Elicker Seeks Ideas; Here Are Eight

In between fixing sidewalks and government IT, New Haven’s mayor-elect has a chance to reset how the city seeks to strengthen its neighborhoods.

The mayor-elect, Justin Elicker, this week won a mandate for change by ousting incumbent Toni Harp by more than a 2 – 1 margin. He drew strong support in every part of town, winning 27 out of 30 wards.

Since then Elicker has resisted the urge to threaten to ​“clean house” or trash the people working hard in government. He has vowed to focus first on working with all groups in town to improve service delivery and communication.

Hiring good people and managing the government well day to day are indeed the top responsibilities of any mayor, including responding to unforeseen tragedies and crises. In fact, that is one way of thinking ​“big,” given how difficult it is to manage a cumbersome government bureaucracy.

Most mayors, at least in New Haven, think big in another way as well: They seek to put their fingerprints on broader, ambitious policy or structural goals, along with smaller high-profile attempts to shine light on government.

Given the institutional restraints to change, accomplishing even one big initiative in a term is a success. Mayor John DeStefano dedicated much of one term to fixing a broken housing authority; another to crafting a model immigration policy; another to launching a drive to rebuild all city school buildings; another to launching a ​“school change” plan. Mayor John Daniels revolutionized New Haven’s approach to policing. Mayor Toni Harp removed a decades-old urban-suburban barrier (the Brookside-Hamden fence) and put together a model program (YouthStat) to help young people in trouble and save lives.

Elicker said he wants to hear people’s ideas. His transition team has set up this website seeking ideas from the public. In that spirit, following are eight unsolicited suggestions from your humble correspondent. Some are new, some borrowed from the past. Most require little to no new taxpayer money.

Making Homebuyers, Keeping Cops & Teachers

Yale hasn’t collaborated with the city on a major initiative since the 2009 launch of New Haven Promise. A new ambitious initiative is long overdue.

Meanwhile, New Haven is having a hard time keeping good teachers and cops away from the suburbs.

As a new mayor, Elicker gets one initial big ask from Yale, a chance to show town and gown working together in each side’s self-interest to better the city. Former Yale President Rick Levin and Mayor John DeStefano were great at that in ways big and small, visible and not: brokering an end to labor impasse holding up development of the Omni Hotel; saving the College-Chapel commercial district after an FDIC foreclosure; quietly finding new jobs for people who needed to leave city government but hadn’t done anything wrong.

Elicker and Salovey could get started with an initiative to extend Yale’s successful homebuyer plan, using university bucks as an incentive for city schoolteachers and cops to buy houses anywhere within city limits. (A few cops currently have apartments paid in public housing developments.) The buyers would get downpayment assistance of, say, $25,000, gradually forgiven over five years if they remain in their homes. This would not just help improve the quality of two workforces critical to New Haven’s future; it would embed teachers and cops in the communities they serve. Yale New Haven Hospital, which also has a homebuyer program, could participate as well in this initiative. (On a related note, Elicker during the campaign proposed that Yale New Haven create a housing fund for the homeless. And he proposed a Yale initiative: scrapping its shuttle service and buying CT Transit bus passes for students and staff.)

Lead Paint Brigades

Problem: Much of New Haven’s housing stock is old and has lead paint.

Lots of little kids live in that housing. The lead paint puts their health at risk. So landlords need to remove it.

Problem: That costs a lot of money.

Further problem: When landlords do cooperate with city inspectors, they sometimes complain, rightly or wrongly, about being steered to contractors who don’t do the job well.

Further problem: The city gets lots of federal money to help landlords pay to clean up lead paint. But at times it doesn’t get the money to them, in part because of inadequate ​“outreach” efforts (like lead paint ​“fairs” two bus rides away form most neighborhoods, at Lighthouse Point).

Extra problem: We have unemployed and underemployed people who need training for good jobs.

Partial solution?: The city’s health department sets up a training program to create a brigade of skilled local people to abate lead from homes. It sets up the program with ConnCAT/ConnCORP, which has established a track record of retraining people for good jobs (in phlebotomy and culinary work) and creating potentially sustainable public-good enterprises through social investing. The health department helps keep the federal money flowing and leads the brigades to the endless list of landlords needing the help. ConnCAT/ConnCORP trains them and sets up the business, with hands-on quality control.

Outing Slumlords

As Elicker noted, tenants throughout New Haven are complaining about slumlords. Landlords collecting general federal Section 8 rental subsidies are too often failing to invest in keeping properties clean and safe.

The landlords often hide behind limited liability corporations (LLCs) that can be difficult to track. Quick land record and state business data searches can often reveal connections between groups or attorneys or some key personnel. But often true identities are hidden. A whole lucrative national industry exists to conceal identities of property owners and shield them from paying taxes or from the consequences of preying on communities through blight or fraudulent foreclosures.

But more digging can reveal who’s the money behind these shameful endeavors. And those names can be cross-checked against records of persistent complaints and enforcement actions.

The Elicker administration could work with the City Clerk’s office, community management teams in each neighborhood, and one of Yale Law School’s hard-working student clinics to compile a list of the most notorious property owners in New Haven, from on-the-ground management companies to distant corporate lenders. The city can publish that information online as a public service to renters. Then the mayor and alders and community leaders can hold monthly public events in each neighborhood to highlight different slumlords and demand specific changes; and keep up the pressure through follow-up events and reports.

Racial-Religious Mediation

The above-mentioned housing code-enforcement issue has contributed to a rise in black-Jewish tensions bubbling below the public surface.

Landlords of all races and backgrounds regularly get cited for lead paint and other code violations (despite, for instance, an allegation posted to the contrary in this campaign article. And many of the city’s good landlords happen to be Jewish.

But right now many black and brown renters are having problems with large management companies staffed by people who wear yarmulkes. Meanwhile, those landlords often feel singled out and unfairly accused or harassed for problems traced to difficult tenants.

On top of that, hundreds of Hasidic Jews have moved into Beaver Hills, helping to stabilize and enrich the neighborhood while also sometimes encountering threats and outright hate.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise nationally; I happen to have encountered it personally in New Haven more often in recent months, from my front porch to online to out in the community. And of course African-Americans face discrimination and institutional and personal wrongs on a daily basis.

The city, working with nonprofits like Community Mediation, needs to enlist trusted neighbors to address the problem before it explodes. One idea would be to form teams of black and Jewish individuals active on the northwest side of town to serve as sounding boards. They could solicit and respond to complaints from people in the community, and then follow up with informal mediation efforts.

Mayor TV

Governments and elected officials have become their own media outlets in the modern era. They can use the web and social media and robocalls to get vital information to the public and obtain feedback. Before most pols discovered this fact, Justin Elicker, then an East Rock/Cedar Hill alder, was mastering social media communication to communicate on complicated issues like the city budget (see above). As mayor, he can follow the lead of mayors like Hamden’s Curt Leng and live-stream from the clean-up sites at big storms and update and connect with citizens. He can establish a ​“Mayor TV” channel on multiple platforms and take it to the next level. He can highlight the great work of city employees — for instance, picking a civil servant of the month, following them on a plow or garbage run or bridge repair or after-school tutoring session, and learn with the rest of us about the nuts and bolts of daily public service.

Mayor For A Day

Elicker could revive a practice of former Mayors Dick Lee and Bartholomew Guida: inviting a promising public school student to accompany him as junior ​“mayor for a day.” The student watches the mayor at work and takes a photo in the mayor’s chair. That can help spread the word about how government works to younger people. And it can inspire them to government service. Both John DeStefano and John Daniels were picked in their elementary school days.

Yeti Brigades

As superstorms became more common in the age of climate change, some New Haveners organized informal ​“yeti brigades” of volunteers who dig out the driveways and sidewalks of homebound neighbors. The experiment was isolated and ad hoc. Through the public works department and community management teams, the Elicker Administration could seek to formalize and support these teams citywide.

Restructure LCI

The Livable City Initiative (LCI) was one of Mayor DeStefano’s first signature efforts. Beginning as in part a selective demolition agency (to clear side lots for abutting property owners and community gardens at a time of population loss), LCI has evolved over time, as a neighborhood anti-blight and development agency.

Its small staff includes some of the hardest-working heroes in city government. They have had great successes in creating working-class homeowners and tracking some slumlords and out-of-state problem lenders tying up blighted properties. They also are trying to figure out how to accomplish more of that with limited resources. One problem is that different departments need to collaborate on the same functions.

The time may have come to separate those two important and different functions and fold them into existing departments: code enforcement into the building department, neighborhood development into the economic development department (a la the former 1980s-era Office of Housing and Neighborhood Development).

The above dreaming and scheming comes from one of Justin Elicker’s 130,000-plus constituents. Please add your reactions and your own ideas in the comments section below.