Rising Rally Asks: ​“Boom For Whom?”

“It feels like a boom is happening in this city,” thundered Rev. Scott Marks to a roaring crowd of 1,000 New Haveners overflowing the pews, hugging the walls, and huddling criss-cross on the floors of Trinity Temple Church of God in Christ (COGIC) on Dixwell Avenue Tuesday night. 

“But my question is: It’s a boom for whom?”

Marks posed the question to the sea of faces flooding the 285 Dixwell Ave. church, setting the scene for New Haven Rising’s ​“Solidarity Summit.” 

The hour-and-a-half-long meeting convened the city’s four UNITE HERE locals — Locals 33, 34, 35, and 217 — and union-backed alders and other labor-friendly politicians for a rally, a fundraising and membership drive, and an address from UNITE HERE’s new Elm City-born-and-raised international president, Gwen Mills. The rally also served as a venue to announce a new effort to push Yale to finance a ​“People’s Endowment.”

Speakers at Tuesday’s event included Local 33 President Adam Waters, Local 34 President Lisa Stevens, Local 35 Chief Steward and Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers, and Local 35 President Bob Proto.

The city, Marks said, has been getting a lot of new investment these days, with billions of dollars surging to ​“luxurious housing and biotech” — but the wealth hasn’t filtered down. Far from it. Now, he said, nearly half the city’s population is low-income. 

Wages have stagnated, Marks continued, and the cost of groceries and rent and healthcare have shot up. One job doesn’t cut it these days — now the average person needs two or three to get by. 

And, of course, there’s Yale, the behemoth that New Haven Rising and the unions set out to tame more than ten years ago, waging an uphill jobs campaign that eventually won 1,000 full-time service, custodial, and clerical positions at the university for New Haveners, adding up to $40 million in wages and benefits. Those numbers are according to both commitments Yale made and New Haven Rising’s website.

The bloc’s new goal is to push Yale and its $41 billion endowment to finance a ​“People’s Endowment,” helping to lay the foundation for a ​“fully funded city,” equipped to tackle housing affordability and boost the public school budget. (Click here to read about the latest city-Yale deal, approved in 2022, which increased the university’s voluntary payments to the city by $10 million a year for five years and handed over a city-owned block of High Street to the university to create a publicly owned car-free walkway, among other provisions.)

Marks related the effort all the way back to Yale’s creation three centuries ago. ​“I thought about the men who founded Yale, men who profited from slavery, men who profited from the system that held my family in bondage,” he said to Tuesday’s crowd. 

And Marks tied it to the memory of his godson, Daily Jackson, who was shot and killed late last year. ​“I thought about my godson’s fate,” he continued, ​“the fact that Yale’s leaders, who crushed the opportunity for the first Black college in the nation — the first Black college, not down south but right here in New Haven. I wonder how things would be different for all those years that were cut off and knocked back, the lives that would be changed.” 

The other big 2025 policy priority for New Haven Rising and the unions is passing Senate Bill 8, a bill now making its way through the state legislature. If passed, the bill would make striking workers eligible for unemployment benefits. Moves like that at the state and local level, speakers from the locals stressed throughout the night, will be all the more important as the Trump administration guts federal labor protections and targets unions and immigrant workers. The struggle, Mills said, begins in New Haven. 

“Right here at home,” Mills said, ​“we’ve got to pass SB‑8, we’ve got to mobilize this city in favor of affordable housing, and we have to insist that Yale settles fair contracts and is redistributing money in the City of New Haven to level the playing field once and for all.”