Thomas Breen photo
Ellen Cupo at Sunday’s campaign kick off.
Labor organizer Ellen Cupo kicked off her campaign to be the next Wooster Square alder with a commitment to fighting for affordable housing and community-developer communication in one of the hottest real estate markets in the city.
Cupo, a 31-year-old New Haven native and registrar in Yale’s Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and LGBT Studies, officially launched her Ward 8 aldermanic campaign Sunday afternoon at the Next Door pizza restaurant in Jocelyn Square.
Cupo is an active member of Yale’s Local 34 clerical and technical workers union, of which her father Aldo was a founding member back in the 1980s.
The campaign event, filled with Wooster Square neighbors and over half a dozen alders, including Board President Tyisha Walker-Myers and Majority Leader Richard Furlow, came just three days after Cupo won the city Democratic Party’s official endorsement for the alder seat at Thursday night’s town convention.
A full house at Next Door restaurant in Jocelyn Square.
“We see rentals popping up all over the city,” Cupo said, “and I myself am concerned that in just a few short years working families like mine would be priced out of the neighborhood.
“I’ve been attending management team meetings and reading in the paper about developments that are coming up more and more. And I think that it’s so important that as neighbors, we’re involved in that process, and that we have a voice in what these developments are, and that we’re a part of bringing people in that builds on the character of our ward.”
Current Ward 8 Alder Brenda Harris, who stepped in to fill out the rest of former Alder Aaron Greenberg’s term when the latter resigned in April to take a teaching job in the Southwest, is not running for a new term. She gave her endorsement to Cupo at Sunday afternoon’s event.
Ward 9 Alder Charles Decker (center) and New Haven Rising leader Scott Marks (left) lining up for pizza.
A native of Downing Street in Fair Haven and a graduate of Benjamin Jepson School and Wilbur Cross School as well as of New York University, Cupo is a second-generation labor organizer with UNITE HERE’s Local 34.
She cited her both of her parents’ active participation in labor battles with Yale over the decades as having a formative influence on her own participation in the politically influential union.
“I was able to walk the picket line with my parents as they fought for equal pay for equal work and respect and jobs for the community,” she said. She herself was able to land a job at the university in 2015 only after getting involved with the local labor advocacy group New Haven Rising in 2015, she said. That Yale job “changed my life,” she said, and allowed her to afford her first apartment on Wooster Street.
Artizan Street resident Karen Young and Cupo.
Since then, Cupo said, she has been active in door knocking throughout the city in support of Yale’s local job hiring commitment.
“I am the proud great-granddaughter of working-class Italian immigrants who came to this country with a dream to build a life of opportunity for their children and their families,” she said. Fighting for good paying, secure, benefited jobs at the city’s biggest employers, she said, is one key way to keep that dream alive in 2019 New Haven.
That jobs message resonated with several attendees at Sunday night’s kick off.
“Yale keeping their jobs promise,” Artizan Street resident Karen Young said when asked what the most important issue for her is in local politics. As for Cupo, she said, the Democratic alder candidate “already said she’d do that.”
But while increased Yale employment, the central issue of much of Local 34’s organizing in recent years, was certainly present in Cupo’s campaign address, her focus on the current development boom in Wooster Square signaled a recent shift in local Democratic Party politics towards focusing more and more on the need for affordable housing.
Greenberg, her predecessor in the Wooster Square alder seat, led the Affordable Housing Task Force, which produced months of investigations and dozens of recommendations into how best to ensure working class New Haveners can continue to rent and buy in the Elm City. Walker-Myers, the president of the board, has been one of the chief proponents of the creation of a new permanent Affordable Housing Commission. And Eli Sabin, the Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for the Yale/Ward 1 alder seat, has also said that fighting for affordable housing is a top priority in his own campaign.
Wooster Square Block Watch Captain Sarah Greenblatt.
“Keep fighting for affordable housing,” Wooster Square Block Watch Captain Sarah Greenblatt said when asked what she would like to see from the neighborhood’s next alder. So many developers are building and looking to build in Wooster Square, she said, which she said is a good thing … as long as the neighborhood’s diversity, affordability, and community cohesion is taken into consideration with each new project.
Cupo has an “opportunity to bring the full community together,” Grenblatt said. She encouraged her to keep meeting with all different types of residents in the ward, to show up to as many meetings as she can, and to “help us see what we all have in common.”
Cupo, who said that she is due to give birth to her and her fiance’s first child in October, promised to do exactly that.
“For me, it’s so important to set an example [for our child] from the very start that hard work, dedication, and community are the foundation of a good life here in New Haven.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of Sunday’s campaign kick off.