Nora Grace-Flood photo
The Lamberton encampment, now cleared by the state.
Between ten and twenty people living under a Lamberton Street bridge by the Metro-North train tracks in the Hill were sent packing Monday morning after the state declared the site unsafe and cleared the campers’ belongings.
Nora Grace-Flood Photo
An encampment member rolls up his mattress as the bulldozers move in.
By 6:30 in the morning, members of the Unhoused Community Activists Team (U‑ACT) had arrived on scene to protest the anticipated clear-out near the train tracks and Ella T. Grasso Boulevard on state-owned land. State, New Haven, and MTA cops showed up an hour later to oversee the movement of camp members away from the overpass.
They were joined by a crew of around ten representatives from the state Department of Transportation, officials from the city’s Department of Community Resilience, and several outreach workers from New Haven’s non-cop crisis response team COMPASS, the Connecticut Mental Health Center, and Columbus House, among other service providers.
“Our goal here is to help re-home the individuals before we clear everything that’s down here,” Kafi Rouse, a spokesperson for the state DOT, told the Independent as bulldozers, loading trucks, and cop cars paraded down a dirt pathway under the overpass. She said the DOT became aware of the encampment in February when a man named Victor Vivar, who had been living by the bridge, was struck and killed on the train tracks (view here a short documentary by U‑ACT member Robert Menefee about a vigil held for Vivar). After that, Rouse said, “we deemed that it’s not safe.”
The state had posted signs warning of the eviction 10 days prior to Monday’s clearing.
DOT Spokesperson Kafi Rouse: "Our primary goal is safety."
“It’s a very difficult situation, we don’t wanna displace people but we want people safe,” city Director of Community Resilience Carlos Sosa Lombardo told the Independent. He said he was on site Monday on behalf of the city to show the state that “we support what they’re doing,” while “making sure people are treated with dignity, humanity, and connected with resources.”
He said the state waited for half a year to take action against the encampment because the city pushed for more time to arrange outreach for those living off Lamberton and to create alternative spaces for affected individuals to find shelter.
Back in March, the city dismantled a three-year-old “tent city” off Ella Grasso Boulevard that saw around ten people displaced. More recently, the state has been taking local action, as witnessed during the Lamberton Street eviction and a July crackdown against people without housing sleeping inside and around Union Station. In response to a growing homelessness crisis, Mayor Justin Elicker noted his administration has launched a new 50-person shelter in the Hill neighborhood and are pursuing plans to turn the Days Inn hotel on Foxon Boulevard into New Haven’s first non-congregate shelter this winter.
Most of those impacted by Monday’s move-out, however, refused those offers for shelter.
Over the course of the morning, members of the encampment, some of whom had lived in the community for up to two years, rushed to make room in cramped cars and boxes for whatever necessities they planned to carry where they wound up next. By around 10 a.m., cops checked each tent to make sure everyone had evacuated, then gave the go-ahead to heavy equipment operators to start dumping what was left: A toy rocking horse, bicycles, mattresses, chairs, grills.
Cotto's cart of goods to go.
MaryAnne Cotto moves her belongings with the help of COMPASS crew.
“I was doing good, but now it’s this again,” said MaryAnne Cotto, who moved to Lamberton Street after another encampment where she was staying off Ella Grasso Boulevard was shut down in March.
“It’s hard. I don’t like it. I just wanna have my spot, and that’s it,” she said of the back-to-back displacements. Asked whether she’d consider moving to a shelter, she said, “I’ve done it before and I don’t wanna go back. I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m a grown woman, what do I need rules for?”
Clutching a bag of Corn Nuts and a cigarette, she shoved her sheets, a phone charger, and pillows, including a unicorn plushie, into a shopping cart. “My bed, my dresser, my couch — all the things that make this place feel like home — can’t come with me.”
Nearby, a couple named Ricky and Veronica debated their next steps.
“We literally come here at 3 in the morning and leave at 6 in the morning,” Veronica said. “At the shelter you’re only allowed there seven to seven, you can’t bring none of your stuff.”
“Then, nah!” replied her boyfriend, Ricky.
The trio ultimately followed the majority of remaining residents for a five minute walk around the corner to Amistad House, a Catholic Worker home with an open backyard where people struggling to find or afford housing can pitch a tent.
Spouses Ivan and Maria Develle, who’d been living in the encampment for just three months, lamented the situation as they marched towards Amistad.
“It’s a friendship community over there,” said Ivan Develle, who moved to Connecticut in 2001 from San Juan, Puerto Rico. “There’s nobody judging you, nobody pointing at you; that’s the problem right now in the world. There are people judging you because you fall one time, you fall a couple times.”
He discovered the encampment through friends after his dwindling income cost him and his wife their apartment. His usual 40-hour week was shrunk to part-time after his employer sought to distribute fewer hours across more employees, which Develle described as a “way to create competition, a race to cut costs.”
Jose Luna makes a phone call to help figure out his next steps Monday.
Two-year-old camp resident Ines Gutierrez: On the look-out for an apartment.
Another man, Jose Luna, said he “didn’t care” to leave the encampment, where he’d stayed with seven of his family members — including his ex-wife, siblings, and nephews — for the past eight months. His family moved from Mexico to the states nearly 20 years ago, he said, but encountered housing instability this year as the 45-year-old stepped back from work due to increasing chronic pains.
Luna said getting through the day under such circumstances with his family had been hard, and he was alright with living somewhere new on his own — but that he refused to move into a shelter because he had to continue caring for a gray cat he’d found abandoned at the encampment when he arrived last year.
While those individuals found their way to Amistad House, Carlos Sosa Lombardo, meanwhile, reported that four or five others had expressed interest in taking up the city’s offer of shelter beds.
Luz Catarineau welcomes new residents to Amistad House: “Right now we do what we can and work with what we have."
By mid-morning, a large group lined up along Rosette Street, hoping for a chance to fit in at Amistad.
“There’s coffee, there’s ice waters, there’s bagels,” Luz Catarineau, who lives in and runs the property, told people as they pulled up with carts of clothes, blankets, and essentials. Catarineau estimated that ten new people joined the Amistad community on Monday — as those individuals showed up, extant residents began downsizing their tents to make space in the already brimming backyard.
“Right now we do what we can and work with what we have,” Catarineau said.
What are the rules that folks complain about the most at shelters? Seems like they don’t want to be treated like children which is reasonable. Would loosening those rules alleviate the encampment problem? Has anyone dug in on this and made any progress or have the shelter rules at Columbus house etc effectively stayed the same?