Q House Hiring Protested

A third group of protesters held a rally outside at the construction site of the new Dixwell Community ​“Q” house to call attention to the lack of contracts for black-owned companies.

The rally was held Tuesday afternoon on Dixwell Avenue. It was organized by Black and Brown United in Action and Unidad Latina en Acción.

“We should stop pointing the gun on each other and pointed to the actual enemy!” read a sign held by one of the ten demonstrators, Catherine ​“CJ” John.

“The lack of jobs and the lack of opportunities has an impact on our mental wellness. And when I say our mental wellness, I’m speaking on black and brown mental wellness. Not being able to afford bread, toothpaste, and basic essentials. New Haveners on average are working at least two jobs just to pay rent,” said John. ​“This contract is a slap in our face. We fought for this and yet this contract does not belong to black or brown individuals. This needs to stop.”

Behind John, protest organizers assembled a banner onto the construction site that cast the issue as fitting into a broader ​“white agenda” in the city.

Last month Black small business contractors rallied outside the Q House to highlight the lack of African-American owned companies in the construction workforce. A subsequent demonstration, organized by Ice The Beef, took place outside City Hall.

A third of the way through the construction of the new Q House, only 9 percent of subcontractors working on the project have been African American-owned companies. Less than 8 percent of the total construction workforce for the project has been Black.

CIty officials responded that they’ve tried hard to work with minority-owned contractors to get them more contracts on the job. They said they have more work to do on that end. (Click here to download a detailed, 503-page document submitted by City Engineer Giovanni Zinn to the Q House Advisory Board that describes outreach efforts so far, as well as which companies have worked on the Q House to date.) City development chief Michael Piscitelli said Tuesday that a working group will have progress to report on that end at a meeting next week.

The old Q house building was closed in 2003. It took until 2017 before it was demolished. It took another two years before construction on the new Q House commenced.

Speakers at Tuesday’s rally like Barbara Fair (pictured above) said the community must demand accountability from the city.

“Contracts are being done in our community, and we’re not even involved. Even though we were involved in the very beginning before the first brick went up. We were involved and promised that people in the community would be having jobs when this building went up and none of our people are on this contract,” Fair said.

“As we talk about that, we talk about the violence in our community. The only resolution that we seem to have in our community is more policing. I wanted to make sure that we recognize that with the issues that we have in our community: No jobs, mental illness, poverty, poor education, homelessness, and trauma. Police are not a solution to any of those problems.”

Unidad Latina en Acción member Jesse Sari (pictured) stated that ​“black and brown people are beginning to unite more and more because of the simple fact that the system itself is rigged, and because of that we lack.”

“What you see on the streets —that’s not a game. That’s not because people are rough. That’s because the oppression is so severe that there’s no money for our communities. As a result, they have us divided because economics doesn’t work for us. It works for them,” Sari said.

Landscape business owner Jayuan Carter (pictured) said economics is a team sport.

“We started this project as a community. We got together. We made sure we found the funding for it but along the way, the vision for the team was lost where people from the community were unable to directly benefit,” Carter said. ​“However, there’s an exacerbation when there’s no opportunity for those to actually make a living to maintain their families.”

Carter, born and raised in New Haven, said the the city should meet people where they are.

“You can not continue the pathway of imposing your ideas of what would work when in fact you have not engaged with us and understand what’s happening,” Carter said. ​“Leaders have weak spots, and this is one of the weak spots that have been exposed.”

Civil rights attorney Alex Taubes (at right in photo, with Alexis Perkins), who’s petitioning to challenge incumbent State Sen. Martin Looney in the Nov. 3 general election, said the Q House community center was part of New Haven history for 100 years, and now symbolizes a civil rights discrimination site of the 21st century.

“I’m here today to talk about the $16 million abuse that the State of Connecticut has brought upon this community by taking control of the dollars coming in and out of this community and siphoning it away from the residents, and giving the money to contractors from outside of this community,” Taubes said.

Sean Reeves spoke of how his son was shot and killed in 2011 at Chapel and Day streets.

He tied efforts to promote job opportunities for African-Americans to the quest to eliminate gun violence.

Reeves (pictured) claimed that contractors made promises they knew couldn’t be kept in order to sway community officials.

“General contractors don’t hire people right off the street to perform projects like this. They would have needed to hire as many subcontractors of a minority level, brown contractors, to get them to even think about hiring one person a piece,” Reeves said. ​“These jobs are big money jobs. You can’t afford to put people that don’t have any experience on jobs like this, but they agreed to do things like that knowing that the people who set up the contract didn’t understand the mechanics of what goes on.”