Christopher Peak Photo
A makeshift tent, right behind Ralph Walker Rink.
Camper Luke and partner.
Homeless people have pitched tents, erected lean-tos and stacked mattresses along the Mill River beneath I‑91, leading neighbors to push the city to clear out the new encampment.
In recent weeks, city outreach workers have made multiple visits to the state-owned property, which sits behind Ralph Walker Rink and the baseball diamond on Blake Field, offering beds at an emergency shelter or spots at an addiction treatment facility.
Of the 20 or so campers, no one has taken up the offer, reported Velma George, the city’s homelessness coordinator. But service providers are meeting to come up with engagement strategies, and outreach workers continue to stop by, including a scheduled visit on Friday.
For now, there’s not much activity on the site during daylight hours. The Independent made two stops at the encampment (where a pungent smell of rotting fish fills the air), late Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning, and spotted only six people.
None of the gates leading to the vacant land are locked.
Yet it appears as if the land has supported many more, with makeshift plywood beds and folded tarps scattered around the river. There are at least three campfires; pizza boxes, aluminum tins and styrofoam cups of noodles are tossed about. The ground is littered with cigarette butts, rolling paper packages, mini liquor bottles and prescription pill containers. A purse, opened up, revealed a bag of hypodermic needles. Mice run through one campsite.
Underneath an overpass, a shelter from the summer rain.
Neighbors, in the meantime, have taken to SeeClickFix to complain about an uptick in theft, trash, panhandling and drug use in the area.
The encampment was first reported on the website on June 1. “The homeless camp by the water in the woods … is starting up again and it needs to be broken up ASAP! I can not comprehend how this is allowed to go on,” the original poster wrote. “They are clearly committing crime in the East Rock area and I am sick of it. … The individuals who are living here litter the area with their garbage and regularly hold up traffic with their panhandling. Can somebody please stop looking the other way and do something about it?”
Some commenters noted that there have long been campers in the area, but they referred to the past denizens as “decent sorts” and “reasonably honest, if messy.” A newer group had seemed to move in, according to neighbors. “The current crowd seems more undesirable,” one person wrote. Another piled on, calling the campsite “illegal,” “unsafe,” and “unsanitary.”
Several campers are known to panhandle along the I-91 exits.
Bottles of vodka and bourbon are strewn on one slope.
In response, Anna Festa, the ward’s alder, wrote on SeeClickFix’s website on June 12 that she had checked with the Livable City Initiative, New Haven government’s neighborhoods anti-blight agency. Officials there told her that the encampment was no longer active. She added that the police “are usually good about getting rid of the panhandlers at the exit,” the off-ramp from I‑91 that lets out into the intersection of State and James Streets.
Yet more complaints kept piling in, including new reports on June 27 and July 6.
Most of the fury on the board directed at the city and the seeming non-response. “Why is there no action? No comment? No anything?” one wrote. “Clearly our elected officials don’t care. No response from the city on this trouble spot,” said another.
Junk fills the slopes down to the river, which campers say was dumped before they got there.
The New Haven Police Department doesn’t proactively clear these lands, unless it gets a call from another government agency to do so, said spokesperson Officer David Hartman. Police also generally don’t go after panhandlers unless they present a traffic hazard (as on South Frontage Road) or with overly aggressive pestering that results in a complaint, he said. “Generally, New Haven cops have a lot more to deal with than panhandling.”
Festa did not respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon; neither did the state’s Department of Transportation.
The rising tent city recalled another encampment that the city cleared last December, closer to the base of East Rock. Crews hauled 12 tons of trash from the site in a payloader, and evicted some years-long residents.
Several appear to have simply moved up-river for the time being. A 31-year-old named Luke, who’s living outside with his brother and fiancée, is one of them. Though he preferred the other location, quieter away from the cars, he set up a teepee in the new area.
Luke, on State Street.
Luke’s been homeless for going on a year after the bank foreclosed on his parents’ house following his dad’s death, he said. He tried to squat in the building, but he was served with an eviction notice and told he’d be thrown in jail. “Now,” he said, he’d take imprisonment. “They’d be threatening me with a good time.”
That’s because living outdoors is “rough,” he said. “It’s hot,” he explained, standing by the freeway offramp, where he’d been begging for change. Until winter, when he’d need to gather blankets and coats to try not to freeze.
He claimed that local someone from the city had taken razor blades and slashed his tents. (Hartman said this didn’t happen, “absolutely not.”) And he claimed that local cops had arrested him for “disorderly conduct.” (Hartman again said that New Haven police don’t have jurisdiction over the highways.) Luke said that the harassment would only drive them further into the woods.
But compared to the fighting downtown in the “flytrap” of the Green and the stealing in bedbug-infested shelters, Luke said, he’d rather brave the elements. Those living outdoors have formed a tight community that shares belongings. He said they police each others’ behavior, once kicking out a group of “obnoxious” drug users who’d set up below an underpass, where syringes still glinted. And he said he’d offered to clean up illegal dumping that predated his arrival, if the city would give him a dumpster to put it all in.
“I’ll be here until the wheels fall off,” Luke concluded.
John Parker, near the rink.
Another squatter, John Parker, said he was waiting for the city to evict him (that morning, he mistakenly thought) and hoping they’d put him up in housing somewhere.
Luke said many other residents leave during the day, and George said many take off into the woods as soon as someone unfamiliar arrives.
A rolled-up tarp near a campfire pit marks one home …
… and a plywood “mattress,” another.
On SeeClickFix’s boards, neighbors have debated how to address the problem.
Some want the trespassing to be dealt with immediately. “Drive them out while the numbers are still small. … Police and Parks Dept do not let this get out of control!” one wrote. In a follow-up post, the commenter added, “This is one of New Haven’s biggest problems: the failure to address quality of life issues for those of us who pay our taxes, volunteer and go about our lives respecting the rights of others. Watch, these encampments will grow in number and remain until it gets close to the first frost. Then the City will feel compelled to act and spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to remove tons of waste, and then they will order the occupants out of the Park. Until next spring…”
By contrast, others argue there isn’t much of a problem with someone living on otherwise vacant public land. “[W]hy can’t we just let these people live their lives? [F]ar as [I] can tell the people in these encampments aren’t hurting anyone,” one lonely commenter said.
Soiled clothes dot the site.
"Drive them out while the numbers are still small. … Police and Parks Dept do not let this get out of control!" one wrote."
This doesn't seem like the right way to talk about human beings.