City Housing Plight Brought To The ​‘Burbs

It might seem incongruous for a wealthy shoreline suburban community to pull out all the stops for a radical Catholic homelessness rights activist from the Hill.

Not at all, said Mark Colville, leader of the Amistad Catholic Worker House, as roughly 100 attendees enjoyed vegetable terrine and fruit salad drizzled with raspberry rose at a ​“Breaking Bread” fundraiser in the brightly lit basement of Guilford First Congregational Church.

“Homelessness is a result of a lot of things, a lot of breakdown of relationships in families, and that’s not specific to any one group or social class,” Colville said at Saturday’s event.

According to organizer Gini King, the purpose of the event was to raise money for six tiny houses in the backyard of the Amistad House at 203 Rosette St. where 14 ​“economic refugees,” as Colville calls them, have encamped. The six will ultimately be part of a larger number of structures known as Rosette Neighborhood Village.

The ​“tiny houses” refer to pre-fabricated weather-resistant pallet shelters which house between two and four people. Each unit has a locking door, a shelving system, as well as a capacity for heating and cooling. 

“We want to raise that money, and then we want to get the city to agree to tiny houses on public property,” said King. 

According to event co-organizer Colleen Shaddox, Saturday’s Guilford fundraiser brought in around $40,000 for the Hill homelessness activist cause.

The occasion, Colville said, marked ​“the first in a series of planned public events organized by a coalition of people and organizations in the New Haven area trying to do something substantive to decriminalize homelessness in the city of New Haven and the state of Connecticut.” 

King said the Guilford event sold out almost immediately. 

“People are concerned about the homeless, especially when the city took down Tent City,” she said, referring to the public eviction in March that bulldozed the encampment on the West River, and displaced the people living there. (Click here to read a top Elicker administration official’s take on why and how the city cleared out the encampment.)

Associate Pastor Reilly Paige sounded a similar refrain.

“We care about folks on the margins and we want to work together to bring dignity to their lives,” she said. 

With that, Colville took the stage.

He said Saturday’s fundraiser was part of an ongoing campaign that started in 2013 when he read a United Nations report on which U.S. cities comply with the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (The U.S. is a party to the declaration by congressional treaty.)

The 2013 report detailed municipal laws across the country, he said, ​“making it a criminal act to take refuge on public land when the state fails to provide you with public housing, and those include New Haven.”

That means, he said, ​“if you’re homeless in New Haven tonight, and you’re not able to access a shelter bed — and, as far as I know, there are literally hundreds who can’t — then anywhere you take refuge, you’re subject to either arrest or some kind of sanction.” 

The report was an eye-opener. ​“We came to realize that no matter how many people that we took in, the people outside the door were still considered criminals.” 

An attempt in 2014 to set up tents on vacant city-owned properties followed. ​“The neighbors were okay with it, some of them were bringing people meals, but the city shut them down within 48 hours,” Colville said.

Then, in early 2020, came the pandemic, shelters being closed by the city, and an Amistad House worker talking with people who had taken to sleeping in the side stairwells around City Hall. 

“From those conversations, we convinced about six of those people to take a chance on a plan we had to offer hospitality on public lands, to set up a tent city, and to do it in a public way,” Colville said.

The reason the city let the tent city stand for as long as it did, Colville said, was simple.

“They knew they didn’t have enough beds available, there’s obviously not enough apartments available, and there’s no plan for long-term housing in New Haven.” 

The larger problem is a shelter system that ​“mimics the criminal justice system,” he said. ​“When you walk into a shelter, after you get patted down, you have to give up your privacy, your agency, autonomy, your property, all the things you give up when you go to jail.”

He compared the human right to shelter to health care. ​“If you don’t have health care, you’re going to go outside the system, whether it’s a faith healer, herbal medicine, or a drug not approved by the FDA,” he said. 

Criminalizing homelessness is tantamount to ​“making it a crime to make herbal tea to cure yourself,” he said.

The new strategy, to set up tiny houses on the property as Rosette Neighborhood Village, ​“a model tent city in our own backyard,” has as its ultimate goal ​“to change the policy away from criminalization so that people can have legal status as neighbors and not criminals.”

One of those neighbors, Suki Godek, said she and her husband, previously dairy farmers, lost everything during the pandemic, and had to start from scratch.

“I organized the cleanup at tent city that the city had told us they would let us stay if we cleaned up the property, but ultimately they forced everybody off the land,” she said, her voice breaking.

She said she and her husband had become part of the movement to help other unhoused individuals.

“It’s not the average everyday criminal or drug addict, it’s families and it’s individuals who just had a tough time and are trying to start over,” she said.

The tiny houses are ​“a safe place, a safe start, somewhere secure that you can actually lock and call your own, a place where we can start to build our lives again… to wake up every day and go to work,” she said, adding that both she and her husband have jobs.

Colville’s son-in-law Jacob Miller, a real estate professional, said he spent the last three years searching for sustainable transitional housing solutions before finding the tiny houses manufactured by Pallet Shelters to ​“rapidly address unsheltered populations.” 

“These units cost between $10,000 and $15,000 landed and installed, and can be constructed in about an hour,” said Miller who, along with his wife, purchased the property next door to the Amistad and have opened their backyard to unhoused individuals. 

“They’re designed to have a life of over 10 years, they’re weather resistant, they can function in cold climates, and they have everything you need for basic necessities,” including storage and the capacity for heating and cooling.

He shared his revelations about the shelter system.

“In most people’s minds, it’s a catch-all solution to the homelessness issue, and the reality for a lot of our neighbors is they don’t fit into the box that the shelter system requires,” he said.

“You cannot have a pet at a shelter, you cannot bring your personal property except for something that fits into a small plastic bin, you do not have privacy, most of the sleeping facilities are shared, and you cannot be with your partner,” he said.

One of the backyard tenants works overnight at the VA. ​“He can’t check in and out at the required hours at the shelter so unless he wants to give up his job, he’s excluded.”

The ​“micro-neighborhood,” as he called it, ​“is clearly filling a very real vacuum in the existing social services infrastructure,” he said. 

Most important, the tiny houses ​“make a statement and demonstrate a more dignified and human approach to transitioning people out of their present reality, and into community.” 

Todd Godek was seated beside his wife Suki at a table near the front, listening attentively. 

“We help out as much as possible,” he said, as the clock struck one and the jingle of an ice cream truck sounded from the Guilford Green. ​“We’re trying to make it work. It’s our sanctuary.” 

His neighbor, who said he goes by Mouse, agreed. ​“We all feel equal,” he said. ​“We all belong.”