Paul Bass Photo
Angel didn’t see any cops as he made it out of an abandoned house on Poplar Street with a stolen sink. He did meet up with Laurie Lopez — and his plot was foiled.
Lopez (pictured) was pulling up to the boarded-up house at 109 Poplar St. last Monday around 2:30 p.m. in her black Acura TSX. Angel was emerging from the back yard with a bulging sack over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Lopez asked him.
Angel just looked at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked again.
“Scrapping.”
Lopez got out of her car. She sat Angel down on the front stoop. She called police. Before they arrived to arrest him, she had his whole story — and a lead on a second abandoned house down the street to investigate.
Lopez is a city neighborhood worker, not a cop. But she has a way of stumbling across people causing trouble in abandoned houses and helping the police stop the trouble.
She did it with Angel on Poplar Street earlier this week. She has done it — fought back against neighborhood decline, kept track of who’s doing what on endangered blocks — many times before in her 11 years covering the Fair Haven neighborhood for city government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). She may not be a cop. But she plays a role crucial to community policing: “partner.”
The cops have noticed. Especially those whom she calls, or who call her, all the time to team up on tackling blight, drug-dealing, or other emerging neighborhood woes.
Sgt. Herb Johnson, Fair Haven’s top cop, notices. He ends up creeping and crawling into dark squatters’ dens alongside LCI’s fearless Lopez in her durable Carolina boots. He sees her get problem properties boarded up. He depends on her to help police stay on top of neighbors’ complaints. So Johnson wasn’t surprised to arrive at Poplar Street to see Angel chilled out and cooperative and ready to be arrested.
“Just like a police officer, she had the guy nice and comfortable. He could have taken off” if not for Lopez, Johnson said. “She’s out here all the time. She does so much for the community. And they know.”
Lopez, who’s 43 and grew up in New Haven after her family moved her from the Dominican Republic, doesn’t cotton to office jobs. She once tried nine to five behind a desk; it didn’t stick. “My work’s out here,” she said. “I need to know what’s happening.”
“What’s Your Poison?”
That’s why she happened to run into Angel at the abandoned house Monday.
She’s been checking that block often recently. The block went downhill for a while thanks to an absentee landlord across the street and, in the case of 109 Poplar, a bank that doesn’t want to finish foreclosing yet on a house a woman abandoned three years ago.
That happens a lot; banks keep abandoned properties a mess and avoid assuming legal liability until a buyer can be found. (Click here for a story about that problem and Lopez’s effort to keep one such house under control. Click on the video to join her on a tour of house’s interior.) In Fair Haven alone, Lopez keeps on top of a good 180 empty, abandoned houses. (Click here for a story about Fair Haven’s foreclosure problem.)
Squatters and bad tenants brought drug-dealing and prostitution and declining conditions to the block. Lopez worked with the landlord to find better tenants. The buyer of another home fixed it up. Lopez worked with UI and the city to get a floodlight up on the corner. Conditions improved.
Except at 109 Poplar. She had the doors boarded up. Vandals broke in, squatted again. She got them re-boarded up. The windows, too, after someone shot them out.
A neighbor had told her that squatters may have returned, or that at least someone had stolen a sink. Vandals, often looking to feed drug habits, gradually remove the fixtures and pipes of abandoned homes to sell for scrap metal, further destroying property values.
That appeared to be the case with Angel.
Lopez learned about that as she and Angel waited for the police to arrive.
“Where are you laying your head?” she asked him.
He was homeless, he said. He told her about a house a block away where he’d been able to get inside to sleep.
She didn’t recognize Angel. She usually recognizes people on the street. It turned out he had been living with relatives elsewhere, then recently became homeless.
Lopez offered Angel a Marlboro. He accepted. They kept talking.
“What’s your poison?” she asked.
“Crack.”
In his sack were a pilfered sink, wires, and other metal pulled from an apartment inside the house. He planned to sell them for scrap metal.
Johnson arrived. “Sarge, Angel,” Lopez said by way of introduction, “Angel, Sgt. Johnson.”
As the police did their job, Lopez continued hers. She went to the back of the house, saw the board Angel had pried to reach an upstairs apartment. She called for an LCI crew to come board it up.
Then she went to the house down the street. She saw the board Angel had pulled from a small basement window to get inside. She called to have that covered back up, too.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Lopez recalled a woman saying from next door. “They’re getting in there.”
That’s the point, Lopez said — the impact of squatters on neighbors.
“These folks, they go to work,” she said. “They pay rent. They pay mortgages. I know people [like the squatters] have illnesses” But the families next door “shouldn’t have to look at” the prostitution, drug-dealing and garbage-strewn lots.
Still “Believing”
Lopez gets her grit from her late mother, Ana Lopez. Ana worked two to three jobs at a time. (Dad was disabled.) She was also a New Haven Latino community pioneer. She helped found the community group LULAC. She worked with immigrants decades before the issue hit the broader public.
“She was a strong woman before her time — a feminist liberal in a culture that says woman have a place,” Lopez said. “My mother imparted that to me.”
That idealism continues to fuel Lopez’s daily determination to reverse blight in Fair Haven after more than a decade of battling banks, slumlords, and general nuisances.
“I still believe,” she said. “I believe that if I can stop [trouble] from coming here, the neighbors’ lives are better. The block is better when you don’t have homeless people or drug addicts.
“I just believe I can make a difference.”