New Haveners Of The Year

In 2018, Kim Harris and Amy Marx imagined a better New Haven. They teamed up with determined people. Then they made it happen.

And they’re just getting started.

Kim Harris imagined that people from neighborhoods all over the city could work together, cross borders, and make everyone stronger. She did it by launching a ​“One City Initiative” that, for the first time, lured leaders of the city’s 10 ​“management teams” into one room. There they got to know each other. Then they hatched a plan to put on 60 days of family-friendly events citywide for people to enjoy in each of their neighborhoods throughout the summer. They drew in scientists, performers, librarians, you name it. They shared tips on neighborhood organizing. They laid the groundwork for years of grassroots cooperation in making New Haven a unified city.

Now Harris is launching a new effort to seed new ideas and leaders in her home base of Newhallville in the hopes of making it the city’s next hot neighborhood.

Amy Marx, meanwhile, imagined that hundreds of low-income families didn’t have to live amid mold in crumbling apartments, their children getting asthma, their belongings getting ruined — even though city officials and others had tried for years to stop an out-of-state landlord from getting millions of federal dollars to keep the families trapped in those conditions at the Church Street South complex. Marx, a legal aid lawyer, took on many of the families as clients. She exposed their living conditions, pressed and shamed government officials into clearing out the place and finding close to 300 families safer new homes.

That took years. In 2018, with the help of hard work by fellow legal-aid attorneys as well as the city’s housing authority and anti-blight directors, Marx helped find housing for the last of the trapped families. Bulldozers started demolishing Church Street South. And another attorney had the owners in court in a class-action civil suit seeking damages.

Marx in 2018 then targeted another scourge that had trapped poor families in dangerous conditions for years: Peeling lead paint in homes all over town, poisoning children and threatening lifelong brain damage. Marx pulled the city into court, where outraged judges ordered the city to clean up its incompetent regulation act and find safer apartments for at-risk kids. The cases also exposed stunning government failures, like the fact that the health department has been trying (and failing) to keep up with cases with handwritten rather than computerized files.

The city now promises to overhaul how it keeps on top of lead-paint cases. The new year will bring Marx and the legal aid team ample opportunities to hold the city to its promise to reform, and to see more cases through the court system if necessary.

For both Harris and Marx, the secret to success has in part derived from a commitment, and ability, to empower other people to take action on their own behalf. Combined with an instinctive grasp of possibilities for change, and a belief in their ability to take on the seemingly impossible.

Kim Harris

Kim Harris, who grew up in Newhallville, is a born organizer. And a born believer.

“I’m a sixth-generation Seventh Day Adventist,” she said. She prays every day. Beginning when she wakes up and drops to her knees.

Prayer ​“keeps me in line with knowing that nothing is impossible,” Harris said. ​“I believe that God can do the impossible.” So maybe people sometimes can, too.

After graduating from Southern Connecticut State University (including a stint as point guard on the 1984 women’s basketball team that made its division’s final four), Harris went to LA to learn about film and TV production. She started and for 14 years ran a production company called Students On A Mission.

New Haven called her home after 9/11, and she started thinking of projects for the kids who attend the Harris & Tucker Preschool, which her mother and aunt founded. (She flew the students to LA, for instance, to do some ​“Kids TV.”) After her mother died in 2005, Kim and her cousin Karen took over the preschool, which they run today.

Harris’s mother and aunt had tried for more than a decade to obtain national accreditation for the center. That would qualify it for more state financial support. But they couldn’t crack the bureaucratic hurdles. Harris now took up the challenge. She spent four years — and succeeded.

Being Kim Harris, she decided not to stop there. The process inspired her to help other preschools serving low-income families to do the seemingly impossible, as well, and win certification as well as negotiate other government hurdles. ​“That’s a thing that’s missing from a lot of black and brown ownership. They can’t get into that game,” she said.

Harris teamed up with another go-getter in the field, Georgia Goldburn of Hope Child Development Center, to form a new child-care coalition called Cercle in September 2015 to tackle a wide range of concerns about early education for black and brown children. (Read more about that here.)

Let’s Get Together

Harris also started showing up at meetings of Newhallville’s management team. The city created 12 teams in the early ​‘90s in neighborhood substations all over town as part of the rollout of community policing. At first they brought neighbors together with cops monthly to discuss crime. Soon other city departments showed up. So did developers and anyone else with neighborhood business. They became the engines, or potential engines, of grassroots democracy in New Haven.

Newhallville’s, like others, needed a recharge. Harris became the team co-chair. She enlisted the active help of dynamic neighbors. The meetings became crisp, businesslike, and spurs to action.

Then, in the summer of 2017, Harris noticed how little was going on for kids and families in New Haven. At least as far as people knew. So she determined to change that in 2018. She issued a call to chairs of all other departments. They met at City Hall. They got excited at the prospect of working together on a project. By the end of the night they were toasting their newfound alliance.

“Kim started the meeting by introducing her team and then we all chimed in. It was amazing that all these diverse members found a common ground,” recalled Marjorie Wiener, who represented the Westville/West Hills management team.

Thus was born ​“One City.” Each team drew up plans for two full months of events. They coordinated so they’d visit each other’s neighborhoods and participate in each other’s events. They also shared information about the many events that already take place each summer (park concerts, branch library activities) that people outside each neighborhood often don’t learn about.

Everyone Harris encountered soon found an assignment. She enlisted Yale graduate students involved in a group called Science Haven to prepare events for kids about astronomy and about how the electricity in their muscles lifts stuff up. She coordinated with public works staffers, firefighters, train officials, anyone running an interesting place in town, to host summer visits by families.

Recognizing the effort’s potential, Mayor Toni Harp volunteered all the city government help the group needed.

“Kim Harris is a convener and a collaborator. She sees what we as a city can do together, and she finds a way for us to make it happen” Harp said. ​“What a gift she is to New Haven.”

“Kim kept the momentum going throughout the year with emails, phone calls and having us visit each others monthly meetings. She has energy for all of us,” Wiener observed.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Hillhouse High field house on June 28 to kick off the summer series. They came from Dixwell and Dwight, Newhallville and Westville, East Rock and West Rock, the Heights and Cedar Hill. As one team, putting their work and their plans on display.

Then they returned to their neighborhoods to host events like evening park concerts in Fair Haven and Dixwell, coding classes at Stetson Library, native pollinator lessons in Amity, a superhero party at Fair Haven’s branch, Lego-making at Wilson, fine arts in Westville’s Mitchell branch, financial literacy lessons in the Hill. Kids from different neighborhood hung out together. The adults hung out together at a rooftop potluck dinner at the Community Foundation.

Over 10,000 people ended up participating in 857 events during the 60-day ​“One City” season. (Click here to read about the closing citywide event on the Green. See the videos at the bottom of the story to watch radio interviews with Harris and some of her ​“One City” co-conspirators about the series.)

More important than any one event, the series showed that, despite the divisiveness of modern American life, New Haveners of all background can also find common purpose.

In between all that work, Harris continued running Harris & Tucker and coming up with after-school ideas for children. One was to develop ​“Kids TV” — she taught neighborhood kids video skills, then set them loose interviewing neighbors about how to improve Newhallville and interviewing voters at the primary day polls. (Read about that here.)

“Dream Session”

Looking ahead to 2019, Harris has identified some big ideas that didn’t jell so much in the first ​“One City” summer. The group plans to step up its website game to put together a more comprehensive, accessible online calendar for the hundreds of events. The group will also try again to organize a ​“passport” program in which small businesses offer discounts to entice families to explore new commercial districts outside their neighborhoods or downtown.

Harris has also agreed to chair Newhallville’s management team in 2019. But her plan is to groom new talent to take over after that. ​“When we develop these leaders,” she said, ​“I can feel good about moving on to the next post.”

Or posts. For instance, she has launched a new enterprise: a nonprofit called Inspired Communities. She pitched it this month at a downtown ​“Collab” event geared to supporting new community-building enterprises. (The above video captures the pitch.)

She has scheduled an initial ​“dream session” on Jan. 2 at ConnCAT in Science Park about goals for the neighborhood. Later that month, she said, she’ll take a group of Newhallville residents on a tour of the Fair Haven tech hub the DISTRICT to show what kinds of entrepreneurial activities and tech job training are just a few blocks away from her neighborhood. Then the group will dream and scheme about ways to create similar business, cultural, and civic enterprises in Newhallville.

“We’re going to take Newhallville and make it the next big thing,” Harris vowed. Based on her record, you can count on it.

Amy Marx

Like Harris, Amy Marx is a true believer. She loves New Haven and believes we can make it a better place.

As with Harris, part of that idealism and motivation comes from religious observance. Marx is Jewish, and takes pride in her faith tradition’s long commitment to tikkun olam (“repairing the world”) and social justice.

Marx’s yearning for justice, equality, safety, and community is also tied intimately to her work as a legal aid attorney. She sees her job as fixing historic wrongs and protecting the vulnerable from immediate harm. Recognizing each person’s common humanity and pursuing broad social change.

“The system is built on lofty ideals,” Marx said about the law. ​“But its functioning is that of human beings solving real problems, affecting real lives. When people can see each other as people in all directions … when people can speak to each other as people, there’s some hope that the law can be a forum for building something that’s more than just adversarial justice.”

In 2018, that mission meant making sure that families have roofs over their heads. Making sure children aren’t poisoned by their homes. Helping to empower tenants to stand up for themselves in a judicial system that can be overwhelming and intimidating to the uninitiated.

Marx, 46, is a staff attorney in the housing division of the New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), aka legal aid.

Her other ​“jobs”: mother of three children, Democratic Party ward co-chair in Upper Westville, board member with Beulah Land Development Corporation and with New HYTEs tennis, and adviser to the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven’s Fund for Women and Girls.

In short, she’s busy making a difference.

A native of just outside Boston, Marx graduated from Yale Law School in 2000. It was there that she first discovered just how potent a tool the law can be for society’s marginalized.

She worked in a landlord-tenant student clinic under the mentorship of Frank Deneen, a Yale Law School lecturer who helped found legal aid in 1964. Marx represented a public housing tenant who struggled with alcohol abuse and, as she put it, was ​“burdened by a lot of life challenges.” She knew the landlord was trying to evict the tenant because he was a difficult person to get along with, not because he had violated any parts of his lease. If the tenant did not have free, pro bono legal representation, Marx said, he almost certainly would have been defaulted from the case for not filling out the necessary paperwork and defending himself in a legally necessary way. That would have meant an easy eviction on what Marx knew to be groundless charges.

Marx turned down the landlord’s lawyers attempts to pressure her client into a settlement, which, on the terms presented, would have basically equated to an eviction. Instead, she pressed ahead to trial and won the case.

She’d found her mission.

“Frank taught me to stand strong in settlement negotiations,” Marx said about Deneen. In particular, he taught her never to back down when she knows she is in the right and when a client’s livelihood is at stake, even if that advocacy puts her up against established lawyers steeped in money, power, and privilege. A lesson Marx has put to good use throughout her career.

After graduation from Yale Law, Marx spent a year clerking for federal district Judge Kimba Wood in New York City. There she learned another formative lesson of the law: What happens in the court is not just a matter of abstract, immutable legal truths. Courtroom outcomes also hinge greatly on the judge’s unique personality, background, style, and perspective.

“She wore a robe with understanding,” Marx said about Wood. And she made a potentially intimidating environment accessible to people with all levels of education.

Marx then spent two years working at Connecticut Legal Services in Stamford. When a job opened up in the housing unit of New Haven Legal Assistance, she jumped. Legal aid jobs are rare to find, she said, and she knew that she wanted to spend her career advocating for those most in need.

She got the job. Fifteen years later, she’s still in the housing unit. There’s nowhere else she’d rather be, she said.

Her second-floor office at legal aid’s 426 State St. headquarters is cluttered with drawings by her children, framed New York Times articles about how Legal Aid helped pass national tenant protection laws in the wake of the 2008 – 2009 foreclosure crisis, and dozens of manila folders stuffed with information about the 75 clients she is currently representing at some stage or other in active cases at New Haven’s housing court.

“Housing [law] has a very special niche,” Marx said, ​“in which you can both do systemic advocacy and very, very small-scale, very human representation.”

That sweet spot, between the individual and the community, between the ideals of the law and the very real person the law is supposed to protect, is where Marx thrives. And in case after case in 2018, that’s exactly where Marx found herself. Her persistent advocacy on behalf of a range of unique individual clients coalesced into a series of judicial mandates, city promises, and private developer obligations that should have an enduring impact on low-income housing in New Haven for years to come.

Church Street South

For decades, the 301-unit federally subsidized Church Street South complex across from Union Station suffered from rotting roofs and landlord neglect. The federal government sent the private landlords millions of dollars a year in rents — as the complex continued falling apart. City inspectors and officials couldn’t get the feds to cut off the money or force repairs.

In 2015, a tenant named Laynette Del Hoyo filed a housing code enforcement complaint against the Boston-based landlord, Northland Development Corp. She was fed up with water leaking into her apartment, covering her living room in mold and getting her kids sick.

She and Marx met in court, and Del Hoyo asked for help with her complaint. Marx corrected a technical error she had made in her initial filing and argued her case in court.

What started out as one complaint about poor conditions at the property turned into 10 legal actions filed by legal aid against the landlord. Those court cases resulted in judicial orders sent to the city’s building department to send inspectors to check out Church Street South’s leaky roofs. And what they found was a decades-in-the-works disaster.

“The rest became history,” Marx said. Legal aid wrote to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had been signing off on the $3 million in rental subsidies for the property each year. After receiving mounting pressure from legal aid and city anti-blight officials, HUD revoked its approval of the property, conceding that the property was not in safe condition to house families, or anybody for that matter.

“Giving professional legal voice to this one client,” Marx said, ​“who then brought in a few others, enabled systemic change through judicial activism. … Through litigation of individual tenants cases, we were able to enact a systemic change that was decades in the coming.”

Marx and her legal aid colleagues represented over 200 families at the 301-unit complex. They secured for the families portable Section 8 housing vouchers, allowing them to move from the crumbling property and find new homes where they could still use their subsidies.

“Church Street South has been a stunning success to date,” Marx said, ​“in that almost every tenant got exactly what they wanted, which was, they wanted out of the conditions of Church Street South and they wanted a Section 8 voucher.”

In 2018, the last of the remaining Church Street South tenants moved out. Northland has begun demolition of the property, and plans to replace it with a new massive mixed-use development.

That gives Marx hopes, and keeps her on her toes. Getting the tenants out of Church Street South was only half the battle, as she sees it. The other half is making sure that whatever Northland builds in its stead contains affordable housing units, allows for the right of return for the tenants who did live at Church Street South, and also encourages the construction of equally desirable affordable housing units for those who can’t return to the rebuilt site.

“That’s the unknown right now,” Marx said. How will Northland rebuild, and what will it do with its millions of dollars in annual project-based Section 8 subsidies

Marx said legal aid will be watching closely come 2019.

“Amy Marx is giving New Haven’s history a forcible shove in the right direction,” observed criminal defense attorney David Rosen, who has been representing low-income tenants in New Haven for five decades. (His firm has filed a class action suit on behalf of former Church Street South tenants seeking damages from their previous landlord.)

“She sees people who have problems that seem intractable because of the forces arrayed against them,” Rosen said. ​“She exerts enough of her own moral and intellectual force to make them at least markedly less intractable.”

Beechwood Gardens / St. Martin’s Townhomes

Most of Marx’s work at Church Street South so far involved figuring out how to help her clients find new housing while the landlord prepared to demolish the derelict buildings. Her work at two other federally subsidized low-income housing complexes — Beechwood Gardens and St. Martin’s on Whalley Avenue and Goffe Street, respectively — has focused on organizing tenants and holding landlords to keep up the properties and let tenants know their intentions.

At Beechwood Gardens, an 82-unit complex on Whalley Avenue, another individual tenant tipped legal aid off to a larger, structural concern. An elderly woman who always paid her rent on time reached out to legal aid with concern about large rent bills and water bills she kept getting from her landlord, bills she thought she didn’t owe.

It wound up that one of the landlord’s employees had been stealing rent money and utility money from tenant payments, leaving tenants with larger, unnecessary bills.

Legal aid convinced the landlord, VestA Corporation, to drop all of the outstanding ledger charges. ​“The record keeping was so bad that they couldn’t be negotiated for anyone,” she said.

She also helped organize group meetings between the tenants and the landlords so that the landlords would have to let the tenants know about a new financing plan that would allow for the renovation of the properties, but also the potential dislocation of tenants who couldn’t afford to payer higher rents.

“Certain people moved out without being given proper relocation assistance,” she said. She made sure that VestA paid up on its legal required relocation assistance payments to those tenants who did decide to move.

Over at the 63-unit St. Martin’s complex on Goffe Street, several tenants called Legal Aid this summer to complain about poor conditions at their apartments.

“We found porches that were literally crumbling and falling apart,” she said. She called the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI), which documented the rotting wood and wobbling rails. LCI filed a number of anti-blight orders, she said, some of which have been attended to, some of which have not.

The porches, at least, seem to be on their way to being fixed. She said the landlords are putting in new porches made of a more durable synthetic wood.

“We at legal ad have done our job right when the landlord is now following the law,” Marx said, ​“and the tenants feel good, that they understand their rights, feel educated as to their rights, and that they have somebody to go to when they feel it’s not working right.”

Lead Paint

Marx has also spent much of the year in and out of the housing court on the third floor of 121 Elm St., where she has argued in four separate lawsuits on behalf of local children suffering blood lead poisoning and living in apartments with toxic levels of lead paint.

In each suit, she has pushed the city’s Health Department to be more transparent about its lead paint inspection, abatement enforcement, and post-abatement monitoring processes. In each suit, she challenged the department to do a better job at following city lead paint abatement laws and at protecting the health of city children.

In the process, wholesale failures have been exposed in the city’s handling of lead paint citywide.

In each suit, the Superior Court judge presiding has ruled favorably for Marx and for her client. Each judge has ordered the city to enforce its lead abatement orders and foot the bills for relocating tenants to nearby hotels.

One judge threatened to find the city in contempt of court when Marx showed that the city consistently handed over incomplete and last-minute health and property records for a case. Another judge ordered the city to pay for an independent third party to oversee the lead abatement of a property after Marx showed that the city had signed off on an inadequate abatement.

“What we saw at trial was far worse than we had ever imagined the dysfunctionality of the Health Department to be,” Marx said.

In each case, with rigor and precision and an unflinching commitment to her clients, she undertook to expose what she saw as systemic flaws in how the Health Department handles lead paint and describe in detail how those deficiencies hurt her clients and hurt the city more broadly.

Marx’s advocacy for children with blood lead poisoning extends beyond the four lawsuits of Jacob Guaman, Malik Muhammad, Elijah Hall, and Tramar Jones. Marx said that over the past year and a half, she has represented 25 different families struggling with childhood lead poisoning.

In one case, she was able to pressure the housing authority to strip a landlord of its Section 8 subsidy and allow a mother and her lead-burdened child to move to a new apartment.

In another case, she revealed that over 100 low-income city tenants are living in Section 8‑approved housing that the Health Department has never actually inspected for potentially toxic levels of lead paint.

“Rather than litigate,” she said, ​“the goal had been to try to cooperate and collaborate and work together to make the system better.”

Legal aid and the city came to an agreement to set up a lead paint working group consisting of city officials, health department employees, a legal aid representatives, and an outside consultant, that would be charged with reviewing the city’s current lead-related policies and procedures.

The working group met once this summer, Marx said — and then nothing. Just three weeks ago, she said, she learned that the city Corporation Counsel had sent a letter to the legal aid board in which he said that the working group is only a possibility, not a definite reality, and that Marx would not be allowed to participate in the group.

“Any hope of collaboration was extinguished,” she said. That was ​“a very sad and low moment.”

Now, she said, she and her colleagues are figuring out what to do next, and whether or not to push forward with yet more lead-related legal actions against the city in 2019.

(“The City continues working to update its lead paint advisory board,” mayoral spokesperson Laurence Grotheer said, ​“the members of which are appointed by the mayor in accordance with the City Ordinance. City officials continue to review established procedures and policies with respect to lead paint abatement enforcement and are working diligently with the assistance of the State Department of Health to address any deficiencies.”)

Jennifer Williams, the mother of one of the lead-poisoned children whom Marx represented in 2018, said that her lawyer achieved a near miraculous balance between being a tireless, at times ferocious advocate in the court room, and a patient and generous listener outside of court.

“I connected with her as a mother,” Williams said. ​“She’s very aggressive in the court room. I like both sides of Amy. I really do. She connected well with Elijah [Williams’s 3‑year-old son]. As a mother, she is good. And as an attorney, she’s great.”

Marx stressed that she is but one member of a hard-working team of legal aid attorneys, managers, and support staff who provide everyday New Haveners with access to justice.

“I am uncomfortable with the conversation being about me,” she said, ​“given that my accomplishments all reflect the communities that raise me and the communities that care for and support me.”

“I truly do believe,” she said, ​“that New Haven is the greatest small city in America.”

Previous New Haveners of the Year:
• 2017: New Haveners Under 30: Caroline Smith, Coral Ortiz, Justin Farmer, Jesus Morales Sanchez, Margaret Lee, Sarah Ganong, Jacob Spell, Steve Winter, Eliannie Sola, Leiyanie Lee Osorio.
• 2016: Corey Menafee
• 2015: Jim Turcio.
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur