Thomas Breen photo
Anthony Geritano, Jr. and Hari Venu: "I wish you and I had met a few years ago."
Dixwell alder-hopeful Anthony Geritano, Jr. didn’t get Hari Venu to sign his petition to appear on the Democratic primary ballot this September.
But the recent Yale graduate with papers in hand did get a crash course from the recent Yale PhD who answered the door on just how persistent the town-gown divide remains — and got the chance to make his own pitch on what to do about it.
Geritano, 26, is seeking to challenge incumbent Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison to represent Ward 22 on the Board of Alders. He’s currently trying to collect 40 signatures from registered Democrats in Ward 22 to get his name on the Sept. 12 Democratic primary ballot.
He needs to collect those signatures because the local Democratic Party endorsed Morrison for another term in local legislative office during its July 25 convention. That means she’s guaranteed a spot on the primary ballot — if there winds up being a primary in the Ward 22 race, which depends on whether or not Geritano can collect enough valid signatures by Aug. 9.
Click here to read more about Morrison’s bid for reelection, as the New Haven native and social worker seeks another two-year term in office alongside a slate of fellow Newhallville-Dixwell alder candidates. Morrison is running on such accomplishments as the successful rebirth of the Q House community center, and on campaign promises to keep improving her home neighborhood, specifically for youth and seniors.
Ward 22's post-redistricting boundaries.
Geritano wasn’t able to convince Venu to put pen to paper to support his bid for primary ballot access on Wednesday on Winchester Avenue, but not because Venu didn’t like the alder candidate.
Rather, Venu didn’t sign because he’s not a U.S. citizen and therefore can’t vote in New Haven. A native of southern India, he just finished his PhD in ecology at the Yale School of the Environment and is about to move to Panama for a fellowship.
Venu nevertheless told Geritano all about his struggles to find and build meaningful relationships outside of the ivory tower during his past nine years in the city.
“I mean, there’s no community here,” Venu said. “Yale is different. New Haven is different. I’ve tried to mingle with the outer community. They hate Yale. There’s a huge discord between the community and Yale.” Venu said he himself isn’t rich. He came to Yale was only because his PhD program was fully funded.
For his nearly decade-long stint in New Haven, he has time and again been unsuccessful in comfortably having one foot planted in the world of the university and one in the world of the surrounding city. He said he’s found it particularly difficult to find landlords who will rent to him and treat him with respect as an international student. He said many of his friends who are South Asian or African have experienced the same type of housing discrimination.
“I didn’t expect this lack of a community feeling in any geographic area,” Venu said. But that has been his experience of New Haven.
“I wish you and I had met a few years ago,” Geritano said. Because then he could have helped introduce Venu to the community-rich parts of the city he has so come to love as someone who came to New Haven to be an undergraduate at Yale, and who has stuck around after graduating because of how deeply rooted he feels here.
Geritano said he supports creating street-by-street tenants unions, to create connections between renters while also boosting their collective power to try to hold landlords accountable for poor maintenance and high rents. He spoke about how poorly he thinks city government communicates with residents today about major developments in their neighborhoods, and pledged to work hard if elected to get the word out early and often to constituents about projects that could seriously impact Dixwell and elsewhere. And he spoke about how meaningful his participation in Dixwell Community Management Team meetings has been for his own engagement with New Haven life outside of Yale.
Dixwell CMT Chair Crystal Gooding, who is supporting Geritano, holding up a flyer for Aug. 12's "Dixwell Neighborhood Day" event.
Geritano also extended a personal invitation to Venu to attend a Dixwell Neighborhood Day fest at Scantlebury Park on Aug. 12 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“Let’s try to give you at least one good sendoff” before Venu leaves New Haven for good next month, Geritano said. Venu thanked him and said he’d consider attending.
He also said he doesn’t have the answers to any of the town-gown divide he sees around him. All he can try to do is articulate the problem as he experiences it. “If I know my neighbor,” Venu said, “that’d be great.”
"Anything In New Haven You Think Needs To Be Changed?"
On Winchester Ave, encouraging Victoria to change her voter registration to New Haven.
That dilemma, of having fruitful conversations with Yale affiliates who were not able to sign on to Geritano’s aldermanic-challenge petition because they are not registered New Haven voters, came up again and again at the doors on Winchester Avenue in the shadow of Yale’s two new-ish undergraduate colleges.
It also sits at the center of the first-time run for office by Geritano, himself a recent Yale grad, who is centering his campaign in part on trying to “stop Yale’s gentrification of Dixwell” while also bringing together disparate communities that converge head on in Ward 22.
Geritano is a newer member of the Dixwell community.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Geritano has lived on Winchester Avenue since graduating from Yale in 2020 with a joint degree in biology and history.
After a stint running Covid tests for Sema4 in Branford during the height of the pandemic, Geritano now works remotely at his Winchester Avenue apartment as a technical application specialist for the Boston-based biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific.
On Wednesday afternoon, he canvassed his block of Winchester between Sachem and Webster Streets before knocking on the doors of Monterey Place further to the west on Webster.
Most of the people who answered the doors of Winchester’s three-family homes were Yale affiliates unable to vote in New Haven elections, and therefore unable to sign Geritano’s primary-ballot-access petition.
A Yale undergraduate named Victoria said shes still registered to vote in her home city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She took a campaign flyer from Geritano and said she’d think about whether or not to change her voter registration to New Haven.
“Is there anything in New Haven you think needs to be changed?” he asked.
“I’ve mostly just lived on campus for the past two years,” she replied.
“Yale is part of New Haven,” Geritano said, as he urged her to change her registration so she could vote locally.
Before he left, he had one more question for Victoria. “Are you on the women’s rugby team?” Yes, she said. Geritano said he thought he recognized her from his own membership in the New Haven Old Black Rugby Football Club, where he serves as secretary.
At an adjacent Winchester Avenue home’s door, Naveen Baweja (pictured above) said he too is not a New Haven voter — and will be leaving soon for California after moving to New Haven for a few months to be near his son as he worked an internship.
Is there anything about New Haven that could be better? Geritano asked.
“Some of the streets are not really well maintained,” Baweja replied. There’s too much trash in the streets, and cars drive too quickly.
Geritano was able to get a petition signature from Jerry Tureck (pictured above), who lives a few houses away from Geritano’s apartment — and is also Geritano’s landlord.
He’s a “great” tenant, Tureck said with praise, and is also an engaged and present member of the Dixwell community. His biggest concern with the neighborhood, and the city at large? “Safety issues,” Tureck replied. “I think it’s a management issue.”
Geritano had more petition luck at Monterey Place, where he convinced Elizabeth Miller (pictured above) to sign on to help him try to get on the ballot.
Miller’s biggest concerns with the area? She and her friends pointed to the intersection of Webster and Ashmun, just a few feet away from where they were sitting. Car traffic is just out of control. “Can we get a light?” Or a speed bump?
After an hour and 20 minutes of doorknocking and conversations with residents on Wednseday, Geritano had gathered only two signatures — bumping him up from 9 to 12. He texted the Independent on Thursday morning to say that he now had 13. He reiterated that he’s not worried about getting the needed 40 signatures by Aug. 9.
"Stop Yale's Gentrification Of Dixwell"
Geritano’s campaign one-pager makes clear that Yale and housing are at the top of his agenda in his first-time run for local opffice.
Under a section called “Stop Yale’s Gentrification of Dixwell,” Geritano wrote, “If the university is not providing enough housing, especially affordable housing, to its entire student body, it will continue to encroach into Dixwell and other parts of the city. Yale expanded its undergraduate population with two new colleges despite not being able to house all of its students, and, in doing so, created more rental competition.”
The very next section of his platform is called “Stop the Expansion of Corporate Landlords.”
“The American dream is founded on the idea that one day people can buy a home, and begin creating generational wealth,” he wrote. “Corporate landlords are eating up every property they can get their hands on and yet, there are active complaints against the properties they already have. The idea of buying a home becomes impossible when corporate entities destroy the housing market artificially for their own ballooning profit. We ought to deny and limit sales on any number of grounds, and use the power vested in the Board of Alders by voters.”
And then, right under a section on curtailing the city’s tax abatements for new developments, Geritano’s platform has a section called. “Rent Caps and Tenant Unions.” “Rent caps are prohibited at the state level. We cannot simply impose zoning rent caps. Fine,” he wrote. “If the state will not help, it is on us to convince our state leaders why they ought to. For that, we need tenant unions. We drive the market, not the corporate landlords. Through collective bargaining and action, we can fight back. The Board of Alders should be leading the charge on behalf of the citizens of New Haven to keep rent fair and reasonable for more than just the few.”
At the doors, with Fluffy.
Geritano said that his main motivation for running for office has been his participation in the Dixwell Community Management Team, and hearing from a few neighbors that they’d like him to run because they appreciate how present and communicative he is.
He also spoke about how he was living on Winchester Avenue in a four-bedroom apartment after graduating and, when his apartment building was sold, the new landlord declined to renew his lease and then jacked up the rent from $2,000 to nearly $5,000.
He did the “landlord special,” Geritano said, painting the walls white and making other mostly cosmetic fixes. At least according to what he could see through the apartment’s online listing.
Geritano said, if elected, one of his top priorities would be promoting the creation of more tenants unions around town. He said he’s been trying to get in touch with the two already in existence. Ideally, he said, these tenants unions could run on a street-by-street basis, as opposed to landlord-by-landlord or building-by-building. That way renters in a whole bunch of, say, three-family houses on Winchester Avenue could pool their voices and paying power together when negotiating with landlords.
He also said a top priority of his would be trying to pressure Yale to build more housing for students on campus. Yale hasn’t done enough of that even as its student body has grown in recent years, he said. That has led to more and more Yale students moving north into Dixwell, increasing property values and taxes and rents along the way. If elected, he said, he’d do what he can to try to use the powers of city government to get Yale to increase its supply of campus housing.
Good Luck Anthony! Every Ward in New Haven deserves a choice at the ballot box!