Hamden’s new mayor said he’d like to tear down the Berlin Wall dividing his town from New Haven’s Brookside projects. Maybe. Three years from now. If New Haven succeeds in building a safer new neighborhood.
New Haven’s housing authority chief is on board with the timetable and pleased with her agency’s relationship with the new mayor.
West Rock’s alderman wants the border crossing opened sooner. He charges that seniors are suffering because of an unfair stereotype.
The Hamden mayor, Scott Jackson, made the comments in an interview following an unrelated event in New Haven Monday afternoon with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.
At issue is a double-layer chain link fence that Hamden has kept up for decades, to keep out potential criminals from the West Rock housing projects. It also blocks a road and keeps out all the people living by the city-town border. For decades the fence has stood as a symbol of closed opportunity to project tenants: They have to take two buses, and sometimes travel hours, to get to jobs or shopping just past the fence across the town border.
Most of the housing projects have been torn down. A pocket of mostly seniors remains. New Haven’s housing authority just broke ground on a $173 million rebuilding of the neighborhood, aimed at mixing lower-income with middle-class families, rental apartments with owner-occupied homes.
Jackson said officials and neighboring families from his town are optimistic the new development will be a good enough neighbor to warrant finally tearing down the fence. But first they have to “see it.” And the earliest the first phase of the project is scheduled to open is 2013.
“I want to see it down, because I think the housing authority is going to do a great job,” Jackson said.
Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch highlights of the interview.
He said his government has participated in the New Haven housing authority’s implementation committee for the Brookside/Rockview redevelopment. It has invited the authority to meet with the Dunbar neighborhood civic association on the Hamden side of the fence. Trust is being built, he said.
Right now the fence can’t come down, even though the New Haven neighborhood consists mostly of old folks, because the area’s old configuration still makes it too easy for crooks to escape after committing cross-border crimes, Jackson said.
“What we don’t want is what existed in the past — which is bad activity happening, people being able to slip away” down dark, winding streets, Jackson said.
“I walked those streets [on the Hamden side of the fence]. I knocked on those doors. I heard firsthand what those people had to say. I have to respect it.”
An Outdated Line?
The housing authority broke ground 11 days ago on the Brookside/Rockview redevelopment. It aims eventually to build nearly 400 new rental apartments and nearly 60 home ownership units.
Housing authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton (pictured) said Tuesday that she agrees with Mayor Jackson: Hamden and New Haven should work together on building trust during the first phase, then wait for the project to take shape in 2013 before pushing to have the fence removed.
“We feel we have started out on a good relationship with the town and the mayor,” DuBois-Walton said. “We need to build something, move families back, and let people see it’s a new community. People need to see what Brookside is like. Then people will not see the need to have fences with us.”
“We have not been pushing [Jackson] to take it down at this time,” DuBois-Walton said. “I know others are pushing for. But this is the conversation we’ve been having. It works for us.”
It’s not working for seniors at West Rock’s Ribicoff Cottages, argued Alderman Darnell Goldson. He’s been among “the others” pushing for a quicker opening of the border; he has consulted with a Quinnipiac University lawyer about the possibility of civil-rights lawsuit against Hamden to pry open the gate.
Asked Tuesday about Jackson’s remarks, Goldson said he’s “encouraged that Hamden’s mayor believes that the fence will eventually come down” but he disagrees with “the timing.”
If the fence can’t come down right away, at the least Hamden should install a gate to which the resident seniors have access, Goldson suggested.
He called it “frustrated” to continue hearing criminals blamed for the fence remaining.
“We all know that 10 or 15 years ago, there was a serious issue of crime at Brookside. Surely some of it migrated to Hamden, how much has not been established in any reports I’ve seen so far,” Goldson said. “Now that the Brookside and Rockview projects no longer exist, and haven’t for a while, [that] seems to have eliminated the problem. But the mayor seems to believe that there are criminals waiting for the fence to come down so that they can pillage Hamden.
“It is simply not true. Crime in Hamden happens without the involvement of New Haveners. What crime are they referring to? Who are these criminals? The mayor seems to insinuate that it is not the seniors, yet they are the only residents in that area at this time.”
Jackson was asked Monday about the plight of seniors on the New Haven side.
“That is the way it has been for half a century,” he responded. “It would be an improvement [to remove the fence], not a correction of an existing issue.”
“I’m not saying the elderly people are committing the crime,” he said. But right now it’s still too easy for “bad actors” to “escape” through poorly-designed West Rock.
“That is the way it has been for half a century. It would be an improvement, not a correction of an existing issue.”
Thomas MacMillan File Photo