LCI Chief Updates The Plan

After watching New Haven’s neighborhoods evolve from every perspective, Arlevia Samuel is now in charge of adapting the ​“livability” quest to a new era.

Samuel is in her third year running city government’s anti-blight and neighborhood development agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). She grew up in the Brookside projects, then helped create a new version of public housing there as a Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) official; she has managed private apartment complexes as well as public-housing complexes, sold real estate, handled tax credit financing.

Meanwhile, over all those years, LCI has changed with changing times.

It began in 1996 as a response to population loss amid spreading blight: the flight of 7,600 residents in just five years brought the population down to 122,000, which the number of vacant buildings soared to 786. So LCI was created with a ​“let’s‑get-small” approach of improving neighborhoods for the people who chose to stay: Knocking down unwanted buildings, selling sliver lots to neighborhoods for expanded lawns and parking or creating community gardens there.

Then the fortunes of small ​“ed and meds” cities turned around, fueled by new investment, vibrant cultural scenes and immigration. Speculators scooped up abandoned properties. Now LCI is pushing people to build houses or ​“ADUSs” on those lots, building housing for working-family owner-occupants, tackling an affordable housing crisis, chasing after a new generation of code-violating megalandlords. 

In her first two years as LCI’s executive director, Samuel has increased the staff from 42 to 52. Her agency just finished spending $865,000 in federal pandemic-relief aid to help renters stave off eviction. It used other pandemic-relief funds to start a program to give lower-income renters up to $5,000 to cover two-month security deposits and $1,500 in utility deposits through 2026; so far 130 applications have come in, with 60 processed and another 30 ​“in the pipeline,” Samuel said during a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Meanwhile, LCI is in the process of creating a database of all available affordable apartments in Greater New Haven. Once it’s up, LCI plans as well to list potential renters who qualify for subsidized units, to help make the match.

It’s also chasing after code violators, with limited resources. Its 12 inspectors are responsible for inspecting all 9,000 or so mutilfamily rentals under the city’s licensing program every one to three years (depending on their track record) and all federal Section 8‑subsidized rentals as well as following up on some 3,200 annual code violation complaints. Samuel said the agency has increased from 25 to 50 percent the number of units it will inspect in multifamily complexes, with the goal of getting all the way to 100 percent. ​“The landlords are forced to pay for every unit. We should go into every unit. You can go into 10 units of a 30-unit building, and there’s no guarantee they are representative” of the entire building, she reasoned. Meeting that goal will involve hiring more inspectors.

As LCI helps bring landlords to court for code violations, Samuel has noticed a new trend: ​“an increase in local investors, smaller people who are vying to buy properties. Some of those megalandlords have shifted their focus to trying to dispose of properties. They want to do different things. They kind of got tired dealing with us. Because while they buy [buildings], we can enforce that they take care of them.”

As she navigates changing times, Samuel looks back wistfully to her own childhood at the pre-rebuilt Brookside and the surrounding West Rock public-housing developments — and sees values worth preserving and pursuing.

“It was prettier. It was a community. Everyone was a big family. Everyone knew each other. We all supported each other,” she recalled.

“We had our fields we played in. We all met up from Brookside, Rockview, Westville Manor.

“Back then it was OK to sit on your porch and talk to your neighbor. Now you sit out in your front yard and someone’s calling the cops or LCI on you. Times have definitely changed.”

Click on the video at the top of the story to watch the full conversation with LCI Executive Director Arlevia Samuel on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe to ​“Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.