Last summer, one of the other dads at daycare asked if I was on the Westville Dad email listserv.
“You gotta be on the list,” he told me. “Everyone in the neighborhood is on it. It’s funny stuff.”
Soon the email started coming. I’ve been on the list for about a year now. And received so many emails from area dads that most end up in my Spam folder at this point. It’s mostly a place for Westville Dads to plan meetups over Ultimate Frisbee, swap contractor names, and share free tickets to the Regicides. Sometimes someone will snap a picture of a fox.
The closest comparison I can think of is a hyper-local Next Door but without all the racism.
It’s exceedingly earnest and corny, if not useful, but not the riotous laughfest I was led to believe. But then again, I’ve never been to a Regicides show.
And it’s great if you need a pack n play or a recommendation for an accountant.
For those who don’t know, the Westville Dad is a subspecies of the typical Westvillian – just another iteration of the same virtue-signaling white middle-class yuppie. They love their families, they love GoNetSpeed, and they love, love, love their neighborhood. Some even write odes to it in the New York Times.
The Westville Dad does complain a lot about the cost of childcare, but still, you couldn’t ask for better neighbors.
And I can say this because I’m one of them.
But lately, the Westville Dads email chain has gotten political. One of their own, Liam Brennan, is running for mayor, and the dads are lining up behind him with their $25 checks and his promise of a cargo-bike riding, skate-boarding metropolitan utopia they envision.
It all may sound benign, but I’m not sure being a good neighbor guarantees that you’ll be a good mayor.
The primary for mayor is about four months away, but the campaigning is in full swing. Not a news cycle goes by without Brennan and the other candidates pouncing on every negative story as an indictment of the mayor.
According to Brennan’s critiques, the current mayor (who could be a Westville Dad if he didn’t live in the wrong neighborhood) isn’t ideologically pure enough, and too much of an incrementalist. And a new leader, another one with limited municipal government experience, is the answer.
Justin Elicker deserves kudos for the gracious way he has absorbed these critiques. He quickly learned running the city was hard, and then Covid hit and the world ended.
So now we have more candidates who plan to learn the job while on the taxpayer’s clock. New Haven, which is a whole lot bigger than just Westville, has real problems that won’t be fixed with enthusiasm and confidence.
The inequality in this city is shameful. Alders don’t come to work. There are too many guns. The board of education is a joke and no teacher wants to work in a New Haven school (some of which are run by Westville Dads.)
Meanwhile, the Westville Dad running for mayor is drafting white papers and producing videos about trees.
New Haven deserves competent leaders at the levers of government. Maybe that means the existing people in these jobs need to be replaced, but very little about this current field inspires a lot of confidence. Now, if a Westville Mom was running for mayor, I could get excited. After all, who do you think the Westville Dad really reports to? But there isn’t one on the ballot, as far as I know. And until then, perhaps this great enthusiasm these dads have for their city is better used elsewhere.
Like the pickleball court.
Max Bakke is a freelance writer and Westville Dad who lives on Central Avenue.