New LCI Chief Hits The Neighborhoods

As Carmen Mendez drove down Winchester Avenue and turned left on Read Street, her boss, Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, proved that she was no stranger to Newhallville.

“I used to live right over there,” Neal-Sanjurjo said while pointing toward the Albertus Magnus College campus.

It looked different from those days.

“What is that?” Neal-Sanjurjo said while looking at a worn looking complex at 25 – 27 Read.

“That’s our U‑shaped complex,” Mendez said. What she saw was an apartment complex that had apartments with open doors on one of the coldest winter days so far.

“Doors open in the middle of winter,” she said. ​“You know there is criminal activity going on there.”

Mendez spends her days in Newhallville as the neighborhood’s specialist at City Hall’s Livable City Initiative (LCI). Neal-Sanjurjo has just taken over as LCI’s director. She took the ride through Newhallville as the first of planned tours with her specialists in neighborhoods around town.

While she might be new to LCI, Neal-Sanjurjo (pictured) knows New Haven and its neighborhoods well. She grew up in Dixwell’s Florence Virtue homes, one of the city’s urban renewal-era federally-supported cooperatives. She attended Hillhouse High. She ran New Haven’s federally-funded Enterprise Community program in the 1990s. She also worked for City Hall as a small-business development officer.

She served as chief of staff and compliance director for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She also previously ran Baltimore’s Empowerment Zone. She recently returned home to New Haven to work as a real estate development and planning consultant for the quasi-public Economic Development Corporation.

Prior to being tapped by Mayor Harp in December to take the helm at LCI, she played a quiet but crucial role in helping LCI develop a ​“Hill-to-Downtown” plan for developing surface lots near the train station, Harp noted. The LCI chief is New Haven government’s point person for improving neighborhoods, from inspecting properties and enforcing building codes to cleaning up vacant city-owned lots, from wrestling with slumlords and out-of-state banks to developing new housing and commercial plans.

An Enlightening Look

Overgrown tree roots pushing up sidewalks at nearly 45-degree angles and house after house with worn façades: That’s what greeted Neal-Sanjurjo on Read Street.

Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn, who was along for the tour, pointed out that there are a number of elderly people on the street who do their best to keep up their property. They could use help with better sidewalks, better upkeep of rental properties and helping people make improvements to the look of the properties.

“That’s what we’ve been asking for,” she said. ​“It would go a long way in uplifting the community.”

Neal-Sanjurjo didn’t need much convincing. During the ride-along she got to see what LCI has already accomplished, from acquiring vacant property to making sure the streets stay clean trash piles.

She also saw opportunity to make changes that would improve the neighborhood. She said Read Street is ripe for programs that prioritize sidewalk improvements and building façades. As she saw block after block with at least one vacant city-owned lot, she and Clyburn discussed the possibility of putting small neighborhood parks on some of those lots. (Click here, here and here for a previous series on Newhallville’s vacant city-owned lots.)

“This is a fabulous opportunity for a public park,” she said. ​“You have that little area that right now is just bare and ugly.”

“One of the things I’m trying to do” in the first phase of the job ​“is to look at what assets we have in the neighborhoods. My number-one priority is to work through the management teams and the alders to figure out what we can do with our limited resources and to try to secure additional resources to make transformative change,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

On the Newhallville tour, Neal-Sanjurjo She also got to meet a property owner who has restored a house next to Eddie’s Barbershop on Newhall Street.

“This has been enlightening,” she said afterwards. ​“There is a real opportunity here to do some real transformation in this neighborhood.”

She said by pulling together city departments and resources, and bringing them together a block at a time, the city could make a difference that people can see.

“Transformation happens in small pieces,” she said.