Elicker Taps The ​“Two New Havens”

Mayoral candidate Justin Elicker speaks of New Haven as a ​“tale of two cities.” He saw that firsthand when he brought one message to supporters’ homes in the Hill and East Rock neighborhoods and to Fair Haven churches — and heard back different sets of concerns.

At 11 a.m. Saturday, Elicker popped in on Ann Boyd, a longtime community organizer, and several guests at her 24 Hedge St. home in the Hill. A few hours later, he made his way to a fundraiser hosted by journalists Jack Hitt and Jake Halpern on East Rock Road.

And on Sunday morning, Elicker rounded out his campaigning weekend by sitting in on two Fair Haven church services: one entirely in English, one entirely in Spanish. The bilingual candidate spoke with parishioners after each service about their concerns with high crime and a rotating carousel of police officers in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.

The Hill: Slumlords & Lead Paint

A group of Hill residents gathered that morning with Elicker around a table in Boyd’s backyard. Dominique Baez, a staffer at Elicker’s campaign, had brought platters of pastries, crackers, cheese, and fruit — along with campaign buttons and flyers.

Boyd had been the first tenant to move into the then-named Columbus West Apartments in 1983. She belonged to the Black Panthers in the 1970s and worked as the chair of Project MORE, a nonprofit devoted to reintegrating the formerly incarcerated. In 2015, Mayor Toni Harp had appointed Boyd to serve on the city’s Community and Police Relations Task Force.

“I’m a lifelong friend of Toni Harp, but it’s time for a change,” Boyd said. The Hill has lived for too long with ​“poor health, poor schools, poor housing, and a poor state of damn mind.”

Every so often, a new set of neighbors stopped by the backyard to speak with Boyd and Elicker. By the time the group amassed about ten people, Boyd decided to migrate to her living room, escaping the intensifying sun.

Conversing with Boyd and her guests, Elicker promised to stop using city funds to ​“subsidize” New Haven’s suburbs. He argued that Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, which have many non-taxable properties in New Haven, employ and benefit many suburbanites. He also referenced a recent New Haven Independent article reported that millions of dollars in state funds have been sent to suburban districts to pay for the education of students who attend New Haven’s inter-district Magnet Schools.

“We need to be at the table when decisions are being made,” said City Plan Commissioner Leslie Radcliffe. ​“If you’re not there, you get crumbs.”

Radcliffe first met Elicker in her work to found and tend to the Truman Street Community Garden. She had collaborated with the New Haven Land Trust, a land preservation organization that Elicker directed up until recently, and said she’d been watching Elicker grow as a politician over the years.

Damar Pringle, who works at the Tree of Life Foundation, said he used to support Harp, but grew disappointed in her administration. ​“They go in and say they know what’s going on in the Hill neighborhood,” Pringle said. ​“No, you don’t know what’s going on in the Hill neighborhood.”

“I got a lot of calls saying, ​‘Harp has done so much for the Hill.’ What?” Boyd asked the group.

“I have never seen Harp in our neighborhood, walking the streets,” she later added.

Elicker brought up the Harp administration’s decision to raise the threshold for what would be considered child lead poisoning, leading to a lead inspection of the family’s home, from 5 micrograms per deciliter to 20. (Last week, after facing backlash, the Harp administration reversed this decision.)

“We’re dropping the ball on the people who we should be invested the most in,” Elicker said. ​“City Hall needs someone who invests in the community, not just people who are politically connected.”

Pringle agreed. He spoke of a cousin of his who was affected by lead poisoning. ​“The management gets away with it. They don’t care. … They laugh at it.”

Elicker echoed this, calling absentee landlords a major cause of the city’s lead problem.

The topic of neglectful landlords came up again and again. Maryann Newland, who lives in the same housing complex as Boyd, said their landlord keepst dodging her calls about issues with the properties. Trash was always overflowing in their yard, she said, since the dumpster was too small for the number of people who rely on it. Her kids often had to pick up trash that had fallen by the side. The houses had possum and raccoon problems as a result. The yard of a supply barn for the complex was full of trash, including old mattresses and broken furniture; Newland said the heap had been there ​“forever.”

“The city has tools to enforce that,” Elicker responded, citing the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), an anti-blight agency. ​“It’s a problem when people in City Hall aren’t being proactive about responding to calls.”

Neighbors also raised concerns about LCI’s record on chasing slumlords after two people died in a fire in May inside an illegally converted rooming house on West Street.

Boyd expressed concerns about charging LCI with the task of enforcing building codes at her apartment complex. ​“If they were to come up here, the paperwork would say, ​‘unable to revive,’” Boyd said. ​“When this is labeled as ​‘unfit to live,’ what’s gonna happen?”

Another resident of the complex spoke of tiles that were lifting from her floor. She had called the property manager, who she said kept delaying repairs.

Boyd replied that the property manager lives in Long Island. ​“He doesn’t care.”

The houses hadn’t been painted in 20 years, according to multiple residents.

“I walked in here and saw the paint job, and I thought maybe that’s a sign of something going on,” Elicker said, nodding.

East Rock: Budget, Board Of Ed

Three miles away, blue tape lined the bottom of Jack Hitt’s front porch, protecting the house’s white panels from new paint on the floorboards.

Four hours after visiting Boyd’s home, Elicker arrived at 184 East Rock Rd., where Hitt and fellow East Rock resident Jake Halpern were co-hosting a fundraiser for the campaign. Halpern won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for writing the New York Times Magazine serial cartoon Welcome to the New World about Syrian refugee families resettling in New Haven; Hitt is an author and magazine journalist who co-hosted the prize-winning podcast Uncivil.

Hitt set out homemade quiches, roasted pecans, and a crab dish. Halpern made mimosas in the kitchen. Guests were asked to sign in, and many wrote checks out to the Elicker campaign. They roamed in and out of the kitchen and dining areas, which both opened to a backyard patio.

Hitt, who has hosted a fundraising pig roast for Elicker’s 2013 mayoral campaign, said he supports the candidate because he wants to see more creativity in how the city approaches its tight budget.

“It’s time that we find something new to complain about,” he said.

One guest, Harry Zehner, said he isn’t, in fact, an Elicker supporter.

“I think he has a good chance of winning, so I thought it’d be interesting to hear him speak,” he said. But Zehner said he plans to vote for Seth Poole, an independent candidate, in the general election.

When Elicker stood up to speak to the group, he raised some overlapping points from his earlier event. He told an anecdote about his staff teaching kids to feel comfortable in the water at a sailing camp through the Sound School. He advocated for job-training programs that actively work to connect trainees to future employers. And he spoke of implementing inclusionary zoning laws, which would require buildings above a certain size to either offer or help finance affordable housing.

Many at the fundraiser voiced concerns about the city’s Board of Education. Halpern mentioned incident at his kids’ school, Worthington Hooker. A teacher had been removed from his post, and a year-long investigation ensued; four substitute teachers had come and gone in the meantime. ​“There was no one you could call who would do anything,” Halpern said, adding that this wasn’t a unique situation in New Haven public schools.

When asked about the Board of Education, Elicker spoke to the crowd about the selection of Carol Birks as the superintendent of schools despite vehement disapproval from some parents. He said Birks, whose severance agreement is now being negotiated, was ​“set up to fail.”

“We should and can expect our city to have highly qualified people within the Board of Education who know what they’re doing, who have the best interests of our kids in mind,” Elicker said.

Several others at the fundraiser said that they support Elicker because they trust him to handle the city’s budgetary woes. Elicker spoke to this priority in his speech to the group as well.

“We have a financial crisis in the city,” he said. He called the city’s current budget ​“wasteful,” citing unnecessary lawsuits, corruption, high pensions, and tax breaks for Yale.

At the end of his speech, Elicker asked the roomful of people for their assistance in his campaign.

“There’s a handful of things that you need to win an election,” he said. ​“The most important thing is …”

“Money,” several people in the group called out.

“Votes,” Elicker corrected, to a laugh from the room. ​“But I like your thinking.”

Fair Haven: Crime, Policing

Two miles east, Elicker attended two Sunday morning church services put on at the two different Fair Haven campuses of the Our Lady of Guadalupe parish.

The first, held entirely in English, took place at 9 a.m. at the former St. Francis Church at 397 Ferry St. The second, held entirely in Spanish, took place at 11 a.m. at the former St. Rose of Lima Church at 115 Blatchley Avenue.

Both services were presided over by Vicar Carlos Zapata and by Deacon Tullio Ossa, whose teal-colored robes billowed about them when they preached from the pulpit and administered communion. Both services featured the same scriptural readings from the Book of Isaiah, St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and the Gospel of Luke, the latter prompting Zapata’s sermon about the importance of spreading the good word and tackling the world’s problems two by two rather than all alone.

Where the services differed was not in content, but in audience demographics: Around 75 mostly elderly, white parishioners attended the English language service on Ferry Street. Over 500 mostly young, Hispanic parents and children attended the Spanish language service on Blatchley Avenue.

Elicker briefly introduced himself from the pulpit with the pastor’s consent towards the end of each service. Then he met up with parishioners afterwards to talk about two issues he heard about again and again from the Fair Haven audiences: crime and policing. He did not have an opportunity to make a campaign pitch during the service itself, as he did at Bethel AME Church on Goffe Street one week prior.

Cindy Calvert, who attended the 9 a.m. service on Ferry Street, said she has lived on Exchange Street in Fair Haven for over three decades. Prostitution, drug dealing, and drug use, she said, are at all time highs on her block just behind Fair Haven School.

“It’s all hours of the day and night,” she said. ​“The drugs and the prostitution are horrible.” Those activities used to take place behind a corral of dumpsters near the school, she said. But since the dumpsters have been moved, she said, the prostitution and drug use activity has simply migrated to behind an electrical box on the street.

Furthermore, she said, she and her neighbors are tired of having their district commander and their neighborhood beat cops change every year or two. ​“We have a ton of rookies,” she said. ​“They just can’t get a handle” on the crime in the neighborhood. ​“We definitely need more cops.”

Calvert said she supported Elicker in 2013, and that she plans to vote for him again this year. ​“I think City Hall is corrupt,” she said, citing the recently announced FBI investigation of the Youth Services department.

On the sidewalk outside the Blatchley Avenue church after the Spanish-language service later Sunday morning, Elicker picked up that same conversation about crime and policing in Fair Haven with parishioner Ernesto Catalan.

Catalan said the Blatchley Avenue church often struggles with people dumping trash on its premises. ​“He’s interested in the Hispanic community in New Haven,” Catalan said after talking with Elicker. He said whoever is mayor should ​“take care of the community, take care of the churches.”

A woman who gave her last name as Sampedro but declined to share her first name said that she and her family live on Dickerman Street in Dixwell. ​“We want to make our streets more secure,” she said in Spanish, as translated into English by her teenage daughter. She called on Elicker to both clamp down on crime in the city and to promote youth summer and after school programs if elected mayor.

“He seems nice,” she said about the mayoral candidate. ​“He seems like he wants to change.”

After speaking with half a dozen more constituents in rapid fire Spanish on the sidewalk outside the church, Elicker took of his suitcoat and bought a cup of pineapple juice to cool down in the midday heat.

Throughout his campaigning in Fair Haven, he said, he’s heard time and again concerns about a lack of security and about police responsiveness.

“Overall,” he said, ​“we need to pay our police more.” Higher pay will disincentivize officers from jumping ship to Yale or the suburbs, and will therefore give them more time and room to build relationships with the communities they serve.

“This is where community policing is particularly important,” he said. He said that consistent rotations in the top cop spot for the Fair Haven neighborhood and for other policing districts throughout the city have bred not just unfamiliarity but distrust between neighbors and the police. If elected he said, he would prioritize not losing top talent to other departments through increasing pay, reforming overtime rules, and helping bring to a close the negotiations over a police union contract that expired three years ago.