“Engagement Center” Eyed For Problem Block

A Fair Haven-based harm reduction coalition has its sights set on turning a vacant Grand Avenue lot into a one-stop ​“engagement center” for sex workers, day laborers, drug users, and other struggling populations. 

They have the backing of local businesses and social service organizations. Now they’re looking for help from City Hall.

The new effort seeks to address a myriad of social issues that have long bedeviled one of the city’s most troubled commercial stretches. 

That’s the corner of Grand Avenue and Ferry Street, which in recent years has become a neighborhood epicenter for panhandling, sex work, public urination, outdoor sleeping, and the open-air consumption of heroin, crack, and alcohol.

“Grand Avenue is just out of control,” Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller said about current conditions in this part of the neighborhood.

Businesses are struggling. Neighbors don’t feel safe. And the people caught up in the throes of addiction and homelessness aren’t getting all of the help that they need.

So, for the past few months, Miller has been working with Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance Executive Director Mark Jenkins, outreach workers from the New Haven-based Sex Workers & Allies Network (SWAN), New Haven Police Lt. Michael Fumiatti, and Fair Haven neighbors to brainstorm ideas for how to help those most struggling on Grand Avenue while also making the commercial corridor a cleaner, safer, and more inviting place. 

The idea they’ve landed on is the proposed new ​“engagement center” at 229 Grand Ave., a two-story commercial building with surface parking, a liquor store, and a church out front, and an empty fenced-in and cracked-asphalt lot in the back.

An engagement center would be ​“a safe space for staff from multiple community-based organizations to provide services to marginalized populations,” Jenkins explained in a recent interview outside of Redenti’s Package Store at 229 Grand.

Those services could range from psychiatric to substance use disorder care; from help finding housing for the homeless to treating abscesses, scrapes, and cuts; from providing a safe and calm respite from the outdoors to a clean and sanitary place to go to the bathroom in private. 

It may also ​“just be somewhere to sit down where you’re not going to be told by the police to move,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins and Miller said that Grand Avenue would be a temporary home for such an engagement center, if and when it opens. They said that, if the pilot succeeds, they’d continue looking elsewhere in the city for a more permanent location for such a program.

This project, however, likely won’t receive funding by the Elicker Administration any time in the immediate future. City Hall signed off on a $25,000 grant for Jenkins’s harm reduction group to lead a citywide syringe and litter cleanup effort, but has turned down the group’s request to use those same funds for both the syringe cleanup effort and the engagement center pilot. (See more below for an explanation of the city’s stance on this matter, from city social services director Mehul Dalal.)

Jenkins, Miller, and SWAN’s Jaclin Lucibello said during the group interview that this engagement center pilot would target its resources at three populations in particular:

• Survival sex workers, who currently have sex out in public, in nearby businesses’ bathrooms, and in alleys behind Grand Avenue restaurants and shops.

• People with substance use disorders, who currently use drugs out in public and in those same private-business bathrooms.

• Itinerant day laborers, many of whom drink alcohol on the sidewalks of Ferry and Grand early in the morning and late in the afternoon as they wait for a ride to and from a job. 

“We need a place that’s safe for them to go to,” Fair Haven District Manager Lt. Fumiatti said in a separate conversation: A place where these particular groups of people feel like they won’t be turned away, where they connect with the social services that they need, and where they can still socialize with their friends without disrupting business life up and down Grand.

Jenkins stressed that such an engagement center would not be the same as a safe injection site, such as those locations in New York City, Vancouver, and Portugal where people with substance use disorders can shoot up with clean equipment under the supervision of a healthcare provider.

“We don’t endorse or condone” the use of drugs in such an engagement center, he said. However, ​“we do understand that people use,” and the center would have protocols in place — such as checking in with a person who has been in the bathroom for more than three minutes — to make sure that people aren’t at as high a risk of a fatal overdose as they might be if using out on the street.

“When people use in secrecy with a tainted drug supply” such as fentanyl-laced heroin, Jenkins said, ​“they die in silence.” An engagement center particularly targeted at helping people with substance use disorders, among other populations, should help reduce some of those harms.

Jenkins and Miller said that they’ve already lined up a host of local community service providers who have promised to help out with an engagement center pilot if and when it gets off the ground. 

According to letters of support provided to the Independent, those partners include Cornell Scott Hill Health Center’s Greater New Haven Healthcare for the Homeless program, Yale University’s Community Health Care Van, Junta for Progressive Action, Fair Haven Community Health Care, and the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s Street Psychiatry Services program.

The proposed engagement center pilot would be located in the back lot of 229 Grand Ave., behind the street-facing commercial building. Jenkins said the group plans on setting up a tent, tables, chairs, and Porta-Potties. During the pilot, he said, the engagement center would likely be open 10 hours a day, five or six days a week.

"Out Of Control"

Jose Jiminian, who runs J & J Restaurant nearby at 244 Grand Ave., endorsed the proposed engagement center pilot in a quick break from tending to a lunchtime rush on Friday — which he said included a visit by 30 new Yale School of Medicine students getting a guided tour of Fair Haven.

He said that the level of public drug use is ​“out of control” on Grand, and often deters customers from coming to his restaurant. ​“It looks dirty,” he said about the block. 

And, he said, people are clearly struggling. They ​“need a place to go” that’s safe and off of the sidewalk. ​“It’d be way better than being arrested.”

Jiminian wasn’t the only business owner in the area to identify public drug use and aggressive begging on the street as problems in the area.

Miller and Yale student Briana Moller said that the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership worked with the Fair Haven Harm Reduction Group to conduct a bilingual survey of Fair Haven residents, employees, and business owners earlier this year. Moller told the Independent that that survey collected responses from 117 participants about their ​“perception of public safety, harm reduction, and the impact of public drug use in the community.”

“When asked, ​‘on a scale of 1 (very infrequently) to 5 (very frequently), how often do you notice people using drugs or alcohol on Grand Ave?’ respondents’ average answer was 4.2,” Moller wrote in a Friday afternoon email.

“Similarly, when asked, ​‘on a scale of 1 (no problem at all) to 5 (a very big problem), how much of a problem do you think the public use of drugs or alcohol around Grand Avenue is?’, the average answer given was a 4.

“These findings underscore the need for a space in Fair Haven that can successfully build connections with people experiencing homelessness, street-based sex workers, and people who use drugs in order to provide them with respite, tailored services, and support.”

In further support of the need for such an engagement center, Grand Avenue Special Services District intern and Fair Haven native Paulette Catota told the Independent in a separate phone interview Friday afternoon that she has spent the past two months interviewing dozens of business owners on Grand Avenue about their biggest concerns right now.

“A lot of the business owners told me that, in comparison to last year, there’s way more people on the streets, and that’s really concerning to them,” Catota said. Some said they’d like to help these people if they can, but, besides giving them some money now and then — and calling the police if they feel unsafe — they don’t really know what to do.

For the three populations at the center of this pilot project — sex workers, drug users, and day laborers drinking on the sidewalk — Lt. Fumiatti said, ​“we are not going to arrest our way” out of any of these associated problems.

“A lot of the times, we get called for people in crisis because they haven’t slept in two or three days,” he said about police responses to Ferry and Grand. ​“We get a lot of complaints in that area of public drunkenness, of people using drugs in public on Grand Avenue, trespassing, people aggressively asking for money. It just creates an overall environment of lawlessness that isn’t conducive” to a safe environment.

“Those calls are really a drain on police resources,” he added. He said an engagement center like the one proposed by the harm reduction group could be an invaluable addition to the neighborhood, a place where cops could direct people to if they need a place to sit or connect with a social service provider. 

That way, Fumiatti said, the police ​“can focus on the people selling drugs and on people with guns, and let the outreach workers do their thing in a safe space.”

Fumiatti said that he and Jenkins recently traveled up to Boston to take a look firsthand at some of that city’s engagement centers. Such a model works, Fumiatti said, and could be a welcome addition to Fair Haven.

Dalal: Syringe Cleanup Proposal Took Precedence

All of which begs the question: Why isn’t this engagement center open now? And, if plans have been in the works for months, what’s keeping the pilot program from starting?

Miller and Jenkins said that their harm reduction group applied to the city for $60,000 to help cover the costs of the engagement center pilot as well as an initiative called a ​“Syringe Outreach Response Team,” or SORT.

Jenkins said that latter project would see cleanup crews travel across the city to drug-use hotspots, safely picking up and disposing of syringes and other trash. He and Miller said that the $60,000 they’ve asked the city for would be enough to cover pilot programs for both projects.

They said that the city’s social services department, the Community Services Administration (CSA), had been in support of the engagement center project — up until quite recently, when the Fair Haven group suddenly learned that the city would not in fact be funding a pilot.

In addition to those funding concerns, Miller and Jenkins said, the harm reduction group has run up against a parking-related zoning roadblock for the engagement center project. They said they’re still waiting to hear from City Hall about how to resolve such an issue, which they believe resulted from the prospective engagement center displacing several existing parking spaces at 229 Grand.

During a separate Friday afternoon phone interview with the Independent, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal clarified the city’s perspective on the Fair Haven Harm Reduction Group’s effort to set up an engagement center at 229 Grand Ave.

First, he said, ​“I am deeply appreciative of Mark Jenkins” and the work his group does in the city. ​“They work with some of the hardest to reach populations, those at risk of overdose. We’re lucky to have his group in the city, and we’re very lucky to have his services in the city.”

Dalal then said that the harm reduction group’s application to City Hall for $60,000 was initially a bid for federal CARES Act dollars specifically to support ​“a citywide syringe and litter pickup and outreach team.”

“We were very open to funding the citywide project,” Dalal said. He said he ultimately let Jenkins’s group know that the city would provide a $25,000 federal CARES Act-funded grant towards that citywide syringe and trash pickup project.

But then, he said, after the city had given a provisional sign off for that $25,000 grant, Jenkins submitted an amended proposal seeking funding for both the syringe and trash pickup team as well as for the proposed Grand Avenue engagement center pilot.

“This was quite a different proposal from what the city has come across before,” Dalal said. ​“It’s outdoors. It’s on private property. There was abutting land that was city owned. There’s a number of complexities to work through.”

After considering this amended proposal to fund both the engagement center and the syringe-trash pickup team, Dalal said, he decided last week that the urgency for a citywide effort to clean up syringes and trash was ​“more and more important,” and had to take priority over the engagement center proposal.

Which is why, he said, the city ultimately decided to go forward with the original $25,000 contract for the syringe and trash cleanup crew — and decided not to repurpose that money for the engagement center idea.

“We’re not opposed to this project,” Dalal said about the engagement center. 

He said he’s open to working with the harm reduction group on trying to resolve the zoning issues and on trying to find money for the project. But, he said, it could take a while for the city to provide money for this project if the harm reduction group submits another application and bids for another contract. He recommended the group seek out a private funding source if possible in order to get the pilot off the ground.

“We’re hearing citywide complaints around syringe litter and folks who need assistance throughout the city” with that type of cleanup, Dalal repeated, which is why his office ultimately chose to fund the citywide project rather than the Fair Haven-specific engagement center proposal.

He said that, if Jenkins’s group decides to move forward with the $25,000 award for syringe cleanup, then that contract should be finalized and the crew should be able to start their work in the next month or month and a half.

Reached for comment on Monday morning, Jenkins expressed his disappointment with the city’s decision not to fund the engagement center pilot with this initial $25,000 allocation. He said he had tentatively lined up additional funding from a New York-based overdose prevention group called Vital Strategies, but that was on the condition that the the city provided a $25,000 towards the pilot.

Now, he said, his group will keep looking for funding where it can — whether that be from the city or elsewhere.