Staff Photos
The week that was: ground broken, ribbons cut, crisises confronted.
(Analysis) Officials break ground at another big upscale downtown building site. They cut the ribbon on a spanking new public-housing development. A deep-pocket out-of-state builder buys land for an apartment-retail complex in Wooster Square.
Meanwhile, New Haven edges closer to a potential state bailout. The mayor and alders go to war again, this time over a potential $10 tax rebate to city homeowners, while a $30 million long-term structural deficit remains unaddressed. Meadow Street yet again confuses 700 workers about whether they have jobs; emails reveal school board members already at war with a new school superintendent they just brought to New Haven.
That all happened just this week in New Haven. And this week looked like a lot of recent weeks.
Call it New Haven’s new Era of Cognitive Dissonance, one that now challenges us to consider seemingly opposite ideas at one time and find a way to tackle a communal challenge without clawing at each other.
We have reason to see this as the best of times in New Haven. From the organized cycling community bringing together 1,000-plus citizens for annual charitable fundraising bike rides and leading government to create new protected bike lanes; to neighborhood groups uniting citywide for the first time in generations to keep families having fun this summer; to performers and artists fueling the state’s most exciting arts and cultural life; to a red-hot market-rate residential rental real estate market that has developers beating down City Hall’s door for permission to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into new apartments and retail spaces without tax breaks or other government bribes; to a tech start-up scene that has filled Science Park and 300 George Street and spurred the creation of a new tech campus in Fair Haven … phew! The city hasn’t thrived like this for at least 40 years.
We also have reason to see this as, if not the worst of times, a painful, broken civic moment in New Haven, reminiscent of the fractious years of the late 1980s-early 1990s recession.
City leaders are struggling to find ways to patch a $15 million general operating deficit left over from the last fiscal year and come up with long-range fixes to a structural deficit that already has the new fiscal year’s budget $30 million in the red, according to one independent estimate.
Alders and the Harp administration have fought each other, perhaps now for the second time in court, over who gets to make decisions rather than making some of those big decisions. Past-due borrowing and pension bills combined with cutbacks from a state government that breaks its own promise to reimburse most of the tax money it won’t let New Haven collect on 54 percent of its property.
A school board that spent years stymied by bitter political infighting finally united to hire a new leader to get the district’s struggling schools and tanking finances into shape; then, the minute she started taking action, she and her former patrons on the school board became mired in new, crippling power-wrestling. They have begun taking a needed serious look at matters like contracting, and at least chipping away at the school system’s own $19.4 million deficit. The future of bilingual education? Racial segregation? College readiness? Not so much. At least not yet.
The Week That Was
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Schools chief Carol Birks: Welcome to New Haven!
Consider the pendulum that has kept swinging from “success!’ to “holy crap” over just the past five days:
• Mayor Toni Harp announced that she won’t abide by a bill the alders are preparing to pass to strip $483,172 from city departments to reduce the 11 percent property tax increase that took effect July 1. Alders picked that number to coincide with two years of raises Harp gave top aides and other non-union employees, some of whom hadn’t gotten pay increases for up to five years. She said the alders lack the charter authority to transfer money once they’ve passed the budget; the alders say they do. The mayor said she may take the alders to court over it (the way alders took her to court over who gets to name school board appointees at a time when school board politics had become toxic).
The alders acted in response to citizens outraged over the tax increase. If they pass this proposed transfer, the average taxpayer will save … $10.
• Two New York City development firms, Epimoni and Adam America, finalized a $10 million purchase of a 50,000-plus square-foot Union Street property and are ready to begin building a 299-unit, market-rate apartment complex with over 6,000 square feet of retail space there. A similar (court-delayed) project is planned right next to it.
• The mayor announced that her administration is preparing to refinance debt to plug the $15 million operating budget deficit left over from the last fiscal year.
Borrowing to cover deficits is always tricky, and frowned upon by rating agencies, because it usually leaves the city with bigger debts years down the road to plug an immediate hole. It was revealed that the state budget director Ben Barnes, concerned about city finances, met with the Harp administration’s finance team to discuss a possible bailout; the Harp team turned down a voluntary bailout (which comes with surrendering sovereignty over some major budget decisions), vowing to fix the problems itself. The borrowing is the kind of action that potentially could trigger an involuntary state takeover of city finances.
The Harp administration has yet to detail the borrowing proposal but claims it can do so in a way that saves the city money overall. Observers are skeptical since this is the second time in recent years that the city will have borrowed to close operating deficits.
• New York (and New Haven-born) developer Joseph Cohen detailed plans to build 60 “mid”-scale apartments on a parking lot at State and Chapel Streets. It is at least the eighth major apartment (or mixed apartment-retail) development either built or proposed for vacant property or surface lots in recent years.
• A ribbon-cutting on Grand Avenue revealed how Farnam Courts, once a symbol of rundown unlivable public housing, has been reborn as a beautiful complex called Mill River Crossing. It has somewhat of a mix of incomes and a design and (hopefully) better management that has been seen across town in similar rebuilt complexes like Monterey Place, Brookside Estates, and Quinnipiac Terrace. With the help of federal programs like Hope VI, New haven has revolutionized public housing. For the better. Without the local scandals that plagued its housing authority throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early aughts.
• Dozens of people attended a walk-through of a former club at the foot of the Crown Street Garage to prepare to bid on building downtown’s next performance venue.
• The Board of Education ordered Superintendent Carol Birks to rescind layoff notices sent to 1,100 current or former part-time employees. So a new letter went out — but those same employees may still hear in coming weeks that they’ll be laid off after all. But the Board of Ed decided it, not Birks, will make that decision. Meanwhile, emails emerged that showed board members, who just months ago pushed hard to hire Birks, amid public controversy overruling a suspension she authorized of a student and continuing to criticize her performance (which they did publicly at a highly unusual press conference weeks earlier). And a $19.4 million budget deficit remains largely untouched.
• A ceremonial groundbreaking took place on an Audubon Street “super-block” for a construction project already underway: A mini-city, called Audubon Square, of (eventually) around 500 apartments and townhouses plus new storefronts. The project extends an arts district that will have low-income, middle-income and high-income housing, stores, a popular Koffee? shop, and arts performance and exhibition spaces co-existing on two long blocks. The builder, Clay Fowler of South Norwalk-based Spinnaker Real Estate, estimates that his company is investing a quarter-billion dollars developing four separate properties in town.
• On Friday, a years-long citizen-driven quest to shut down a loud night-and-day open-air police shooting range and open a quiet indoor one culminated with a ribbon-cutting in West Rock.
How We Got Here
Thomas Breen Photo
An anti-tax-increase meeting on Whalley.
To some extent, our own actions have gotten us here. We underfunded pensions for years, along with our rainy day fund. We changed to a partially elected Board of Education which, along with some advances (an added student voice; greater public representation), has brought us a fully political mud-wrestling and backstabbing spectacle. We have developed the state’s premier arts and cultural district, a magnet for creative people and empty nesters and young singles wanting to live in an urban downtown. We improved how we police the city, and crime has dropped.
Since the early 1990s, separate from the broader argument over taxation and aside from occasional reversions to old form, Yale became on balance an active participant in solving problems rather than creating them. Citizen activists demanded a bike-friendly, “safe streets” approach from government; now community management teams across town have decided to work together to unify the city. Our city welcomed immigrants, who in turn have strengthened our city.
But New Haven is not alone. Small university cities across the country are becoming funkier, funner, smarter, safer, with new development for the future. And cities, in general, are wrestling with fiscal crises and struggling schools.
New Haven is not the only local or state government that underfunded pensions so politicians could get reelected in the short run. And it’s part of a country with an aging population — people living longer to collect pensions and fewer young people to support them.
New Haven is not the only urban center dependent on a suburban-dominated state legislature that’s happy to use hospitals and universities and cultural amenities while destroying cities’ ability to pay for services by breaking its promise to reimburse them for state-tax-exempt properties or allowing them to raise money in other ways.
New Haven is not the only community in America where people are demonizing each other and arguing over side issues (symbolic $10 tax rebates) rather than making difficult choices to solve big problems.
And New Haven is not the only place where health care costs keep soaring. That’s a national disaster that we all feel, and that local governments can’t solve (though the Board of Alders this year made a good start).
Matthew Nemerson has been observing these trends develop up close over 50 years, in the private sector and now as city government’s development administrator. He’s hearing from developers eager to build here. And he’s watching the fights over who will benefit and how to keep government in business.
He believes New Haven’s best-of-times is running up against an historic confluence on national trends.
“It’s like a cold front and a warm front coming together to cause tornadoes,” he said in an interview. Two existential American policy issues coming together: how to include everybody in the benefits of growth, and how to cope with a changing economy.
More than ever, shut-out groups — African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, working-class whites — demand access. Meanwhile, inequality is growing, not abating, in the modern gig economy.
“When the economy was expanding in the 1990s, it looked like everybody could click on,” Nemerson observed. “With [Presidents] Clinton and Obama, maybe you would have new rules that would regulate people grabbing onto the economy, and you would overcome systemic issues of inclusion by growth of the economy and by government action. You had affirmative action. In New Haven, you had Hope VI. Not that everything was perfect, but we were trying to think through those policy issues.
“Now that you have this new economy, which is not rising all boats, but only rising a few yachts, the other boats — it’s unclear where they are. There’s a great desire by progressive leaders to figure out how to compete with Boston in that winner-take-all New England a‑couple-of-cities-are-going-to-make it [environment], and at the same time think about distribution and fairness and access within the city itself.”
So the challenge for New Haven moving forward: Embracing cognitive dissonance, celebrating this best of time, acknowledging that we’re also facing an urgent once-in-a-generation challenge to reinvent government so it can carry out its functions in a modern age while paying for itself. (Click here for a story suggesting one way to participate in doing that.)
New Haven has conquered challenges before. We have ingenuity, talent, smarts, and a sense of shared community and destiny in New Haven. We’ve conquered challenges before. We can do it again.
Good analogy by Matthew Nemerson with the boats and yachts etc.
But if you reallly want "fairness", then make NHPS a world class, choice based education system. New Orleans has improved dramatically since Katrina and is now a 95% charter school district with academic results that are far better then they were prior to 2005.
Allow parents the right - and the funding to choose what is best for their kids. Affluent families have that right today but New Havens low income families are trapped in a disfunctional, monopolistic government school system. Change the way that the education system works and you begin to bring about "fairness" and oppportunity for all to succeed. Nothing else will work in the long run.