Paul Bass Photo
Steve Winter (center) lining up wth fellow Alders Evette Hamilton and Tyisha Walker-Myers for Monday’s inaugural procession at Hillhouse High School.
Steve Winter had heard the song many times. But this time he noticed one of the lyrics for the first time — and it made him think about the change that needs to come in New Haven.
The song is Sam Cooke’s 1963 hit “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The line: “I go downtown / Somebody keep telling me / Don’t hang around.”
Winter was listening to the song Wednesday while sitting on the stage of Hillhouse High School’s auditorium. He was there to be sworn in to a new two-year term along with the 29 other members of New Haven’s Board of Alders. A local singer named Jordan Watson was performing the civil rights-themed song in honor of the inauguration.
“What struck me was the reference to downtown — keeping out of downtown,” Winter recounted the following day during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “That was a lyric that never jumped out at me before.”
On Wednesday it made him think about a topic he kept hearing on the campaign trail this past fall and during his first two years as an alder representing a gerrymandered slice of the Prospect Hill, Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods: How many people look at all the building taking place in New Haven, especially downtown but also in neighborhoods, and wonder if this is still their city.
“I’ve seen it as the Yale community starts to come down the west side of” Prospect Hill down to Winchester Avenue and Thompson Street, Winter said.
He heard fears expressed as he took parts in many debates about a builder’s evolving plan to turn a polluted abandoned factory site at 201 Munson St. into close to 400 apartments — most of them market rate. He heard people ask: “Three-bedroom townhouses on Munson Street for $3,500 a month? Who can afford to live there?”
In the short run, Winter and others in the community worked with the builder to hire local people to help construct the complex. And the builder agreed to include some affordable housing.
More promising, in Winter’s view, was the city’s decision to sell an adjoining property to the nonprofit Believe In Me Empowerment Corporation to build a single-room-occupancy (SRO) facility with social services on site.
The burning broader question facing New Haven is how to ensure people in neighborhoods like Dixwell and Newhallville can afford to continue living and thriving here.
Winter echoed a theme of Mayor Justin Elicker’s inauguration speech delivered Wednesday on the same stage from which Jordan Watson sang about change: New Haven should see the boom as an opportunity. It should make room for newcomers in a way that helps build everybody up.
Winter embraced the call for “inclusionary zoning” in a recent affordable-housing recommendations report the city has adopted. That means ensuring that new developments include apartments people here can afford. He also embraced the proposals for zoning changes that allow for more “accessory” (“mother-in-law”) apartments and “tiny houses.”
He’d like to see more SRO rooming house-style projects like Believe in Me’s — but only if responsible groups like Believe in Me run them, so the projects strengthen surrounding neighborhoods rather than bring blight.
New Haven’s City Plan Department should study how other cities further along the current urban building boom have addressed the affordability challenge, Winter said. He also called for exploring “alternative paradigms” like community land trusts.
That Was Fast
Thomas Breen Photo
Steve Winter speaking out in favor of a “community-choice aggregation” alternative energy plan at a November hearing.
Winter is beginning his second term on the Board of Alders. He was asked in the “Dateline” interview what was the biggest surprise in his first term. His answer: How quickly it is sometimes possible to get results from city government.
He learned that when neighbors complained to him about broken streetlights.
A woman on wealthy St. Ronan Street said she’d been trying in vain to get a streetlight fixed for two years. Winter took a photo of the broken light. He posted it on the SeeClickFix problem-solving website. Within a week, it was fixed.
That got him wondering if the same results could be produced in the low-income parts of his ward. He eventually tagged more than 50 broken streetlights on SeeClickFix, all in Newhallville. Some involved more elaborate fixes than the one on St. Ronan. But by term’s end they were indeed all fixed.
“There’s a system here. If we engage with it, we can get a lot done quickly,” Winter said.
He also noted that there’s much more that needs fixing, including Newhallville streetlights concealed by overgrown trees.
Budget, Pedestrian “Carnage” Crises
Looking ahead to the coming term, Winter — who works at a “data scientists and policy wonks” green energy-promoting collaborative in his day job — spoke of the city’s budget and “pedestrian carnage” crises as two other central challenges.
Even with 2018’s “scoop-and-toss” refinancing of $160 million in city debt for operating expenses (which Winter questioned) and the 11 percent tax increase the year before, the city is still running a deficit of more than $8 million in the current fiscal year. Winter threw out ideas for addressing the long-term structural deficit by seeking to add a fee on Airbnb rentals in town as well as a congestion fee on Uber rides (to address public-health concerns like asthma), as well as state enabling legislation for the city to collect special taxes on entertainment and restaurant meals and hospital beds.
He noted that almost as many people (nine) were killed by cars while walking New Haven streets as were killed by guns in 2019.
Winter cited those crises in response to a caller’s question about whether he thinks the alders will be able to work well with the new mayoral administration.
“We have to,” Winter responded. “We don’t have time to wait.”
Click on the video above to watch the full interview with Alder Steve Winter on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”