Thomas Breen photo
Justin Farmer and Liam Brennan on Edgewood Avenue Wednesday.
Justin Farmer traveled out of the town where he serves as an elected politician and into the city where he’s long labored as a police accountability and affordable housing organizer to back the New Haven mayoral campaign of progressive activist ally Liam Brennan.
Farmer joined Brennan on Wednesday afternoon on the sidewalk in front of Possible Futures bookstore at 318 Edgewood Ave. to formally endorse the latter’s campaign for mayor.
Brennan – a Hartford inspector general and former New Haven legal aid lawyer who lives in Westville — is one of three Democratic challengers running against two-term incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker in this September’s Democratic primary for mayor. On the campaign trail, he’s pitched policies built on his years as an activist with groups like the Room for All coalition around how to, say, update the city’s zoning code and repurpose vacant lots and exercise eminent domain to promote the creation of more housing and “rethink” public safety.
Farmer, a democratic socialist who represents District 5 on the Hamden Legislative Council and who hosts the “Just-In Time Conversations” weekly radio show on WNHH, cited that shared history of New Haven organizing during his endorsement of Brennan on Wednesday.
Brennan, Farmer, and Brennan campaign field director and fellow Hamden Legislative Coucilman Abdul Osmanu.
“I’ve gotten to know Liam mostly as an advocate and activist” over the years, Farmer said. Brennan is “just a great guy. He’s a person who cares” who has mostly worked “in the background” and collaboratively to further the causes he cares about. He praised Brennan for helping him as a Hamden local legislator to develop policies to “better improve community oversight of policing” in his town.
“I think we’re in a pivotal time where whoever the leader of New Haven is, they need to set the tone for the region,” Farmer said. He praised Brennan for working throughout his career with activists, nonprofits, and municipal governments to promote affordable housing, accountable policing, and safer communities.
Brennan described Farmer as a “politician of values. He does not have positions to be in politics. He is in politics because he has certain positions and certain values he wants to see carried out.”
He praised Farmer as being at the forefront in Connecticut of “a new generation of leadership” that prioritizes openness, grassroots organizing, and coalition building in pursuit of progressive policies. “That’s the type of leadership we need,” and that’s what makes Farmer such a popular political figure in both Hamden and New Haven.
And why exactly should New Haveners pay attention to the endorsement of a Hamden politician in a New Haven mayoral race?
“Political movements and political ideas don’t just stay in one spot,” Brennan said. “They spread from one place to another. If we are going to build a coalition for a better future and a brighter future, we’re going to need to build a coalition across towns.”
Any issue facing New Haven, or anywhere else, “is never fully just localized,” Brennan said. Public safety and police accountability go across city bounds, as evidenced by the 2019 shooting of Paul Witherspoon and Stephanie Washington in Newhallville by a Hamden police officer who had driven into New Haven. And “housing doesn’t exist just within one town,” he added. “It’s a regional issue.”
Farmer agreed. “I’m six houses from living in New Haven” in the Newhall section of Hamden, he said. And issues of “public safety cross the board all the time. Issues of civic responsibility require a community approach.”
Click on the video below to watch Farmer’s endorsement of Brennan, and to watch Farmer’s recent interview of Brennan on his WNHH radio show “Just-In Time Conversations.”