Who Speaks For ​“The Community”?

One side brought petitions. The other side brought petitions. One knocked on doors and held a protest. The other knocked on doors and ran two community meetings.

Both sides said they represented ​“the neighborhood.” And they urged decision-makers to heed that neighborhood voice.

Those competing claims clashed at a two-hour hearing Wednesday night before the Board of Park Commissioners. The subject at hand: Whether to proceed with plans to build a new skateboard park inside Dixwell’s Scantlebury Park.

That proposal has been debated heatedly for months. Proponents hail it as a great opportunity to provide Dixwell teens a safe, healthful way to spend time outdoors, in a project designed by two homegrown skateboarders. Opponents see it as a noisy paving over of needed greenspace by Yale (a division of which is donating $25,000 of the $100,000 cost) as part of its encroachment and gentrification of the neighborhood. (Click here and here and here to read previous stories detailing the project and the arguments on both sides.)

The two sides reprised those arguments at Wednesday night’s hearing at the parks department’s Edgewood Avenue headquarters.

In the process, they posed a larger question: How do decision-makers determine who speaks for a community?

That was the question of the week in New Haven. Some of the same opponents presented the same broader claim — that they represent the genuine ​“community” voice — the same night as the parks hearing, at this passionate City Plan Commission public hearing over a planned rezoning of neighborhood commercial corridors. On Tuesday night a new team of developers looking to build on the grave of the old New Haven Coliseum commenced a year-long design process planned in conjunction with neighborhood groups.

You might say that ​“who speaks for the community?” has also been the question underlying the city’s public debates since mid-20th century urban renewal, when New Haven spent more money per capita than any other American city to bulldoze blocks of buildings in the hope of renewing them. Planners believed they had public buy-in. The consensus now is that they didn’t, and they therefore irrevocably destroyed neighborhoods.

Wednesday night’s skateboard hearing demonstrated how that question raises a host of sub-questions like:

• Who gets to decide the answer?
• Do elected representatives best speak for a community?
• Do the voices of people who show up — to meetings, to elections — count more than those who don’t participate?
• Do long-time neighbors count more than newcomers?
• Should decision-makers take a poll, either of ​“stakeholders,” or of the public at large? Or should they ensure everyone is heard and then seek to decide on the merits?
• Do advocates and activists who come to organize a community give voice to the voiceless? And unite different communities in broader quests? Or do they skew the voice to advance an outside agenda?
• Do claims of ignored ​“community” voices serve as a cover for a losing side to keep an issue alive after it has been decided?

Longtime Neighbors: It’s Our Park

Wednesday’s hearing was actually the third time the parks commissioners have considered the skate park in Scantlebury, which is bounded by Bristol Street, Ashmun Street, Webster Street, and the Farmington Canal Trail. The commissioners previously held two hearings and voted twice to approve accepting the $100,000 in donations and public dollars to build it. (The Board of Alders subsequently voted to approve the plan as well). The commissioners agreed to hold the new hearing Wednesday in response to neighbors’ requests.

There was no new resolution on the table. ​“We’re not going to vote tonight,” said commission chair Georgia Miller. ​“We wanted to make sure we heard everybody … We’ll make a final plan” later.

Roxanne Condon led the charge for the new hearing. Condon heads the Friends of Scantlebury Park. She has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years.

Condon spoke first Wednesday night, for a half hour.

“We were totally ignored,” Condon said of her neighbors as she addressed the commissioners. She said she missed the original parks commission hearing on the skate park because she hadn’t known about it.

Condon unfurled maps of the park to show the commissioners (pictured above) as she (and subsequent opponents) argued that the paving of a concrete skate facility would eliminate needed greenspace valued by the neighborhood. She spoke of a survey her group did 15 years ago in which neighbors said they would like to see a tennis court, more trash cans and benches. No one mentioned a skate park, she said. Another survey was taken in 2015, according to Condon. Very few people mentioned a skate park as a priority, she said.

She also said she has spoken to neighbors, and they oppose the park. ​“We have Chinese people that use that park. We have Latino people. We have black and brown people. I talked to a woman who had a burqa— she did not want a skateboard park.”

Park neighbor Carla Chappel, who lives on Ashmun Street, said she never ​“got notification” of neighborhood meetings held by Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, who supports the project. ​“There are a lot of residents that would come out, if they knew about” meetings she said.

Chair Miller asked if the half dozen or so fellow opponents in the room were ​“all your neighbors.”

Some were, Chappel responded. Others were from an advocacy group led by New Haven Legal Assistance Association staff organizer Kerry Ellington.

“I’ve been here 15 years,” Chappel added.

Commissioner Ernie Santiago asked if she attends meetings of the Dixwell Community Management Team, where skate park organizers Steve Roberts and J. Joseph also made a pitch.

Chappel said she doesn’t usually attend those meetings. She doesn’t always know when they take place. Plus she works two jobs, making it hard to attend community meetings.

Another opponent, longtime neighbor Jerry Turek, said the management team declined over the years but is now making a comeback.

When she did attend, Chappel said, she saw only three or four genuine ​“neighbors.” ​“Everybody else who comes there, it’s either Yale” or another institution.

Is Yale A ​“Neighbor”?

Yale, at least by its own definition, is a neighbor: Its presence has expanded in Dixwell. It moved its health center and police department to new buildings right off Scantlebury Park. It built two new residential colleges along the Canal Trail a stone’s throw from the park.

Skate park opponents portrayed that expansion as encroachment by an outside entity looking to ​“take over” their neighborhood.

“The impact of their presence in the neighborhood is negative to people who look like me,” testified Paul Hudson Bryant (pictured), 28, who grew up on Ashmun Street.

Roberts grew up in New Haven, skateboarding. He still lives in Dixwell. He and Joseph currently teach kids skateboarding in a parking lot behind Stetson Library; they said they took on this project to give kids a safer place to skate, closer to their neighborhood so they don’t have to travel to Edgewood Park’s facility. They noted that only $25,000 of the $100,000 comes from Yale, from its Schwartman Center.

Community organizer Ellington, in her own remarks to the commissioners, pointed out that Joseph attended Yale (graduating this May). She noted that Joseph and Roberts both work for Yale’s Schwarzman Center. She claimed that their boss pointed them to another donor (the Could Be Fund) in town where they found some of the grant money. Their role here is really to promote Yale’s agenda of kicking local kids off Yale’s Beinecke Plaza and taking over Dixwell, Ellington argued.

Joseph responded by telling the commissioners ​“it is good to be skeptical of Yale’s moves given the history.” But in this case he and Roberts developed a homegrown skate park plan and ​“leveraged Yale funding to put it in the neighborhood Steve grew up in.” He spoke up for ​“black and brown communities” whose young people ​“don’t get skateboarding” opportunities.

Proponents: The Community Was Heard

Alder Morrison (pictured) tore into the opponents when she got a turn to speak, accusing them of lying about the process and not truly representing the neighborhood.

Morrison noted that she conducted two neighborhood meetings about the skate park, which some opponents attended, including Condon. (Read about those here and here.) She distributed over 1,000 flyers to neighbors in advance of the meetings, she said.She noted that Roberts and Joseph presented their plans to the community management team; they also showed up at a protest to engage with the critics.

Morrison’s presentation raised the question of whether elected officials or bodies can speak for a neighborhood. As alder, she said, she regularly knocks doors to get constituents’ feedback.

“I knock on doors all the time. I talk to hundreds and hundreds of people on a regular basis,” Morrison said. ​“These five people appear to be making a lot of noise. They’re five people.

“If you have 600 people over here saying they want something … and five people who say they don’t … what am I supposed to do?”

Morrison said she was referring to a pro-skate park petition Joseph and Roberts circulated, which gathered over 600 signatures. The other side said it, too, collected hundreds of signatures on petitions. Both sides noted that not all the people on the other side’s petitions live in the neighborhood.

As for Condon’s complaint that the Friends of Scantlebury Park weren’t involved in planning?

“I have lived in that area 26 years. I have never been invited to be part of the Friends of Scantlebury Park,” Alder Morrison said. And even though she’s the alder, she never received information about the group’s activities, she said.

She said that the 15-year-old survey Condon presented doesn’t represent the voice of today’s neighborhood. Children interviewed at the time are now adults, she noted. And skateboarding wasn’t popular back then; people’s weren’t talking about it. It has grown in popularity since then and become an Olympic sport.

Morrison also took up opponents’ characterization of the community as ​“families” for whom Scantlebury is a ​“family park.”

“You’re right. This is a family park,” Morrison said. ​“What about the teenagers?”

A commenter to a previous Independent article on the controversy echoed Morrison’s point about government representatives.

“The Board of Alders wouldn’t have approved it if they hadn’t already shown community support,” wrote the commenter, who goes by the handle Politics 101.

“The ease with which small groups of New Haveners claim the legitimacy and authority of speaking for The Community astounds me. Community ought to be an inclusive term and yet it is used much more frequently to exclude. … Why do we so glibly accept people’s assertions that they are The Community? Why are we quick to accept those assertions when people are yelling, ​“No!” to any and all forms of development while doubting those assertions when people are saying, ​‘Yes, we can build infrastructure and housing and resources that are desirable and beneficial for people who already live here and who may choose to live here in the future.”

The Role Of Organizers

Politics 101 specifically mentioned how paid staff from legal aid organized and were among the 15 – 20 protesters at the Sept. 13 protest against the skate park.

The main legal aid organizer, Kerry Ellington, said her effort has given voice to people who weren’t heard.

She told the commissioners that while she doesn’t live in Dixwell, she does hang out sometimes in Scantlebury Park. Like the neighbors, she believes the black community deserves ​“serene” greenspace rather than a concrete skate structure.

Legal aid hired Ellington as part of a grant to organize communities to play more of a role in the development of their neighborhood. Ellington characterized the opposition to the skate park as part of a broader opposition to outside Yale-hatched gentrification foisted on Dixwell — and elsewhere in New Haven.

“The neighborhood has been loud and clear” in opposition to the skate proposal ​“and brought it to my doorstep,” Ellington told the commissioners. She asserted that ​“over a dozen” community members participated in the Sept.13 protest.

Commissioner Santiago pressed Ellington on the possibility of working out a compromise over where in Scantlebury to place the skate structure.

Santiago: ​“You’re saying the community is not willing to compromise at all on this skate park?”
Ellington: ​“What I have heard is that the community wants to preserve the greenspace.”
Santiago: ​“So that’s a no?”
Ellington: ​“I don’t want to speak for the residents …”
Santiago: ​“You’re doing that right now!”
Ellington: ​“The people I have talked to … don’t want it.”

Ellington called on the commission to hold another meeting, in Dixwell, so the community can weigh in more, before proceeding to approve any specific construction plans for the skate structure.

The Quest Continues

Which raised the question: When can decision-makers conclude they’ve done enough to hear from ​“the community” before voting on projects that affect them?

Activist Patricia Kane suggested an answer: New Haven should pass a ​“mandatory notice” ordinance requiring multiple specific steps officials must take to inform neighbors 30 days in advance of hearings on any ​“project of significance, such as a new building, a major renovation or rehabilitation, a demolition or a change of zoning” that affects them.

Kane has drafted such an ordinance. Read it here. She presented it to the parks commissioners at Wednesday night’s meeting. She said she has so far received support for the proposal from the Quinnipiac East Management Team, the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association, Fair Haven Management Teams, and Alders Steve Winter, Abby Roth and Frank Douglass.

New Haven needs such an ordinance because, no matter how hard they’ve tried, officials haven’t succeeded in alerting enough neighbors long enough in advance to truly involve the community in community decisions.

As the city wrestles with how best to involve the community in community decisions, solutions may not come easily. The results may not always satisfy all sides of a controversy. But the fact that New Haven continues to wrestle with the question with such passion and at such length reflects what seems to be a consensus: That it’s worth it. That more public input, no matter how drawn-out or contentious, in the end will produce better public decisions.