Thomas Breen photo
Rolling down Chapel Street towards the scrapyard.
Mike P. doesn’t remember exactly when he last voted. It was probably a decade ago, likely for President Barack Obama.
As he pushed a shopping cart full of bicycle wheels and mattress frames and long metal poles to a Chapel Street scrapyard, he reflected on what would convince him to return to the polls: a candidate committed to making “a very, very, very noticeable difference for the homeless community.”
Mike shared those thoughts on Election Day as he walked through the Wooster Square and Mill River neighborhoods to the Alderman Dow scrapyard and metal recycling site on Chapel near East Street. As thousands of other New Haveners cast ballots, Mike had more immediate ideas on his mind — connected to a spike in homelessness that will challenge the winners of this and coming elections.
The 32-year-old New London native didn’t vote in Tuesday’s municipal elections for mayor or alders or city clerk or school board or charter revision.
Instead, on Tuesday afternoon, he made a trip he finds himself walking two or three times a week: from the downtown area wherever he had spent the night before — which in this case was the Green — along Chapel Street to the scrapyard to try to make a few dollars off of whatever he can drop off.
Included in his cart on Tuesday were a jumble of metal refuse that he said he had picked up from dumpsters around the city.
Mike said he’s been homeless for roughly four months. His dad died; his mom got sick; he lost his job when the hotel he was working a maintenance job at in Cromwell shuttered.
He said he moved to New Haven several years ago to live in a halfway house after getting out of prison. He decided to stay in the city, even though he spends most of his nights sleeping outdoors or, if he’s lucky, in one of the city’s homeless shelters or warming centers.
On Tuesday, the election was far from Mike’s mind. He had gotten soaked with rain the night before sleeping on a bench on the Green. He was still cold from the downpour, and was hoping to dry off as he walked with the shopping cart of metal along Chapel Street.
“All the shelters are full,” he said with dismay. And winter is almost here. “When it gets to this temperature, you can’t be outside. You’ll freeze to death.” Right now, he said, he’s trying to get himself a tent so that when he sleeps outside, at least he’ll be covered. Right now all he’s got is “a blanket and a very thin sheet,” he said, which he carries around in his backpack.
Mike said that what helps get him through most days is “being around decent people.” That was on full display as he walked by Conte West School’s playground, and a woman called out to let him know she had a piece of metal he could take.
He jogged across Chapel Street to pick up a lamp post. “Cast iron,” he said, taking an appreciative look at the piece of metal before putting it in his cart. Further down Chapel, by the highway overpass, Mike bent over to salvage a long strip of metal from the gutter. “A piece of aluminum,” he explained.
Mike said he hadn’t heard about the Elicker administration’s plans to purchase the Days Inn hotel on Foxon Boulevard and convert it into a non-congregate homeless shelter, though he heartily approved of it. He had heard of city and school board plans to turn the former Strong School on Orchard Street into an overnight warming center, and thought highly of that plan as well. “If I could be inside somewhere warm,” he said, “I could be on the floor,” he doesn’t need a bed.
“Night times are very, very, very rough,” he said. Between 1 and 5 a.m., the rain and wind pick up. “It’s hard.”
Mike said he’s also noticed an increase in New Haven’s homeless population, even just over the past few months. Asked for a theory on why more people are sleeping outside now, Mike offered a one-word answer: “Drugs.” He also said that some people choose to sleep outdoors because they don’t want to follow shelter rules about when, for example, you have to be inside for the night.
When he got to the scrapyard, Mike pulled the shopping cart to a stop and began to take out each item of metal and tried to organize them by metal type: Steel. Aluminum. Hopefully some copper.
He estimated on the way to the scrapyard that he’d be able to get $20 for his haul. When he left after exchanging the metal for cash, Mike lit a cigarette and said Tuesday’s payday was “not so good.”
Asked what he wanted his fellow New Haveners — voters and elected officials — to think about this Election Day when they went to the polls, Mike paused before replying: “I just want people to vote for somebody that’s for everybody, to help everybody. Not just the rich or poor. Everybody.”
See below for more recent Independent articles about homelessness, activism, and attempts to find shelter.
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