Church to Elicker: "Turn on the heat"
Sixty tiny-home supporters at a church in North Branford lifted their voices in song. It was about electricity and housing affordability, and aimed at New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker.
The occasion was “Home for the Holidays,” a brunch fundraiser held on Saturday, Nov. 11 at Zion Episcopal Church in North Branford to raise support for ongoing expenses toward sustaining New Haven’s Rosette Neighborhood Village, with its six tiny homes that house people who had been living in tents.
The event raised $10,000, according to organizer Colleen Shaddox, member of the Rosette Village Collective, and author of “Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending US Poverty.”
Click here to read about another suburb-hosted fundraiser for the Hill tiny homes, at the Guilford First Congregational Church back in May.
Jacob Miller.
Electricity is “the last piece of the puzzle” for the six shelters on Rosette Street, said Jacob Miller, a real estate professional and the son-in-law of Mark Colville, co-leader of the Amistad Catholic Worker House.
The houses “basically meet all the baseline provisions for most building and zoning codes,” he said, as attendees enjoyed vegan French toast, Moroccan chicken, and rose-scented fruit salad in the mellow-lit space. “They have prebuilt electrical connections points, heating and cooling units, hard-wired smoke detectors.”
The brunch spread at Zion Episcopal.
Beyond that, “we have the funds and a licensed electrician who’s ready to do that work within 24 hours. We just need the city to issue a permit to allow UI to turn the electricity on.”
The stumbling block, he said, is “a 100-year-old zoning code that doesn’t contemplate tiny houses.”
That means Rosette Village is constrained “to follow the same drawn-out process as someone who’s redeveloping a 100-unit apartment building, leasing it out, and then selling it for $20 million,” he said, referring to the apparently stalled redevelopment of an apartment complex on Congress and Davenport Avenues.
In a follow-up interview with the Independent Monday afternoon, Elicker said that city staff had a “productive meeting” with representatives from the Rosette Village group last week in his administration’s ongoing efforts to try to get these shelters into compliance with local zoning and state building codes. He also criticized the “hypocrisy” of residents of an affluent suburb criticizing New Haven for not doing enough to support affordable housing, when a third of New Haven’s housing stock is affordable while only 2.2 percent of North Branford’s is. See more below for Elicker’s response in full.
Mark Colville.
Mark Colville called out the mayor for impeding the process.
“His argument, that it isn’t fair to the other homeowners in the immediate area, doesn’t make sense,” he said. “All our neighbors have not only been informed, but consenting of this from the beginning and many have become active participants.”
Regarding the electricity issue, “City Hall is telling us that these encampments are unsafe and unsanitary,” he said. “It’s essentially the same argument they’re using for not turning the electricity in our backyard in the tiny homes. Because they don’t have electricity, they’re not safe, so we won’t turn on the electricity.” (Click here and here to read about two violation notices the tiny home builders have received from the city, and about the Elicker administration’s stance that these shelters be brought into compliance with local zoning and state building codes.)
Some of the attendees.
Colville cited a JAMA study showing the adverse health effects of evicting people from public spaces, particularly encampments.
In contrast to that, he said, “I think the places where people are trying to build their own communities, even on the periphery, without any support from a city, are much more healthy for people dealing with being homeless.”
Miller discussed the Elicker administration’s purchase of the 56-room Days Inn Hotel on Foxon Boulevard for $6.9 million in mostly federal funds in order to convert that site into a non-congregate homeless shelter.
Attendees listening to Jacob Miller.
“When all is said and done, with retrofitting and renovations, the city will be in that project for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million,” he said. “Part of the reason we thought it was so important not to just talk about these tiny homes but build them is to show how much more cost-effective they are.”
To replicate the Foxon Boulevard project, including 56 modular units, as well as a suite of other facilities like bathrooms, showers, full bath, and a community center, “it would cost about $1.5 million. We’re about 10 times more cost-effective,” he said.
Regarding plans to expand the model elsewhere, Miller described a village in Los Angeles of almost 1,200 units. “We may be on the cutting-edge in Connecticut, but this is not a new concept,” he said. “This is not a fly-by-night operation. This is being deployed at scale.”
Dwayne Akins.
For Dwayne Akins, Rosette Village has been a godsend.
“I make the coffee, I do the dishes, this and that, and I’m doing a service to a community. I’m not a problem to a community. That’s what everybody thinks a homeless person is. I’d rather be a help, help someone out.”
Orlando Sanchez.
Orlando Sanchez agreed. “I’m a person of not many words, but these little tiny houses, they’re a beautiful thing, and I’m grateful I’m a part of it, and I hope we can grow,” he said.
Christina DelSanto.
Christina DelSanto likewise expressed pride in being a part of Rosette Village.
“The way, we as humans take care of each other, I see our community leading by example for the rest of the state, rest of the country,” she said.
She detailed the plight of being unhoused in New Haven.
“A lot of people eat dinner at DESK,” she said, referring to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen on Temple Street in New Haven. “You get served at 4:40, you scarf it down, then you have to run to Grand Avenue to wait across the street from a church because you can’t wait in the parking lot yet. You have to wait right in front of the liquor store, and that’s humiliating.”
Then, she said, “you have to run across the street to wait another hour with a bunch of people who are desperate and willing to elbow you and fight you for one of the spots.”
Stats on homelessness projected at brunch.
If you get a spot, “they say they wake you up at 7, that’s not true, they wake you up at 5:15 quite aggressively, like we’re cattle, trying to shoo us out.”
That, said Colville, encapsulates the shelter system, which has “people getting ejected from these places, and then going to one of two areas, The Hill or Fair Haven, because that’s where most of the services for people in crisis can be found and also where you can find nooks and crannies to disappear into until it’s 4:40 and time for dinner.”
He talked about the effect on a neighborhood from a homeowner’s perspective, of unhoused people “not just getting unleashed, but getting unleashed as strangers.”
Rosette Neighborhood Village motto.
“The situation begins to get turned around when a neighborhood decides, as ours did, that we will no longer not recognize people as neighbors,” he said.
After the attendees pledged to cover the cost of, among other items, a cord of firewood, hardware store supplies, and Thanksgiving groceries for everyone in the backyard, Sean Gargamelli-McCreight led the group in full-throated song addressed to New Haven’s mayor:
Justin, Justin, warm your heart
Turn on the heat, that’s a good start
Homelessness is not a crime
Make housing affordable
It’s way past time.
The Rev. Lucy LaRocca
“I think all the time of the expression ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’” said Lucy LaRocca, Zion Episcopal’s assistant rector. “It doesn’t say neighbor just as the person next door or down the street. We need to love our neighbors wherever they are.”
Elicker: "They Should Practice What They Preach"
Thomas Breen file photo
Mayor Justin Elicker.
In a Monday afternoon phone interview with the Independent, Elicker pushed back on the narrative that the city administration under his leadership isn’t doing enough to support these tiny homes in particular, and affordable housing and homelessness services more broadly.
“It’s unfortunate the city’s position on the Rosette Street project was misrepresented at this meeting,” he said. “We’ve said time and again that we have the same goal to support the unhoused” as expressed by the Rosette Village group. “We’re trying to work with the folks at Rosette Street to find a pathway to potentially make the project legal, but we have an obligation to make sure residential housing is safe.” The city’s zoning code and state’s building code exist for a reason, he stressed.
Secondly, Elicker continued, “I’d say that New Haven is investing and doing more than any other municipality to support the unhoused.” He referenced the city’s conversion of a Foxon Boulevard hotel, a vacant former Orchard Street school, and a Hill industrial building into spaces to sleep for those with nowhere else to go as examples of his administration’s work on this matter.
Third, the mayor said, “respectfully to these residents in North Branford, they should practice what they preach. It’s the height of hypocrisy for a group of affluent suburbanites to lecture the City of New Haven to do more when it comes to homelessness and affordable housing.
“If they really want to help individuals struggling with homelessness, they can start by building more affordable housing in their own backyard.” He referenced a recent state Office of Legislative Research report showing that only 2.2 percent of North Branford’s housing is affordable, compared to 33.4 percent of New Haven’s.
Thomas Breen contributed to this report.
See below for more recent Independent articles about homelessness, activism, and attempts to find shelter.
• 700 Free Turkeys Fly At Food Pantry Giveaway
• Homelessness Update Uncovers Mental Health Toll
• NHPS: 567 Students & Counting Are Homeless
• Youth Shelter Planned, But Not For Hazel St.
• Mike P. Skips Polls, Heads To Scrapyard
• Tiny Homes Hit With 2nd Violation Notice
• City Tells Tiny Home Builders To Cease And Desist
• 6 Tiny Houses Built In Hill Backyard
• $3.5M Hotel-To-Homeless Shelter Contract OK’d
• Hotel-To-Homeless Shelter Contract Advances
• Hotel-To-Homeless Shelter Plan OK’d
• Memorial Uplifts Activist’s Fighting Spirit
• Tents Pop Up In 2 Candidate Debates
• Three Tents Pop Up On The Green
• Unhoused Activists Mourn One Of Their Own
• Homeless Activist Found Dead Outside Soup Kitchen
• Opinion: Don’t Sweep People Away
• Union Station Clears Out
• 50 New Homeless Shelter Beds Open In The Hill
• Tuesday In The State St. Triangle With David
• DESK Preps For Temp Relocation, Major Renovations
• Parking Chief: Homelessness At Union Station Is A Housing Problem
• Closing Time At Union Station
• City Housing Plight Brought To The‘Burbs
• Tent City Exiles Re-Camp On Rosette
• Debate Q: The Lesson Of Tent City Was …
• Homeless Youth Housing Plan Revived
• 6 Crisis Beds OK’d For Winthrop Ave
• Non-Cop Crew Cruises To Crisis Calls
• Don’t Like Encampments? Fund Solutions
• Brennan Slams Elicker For“Cruel” Tent City Sweep
• Why & How We Took Action At The Encampment
• DuBois-Walton: Tent City Reflects Broader Housing Crisis
• Tent City Bulldozed
• Tent City Campers Start To Clear Out
• “Tent City” Hit With New Move-Out Order
• “Tent City” Survives City Cleanup Order
• Competing Visions Emerge For Homelessness $
• Surprise Drop-Off Turns Bottle Man East
• State Lands $18M Homelessness Lifeline
• Tent Citizen By Choice Builds Community
Beautiful project.
Imagine every church doing this