Newhallville Heard In Mayoral Race

Gentrification and unemployment took center stage for a night in New Haven’s mayoral race, as Democratic candidates fielded questions in Newhallville.

The occasion was the third neighborhood forum for the four candidates asking for the Democratic Party’s support. Unlike the past two forums — which took place in Westville and East Rock — this one was held at Lincoln Bassett School in Newhallville. And it featured a different issues focus as a result. The forum brought front and center the challenges, joys, and pride of living in the majority black, working class neighborhood.

The forum took place during a three-hour meeting of the Ward 20 Democratic Ward Committee. At the end of the three-hour meeting, held in the school’s cafeteria, the ward committee overwhelmingly voted to endorse Mayor Toni Harp in her reelection bid.

The committee members voted 13 to 2 to support Harp over former East Rock/Cedar Hill Alder Justin Elicker, who is challenging the mayor for the Democratic nomination in September’s primary. No one present voted to support the other two mayoral candidates present, Wendy Hamilton and Urn Pendragon. The committee also voted to endorse Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn for reelection.

The committee vote represents a nonbinding recommendation for how the ward committee’s two co-chairs, Barbara Vereen and Oscar Havyarimana, should cast their ballots at the Democratic Town Committee convention later this month.

The first two hours of the committee meeting consisted of a candidate question-and-answer session, in which Harp, Elicker, and Hamilton took turns fielding neighborhood-specific queries from committee members and from other Newhallville residents in attendance. Pendragon did not attend the meeting due to a scheduling conflict at work.

The Q‑and‑A portion gave the three candidates ample opportunity to discuss their visions for the neighborhood. Harp promoted job creation through a proposed new worker-owned laundromat. Elicker touted inclusionary zoning as a path to creating more affordable housing. Hamilton promised to halt Yale’s expansion into the neighborhood by cutting off all municipal services to the university until it commits to paying the city $250 million a year.

The candidate forum also shed a light on the diversity of Newhallville-specific concerns felt by at least the 30-person cross section of the neighborhood crowded into Lincoln Bassett’s cafeteria for the night.

Those concerns ranged from underemployment to budget deficits, from tree trimming and sidewalk repairs to gun violence and summer youth programs, from immigrant protections to affordable housing to prison reentry to food insecurity.

“Whoever wins,” Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris said at the end of Tuesday’s meeting, ​“needs to keep us on the path towards wealth building, entrepreneurship, and jobs in Newhallville. In Newhallville.”

Co-chairs Vereen and Havyarimana and Clyburn said the majority of the committee ultimately decided that Harp is the mayoral candidate most likely to succeed in promoting public safety, gainful employment, and affordable housing in the neighborhood.

“We talked about what Newhallville was like 20 years ago versus what it looks like today,” Vereen said about what was discussed during the hour-long, closed-door deliberations undertaken by committee members after the candidates made their pitches. The committee barred all non-Newhallville residents, including this reporter, from sitting in on and listening to that part of the meeting.

Crime is down, Vereen said, and the mayor is more accessible to neighborhood residents than ever. ​“People have seen that turnaround.” Click on the Facebook Live videos at the bottom of this article to watch the committee’s full Q‑and‑A sessions with Harp, Elicker, and Hamilton.

Gentrification

Harris, who runs the Harris & Tucker preschool in addition to serving as the neighborhood’s management team chair, focused her question for the candidates on rising rents, absentee landlords, and the slow creep of Yale University into Newhallville through its expansion of Science Park.

“What will you do,” she asked, ​“about the gentrification that’s plaguing and about to plague Newhallville?”

Shepard Street block watch captain Addie Kimbrough put the question more bluntly. ​“Yale is basically taking over Newhallville,” she said. What can the mayor do to make sure Newhallville residents can continue to afford to live in their neighborhood?

Wherever there is housing being developed, Harp said, the city needs to make sure there is an affordable component. That way working class people, even people earning little more than minimum wage, can afford to live in neighborhoods like Newhallville.

That can be done through state subsidies for affordable housing set-asides in new market-rate developments, she said. Gov. Ned Lamont initially planned on cutting millions of dollars of such subsidies in the state’s latest budget due to his ​“debt diet,” she said, but then she picked up the phone, called the governor, and worked with the local delegation to ensure that money made its way back into the budget.

The city can also build its own affordable housing, she said, as it has done at Judith Terrace with five new two-family homes. ​“You’re stabilizing the community through homeownership,” Harp said about such projects, ​“and you’re providing a decent and new place for people who need a subsidy to live.”

In his response to the gentrification question, Elicker promised to support an inclusionary zoning ordinance that would require developers to set aside a certain number of units in every new apartment complex at affordable rates. Existing projects like the Winchester Lofts and upcoming projects like 201 Munson bring hundreds of new residential units into the neighborhood, he said. But they do little good for Newhallville residents if they cost an exorbitant amount of money to rent, he argued.

New York, Washington D.C., and Boston all already have some kind of inclusionary zoning laws on the books, he said. ​“Why have we not done this before it’s too late? And I fear that it’s already getting too late. You see these buildings popping up everywhere and pushing out the residents that have been here so many years. We don’t want to be a city that’s either for the richest or the poorest among us. We want to be a city where every neighborhood has mixed diversity, both economically and ethnically.”

Hamilton, for her part, said that she will combat gentrification by taking every building in the city with empty apartments and require those landlords to rent those units to low-income tenants. She’ll do that by mandating that landlords rent 50 percent of each building’s residential units to tenants with Section 8 federal housing subsidies, she said. (She was not asked what legal basis she would invoke to require private landlords to participate in the Section 8 program, and whether New Haven could afford to defend and pay damages in the resulting lawsuit.) She also promised to house the city’s homeless in City Hall.

Employment

Ward committee member Shirley Lawrence asked the candidates about boosting employment in the neighborhood.

“What and how are you going to build economic training and entrepreneurship opportunities for the residents of Newhallville?”

Huntington Street resident Ruth Anderson, who said she has lived in Newhallville for well over half a century, underscored that point when she asked about each candidate’s vision for the neighborhood. How do they envision City Hall helping Newhallville and its residents succeed by building intergenerational wealth?

The worker-owned laundry slated for the former Department of Social Services building on Bassett Street, she said, will do just that. The project calls for the development of a community-owned workplace that will tend to the laundry needs of major local employers like Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital.

Furthermore, she said, the city’s Small Business Academy on Dixwell Avenue has graduated over 300 local entrepreneurs and trained them on how to open their small businesses in town.

Elicker said the city should instead return to the work it did through programs like the Construction Workforce Initiative and prioritize connecting students in jobs training programs with actual potential employers, like construction companies or Yale.

Hamilton said that, if elected mayor, she would create an entirely new department in City Hall solely focused on the welfare of Newhallville, Dixwell, and the Hill.

Public Safety And The Law

Several of the attendees present Tuesday night asked some questions regarding public safety, police-community relations, and criminal justice reform more broadly.

“Over the years,” local poet and Dixwell Avenue resident James Pagan said, ​“all of our community centers turned into [police] substations.” That has only increased the frequency of interactions between police and local people of color. What’s your take on that?

“The real way to address crime in our city is not by overpolicing our communities,” Elicker said, but rather by investing in after school programs and job opportunities.

If reelected mayor, Burundian immigrant Pascazia Havyarimana asked, will you commit to keeping New Haven a sanctuary city?

Absolutely, Harp said. New Haven law enforcement already has a standing order on the books about not cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in regards to taking custody of residents simply because of their citizenship status. That won’t change if she’s reelected, she said.

Elicker added that, if elected mayor, he would push for the Board of Alders to adopt a formal sanctuary city resolution that extends not just to law enforcement, but to teachers, school security guards, and other city employees.

What about all of the police officers who are trained in New Haven and then promptly flee to better paying jobs in the suburbs? Clyburn asked. How can the mayor turn that tide around?

Harp said that the city has pushed, unsuccessfully so far, a proposed state bill that would require towns that poach officers trained in other municipalities to pay a multi-thousand dollar reimbursement to those municipalities. That has met resistance from suburban legislators, she said, but it’s well worth pursuing.

First and foremost, Elicker said, he’d increase police officer pay. New Haven cops start at just $44,000 per year, while the lowest Yale cop starting salaries are closer to $66,000.

“Our police officers have been without a contract for three years,” he said. ​“That’s ridiculous.” And it’s deleterious to police officer retention. Pay them more, he said, and settle the outstanding contract negotiations.

If elected, Hamilton said, she would cut the number of budgeted officers from 429 to 300. She would give the officers pay raises and let them pick their own chief. And then she told a story about how she recently tried to talk with police officials at the 1 Union Ave. headquarters, but was denied entry. She said she was told she could come in only if she was arrested or if she had an appointment. ​“Everything here is so aggravating,” she said.