Housing Tops May Day Rally Cry

Hundreds of activists took to the streets to commemorate International Workers’ Day — and to celebrate local strides taken to solidify people power not just across jobs, but within New Haven apartments, homeless encampments, and shelters.

New Haveners have formed a tradition of marking that worldwide May 1 labor day each year by embarking on a march for justice throughout downtown after gathering on the Green for hours of music, maypole dancing, and speeches spanning issues from worker protections to healthcare access to immigrant and indigenous rights to environmental action.

On Monday, that standard scene saw activists newly emboldened by a string of recent gains and losses in another foundational fight which New Haveners have largely been leading throughout the state, around affordable housing. 

In addition to passing out fliers championing progressive causes and running ribbons around a post, organizers of Monday’s event pedaled a quadricycle with an effigy of Mayor Justin Elicker strapped into the passenger’s seat over to City Hall where they blasted the administration for bulldozing a West River homeless encampment and sought to stir up more support for tenants’ rights.

While May Day is centered around the dignity and collective potential of workers, the city’s rally recalled a special 12 months and change spent legitimizing the unionization of renters — a New Haven-led effort that is spreading across the state and drawing attention not just to substandard living conditions in steeply-priced apartments, but to a broader housing stock shortage, packed shelters with impenetrable waitlists, and a growing number of faces with nowhere to sleep except the street.

“Housing is a human right, that is why we have to fight!” Democratic Socialists of America organizer Luke Melonakos-Harrison chanted into a megaphone outside of City Hall.

“Here in New Haven and across Connecticut,” he declared, tenants are unionizing, ​“costing landlords a lot in court,” and ​“putting rent control on the table in Connecticut for the first time in fifty years.”

Although the state legislature ultimately dumped a proposal to establish a rent cap, Melonakos-Harris said that ​“all they did was piss off a lot more people. We know our movement is growing. We know tenants have the power.”

“Down with the landlords!” organizers shouted, to which the crowd responded ​“Boo, boo!”

“Up with the tenants!” 

“Yeah, yeah!”

That cheer evolved to include: ​“Up with the workers, up with the students, up with the teachers!”

“Down with the bosses!”

New Haven Federation of Teachers President Leslie Blatteau was one of several speakers to take the stage on the Green and name different pathways towards housing justice.

In Boston, she noted, the city’s teachers union crafted a contract with the school system that included a pilot program to house the families of up to 4,000 students without housing.

“We’re bargaining for the common good,” she said of New Haven’s teachers union. ​“We’re fighting for Husky for immigrants, we’re fighting for rent caps, we’re fighting for higher wages for our low-wage union siblings, paraprofessionals, we are fighting for people to make sure that they can organize unions.”

“We can do it when we come together, when we demand enough is enough.”

17-year-old Board of Education Representative and Wilbur Cross junior Dave Cruz-Bustamante said that just as the United States fails to recognize International Workers’ Day as a federal holiday, only one of their teachers mentioned the occasion during his school day.

Cruz-Bustamante attended the event on the Green to remind himself of another life lesson: ​“It’s a reminder of our duty to each other, of the joy in solidarity,” they said of May Day and the way New Haveners come together to celebrate the holiday.

Soon, they, too, will have to join the workforce and pay rent. ​“I can’t just remain a Bohemian intellectual my whole life,” they lamented. 

(Read here about some of the work Cruz-Bustamante does, not as self-proclaimed Bohemian layabout, but as a literacy teacher, Board of Education student representative, and community organizer).

Bustamante-Cruz, however, was one of few not to raise their hands when Melonakos-Harrison requested members of Monday’s audience indicate whether they paid rent to a landlord.

“Too many of us have been divided and isolated just trying to get our rent paid,” Melonakos-Harrison said. ​“Imagine what we could do if just half the renters in New Haven were in a tenants’ union.”

The growth of tenants rights in New Haven and beyond has developed in tandem with the expansion of communal organization and speak-outs by New Haveners without any housing whatsoever. 

“Mayday is an international distress call,” Arthur Taylor, an organizer with the Unhoused Activist Community Team (U‑ACT) who has been finding refuge at a warming center for months while looking for housing, said to the crowd convened on the Green Monday afternoon. ​“We’re in an emergency here in New Haven.” 

Read more about U‑ACT, a crew of activists experiencing homelessness as well as allied organizers, here. Tammy Imre, another U‑ACT member who said she just found an apartment in Cedar Hill after 13 years without consistent housing, read a list of demands drafted by those living without shelter in the city, such as: No evictions from public lands, no police involvement in encampment sweeps ​“except in last resorts,” permanent public bathrooms for all, and no legal charges for public urination or defecation until bathrooms are provided.

“We’re tired of being criminalized for things like eating, sleeping, using the bathroom,” Taylor asserted. ​“We shouldn’t have to be begging for shelters… The emergency is tonight. The time to act is now.” 

He remembered the bulldozing of an encampment of ten people living just off Ella Grasso Boulevard this past spring as ​“a cruel inhumane act against people who were very vulnerable,” a city intervention that later prompted the crowd to flood the inside of City Hall and shout ​“shame” at Mayor Elicker from the city’s steps.

As the crowd later moved on from City Hall to a Chapel Street Starbucks and Howe Street Pizzeria to protest alleged worker abuses, Melonakos-Harrison told the Independent as he marched that the housing focus of this year’s celebration was an inevitable reaction to an ever escalating housing disaster. 

“Without housing you can’t do anything else – without a stable place to live, how are we gonna address every other issue coming up today?” he questioned. 

Just like labor unions, he said, tenants unions ​“are challenging the balance of power.”

“It’s really encouraging that many more people are able to understand that the homelessness crisis is part of the housing crisis. Turning homelessness into an issue of substance abuse or mental illness… I think that perspective is starting to shift in New Haven.”

“We keep building,” he said of New Haven’s organizers, tenants, and community members without housing, ​“because the crisis keeps growing.” 

“As long as they let the crisis deepen, this crowd is gonna grow,” he said, looking over at the tens on tens of walkers dialoguing back and forth: ​“Whose streets? Our streets!”

Through unionization, he said, the chaos of the crowd ​“will turn into organization, into change.”