Parking Chief: Homelessness At Union Station Is A Housing Problem

It sends a real message when the parking authority must step up and do the job the city government should already be doing. Why is Parking paying for/hiring social workers when we already have Community Services Administration? It isn't like what's going on at Union Station is a secret. The city is lucky to have a Hausladen to pick up the ball; too bad we don't have a few more of him.

This is the problem.
Gentrification Leads to Homelessness.

If there is a social worker hired they need to work second or third shift. There are so many outreach workers that work first shift. Problem is, the wait for permanent supportive housing is at least a year. Why? Good old supply and demand. We need deeply affordable housing and need it bad.

Creating more types of housing for the homeless population is such an obvious answer, but there also has to be more ways other than creating more housing that will actually put a legit end to the overall crisis of homelessness pretty much for good..

Jexodus116, right, but the question is how do you provide deeply affordable housing. A single person working full time at a minimum wage job can afford to pay about $750. Market rents for new construction are more than twice that. And obviously, most homeless individuals have substantially lower incomes. Sharing is an option for some low-income people. But individuals with serious mental health issues, including many of the homeless, would find it difficult to find and keep a housemate.

@Kevin McCarthy:
Exactly on point as to the crux of the problem.
The political classes sent about $150 billion to Ukraine for another proxy war while Americans remain without healthcare, without shelter, without food and without a plan to care for them.
None of this is inevitable.
The crisis has been escalating since the 1990s.
This is what the decline of a society looks like.

Houselessness in New Haven is out of control it does not help that the City of New Haven looks away from blighted houses, ones which are not kept or clean, falling apart, hoarding, trash, like the one next to the corner store at Dixwell and Henry, which was only partially condemned even though the entire structure is problematic much less how badly it is on the inside - rotting food, trash and hoarding. This building has been reported to LCI several times, and even brought to the attention of an LCI employee who lives on the same street, yet nothing happens and this is an owner occupied blighted house. Now imagine, there are over 30 of these types of non-owner occupied blighted houses, what would happen if the City flipped those and made them into temporary safe housing so people can sleep on a bed instead of a bench - but that would mean really wanting to address gentrification. This is why Doug should be running for office, but also why he won't. One can only imagine the level of corruption because City Hall is great at advertising all the words to build up hope and do absolutely nothing about it.

The housing stock in Connecticut is abysmal. A fixer upper starter home is $300,000. If milk is $4.29 a gallon, electricity, gas, heating oil prices and healthcare doubled then, plan on a wave of foreclosures. Lower and middle class families can not sustain these higher prices. Shame on the corporations that dole out millions in bonuses while starving average American households.

The stories Wendy Hamilton published on this site about her efforts to save MC were eye-opening to me. He had an open wound and the systemic damage caused by years of rough living. She knew he would not survive the winter living outside. MC had a small income that could have supporting him in subsidized housing. His addictions were limited to alcohol and cigarettes. He had no anti-social mental illness. Wendy tried for weeks, on-on-one to get him to fill out forms for assistance, make health care appointments, etc., bribing him with money, beer and cigarettes to meet with her and do those things. In spite of Wendy's heroic efforts, MC could never see beyond the next beer or cigarette, and died of exposure that winter. For a few of the homeless here, the problem may be affordability. For most, however, it's not affordability, it's their own mental illnesses and addictions that keep them on the streets. The only viable solution I see is involuntary commitments.

After the first sentence in the second paragraph, I stopped reading. How could he possibly make this comment that he’s working on it everyday? Every day that they find a new empty piece of land in New Haven, they build unaffordable, multilevel apartments none of which the homeless could ever afford unless they won the lottery! This is getting to be a joke! In New Haven it’s all talk and no action. I don’t know if I’m nuts or if they’re nuts, but something isn’t right here. Somebody’s making a lot of money out of all these buildings going up and it certainly isn’t the homeless!

I haven’t read the other comments yet, but I know that there are people here who are connected with the city and who know what’s going on and I wish they could share that with us and tell me if I’m crazy that they are really working on the homeless situation every day when I don’t see one thing being built for the homeless! What about that gigantic vacant lot across from the railroad station where the jungle was located or whatever they called it! Why are they talking about building more expensive apartments and offices and stores there when building one gigantic building there could probably solve all the homeless problems in New Haven, if the city kept up with it and didn’t let it turn out like the jungle dead, full of mold! SMH!🤦‍♂️

owen@large- the best kind of revolution would be taxing the rich individuals and corporations equitably so that everyone in our country pays their fair share, and then providing universal single payer government funded healthcare, quality childcare, quality elderly care and disability care, mental healthcare, addiction recovery care, quality pre-K-12 education, higher education, vocational training, job retraining and job placement services, basic affordable housing, mass transit, global warming mitigation and green energy measures, and a universal basic income.
There are many jobs that were lost to the industrial revolution moving out of country, and we did very little to replace those jobs for those people who did not have college degrees to replace the path to middle class status. Now we are experiencing jobs lost to robots and computers, and are facing the rise of AI replacing even more jobs, with no real plans to replace those jobs lost.
We have to create a basic minimum standard of living for every American to prevent our society’s collapse. When you have a critical mass of people unhoused and starving, they are going to rise up against those who they hold responsible for their suffering.
If we subsidize people’s ability to get the education and resources they need to improve their lives, and support the basic minimum floor for necessities like food, shelter, healthcare and taking care of very young, very old and disabled, then our society will be healthier and stronger and more productive, and less likely to fall to a revolution.

Hausladen is a gem. He has made an impact in parking authority but boy, did Elicker make a mistake when he relegated him to the wall. We need him in Traffic and Parking or Economic Development.

"“The sentiment around the bill of rights is there are limits to what we can or cannot do no matter what the public may or may not want us to do,” Hausladen said. ​“There’s limits to what policing power can enforce. And that’s a good thing.”"

Doug Hausladen is right, and this statement alone is strong evidence that he absolutely should be running for office because it shows that he's aware of what's really important when what 'the public' wants comes into conflict with people's basic humanity. It shouldn't be--it can't be--a crime to simply exist in the middle of the night, on a bench in the train station or in a public park. This is not how a humane society operates.

The irony of a guy named House-laden saying there aren't enough houses.

Why doesn't he give up some of his if they're such a burden. 🧐

The "homeless" people here are addicts who do not want to get sober.
They are also DENYING BEDS elsewhere in the city.

They are the SAME faces, giving the same spiel. Day in, Day out.

Big Question - Were they ever New Haven residents?
Bigger Question - What percentage of them are current APT Foundation patients? 90? 100?

Enough is enough. "NO LOITERING' should be paired with a STRICT "NO HARASSING Patrons / Panhandling" Standard!

APT Foundation, it is time you are held accountable for what your Cash Crop attracts to this town.

The train station waiting area is not a homeless shelter. All homeless people should be removed. Period.

What we need is human compassion for others which increasingly, our society is lacking. Most of our ancestors and great ancestors were poor or lacking financial means. They lived in tenements in terrible conditions. One would think we have come along way since then, but how times have reversed. We closed our institutions years ago for people with mental disabilities. That was a big mistake and frankly facilities need to re-open to give people a chance to live with dignity, and to be cared for correctly for those that cannot care for themselves. We have immigrants that have come to live here from horrible circumstances. Entire families living in one bedroom apts. It’s ridiculous that we have gone backward. Not forward at this point in time. We need to build more housing similar to Bellavista, where families can live in a decent clean apt with natural surroundings according to what they can afford. Bellavista has started to take in families it is no longer for seniors only. . Obviously we need subsidize housing. This is not up for debate. It’s a reality. Take the schools that have been abandoned in New Haven get federal grants to revamp them into housing. To me this is a no-brainer. I don’t know what the wait it is.