can see, those landlords are rarely ticketed or given violations by city housing code inspectors.

“There needs to be some enforcement,” she said. ​“There needs to be increased oversight.”

Wooster Square resident and New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell (pictured at right, with local architect Jonathan Hopkins) suggested that the city come up with some way to prevent properties from ​“falling into private equity hands” entirely.

“Prevent it from happening,” she continued, ​“and make sure it goes into homeowners’ hands” instead.

Myra Smith, an organizer with Mothers and Others for Justice and the Room for All Coalition, called out by name the large landlords she sees gobbling up single-family, two-family, and three-family houses in predominantly working-class, African-American neighborhoods like Newhallville.

“Companies like Mandy and Pike go unchecked,” she said. They buy up properties, she said, get approvals from Section 8 housing inspectors, and then fail to keep those buildings up to code.

“They don’t fix things up,” she said, ​“and that causes stress.”

Westville landlord Rebecca Weiner (pictured) said that she has experienced firsthand a related ​“cancer” in the city’s housing market: corrupt third-party contracted inspectors who ask for bribes in exchange for various housing safety and condition approvals.

“I have never had LCI solicit a bribe,” she said. But ​“I have had some of the subcontractors” do exactly that.

Weiner added that the city’s zoning code should be amended to encourage the development of more affordable housing.

Josh Glaab (pictured) said he moved to New Haven from Boulder, Colorado, after his former home’s housing market was bought and built up by upscale developers, driving real estate values through the roof and pushing many longtime residents out of the city.

“We currently evaluate cities based on housing prices,” he said. A much better metric of citywide economic health would be the percentage of individuals who own their own properties, he continued.

“If you own your own home you should be paying significantly less in property taxes” then big absentee landlords, he said.

By the end of the breakout session, DuBois-Walton distilled the group’s conversation into the following one-sentence recommendation: ​“Increased management of the housing development in this city that really supports local ownership and home ownership, and that regulates some of these mega-agencies that are taking a lot of properties, and increased enforcement in general.”

As she put on her winter coat and prepared to head out into the late-afternoon winter chill, Harris (pictured) said the two-hour session had been constructive — but had gone by too quickly to engage in as deep and detailed a conversation about policy proposals as she would have liked.

She said she was proud that the management team turned out at least a dozen Newhallville residents to the transition team gathering. ​“We doubled our turnout,” she said with a smile.

“I think it went very well,” Fawcett said about the meeting. She too noted how the time flew by. The question now, she said, is how these recommendations will actually be put into practice.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the beginning of Sunday’s meeting.