Allan Appel photo
Neighbors Marjorie Weiner and Meg Friedman checking out Beecher Park photos before Wednesday's meeting.
Lizzy Donius was driving near Valley Street on Dec. 19 with a car full of 16-year-olds, including her own son, when a volley of police vehicles, sirens blaring, raced past.
Later, she learned the cruisers were headed to a nearby scene where another local 16-year-old, Joshua Vazquez, had just been shot and killed while riding his bicycle.
“That’s our community,” Donius recalled, choking back tears.
That moment unfolded at Wednesday’s latest regular monthly meeting of the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team — and with it, a quietly painful discussion of the role of a community management team (CMT) in enhancing community safety.
It was the new year’s inaugural and first hybrid meeting for the group and featured 20 neighbors on Zoom and a dozen more in person, all gathered on folding chairs and on the shiny floor at the brightly painted and renovated Coogan Pavilion in Edgewood Park.
Alder Richard Furlow delivering his report.
In the prologue to his monthly report, Amity/Westville Alder and Majority Leader Richard Furlow referenced both Vazquez’s recent murder and the general sense of cascading insecurity that falls from that shooting.
“Youth violence is on the rise and affecting every part of our city,” Furlow said. “A 16-year old was killed .… Our neighborhood gas station was [recently] robbed. It’s as if you can’t stand out on your steps without worrying what’s going to happen.”
Then Furlow laid down a challenge: “I think helping to find solutions is one of the jobs of a CMT. Would you agree?”
The resounding “Yes” that Furlow elicited was followed by a discussion of how CMT support for steps to solve homelessness, to increase the stock of affordable housing units, and about how cultural events as well as local businesses that reclaim the night can contribute to a neighborhood’s sense of safety and well-being.
Westville resident Dennis Serfillipi challenged both Furlow and Westville Alder Adam Marchand, who was also in attendance, about the trade-offs involved in the city giving tax breaks to developers in part because they include affordable units in the mix that their projects offer. “Isn’t that loss of city revenue now on the back of middle-class people, you and me, and the city’s taxpayers?” Serfillipi queried skeptically.
“When you abate,” Marchand replied, “there is a loss of income to the city. But we’ve made more affordable units a priority. That’s a very good reason to do it. We’ve found out if you don’t do [tax abatements], you don’t get affordable units. So let’s just suck it up and do it!”
Furlow reported that the developers of 446A Blake Street recently changed their mix of apartments to be offered in the proposed 293-unit development. At the request of the Board of Alders, which recently approved the deal, the number of studios — which might attract Southern Connecticut State University students and a more transient population — has been reduced; the number of one-bedrooms dramatically increased; and the number of affordable units was raised to 12.
“They did not fall under IZ [inclusionary zoning law],” so the offering of the affordable units was “a tremendous show they cared about our neighborhood.”
Long-time Westvillian Marjorie Weiner said she was heartbroken to see one particular group of homeless folks in the neighborhood: homeless vets accompanied by their wandering pets, panhandling on medians amid dangerous flows of fast traffic. What interventions are possible?
Jocelyn Antunes, a staffer with New Reach, a homelessness-prevention agency with a facility in Westville, answered, simply: “There are just not enough affordable housing or sheltered housing units in the city.”
And there’s a special paucity for people like the homeless vet Weiner had described, because no shelter or homeless setting is going to allow in a man and a dog. There are also couples who want to stay together, and that’s another setting that’s hard to find. “I know Westvillians want more affordable housing. Housing ultimately is less expensive than homelessness. We’ve made a bit of advances, but there’s just not enough. We’re just not there yet.”
After Donius, who is the head of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA), spoke, Meg Friedman asked, “What can WRVA do to get people and eyes on the street, things that add to safety?”
“We have restaurants open at night,” Donius replied, “and it does make a difference, a huge difference. Quality of life makes a difference to people, and it can be a piece of making more opportunity. Making opportunity and joy puts more people out there doing good things.”