Thomas Breen photo
Pendragon at a recent affordable housing rally.
The latest candidate to enter New Haven’s mayoral race offers these qualifications for serving the marginalized:
• She’s an affordable housing wonk.
• She’s faced discrimination as a transgender woman.
* She struggles to find steady work.
* She has been homeless — and is currently couch-surfing.
Urn Pendragon has officially registered to run for the Democratic nomination for mayor.
She is the third candidate to file papers to challenge incumbent Mayor Toni Harp, following New Haven Land Trust Executive Director and 2013 mayoral candidate Justin Elicker and local philanthropist Wendy Hamilton.
Pendragon, a 50-year-old Michigan native and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) graduate, has lived in Connecticut for over a decade. She moved to New Haven a few weeks ago. She has never held elected office.
After earning her political science master’s degree last year from SCSU, where she focused her studies on the intersection of inclusionary zoning and renewable energy as part of the solution to both environmental and affordable housing crises, she has thrown herself head first into local political advocacy.
“I’m a person who researches,” she said during an interview at the main branch of the public library. “Who gets out and advocates, recognizes, and has discussions with people who are in the trenches.”
Mayoral candidate Urn Pendragon.
After interning for the city’s Economic Development Corporation in the spring of 2018, Pendragon got involved with Mothers and Others for Justice and a host of other local activist groups that would ultimately coalesce into the Room for All coalition. That group held rallies and turned out en masse for meetings of the Affordable Housing Task Force, consistently calling on them to keep the voices and needs of the homeless, the working poor, and the most marginalized members of society front and center as the task force developed its recommendations for how to increase the number of safe, affordable, and convenient housing options in the city and beyond.
If elected mayor, Pendragon said, she would push for the city to adopt an inclusionary zoning ordinance that would mandate 20 to 22 percent percent of units in new housing projects be set aside as affordable. She said she would also hire more housing inspectors, code enforcement officers, city planners, and economic development staff.
How would she pay for it? By appealing directly to the governor for more state aid, she said.
And what would make her ask for more aid from Hartford more convincing then the current administration’s?
“You have to put your foot down and say the city’s falling apart,” she said.
Before landing at SCSU, Pendragon said, she bounced around between the South and the Midwest, living in St. Louis, Tulsa, and Winston-Salem, N.C. She said she was twice homeless in North Carolina, and once homeless after moving to Connecticut over a decade ago.
While living in Shelton, she worked as a telephone tech support provider for Cablevision. She was laid off with hundreds of her colleagues in when a European telecommunications company purchased the New York cable provider in 2016.
Soon thereafter, Donald Trump was elected president. The combination of Trump’s misogynistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-transgender rhetoric and policies with her own firsthand experience of homelessness and job loss inspired her to go back to school to pursue progressive social change with an academic bent, she said.
She took a class with SCSU Political Science Professor and former Republican Town Chair Jonathan Wharton. Wharton brought his class down to City Hall to witness first hand how the Board of Alders and city government work.
During those class trips to City Hall, Pendragon said, she was “listening and hearing people saying that housing is a major, major issue.”
After earning her master’s degree last year, Pendragon said, she has struggled to find steady work in New Haven. She’s currently working part-time as a secretary, and bouncing between friends’ apartments in West Haven and New Haven. She said she has applied time and time again for a full-time job at Yale University, but so far, hasn’t landed anything.
She said she fears that one of the reasons why she has so struggled to find work is her being a public transgender woman fighting for housing rights.
“I’ve walked both sides of the street, so to say,” she said. “I’ve been homeless before. I know what its like to be underemployed, to struggle to feed yourself, to struggle to have good, decent insurance.”
In Pendragon’s official registration to run for mayor, she exempted herself from forming a candidate committee, meaning that she won’t be raising money for her run. Though, she said, she’s open to raising money in the future if her campaign picks up traction.
“I’ve always been the person to stand up, be a protector and help other people,” she said, describing why she felt compelled to throw her hat in the ring for mayor. “I’ve always been the person to stand up and help others. That really shapes my entire personality.”
Best of luck to Urn! I'm looking forward to the debates.