City development chief Mike Piscitelli (right) at Wednesday's presser about a new $53 million federal-aid spending plan.
The Elicker Administration unveiled a proposed $53 million plan that would direct a bulk of the city’s remaining federal pandemic-relief aid towards a host of housing, employment, youth engagement, and climate resiliency initiatives.
Those include boosting vo-tech education in the public schools, expanding downpayment assistance for homebuyers, funding energy efficiency building upgrades, and creating a new “land bank” to purchase properties before megalandlords get there first.
Mayor Justin Elicker, city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli and a handful of top City Hall officials made that announcement Wednesday afternoon during a press conference held in the Hillhouse High School auto maintenance lab on Sherman Parkway.
The presser took place alongside a half-dozen poster boards with pie charts and financial breakdowns, and just a few feet away from where high school students had recently been learning how to repair a lifted wine-red Chevy Cruze with its hood open and ready for tinkering.
The spending plan announced on Wednesday represents a proposed allocation of nearly half of the $115.8 million in federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) aid heading towards the city thanks to a law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden last spring. Click here, here and here for articles about roughly $38 million worth of ARPA-aid spending plans that have already been proposed by the Elicker Administration and approved by the Board of Alders.
Mayor Elicker.
Elicker described the proposed $53 million spend plan as a “once-in-a-lifetime investment in youth engagement, vocational education, housing affordability, wealth creation, and climate resilience.”
After soliciting community input at a series of public meetings over the past year, he said, “We believe we’re submitting something to the Board of Alders that reflects the hopes and desires of our community, and that will have a deep, significant and long-term impact, in particular on those who have been under-resourced for decades.”
This spending plan, Piscitelli said, offers an opportunity to fund programs that can “really create structural change in our communities.”
Elicker and Piscitelli said the city plans to submit the $53 million spending proposal to the Board of Alders next week, meaning that there will likely be an aldermanic committee hearing on the proposal in February, and a potential final vote by the Board of Alders later this Spring.
Elicker and Piscitelli — with the help of fellow press-conference presenters Hillhouse Principal Glen Worthy, city Youth and Recreation Department Director Gwendolyn Busch Williams, and city Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force Member Kai Addae — described the broad categories and initiatives covered by this $53 million plan.
Those include, as detailed during the presser and in a printed handout distributed by the mayor’s staff:
City Youth and Recreation Director Gwendolyn Busch Williams.
• $10 million for “Youth Engagement & Early Childhood.” That would go towards funding the Youth at Work employment program, “early childcare workforce development,” subsidies for family access to childcare, and the development and operation of new youth centers across the city.
“It is extremely important to us that we continue to acknowledge that young people are being infected by Covid-19 in mass numbers,” Busch Williams said. “It is extremely important that, as adults, that we are here to advocate for them, and protect our young people, and make sure that they make it through this pandemic.”
• $10 million for the “I’m Home Initiative.” This money would go towards expanding the city’s downpayment assistance program for homebuyers, supporting “technology upgrades and program management for residential license inspections, Fair Rent Commission and gap financing for development projects with deeply affordable and/or supporting housing components,” and providing rental assistance for very-low and low-income families.
• $10 million for “Wealth Creation & Economy.” This would help create a “small business fund” that would provide grants to local, small Black- and Latino-owned businesses, an “economic resiliency fund” that would provide larger grants “in support of recovery through innovation and start-up business development all designed to improve economic competitiveness.” This allocation would also support the expansion of the city’s Financial Empowerment Center and its existing banking, debt management, and financial planning programs.
Thomas Breen Photo
Hillhouse High School Principal Glen Worthy.
• $8 million for “Vocational & Technical Initiatives.” This would be used to launch a “Vo-Tech Initiative with the goal of creating a vocational and technical school together with a training and entrepreneurial pipeline that guides New Haven residents through the process of attaining living wage careers in growing industries.”
What does that mean exactly? Piscitelli said this tranche of money would help the city figure out the best model for vo-tech education in the city’s school system — in regards to curriculum, technology, whether to have multiple programs in multiple schools or one main program in its own school, and how best to help graduating students into the trades and starting their own businesses.
Worthy said that Hillhouse’s existing pre-professional programs in auto repair, construction, and medical labs are already “preparing kids for the next chapter of their lives.” This aid will allow the city and the school system to help make sure that students who do not want to go to college are employed in a well-paying and fulfilling job after graduation.
Kai Addae.
• $5 million for “Climate Emergency.” This would go towards the city’s “Carbon Free Future Program,” which in turn would support energy efficiency upgrades to single, two- and three-family buildings; funding for training and supporting small contractors in making these types of resiliency upgrades; and paying for “municipal carbon reductions and cost savings initiatives, including municipally-owned assets, solar installations and rolling stock.”
Addae said that the Carbon Free Future Program represents “an amazing opportunity for our city to begin to address the climate emergency,” in particular by targeting residential electricity — which she said accounts for 40 percent of New Haven’s greenhouse gas emissions.
• $6 million for “Public Health & Infrastructure.” This would go towards funding community outreach workers, lead abatement and prevention, and the city’s “Healthy Homes” campaign. It would also support improvements to city parks and public spaces.
• $4 million for a “New Haven Land Bank.” Piscitelli and Elicker said this proposed allocation would help launch a new separate authority that, as Piscitelli put it, could help the city “be a little bit faster in the marketplace, to create an opportunity for us to buy and hold key real estate assets in the city and have them ready for longer term investment.”
Piscitelli said that, per state statute, this entity would be legally separate from city government. It would be on the lookout for properties “where the immediate economic opportunity may not be there, but you want to buy and hold it and set it up for something in the future.”
Given how much money is flowing into New Haven real estate these days, Elicker said, $4 million is admittedly not a lot. “This is a start to allow us to create the land bank,” he said, “start getting it active, show proof of concept so that we can start to put more funding into that entity, so that we can protect some of these properties that are being gobbled up by absentee landlords that oftentimes don’t have the best interest of the community in mind.”
Elicker (right) talking with Sisters in Diaspora Collective members after Wednesday's presser.
After the presser, a dozen members of the Sisters in Diaspora Collective pressed Elicker on the city’s planned investment in housing.
Elicker pointed back to the land bank plans. It takes the city a long time to acquire properties today, he said, because of municipal processes and limited public funds. “The land bank will allow us to have a way to quickly acquire properties that may be of interest to the community,” he said, “so that someone else doesn’t just take it who doesn’t have the best interest of the community in mind.”
He also said that some of the $10 million in the “I’m Home Initiative” bucket will go towards expanding the city’s existing downpayment assistance program.
Collective members Nieda Abbas, Kobra Rohon, and Hala Ghali all said that their top ask for the city is finding ways to help low- and moderate-income homebuyers afford to buy a house.
“Houses have become very expensive,” Abbas said. Anything the city can do to help more people own their own homes the better.