Laura Glesby Photos
Linda Gilliams and Westin Robinson in their home of 20 years.
Last bits of back fence not stolen or demolished.
When Westin Robinson heard the whir of a power drill coming from her backyard earlier this week, she walked outside to see a stranger scampering off with the second-to-last remaining slab of her back fence.
She didn’t bother shouting after him. She sighed.
Robinson has replaced that back wall of her fence three times since the start of the pandemic. Each new fence costs thousands of dollars. She can’t afford to redo it another time.
Her neighbors and their friends kick down the fence, section by section, again and again — removing most of the boundary between her neighbors’ yard and the house at 157 Edgewood Ave. that she has owned for 20 years.
By the time the trespasser drilled off the penultimate piece of her fence and carried it away, Robinson hardly had the energy to react.
Without a back fence, according to Robinson, people regularly sprint from the police into her yard. Once a stranger urinated in her backyard while brandishing a knife.
Calls to the police and to the property owners next door — a Boston-based nonprofit called The Community Builders, or TCB — have yielded no change.
“I’m a first-time homeowner,” she said. “I’m pulling names out of the hat” to contact about the issue. “I don’t know where to go.”
Robinson signed on Tuesday night to the Dwight Community Management Team’s virtual meeting with a plea for help on what to do next. Robinson heard about the management team only recently from a commenter on SeeClickFix.
When the Dwight specialist from the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative gave an update on neighborhood issues, Robinson interjected with her story.
“Nobody’s doing nothing,” she said.
At the management team meeting, Robinson received her first response: The neighborhood’s top cop and a TCB representative both promised to reach out. The management team’s chair contacted her personally. Robinson emerged hopeful, though not certain, that someone will be able to help her repair her fence.
Grilled Hamburgers
Robinson had never owned a house before she bought 157 Edgewood Ave. in 2002. She grew up blocks from the house, at the former Trade Union Plaza co-op at 450 George St. While she had contemplated leaving New Haven altogether, Robinson decided to settle down in the neighborhood where she had lived her whole life. She wanted to buy a home close to her mother’s work at Yale so that her parents could move in with her.
Upon visiting 157 Edgewood for the first time, Robinson gazed at the backyard and envisioned guests streaming through, eating and enjoying time together.
“This is my house,” she remembers thinking.
She bought 157 Edgewood from the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, and moved in with her parents, her husband, and her four children.
For more than a decade, Robinson’s hopes for the backyard seemed to become reality. The family’s backyard radiated the aroma of grilled hamburgers — a special recipe from Robinson’s late father, who always added cheese in just the right way. Neighbors were always coming over: “I’ve always fed people in the community,” said Robinson, who is a reverend at Saint Paul U.A.M.E. Church on Dwight Street. The family kept a swing outside and often put up decorations. Their beloved dogs would run throughout the yard.
After the pandemic arrived, a series of vandalisms and bad weather events ensued. The family’s backyard began to feel less and less like their own.
In August of 2020, Tropical Storm Isaias knocked down Robinson’s fence. The family’s insurance refused to pay for the repairs. Robinson had recently gained employment as a call center representative for Bender Plumbing, but during the prior two years when she was out of work, her credit score had plummeted. It took her a month to cobble together the $3,500 required to fix the fence.
Just one week later, a group of young people hanging out in the neighboring backyard — the one owned by TCB — kicked the fence back down.
She wondered if maybe the repaired fence hadn’t been sturdy enough. So she hired someone to replace the fence with cement clamps meant to hold it in place. The repairman gave her a discount, doing the work for $2,400.
After another week passed, Robinson heard a “BOOM” from the backyard.
The same group — invited to the backyard by the neighbors’ son — was knocking down the fence, slat by slat, kick by kick.
Robinson got the fence fixed again at the discounted rate. The group next door knocked it down again.
With food prices rising and extended family to support, Robinson hasn’t been able to afford another fence repair. In any case, the contractor she previously worked with has refused to come back out again, believing that the work would be fruitless. She wishes there were more resources available for homeowners in her position — and more information about whom to turn to.
Will TCB TCB?
Robinson and her family have tried to address the issue with the Kensington Square residents themselves. Robinson has spoken to the next door parents, who she says have tried to speak to their kids. Robinson’s adult son approached the young people themselves — and says he was threatened with a gun in response.
Robinson called the police three times. While officers came over to help slide missing pieces of the fence back in place, they haven’t addressed the root cause of the vandalism, she said.
She also called a representative of The Community Builders (TCB). She asked them to put up a wrought-iron fence, like the ones that line other parts of their Kensington Square properties, along her property. She recalled that TCB informed her that they did not want to set a precedent of responding to that type of request.
“When I found out they were labeled ‘Community Builders,’ that nearly knocked me off my seat,” Robinson said.
After the meeting, Kristin Anderson, a project manager with TCB, wrote in an email to the Independent that when Robinson first called, “Our team asked for additional information so we could confirm whether it was one of our residents and how best to address the issue, but that was the last we spoke with her.” She said that TCB was unaware that the dispute with neighbors was “ongoing.”
“It almost goes without saying, we take very seriously the quality-of-life concerns from our neighbors and tenants, but we try to approach these issues with balance and without evidence our residents deserve the benefit of the doubt,” Anderson wrote.
Since the vandalism, threatening, and trespassing began, family members no longer feel comfortable using their backyard. They can no longer bring their dogs in the yard unsupervised, since the area is no longer enclosed. Robinson worries about the house’s security.
The events have impacted the family’s broader sense of safety in the community where they’ve spent their whole lives.
Robinson’s mother, Linda Gilliams, used to relish leaving the house each night at 2 a.m. for a walk with her dog. The cops at the substation across the street would stop her and ask if she was all right, wandering with her dog at that hour, Gilliams recalled with a laugh. “That’s how comfortable I felt in my neighborhood.”
Since the fence debacle, Robinson has refused to let her mother leave the house that late into the night. The family is considering leaving the neighborhood altogether.
In addition to the fence, other parts of the house are in need of repair. A year ago, a tree fell on the house during a storm, knocking off part of the edge of the roof. Multiple vehicles have crashed into the front porch, causing lasting damage.
At the Community Management Team meeting, Lt. Ryan Przybylski, the police district manager for the Dwight neighborhood, suggested that the sidewalk outside Robinson’s home might be a good candidate for concrete or metal pylons to prevent future crashes.
The neighborhood’s alder, Frank Douglass, addressed TCB’s Kristin Anderson directly. “I confronted your office about this issue,” Douglass said. “We discussed it, and there was supposed to be a follow-up. This needs to be addressed now.”
Anderson told the Independent that after the meeting, she connected Robinson with Olga Perez, the community manager for the Kensington Square complex.
“I was so pleased with the response right away,” Robinson said after the meeting. She plans to go back to future meetings, to share her concerns as a resident and to invite neighbors to events at her church.
In the meantime, Robinson has kept the broken shards of her fence, even though she knows they aren’t intact enough to be salvaged. She’s holding out hope.