Tents Pop Up In 2 Candidate Debates

Two candidates for mayor and two candidates for Westville alder waded into an ongoing homelessness crisis as they sought to answer the same question posed on different nights by different debate moderators to different candidates running for different local elected offices.

The question: What should the city do when people who are living outdoors refuse to go to homeless shelters and choose instead to camp on public land?

Some of the answers put forward included:

• Hand a bigger bill to the state to cover the costs of local homelessness services.

• Create more and different types of accessible housing — from single-room rentals to converted hotels.

• Keep on engaging those who persist in living outdoors, to find out why they avoid shelter beds and to understand what resources they need to survive.

• And don’t tear down tents — unless if an encampment presents a real danger to human life.

Those proposals arose during separate debates that took place this week in the runup to the Sept. 12 Democratic primary elections.

The answers — from two-term incumbent Mayor Justin Elicker and mayoral challenger Liam Brennan on Tuesday night at Career High School, and from six-term Ward 25 Alder Adam Marchand and aldermanic challenger Dennis Serfilippi on Wednesday night at Coogan Pavilion — ranged from pro-development zoning reform to stepped-up social service outreach to hitting up the state for more cash because New Haven supports a whole region’s needs.

They also included candor, humility, and perseverance in the face of a rising tide of homelessness across the city, state, and country. In New Haven, that crisis has sparked debates around public sleeping on the Green and at Union Station, and around government clearance of encampments by the West River and under a Lamberton Street bridge.

“We engage, we engage, we engage with all kinds of supporting options,” Elicker said when pressed during Tuesday night’s debate about what to do when someone turns down all other offers and continues to sleep outside. ​“We do not remove tents unless there is a life, health, and human safety issue, and we have done that in the city very few times, because we want to make sure that people have some option.”

"We Do Not Have Enough Homes"

La Voz Hispana Publisher Norma Rodriguez-Reyes brought up this question of persistent outdoor sleeping in public in her role as one of three moderators at Tuesday night’s Democratic mayoral candidate debate at Career, as hosted by the city’s public financing program, the Democracy Fund.

“How should the city deal with people who choose to sleep outside, including in tent encampments, rather than go to shelters or … participate in supportive housing prorgams?” she asked.

Brennan, a former federal prosecutor and legal aid attorney who has centered his campaign on a call to create more housing citywide, replied that the city needs to have a ​“deep understanding of what is motivating folks to live outside.”

Often, he said, people don’t want to go to homeless shelters ​“because they cannot be with family members, or because they cannot be with pets that they have. Because of the restrictions that we have in shelters [which] limits people’s accessibility because they can’t separate from some of these emotional supports.”

Brennan stressed that the problem of homelessness, in New Haven and around the country, is ​“a housing problem. We do not have enough homes and homes that are affordable here. The way to address that is to address our restrictive housing policies that we have here in the city and to create more ways to create housing that meets the needs of people here in the city.”

That means updating the city’s zoning code to allow for the creation of more single-room occupancy units, or SROs, ​“where people can rent a room instead of a whole apartment.” He said city housing, and the land-use policy that underlies its creation, must meet the needs of all New Haveners, including those currently living outside. ​“We are way out of whack with what can be built here in the city.”

During his time at the mic, Elicker said that the city needs to provide more ​“emergency housing — and we are doing just that.” He pointed to the 50 additional beds that the city worked with Columbus House and Upon This Rock Ministries to bring online earlier this summer off of Ella T. Grass Boulevard.

And he pointed to his administration’s proposal, now before the Board of Alders, to purchase the 57-room Days Inn hotel on Foxon Boulevard and convert it into a non-congregate shelter for the homeless.

A model like that where residents have their own rooms might address some of the concerns keeping people from using shelters today, because ​“they might be homeless with their partner” or ​“they might have a pet” or ​“they don’t want to leave in the morning at 7 a.m.”

The hotel conversion proposal creates additional shelter options where people can ​“have dignity, they can have privacy, they can feel safer, they can store some of their things, so you land on two feet and [can] be able to actually secure longer-term housing.”

"We Have To Be Persistent"

Marchand and Serfilippi were asked a nearly identical version of that same question on Wednesday night during a Ward 25 Democratic alder candidate debate that the New Haven Independent hosted at Coogan Pavilion in Edgewood Park.

“For people who choose not to want to go to shelters,” asked Independent founding editor Paul Bass, who was also one of the debate moderators at Tuesday’s mayoral event, ​“where if anywhere on public land should homeless people be allowed to set up in tents and live outside?”

“I don’t like the idea of people living in tents on public land anywhere,” Sefilippi replied. ​“If that’s what it comes to, we’ve failed.”

He described New Haven as a ​“very generous community” that has ​“absorbed all the social needs, the social ills of surrounding communities for decades.”

That’s a good thing, he said. Because people in need and down on their luck should get help. But, he continued, ​“we should ask the state to reimburse us fully to take care of the homeless and those who are dependent on drugs.” New Haven’s attitude towards state government on this front, he said, should be: ​“We’ll take them, but you need to fund them.”

Bass then turned to Marchand to ask that same question: On which public lands, if any, should people who refuse to go to shelters be allowed to tent?

“I don’t know, and that’s an honest answer,” Marchand said.

He said this is an issue that he deals with all the time, as Ward 25 includes almost all of Edgewood Park and is right next to West River Memorial Park.

“We’re worried about the public safety aspects of people living in unhygienic conditions,” he continued. ​“We don’t want public health issues [that come] without the facilities to deal with human waste, for example. We don’t want people burning propane.”

But, Marchand said, ​“what we [also] don’t want to do is grab a homeless person and throw them in jail. We can’t do that. That wouldn’t be humane. That wouldn’t be a good thing to do.”

The answer instead is that ​“we actually have to engage people” about what they need, and why they’re currently outdoors. Marchand said he talks all the time with city Department of Community Resilience Executive Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo ​“about the case managers who are reaching out to these folks who are currently living in Edgewood Park and spend a lot of time in the gazebo and next to the tennis courts” on the western end of the park.

The city needs to provide places for these people to go, Marchand said. ​“But they also have to agree to go. We’re not the kind of society that should warehouse people. … It’s a very difficult thing.”

“We have to be persistent,” he concluded. ​“We have to work closely with these folks.” He then encouraged those interested in this topic to come out to a planned Sept. 14 aldermanic hearing about the Elicker administration’s proposal to purchase the Days Inn motel and convert it into a non-congregate living space for people without a home.

“There are proposals being made to try to find good wholesome places for people to live.”

Click on the video below to watch Wednesday’s Ward 25 alder candidate debate in full.