Nora Grace-Flood file photo
Four of the six tiny homes constructed behind Amistad House.
Six backyard emergency shelters built without city approval won zoning relief Tuesday night — as even rule-abiding commissioners backed the argument that community action should sometimes precede paperwork.
The Rosette Village Collective, a crew of individuals experiencing homelessness and the volunteers helping to house them, made their case during the latest online meeting of the Board of Zoning Appeals to legitimize the six one-room shelters erected last fall in a Hill backyard.
“This is a community-based solution to a problem we all acknowledge,” stated Jacob Miller, the lead applicant on the project. The problem at hand: “The rise of homelessness in the state of Connecticut, and I think disproportionately in the city of New Haven.”
The project at hand, he said, is a “neighborhood getting behind the creation of a community for people who are pushed into the margins of society.”
The backyard belongs to Amistad House at 203 Rosette St., which first opened up to individuals in need of a place to pitch their tents after the city bulldozed a homeless encampment on Ella Grasso Boulevard last spring and left unhoused individuals unable or uninterested in finding regulated shelter spaces without a place to go.
Recognizing that winter was around the corner, and that navigating city bureaucracy with atypical building plans takes time, Amistad House decided on their own to put roofs over their outdoor residents’ heads. The team managed to raise enough money to buy six prefabricated shelters, which they installed with professional help.
Then came cease and desist orders from the city. Amistad later agreed to work with the city to try to come into compliance with city and state zoning regulations. Read in detail about that twisted chronology here, here, here, and here.
“So,” BZA Chair Mildred Melendez asked Tuesday, “how did you get to us?”
The answer: While Amistad House is working to pass state legislation that would create zoning pathways for emergency housing, they are, in the meantime, asking to live as an exception to stringent building code rules to let ten otherwise unhoused New Haveners remain in their so-called “tiny homes.”
In order to do that, Amistad House requested retroactive zoning relief from the board. Specifically, they asked for a use variance to permit “detached single-room occupancy structures,” as well as variances to shrink side yard setbacks from eight feet to five and the rear yard setback from 25 feet to five.
They also sought permission to increase their maximum building coverage from 30 percent to 32 and to allow for a minimum distance of three feet between buildings where seven is usually required.
Only one commissioner, acting chair Mike Martinez, voted against the application. “Because it was built without going through the proper steps,” he said.
Chair Melendez led the rest of the commissioners to vote in favor of the project.
“I understand they didn’t go through the proper channels,” but neither do plenty of people who come before BZA, she reasoned. Many people seek retroactive relief for building on their private property after receiving notification from the city that such work requires government approval, she said.
The application was approved with four conditions:
First, only two individuals can reside in each structure at any time.
Second, any potential resident is expected to be a direct family member of the first.
In addition, no more than the six structures currently on site are allowed to serve as residences. All shelter occupants must maintain access to shared facilities inside Amistad House, including the first floor bathroom and kitchen.
And lastly, an easement must be in place for structures that extend beyond the property lines of Rosette Street if Amistad House is sold down the line.
"Leave It In Our Hands."
Resident Suki Godek outside her home in October.
The application was approved following extensive support from Hill community leaders, next-door neighbors of Amistad House, and testimony from those living in the shelters themselves.
Leslie Radcliffe, the chair of the City Plan Commission, weighed in as a Hill resident.
“Did Amistad jump the gun?” she said of their approach to building the shelters. Sure. “But would we expect someone to not go to the emergency room because they don’t have health insurance?
“Most people deal with the emergency and then the paperwork. That is literally how this community arose — to put a tourniquet around the flow of unhoused communities into the street.”
While the situation might be understood as neighbors doing a favor for Amistad House and those living behind it, those living in the Hill who spoke Tuesday pressed the reality that Amistad is doing a favor for the neighborhood at large.
Teachers Union President and Hill resident Leslie Blatteau agreed: “They’re doing the work that community needs to do. They are showing us how it’s done.”
She noted that in recent years, a Hill playground that used to bustle with kids and families has been taken over by adults with nowhere else to sleep. Amistad House “helps improve individuals’ lives,” she said, “because folks who are unhoused deserve more stability than the corner of a playground.”
At the same time, she said, “it helps playgrounds be playgrounds” by granting unhoused people an alternative.
Neighbor Kyle Ferris, who has lived in the neighborhood for ten years, said “I’ve got no problem with the people at Rosette Village.
“At Christmas, the whole community comes to Rosette Street. They’ve got a Santa Claus there, and at least 100 kids are welcomed.
Crystal Fernandez, who lives in an apartment above Miller’s home at 207 Rosette St., further noted an even more direct effect Amistad residents have had on her own family’s life. A single mom with four kids aged five, nine, 10 and 16, she said “it takes a village to raise a family and our backyard has stepped up in that regard.”
The residents cook meals together on Sundays to share with the broader neighborhood, Fernandez said. “They remind me if we’re missing the school bus” on hectic mornings when she’s struggling to get her kids out the door on time. They tell her kids “cautionary tales” to encourage them to get their homework done and to take educational opportunities seriously.
She translated testimony from a backyard resident, Eddie, who spoke in Spanish about how living in a shelter for three months has reduced the intensity of his chronic asthma. Not only does he now have a clean, warm place to stay, but he has somewhere to keep the nebulizer that helps him breathe easy, he said.
Another resident, Suki Godek, added that Amistad has “given me a sense of home and stability that I’ve been missing for several years. Without that I’d be really lost and in an awful place.”
Since transitioning from a tent to a four-walled shelter, she added, her husband has finally obtained stable employment.
Miller said that since the shelters have gone up, two residents have gotten off federal Section 8 rental subsidy waiting lists and found permanent housing.
Top neighborhood cop Sgt. Jasmine Sanders reported that police had been called six times to the location over 2023, including responding to the sudden death of one individual (from a heart attack) in a tiny home back in January of this year. Miller clarified that none of those calls were from neighbors complaining about disturbances.
“Do we have the police come in response to backyard residents who are in crisis situations? Yes,” he said. “Do neighbors call the police? No.”
The reason that a zoning variance is important and valid in this circumstance, he argued, is because the initiative is “widely accepted by the neighborhood.”
Mark Colville, co-owner of Amistad House alongside his wife, Luz Catarineau, said: “I would ask the zoning committee to step aside and let this thing go.
“You need do nothing else but leave it in our hands.”