Youth Shelter Planned, But Not For Hazel St.

A local homelessness services nonprofit is looking to open the city’s first warming shelter exclusively for young adults — but is still searching for a location after scrapping a Newhallville church partnership in the face of community opposition.

Youth Continuum has secured funding to establish a 12-space overnight stop for teens and 20-somethings in need of a place to crash this winter, but has yet to name a spot as the cold season approaches. 

The organization abandoned a plan to utilize a building on Hazel Street, owned by Mt. Calvary Deliverance Tabernacle, after Newhallville residents pushed back, citing concerns that such a site could fuel an uptick in crime. 

Youth Continuum Executive Director Tim Maguire and Mt. Calvary Deliverance Tabernacle Pastor Robert Smith pitched their original idea to team up and bring that temporary shelter to 5 Hazel St., a vacant church building directly next to Newhallville’s police substation, during an open meeting led by the neighborhood’s community management team on Nov. 2.

The Thursday evening conversation shed light on the state of youth homelessness across the city — and the outstanding safety concerns of those living in an area disproportionately impacted by gun violence and other crime.

While some community members expressed support for the project, citing a crisis in housing availability and skyrocketing rents, others worried that the center would attract more troubled people to the area and create more crime.

Ultimately, Smith, who grew up in Newhallville and whose church is based in the neighborhood, said he decided to choose another use for the vacant church space not because he was convinced that the center would cause problems, but ​“because I’m a neighbor,” and he didn’t want to cause further stress to already traumatized friends and family. 

“It’s hard for the community right now to really see and grasp how this location would be ideal because the whole nature of homelessness always brings question marks,” he said. 

Smith, who works in New Haven Public Schools, said he is now looking into using the Hazel Street property for an elementary math tutoring program. 

The future of the youth warming center, meanwhile, remains unclear. 

All the while, the city continues to see an increase in homelessness. City government has sought to address that rise through the conversion of a Foxon Boulevard hotel, a vacant former Orchard Street school, and a Hill industrial building into spaces to sleep for those with nowhere else to go. A community of Hill activists have also set up tiny homes on a private backyard and tents on adjacent public space to provide shelter for those displaced from government-cleared tent encampments.

Warming Up To Youth Warming

Though the Hazel Street property is now a no-go, Youth Continuum has already secured funding from the United Way of Greater New Haven to launch a youth-based warming center.

The idea, as Maguire explained last week, is to establish a warm space where individuals between 18 and 24 years of age can spend cold nights between December and April, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. He said he had acquired enough funding for roughly 12 individuals to stay over each night. 

No beds would be provided — just chairs and mats, plus hot coffee and perhaps some breakfast, and on scene staff who could help connect youth in need to other social services, like case management or rental assistance.

By keeping young people together, Maguire said that clients would have the ability to engage in peer to peer support, and potentially make friends or find potential roommates with which to split rent or otherwise bond together in the face of similar hardships. 

“It would create another link in the chain in the system that we do as an agency,” Maguire said, noting Youth Continuum’s exclusive focus on combating homelessness among young adults. 

He said that there are currently 700 adolescents within New Haven who are experiencing homelessness.

Youth homelessness merits targeted intervention, he said, not just because it is a growing crisis locally, but because outreach is particularly tricky among young people who typically couch surf from night to night as opposed to older populations who are more frequently out on the streets or in shelters.

Youth Continuum also already offers 12 crisis beds in New Haven, where youth can stay full-time in lieu of another safe, stable place to live. But getting into a shelter or emergency housing always takes time — not just because of full waitlists, but because of the referral and sign-on process – while many are in need of a walk-in option on nights when they might unexpectedly find themselves with no place to go in the freezing cold.

Maguire said that the Newhallville community meetings ​“made clear that the residents were not comfortable opening a center so quickly in the neighborhood.” After Smith had approached him about possibly teaming up to use Hazel Street for the center, Maguire said he had a mere week to apply for and hear back about cold weather funding. Because of the quick turnaround time with cold weather funding, he lamented that there wasn’t adequate time to get the neighborhood fully on board with the project.

In the meantime, he said his team is currently looking for another space, and considering setting aside a room in one of their own buildings to accommodate an overnight shelter. Though the cold weather season starts Dec. 1, he said he’s aiming to open such a site before January as time closes in.

“Warming Space” Or “Lion’s Den?”

During a public input session called for by the Newhallville Community Management Team on the possibility of a warming center, Smith framed youth homelessness as a citywide problem that the neighborhood should take responsibility for helping to solve by supporting the use of vacant space for those most in need.

The Nov. 2 meeting took place inside the Newhallville police substation on Winchester Avenue, directly adjacent to the church-owned property at 5 Hazel St.

“These are our kids, our neighbors, our daughters, our sons, our nieces, our nephews,” he said. ​“If not us?” he questioned. ​“Who?” the audience immediately responded. ​“If not now?” he asked. ​“When?” the audience called back.

A 12-person room to keep young people warm, he said, would not be a ​“crackhouse” or a ​“gambling den,” or even a ​“stab in the dark.” 

He had reached out to Youth Continuum to partner on the project, he said, ​“because they have a system in place.”

Community member Ron Harrell was one of the night’s most outspoken opponents of the project.

“This is not a safe place,” he declared. ​“You don’t know nothing about shoot-outs on Sundays,” he said to Maguire, asking, ​“why you wanna bring the youth over here anyway? It’s the lion’s den.”

He scoffed at the idea that those over 18 constituted ​“youth.”

“They’re not kids,” he said. They’re probably people who ​“must not have done right by their families,” and were therefore without a support system.

Many audience members shot back at that remark, like Warren Whits, who said that ​“not everybody who’s homeless is a criminal.”

Whits joined Smith and Maguire in pushing the fact that a growing number of young people are without housing simply because the rent is too high. Plus, he said, ​“people aren’t gonna be looking for help if they’re a criminal,” at a warming space next to a police station with security and other supervisory staff.

“This kind of reminds me of racism,” he countered, ​“making a judgment of someone because of their current condition.”

Still, others repeated the concern that rather than just stopping by the shelter to get a snack and some sleep, desperate people might congregate at the shelter and pose negative influences to their susceptible peers.

“You don’t wanna put them in that center where they’re easily manipulated,” said one woman named Dorothy. 

Another woman named April said that ​“the biggest concern is safety.”

“People pull up in broad daylight right here, they pull out guns and start shooting,” she said, and ​“nothing happens about it… If we had more support from our men in blue, I wouldn’t have to worry.”

Chanelle Goldson agreed: ​“Maybe we should have thought of a different location other than here, where there’s shootings in broad daylight.” 

Another man, Brother Born, spoke up in support of the center. ​“I’m a gunshot victim. I’m in this wheelchair because of being shot in this community,” he said. He also runs multiple pop-up food pantries in the area. ​“I’m in touch with the people who need help,” he said. ​“I understand the homeless.” 

“I know youth in our community who are sleeping in their cars, and have no place to go, and they work, and they’re still sleeping in their cars,” he said. He urged the importance of not allowing broader fears and trust issues regarding safety and crime obscure the genuine need of so many young people trying their best just to survive.

Others, like Jeanette Sykes, still pushed back on the pastor’s and others’ stance that it was Newhallville’s responsibility to take in those pushed out and down by society all across the city. ​“We always do it,” she said. ​“We don’t wanna be shamed into anything.”

More Downs Than Ups

The meeting seemed to end on an optimistic note, with a plan to bring in the city’s police chief for a second community session the following week on public safety and specific solutions Maguire and Smith could adopt, such as heightened site security, to prevent any increase in criminal activity.

However, after the Nov. 2 meeting, Smith and Maguire told the Independent they made a joint decision not to use the Hazel Street property as a youth warming shelter, considering the amount of community backlash.

Maguire said that since his organization already has funding initially secured for Hazel Street, his team will continue to search for other community organizations with the space to accommodate a temporary warming center. 

“The community is hurting. The community is broken. The community has been through its fair share of ups and downs. Sometimes it seems like more downs than ups,” Smith said.

He said he chose to scrap the warming center after one of his oldest friends from the neighborhood told Smith that his 80-year-old mother was ​“stressed, a nervous wreck” about the potential plan.

“The reality is this. I’m a product of Newhallville, born and raised,” he said. ​“The church was established 59 years ago as an organization in Newhallville,” he said, and 5 Hazel St. is ​“near and dear to us because the founders of our church built that location.”

“At the end of the day I don’t wanna be the neighbor who nobody likes. And I knew there were other good options. I’m choosing another option that’s just as important. It was just a call for an adjustment.”

He said that the deeper problem with criminal activity, and youth involvement in gun violence or other crime, is that Newhallville faces unique scarcity when it comes to community spaces to keep youth engaged, occupied, and out of trouble. ​“The Hill section has the Boys and Girls Club… the Westville neighborhood has community rooms… Newhallville has never had anything like that… There’s always been a deficit of positive engagement for youth.”

That’s why, Smith said, he plans to use 5 Hazel St. as a tutoring center. He said he’s lined up volunteers to staff a space that will coach elementary students in math, and that once the community is on board, he hopes to launch that program by the new year.

“Our most vulnerable citizens are young,” he said. ​“Right now we’re headed down the wrong path and it’s a cycle. It’s gonna repeat itself if we don’t pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. That’s why I said, if not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

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