Markeshia Ricks Photo
Members of the Youth Continuum Advisory Board testify the need for affordable housing for teens and young single parents.
The city’s affordable housing crisis is not just a matter bedeviling working families. It hits homeless teens and young single parents too.
That message came across clearly, in personal terms, during two hours of testimony Thursday night at a joint Community Development-Legislation Committee public hearing at City Hall on a task force report dealing with the city’s affordable housing crunch.
Supporters of the comprehensive report from an Affordable Housing Task Force came out en masse to press the urgency of the issue. The task force devised six main recommendations for areas of action that the Board of Alders will have to figure out how to legislate. (Read more about that here.)
Those recommendations do not include many of the suggestions that the Room For All Coalition put forth including its emphasis on teen homelessness, and many supporters pointed out the omission in their remarks.
Santana: Let’s “make a dent.”
Testimony Thursday night of a group of young people who serve on the Youth Continuum Advisory Board who had all been touched by homelessness resonated strongly for Fair Haven Heights Alder Rosa Santana, who promised to take action.
Chelsi Torres, a young mother of three and a military veteran, said she has been seeking affordable housing for five years and been homeless for two of those years.
“Do you know how hard it is to give up your children just because you don’t have a home to call your own?” Torres asked.
Santana said that listening to the stories of teen homelessness in the city “breaks my heart to still hear today that we still have so many homeless youths.”
“It’s not easy when being kicked out of your home and you’re on the street sleeping in cars,” she said. “This is a story that has been going on for 20 years, and I thought we had done a better job but we have not. It’s my promise to you that I will make every effort I can to hopefully help make a dent for youth.”
Destiny Staggers, a Youth Continuum board member who also testified before the committee, said she welcomed Santana’s efforts and asked that city officials keep meeting with young people like her so they can be part of that solution.
“I know I’m young,” Staggers said. “But I feel like we all could do something.”
Next Steps
Thursday night’s hearing had no specific legislation attached to the various recommendations from the Affordable Housing Task Force. That means that the joint committee’s only vote was to accept the report and recommendations and then read and file them. It will be up to alders to come up with legislation that would put any of the affordable housing fixes into motion.
Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg, who served as the non-voting facilitator on the task force, said the alders can tackle some short-term ideas, the first of which is creating a commission to oversee city, state and federal policy that is responsible for reporting on the state of affordable housing in the city. He said that the commission would preserve the nine months of work that went into the recommendations and the input of all of those who helped create them and then advance them.
“This is the beginning of the legislative process,” he said
Mattison.
Task Force member Ed Mattison said that the City Plan Commission, which he chairs, and its staff are the likely avenue for handling the recommendations that call for making changes to the city’s zoning code to increase the number of safe, affordable housing including any efforts like inclusionary zoning. The commission has already produced an advisory report endorsing the Affordable Housing Task Force’s recommendations.
We have to keep pressing that the changes be made without any or very little editing. I spent more than 5 to 6 months working on a independent feasibility study of the New Haven city.
The written recommendation I authored as a thesis and plan proposal to the Task Force, spells out the details of an inclusionary zoning ordinance, based on certain criteria. I have very deep knowledge of this type of ordinance, and how to implement it. However, I understand the Task Force's need to take testimony from the public and search for housing professionals to implement such an endeavor.
Let's keep pushing this, until it happens.