Activist Sean Gargamelli-McCreight at Monday's encampment arrests.
Jabez Choi photo
U-ACT's Suki Godek and Joel Nieves join Thursday's protest.
“When the city evicts our unhoused neighbors from the train station and the Green, they call it a cleanup,” arrested homelessness activist Adam Nussbaum said during a protest on the front steps of the downtown courthouse. “And we ask, clean for who? We all know to them, ‘clean’ means dead.”
An East Rock landlord won permission to boost the number of apartments at a Humphrey Street house from six to 15 — after a local attorney pointed out that the existing building contains four floors, not three, and therefore has enough gross floor area to accommodate the higher unit count.
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Paul Bass and Thomas Breen |
Oct 28, 2024 1:47 pm
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Officers arrest homeless advocate Mark Colville.
Police made seven arrests of activists for the unhoused and removed four tents on the Upper Green Monday after a weekend of negotiations over the city’s latest homeless encampment.
Property Manager Amanda Naranjo (center) helps cut the ribbon ...
... on "the Archive" on Chapel St.
Downtown renters looking for a shiny new two-bedroom apartment can now spend $3,399-plus per month — to live in a two-building, 166-unit complex that has risen from the ashes of a pair of long-vacant Chapel Street lots.
Homelessness, policing on the agenda for Hill CMT.
Hill South neighbors pressed the mayor, the police chief, and their district’s top cop to do more to build up the ranks of the city’s police department — and to work harder to address homelessness in the neighborhood.
Mark Colville (right) and volunteers handing out food and supplies on the Green ...
... to campers like Strongbow Lone Eagle.
Though their tents are largely gone, unhoused campers have set up sleeping bags on the grassy patch behind United Church on the Green — where they continue to distribute and receive food and other aid, as an activist crew keeps up their protest of homeless encampment sweeps.
Jianchao Xu's property manager, David Kone, at LCI hearing: "Obviously, there's been some miscommunication."
A Bethany-based landlord was hit with $18,200 in city fines — as part of a rejuvenated quasi-judicial process designed to give the Livable City Initiative (LCI) more teeth when confronting negligent rental property owners.
LCI's Liam Brennan (center) and Javier Ortiz with Fire Inspector Steve Martin at an inspection on Nash St.
Watch out, derelict landlords: housing code violations can now come with a $2,000-a-day price tag levied directly by the city.
The Board of Alders instituted that maximum fine for landlords renting out units that are deemed to be unsafe on Monday evening, escalating the consequences from a previous $250-per-violation fine.
Police, social workers, and unhoused activists in the final hours of Thursday morning's encampment.
(Updated) As a tent encampment on the Green came down Thursday morning, city homelessness services coordinator Velma George and Lora Weeks soon realized they had met before — at a different New Haven encampment, back in 2016.
George had been an outreach social worker. Weeks had been living outdoors.
Eight years later, they found themselves back in the same positions.
Xu (in the background) arguing with Brennan, and shouting at this reporter: "Don't take a picture!"
A fatal-fire-inspired inspection of another one of Jianchao Xu’s potential rooming houses came to an abrupt end when the landlord confronted the city crew on his building’s front porch.
“Why did you come here? Because I’m a colored person? Why did you single me out?” Xu asked, his phone’s camera pointing at Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Liam Brennan. “This is not a communist country.”
Shenae Draughn, right, responding to a room of applause at her appointment.
Shenae Draughn will once again step in as the interim head of the Housing Authority of New Haven and its affiliate organizations, after Karen Dubois-Walton steps down in November.
Plans to bring a cannabis dispensary — and not 75 new apartments — to an Upper State Street warehouse took one big step forward, after a Fairfield-based housing developer flipped the property for $3.15 million to a local bud entrepreneur looking to bring “Hi!” to the people.
Showing up: Street medicine outreachers Phil Costello, Emma Lo, Claudette Kidd at WNHH FM.
Teens have started jumping out of cars and attacking homeless people sleeping on the street in Fair Haven, according to a veteran street outreach worker.
Welcome back, Chapel Street, looking east from Church.
Eastbound travel lanes are back open for the first time in a year and a half on a downtown block of Chapel Street — which is no longer a roadway-shuttering construction zone, and which now has 166 new places to live.
Yvonne Watts (right), with neighbor Lourdes Oritz, at a Mandy Management building that has failed two recent LCI inspections: "If they fix anything else, they're going to go up on rent."
Yvonne Watts said she doesn’t want Mandy Management to repair her bathroom mirror or replace her kitchen countertops — because she’s afraid that will raise the rent too high.
... and 50 senior dwellings approved for 34 Level.
The City Plan Commission signed off on 162 new mostly affordable apartments to be built in Newhallville, West Rock, and Whalley — as part of three more new-construction projects involving the housing authority’s nonprofit development affiliate, the Glendower Group.
Developer Jay Hakimian (center) at Tuesday's groundbreaking.
An $18 million infusion to a long-stalled downtown development means that 96 new apartments will finally soon rise at the site of the ex-Harold’s Bridal Shop — the latest step in a builder’s journey that began with a love for Louis Kahn’s architecture.
Renderings for the future of the Church Street South site, including a "central green" pictured here, were revealed...
Laura Glesby Photo
...at a packed meeting on Thursday.
Townhomes shift into high-rises as the buildings transition from the Hill to Downtown, anchored by a “central green.” In the mix is a coffee kiosk, an outdoor theater, and a pedestrian promenade.
A team of architects and designers sketched out those ideas on Thursday for a future mixed-use, mixed-income development at the vacant site of the former Church Street South housing complex and the current Robert T. Wolfe public housing apartments.
LCI Director Liam Brennan (center), with deputies Mark Stroud and Frank D'Amore: Time to "streamline all these processes, so that they conform more to what we think public expectations are."
Landlord fines for housing code violations are on track to jump from $250 apiece to up to $2,000 a day — thanks to a state-enabled local law newly endorsed by an aldermanic committee.
Joel Nieves, staying at Rosette for now: "I'm not alone anymore."
With the help of an extension cord providing power to his CPAP machine, Joel Nieves is still living in a tiny shelter on a Rosette Street backyard — two months after the city ordered the power turned off for him and his unhoused neighbors.
In that same time, the Elicker administration has also offered Nieves a new, more permanent place to stay, along with security deposit help.
The problem for Nieves — which has led him to turn down that housing help — is that the replacement apartment is two towns away, in Branford.
Ward 3 alder candidate Angel Hubbard kicks off the campaign launch: “I will never judge anyone for having an addiction. We do need programs.”
Rafael Rodriguez and Steven Fontanez (right) are working hard to help themselves and others out of addiction, as they told Hubbard, Valerie Boyd, and Justin Elicker.
Steven Fontanez is running out of time. He has only a few days left to stay at a sober housing program, and he hasn’t had luck finding an apartment.
Giselle Orosco is running out of patience. She’s tired of guessing whether the people who lie down outside her house are overdosing or merely asleep.
Angel Hubbard is running to be an alder for them both.
Liam Brennan: Looking for enforcement mechanisms "everywhere we can."
With hopes of building a faster housing code inspection system with more teeth, the Livable City Initiative (LCI) under its new director is moving away from the courthouse and toward municipal fines.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Aug 28, 2024 3:38 pm
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Dereen Shirnekhi photo
Jim Farrales and Nancy Navarretta: This center is the "first of its kind" in the state.
The city’s non-cop crisis response team now has a central location on Winthrop Avenue where first responders can bring adults who need short-term help for substance use and mental health challenges — while keeping them out of hospitals.
Soon after she moved into a rental in Fair Haven in the winter of 2022, Stella Damoah realized the heat didn’t work and the landlord couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fix it. She looked around for another place and found studio apartments starting at $1,800 and one-bedrooms for well beyond that. So she opted for space heaters, adding about $600 to her expenses.
“That was when I made up my mind to look for a place to own,” said Damoah in a recent Zoom interview.
Following an almost two-year odyssey, Damoah, an accountant who came to Connecticut from her native Ghana in 2005 to pursue a master’s degree at the University of New Haven, will close on a home in Naugatuck next month.
