Wooster Square Wars Over Youth Shelter

Wooster Square residents shouted each other down, hurled accusations of racism and NIMBYism, and brought some close to tears over a proposal to bring an overnight shelter for homeless youth to a struggling commercial strip of Grand Avenue.

The neighbors said they all admire the idea of an overnight shelter for homeless youth. But they’re bitterly divided about whether the beds should go on Yale’s campus or in their neighborhood.

Those divisions flared up at a tense meeting at New Light High School on Thursday night, where dozens of residents filled a cafeteria and overflowed into the hallway to hear from the project’s backers and make their views known.

“It’s intense,” Aaron Greenberg, Ward 8’s alder, said after the meeting. ​“In my four and a half years on the board, no issue has inspired such passionate support and opposition as this project.

“I’ve been hearing from constituents for weeks, with emails, phone calls, conversations on the street and through an informal poll I sent out last week, and there really is genuine division and disagreement about the virtues and challenges of the program and the location.”

The meeting focused on an early proposal to expand services for homeless kids at 924 Grand Ave. The site, run by Youth Continuum, is currently a daytime drop-in center where youth (up to 24 years old) can hang until 5 p.m. The nonprofit is considering adding a 20-bed overnight shelter, possibly in the center’s basement or elsewhere in town.

Once Youth Continuum picks an address, the Board of Zoning Appeals will ultimately decide whether to grant a use variance needed to start construction. By code, the board’s five mayoral appointees will weigh whether an emergency shelter is a ​“reasonable use of the property” that won’t ​“impair the essential character of the area.”

The idea for the overnight shelter is modeled off Y2Y Harvard Square, a student-run shelter in the heart of Cambridge, Mass. There, kids receive a wide range of services during their monthlong stays, including medical check-ups and legal help, financial literacy workshops and résumé writing sessions, yoga workouts and cooking classes.

That shelter’s co-founder, Sam Greenberg, has moved to New Haven to implement a similar design here.

Working closely with 18 Yale students, his team has met with over 50 organizations and assembled a 13-member advisory board, including Community Foundation for Greater New Haven’s Lee Cruz, Columbus House’s Alison Cunningham, Center Church on the Green’s Rev. Kevin Ewing, Yale Law School’s Emily Bazelon, and Connecticut Coalition for the Homeless’s Mimi Haley.

During the fall semester, students plan to start volunteering at Youth Continuum’s other locations: an emergency shelter at 315 – 319 Winthrop Ave., a group home at 141 Valley St., and permanent supportive housing at 888 Winchester Ave. That will help them train other students to eventually run the shelter.

At Thursday’s meeting, advocates made clear that the city needs a shelter for the hundreds of New Haven children who experience homelessness every year.

This spring, the public school system said it had identified 676 kids without stable housing. Two-thirds ​“doubled up” with friends or relatives, a quarter entered homeless shelters and an eighth stayed in motels.Point-in-time counts show that the county is making progress. This winter, the number of homeless youth under 25 years old declined dramatically, down to 97 from 142.

But even if fewer are on the streets, finding a safe place to stay is a still a major challenge for young people, said Paul Kosowsky, Youth Continuum’s chief executive officer.

“It’s very, very difficult to get into the service system, because of the federal definition [of homelessness]. You either have to be living in a shelter or a place that’s not meant for habitation — under a bridge, in a car, in an abandoned building — and we know that most young people don’t do that. They go for a night here and there,” he explained. ​“Even though they might find a safe place to be on most nights, they often don’t know where they’re going tonight. Because of that, young people end up not being able to get into housing and become a very high risk for getting sexually trafficked, exposed to HIV/AIDS, [victimized by] violence or into legal difficulty.

“Ultimately what it means is that they have to put themselves at increasing levels of high risk before they can get help,” Kosowsky went on, ​“and we don’t think that’s a reasonable way for young people to be. We want to get them off the streets and into a safe place.”

Neighbors didn’t dispute that there’s a dire need. But they argued that Grand Avenue isn’t a good spot for a shelter. They said there are already too many drug users in Lenzi Park and drunks at Hollywood Package Store and Co-Opp Liquor. Even city officials agreed the location isn’t safe.

“We support this program, just not this location,” said Lt. Mark O’Neill, downtown’s and Wooster Square’s top cop. ​“There’s too many problems down on Grand Avenue, and I don’t want to add to them.” 

Lt. David Zannelli, Fair Haven’s district manager, added that the police department is already too short-staffed to deal with the constant calls for service at Emergency Shelter Management Services’s beds for homeless men at 644 Grand Ave. ESMS has been trying to move to an alternate location, but has been blocked by the zoning board.

Carmen Mendez, the Livable City Initiative’s neighborhood specialist, added that businesses are already struggling to make it. ​“We have to revive it; we have to make it welcoming,” she said. ​“We are killing our commercial spots with social services.”

Many speakers urged Youth Continuum to approach Yale about leasing out space. They said that the model should be replicated exactly like in Harvard Square, where the shelter was right across the street from the Yard, with crowded businesses and school security close by.

“Long ago, when Mansfield couldn’t be walked on because of the crime, Yale ended up buying a lot of the homes there and now it’s beautiful,” Mendez recalled. At Yale, ​“they have to stretch out their hand to the people who don’t have as well.”

But advocates said that homeless youth wouldn’t be comfortable walking onto campus. If black graduate students are getting the cops called on them, homeless kids who are often racial minorities and gender non-conforming would stand out even more, said Patrick Dunn, director of the New Haven Pride Center.

Kosowsky said he couldn’t understand why the neighborhood wouldn’t let him offer a hot meal and bed downstairs in the drop-in center’s basement, rather than turning youth out onto the street every evening. If the area was as dangerous as residents described, wouldn’t it be safer to keep kids inside? he asked.

Neighbors like Mona Berman and Jeffrey Kerekes have already collected 150 signatures against the project, and they say they haven’t even started organizing yet. Many at the meeting said they’ve endured people defecating in their yards, passing out on the sidewalks and burglarizing their houses.

“I think it’s time that you folks paid attention to the people that are supporting this city. When we moved here, our neighborhood was horrible. We built it up. We are now major contributors on William, St. John and Lion Streets to the tax base. You are benefiting from us, and yet they think this is Social Service Alley,” Berman said. ​“I spoke to another business today that deals with children, and they have somebody who sleeps in their backyard every night.”

“Sounds like they don’t have a place to stay, yeah,” Y2Y’s Greenberg said.

“You are not welcome here,” Berman said.

Another soon-to-be homeowner, Emma Lo, a Yale medical student completing her residency in psychiatry, said she was ​“disappointed” to hear opposition from people ​“who have money, who have a roof over their head” — a comment that immediately set off the room.

“Let her speak!” ​“She doesn’t live here!” ​“It’s not your backyard” ​“Could you just please be respectful?” everyone said at once.

Lo picked up again by saying that it was a ​“small ask” to let Youth Continuum expand into their basement.

She said she’d already seen the help the non-profit offered to one of her patients, an African immigrant with a severe mental illness. After an arrest, he lost his housing, then after a hospitalization, he landed at Youth Continuum, she said.

“The alternative for him was staying in his car, wandering the streets and contributing to these problems that you all are mentioning,” Lo said. ​“I’m proud to go down Grand Avenue and find that there are so many resources for people in my neighborhood. I go running there and see many homeless people that are standing outside loitering, and I love it: I want them to be there. I’m very disappointed by people who have and are not sharing with people who have not.”

Responses flew back. ​“We pay taxes.” ​“We have to protect our neighborhood.” ​“You don’t go in the middle of the night and pick up condoms and needles.”

“These are kids!” Lo yelled.

Alder Greenberg said he hasn’t made up his mind about the project. ​“I’m still listening,” he said. ​“The poll is still open, and all my constituents have my phone number and email.”