Paul Bass Photos
Tyshena Williams Sunday gets the kids ready for a roundabout drive from Rockview to a Hamden clothing store.
After decades of contention, the city is tearing down the fence that divides the public-housing developments in the shadow of West Rock from the town of Hamden.
New Haven’s housing authority plans to meet with a contractor Tuesday morning to finalize details for razing the fence within two weeks. The plan is to reconnect Wilmot Road back to Hamden’s Woodin Street.
No longer will people on the New Haven side have to take an extended detour, including several long bus rides, to get to jobs or stores or friends and familly in Hamden.
Hamden erected the fence five decades ago in response to complaints about crimes committed by people living just over the line in New Haven. Since then it has been a flash point in New Haven and Hamden’s relationship, seen as a “Berlin Wall” to New Haveners, as a needed safety barrier by Hamden homeowners — and a symbol of urban-suburban divisions.
The new Brookside.
The issue resurfaced in recent years as New Haven knocked down the crime-ridden, decaying public-housing complexes there and began replacing them with $200 million of new urbanist-style, less dense, mixed-income, rental and homeowner Brookside, Rockview and Ribicoff developments. New Haven’s previous mayor in 2012 suspended an effort to tear down the fence after homeowners on the Hamden side exploded in anger over the prospect. A year-long process to try to build trust on both sides ensued — and got nowhere.
“I think it’s better” to have the fence come down, Tyshena Williams (pictured) said Sunday as she prepared to pack up her children and nieces in the car for a roundabout trip to a Hamden clothing store. “People won’t have to drive all the way through New Haven to get to Hamden.” Williams moved into one of the new Rockview homes (which she loves) last December. It’s around the corner from where the fence cuts off Wilmot Road.
Federal Pressure, & A Discovery
The decision now to remove the fence follows months of behind-the-scenes discussions among officials form Hamden, the federal government, and New Haven’s new Harp administration. Mayor Toni Harp said she decided New Haven wasn’t going to wait any longer to remove a “morally reprehensible” barrier that put elderly people’s lives in jeopardy.
Two developments quickened the process: The federal government began a civil-rights investigation that could lead to a lawsuit against the town of Hamden over the fence, and prevent the town from receiving any federal money. And New Haven did a new survey of the property that revealed that the housing authority owns all the land on which the fence stands — and therefore has the legal right to tear it down. The fence winds along the town line, parts of it technically on the New Haven and parts of it technically on the Hamden side. But New Haven’s housing authority owns all the land. In fact, it turns out, the housing authority owns half of Woodin Street itself, since land owners have claim to half of the adjoining street.
Harp gave Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson time to break the news to his constituents.
“I told Scott, ‘We’re going to take the fence down. But I don’t want to create a problem for you,’” Harp said Sunday. He said, ‘It hasn’t been through our process. Just let it go through our process.’ I said, OK.”
Now Jackson plans to explain what happened at a meeting of Hamden’s Town Council Monday night. Outraged Woodin Street neighbors, just learning of the news, spent the weekend distributing flyers to hundreds of people to attend what promises to be a stormy meeting.
Jackson said Sunday that Hamden has no ability to stop New Haven from dismantling the fence.
“Property rights are the determining factor,” Jackson said. “‘Settlement’ [of the dispute] is the wrong word. ‘Agreement’ is the wrong word. What is fair to say is the facts indicate that irrespective of boundaries, the fence is on property not owned by the town of Hamden.”
“The people are going crazy,” reported Hamden Councilman Mike Colaiacovo, who represents the border neighborhood and has been meeting with and hearing from upset constituents all weekend. He said that after word leaked out about the decision, he met with 30 constituents Saturday morning at the Three Brothers Diner. “Thirty people showed up. A lady that owns a printing company went to her office at 10 o’clock, and printed 1,500 flyers. We had 40 people giving out flyers last night to give out to the neighborhood. They want to go the Council meeting [Monday] night to give their opinion.” Click here to read about what the Hamden neighbors had to say at a previous public meeting on the subject.
Hamden’s Jackson is prepared for a harsh reception Monday night — as well as “for the next couple of years. You don’t make friends in this business. Every day you make less.”
The new Rockview.
Meanwhile, New Haven housing authority officials plan to meet Tuesday morning with Haynes Construction, the company rebuilding the Rockview development. There they will come up with a schedule over the next two weeks to tear down the fence, extend the road, and build six new driveways for privately owned homes under construction as part of the development that face onto the Hamden side of the landscape.
In order to avoid needing any permission from the town of Hamden, the authority will build the Hamden portion of the newly extended road as a private right-of-way rather than technically a public street; it will have a contract with New Haven to plow snow and otherwise maintain it.
The arguments over the fence have proved frustrating over the past two years, not just for Hamden Mayor Jackson, the man caught in the middle, but to New Haven officials as well. They tried holding trust-building events like cook-outs; only families on the New Haven side of the fence turned out. They proposed building a jointly run police substation along the new road. They invited Hamden neighbors to view the new Rockview Homes as they came online. They couldn’t even get permission to build the driveways for the six homeownership units facing Woodin Street.
Hamden public opinion didn’t budge.
Meanwhile, city officials approached the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) about the possibility of suing the town of Hamden for violating New Haveners’ civil rights by keeping the fence up, arguing that the decision to erect and maintain the fence was discriminatory. The U.S. Attorney’s Office opened an investigation. Hamden is already arguing with HUD about cutbacks in federal block grants, Jackson said. A civil-rights action threatened to cut off all HUD money flowing to the town.
New Haven Mayor Harp said she made it clear that she intended to have the fence removed.
“Why don’t we just go in and take it down?” she recalled saying in a meeting. “To me it’s morally reprehensible. Last week that little stream flooded. They had no way to go out. If something had happened up there, a storm-related thing, an earthquake, those people would have been trapped. And they were elderly. I felt it was really evident of real moral and ethical issues. I really believed that. So I have always wanted it taken down.”
The housing authority hired a firm to survey the property. Its outside law firm, Bercham Moses, reviewed the findings and reported that New Haven didn’t need Hamden’s OK to take down the fence. For decades it had been assumed that Hamden had legal control over the fence. But not only does the fence wind its way on both sides of the town border; more importantly, it falls 100 percent on housing authority property. The housing authority can do whatever it pleases with the fence.
That was in March. Harp agreed to wait until Tuesday to start moving on the work.
She already started hearing about it this weekend from her hairdresser, who is close to a number of people on the Woodin Street side of the fence.
“I guess,” Harp remarked, “I’ll never be the mayor of Hamden.”
Douglas with nephew Sheldon and sons J-Shaun and Thoams.
In West Rock, at the new Brookside development, Anaedrea Douglas was happy to hear the news Sunday. She has known the fence all her life. She grew up in the old Rockview Circle, moved with her family to Fair Haven, then to Helen Street in Hamden. She now lives with her two sons back in the new Brookside. They visit Anaedrea’s mom back on Helen Street almost every day — taking a circuitous route rather than driving straight down Wilmot across the board.
“I take offense the people think taking a fence down will bring crime,” Douglas said. “Crime happens in Hamden all the time. I know people that get killed in Hamden.”
Where Wilmot Road runs into the fence, for now.
A neighbor just past the fence in Hamden, who was clearing leaves on his property Sunday (and who declined to give his name), said he found the way officials put together the fence decision “sneaky.” He just learned about it this weekend when he received a notice in his mailbox. He grew up in the house he still occupies at Wilmot Road and Elliott Drive.
He would rather the fence stay up, he said. He said he worries more about extra traffic than extra crime. That said, he mostly shrugged it off.
“Far greater worse things are going on in the world,” he said, “than this fence.”