Newhallville Gets Back Into Building

A group of Newhallville residents has banded together to build affordable, owner-occupied housing — and expand awareness of neighborhood resources — by way of a revived community development corporation.

The Newhallville Community Services Development Corporation, a newly-registered nonprofit organization helmed by longtime neighborhood activist Jeanette Sykes, is hosting its first official community event at the end of the month: an ​“I Love Newhallville” symposium brimming with resources for neighborhood residents.

The symposium will feature information compiled by Development Corporation board members Chanelle Goldson and Linda Davis-Cannon on how to become a homeowner, and after buying a house, how to prevent foreclosure. 

According to the organizers, the event will convene housing quality information from the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), motion detector and street lamp installment resources from Neighborhood Housing Services, information about applying for the state’s Baby Bonds program, Yale’s Pathology Department members able to conduct health screenings, and representatives from United Illuminating and the New Haven Police Department. 

The symposium is slated to take place at Albertus Magnus College’s Behan Community Room on Saturday, June 29 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Development Corporation is a revival of a previous organization in the neighborhood — and of a community-driven development model that once thrived in many New Haven neighborhoods, with the Greater Dwight Development Corporation as one remaining example. 

This iteration in particular grew out of a surge in neighborhood activism opposing a proposed methadone clinic in the area. Residents organized a series of protests, press conferences, petition signatures, and neighborhood meetings, expressing outrage about the lack of community outreach from the addiction treatment center in question, the APT Foundation. 

During these gatherings, leaders of this effort solicited community input on what attendees hoped to see in the neighborhood, hearing back ideas for health-oriented supermarkets, youth centers, and a sense of safety outside. The group was ultimately successful in both spurring APT to move elsewhere and generating an ongoing list of neighbors’ dreams for Newhallville — a list that became a guiding document for the Development Corporation.

So far, the corporation has received about $4,000 from fundraising with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and $90,000 from the City of New Haven, according to vice president and two-year neighborhood resident Sophie Kaplan.

For now, one of the corporation’s top priorities is creating homeownership opportunities in Newhallville. The group is looking at vacant or blighted properties in the neighborhood to potentially convert to owner-occupied housing in partnership with other organizations.

The group is embarking on this goal with an acute sense of Newhallville’s decades-long history as a neighborhood where Black homeownership thrived. ​“Everyone owned their homes around here — that’s just history,” said Sykes. ​“Now we’re finding that a majority of [housing in the neighborhood] is renting out.”

Homeowners, Goldson said, not only have a chance to improve their own wealth — they also have an incentive to invest in the neighborhood and remain present, on a long-term scale. ​“When you have landlords, they’re not there with eyes on the property,” said Goldson. ​“That’s what we see: blighted properties, littering, loitering, things like that that have exacerbated over the years.”

Davis-Cannon hopes that promoting homeownership — and more broadly, community participation among all residents — can bring back a tighter-knit sense of community, in which neighbors watched over each other’s children and ensured one another’s safety. ​“Everyone took care of their properties, took care of their street. That’s how we all became connected.”

As Sykes envisions it, a stronger sense of connection and investment in the neighborhood could ultimately lead to a safer community, too. ​“We know if there’s activities around,” along with measures like well-lit streets, crime is less likely to occur, she said — and neighbors may be more likely to reach out to one another and offer help.

The group, whose board also includes Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, Miriam James, Rhonda Nelson-Sheffield, Ngola Santos, and Brittany Tomling, aims not only to fund community-driven development, but also to spread awareness about neighbors’ rights and opportunities through events like this month’s symposium.

“We also want to build relationships, so people can feel comfortable” if they need to ask for help, Davis-Cannon said.

In the long term, the group envisions a broad scope of priorities including promoting job creation, expanding opportunities for elderly and young people, addressing health disparities, and perhaps even bringing in a grocery store.

“This is just the beginning,” Goldson said.