Clean Neighborhood Quest Starts Here

When dozens of government workers swarm into Newhallville next week on a new ​“Clean City” quest for clues about what makes blocks thrive or decay, they might want to pop in on Levon Quattlebaum and Alberta Nelson on Bassett Street.

Their block of Bassett, between Winchester Avenue and Newhall Street, has lovingly tended homes. It also has neglected or even trashed properties. They co-exist seemingly in battle for the soul and future of the neighborhood — a battle the Harp administration seeks to join with a new citywide program that combines upgraded data-collection and analysis with intensive enforcement, to be unveiled starting Thursday, Oct. 26, with a two-day Newhallville visit.

More than two dozen the fire marshals, public works, health, social services, police, development, and LCI (Livable City Initiative) department staffers plan to fan out across a 20-block area between Winchester Avenue and Fournier Street to track broken streetlights, illegally dumped trash, illegal apartments, collapsing porches, overgrown trees, and clogged catch basins.

In the process, they’ll also test out a new homegrown app aimed at changing the way the city keeps track of block-by-block neighborhood problems. Then they’ll spend weeks fixing the problems they’ve found, analyzing how to use data better, with an eye to bringing the campaign next spring to Fair Haven, the Hill, and Downtown.

They’ll also look to touch base with neighbors about how the city can do better in Newhallville.

Quattlebaum, who was planting grass seeds outside his property the other day, has owned and lived in a well-kept home on Bassett Street for 32 years.

“This house — look at her,” Quattlebaum said, taking a break from his task to point at the top of an absentee-owned house next door (pictured at left). ​“The landlord don’t care about her property. Look at the roof. All they want is money. They don’t care how the property is.”

Across the street, Alberta Nelson already had an elaborate annual Halloween display out on the front porch of the property she, and her parents before her, have owned and nurtured for 50 years.

“This block was very, very nice,” she said as a mechanical witch behind her cackled a Macbethian ​“double double, toil and trouble.” ​“Most those people [who owned and maintained homes] are gone.”

Some new owners have boosted the neighborhood by beautifully restoring old homes, like the Neighborhood Housing Services-revived home across the street (pictured at right).

Meanwhile, next door, a fast-growing property management company — a category of owner replacing homeowner-occupants like Nelson and Quattlebaum as dominant landlords in the neighborhood — was preparing to overhaul a vacant three-story house.

Jacob Pap (pictured) is overseeing the renovation work on the trashed house, with its crumbling second-floor porch and ripped fence, for the company, Ocean Management. He promised the company will revive the property, as it has sought to do with similar properties neglected by slumlords across town. About 30 percent of Ocean management’s 900-plus apartments in town are in Newhallville, he said. It took over this blighted house on Bassett, like many others, from a bank, he said. The tenants had already left, but ​“their belongings were in the house — couches, beds, everything.”

Pap was asked what has led so many Newhallville streets to be plagued by houses like this one.

“I think it’s the landlords, absentee landlords,” he said. ​“You need to be here every day, watching it, making sure everything is” in good shape.

The New ​‘Stat’

Next week’s program launch grows out of the Harp administration’s ​“Clean City” initiative. Its motto: ​“Safe Houses/ Safe Streets/ Safe Neighborhoods.”

The administration chose Newhallville as the first neighborhood to try the approach. Once dominated by African-American homeowners, Newhallville is now dominated by sprawling poverty-landlord companies.

“We want for them to be as vigilant about property they own in poor neighborhoods as they are about property they own in more stable neighborhoods,” Mayor Toni Harp said in an interview. And she wants city departments to break down ​“silos.” Harp said the goal is to bring this laser-like approach to neighborhoods throughout the city, to engage citizens in the problem-solving process, and to put in place a long-term problem-solving system.

“Like modern dance — once the music starts, we’re going to make it up,” one of the effort’s quarterbacks, Chief Administrative Officer Mike Carter, who participated in a similar initiative when he ran public works in Washington, D.C., said of the dozens of staffers from different agencies involved in the two-day canvas. ​“We’re going to dance until the music’s over.”

After identifying all the problems big and small, Carter said, the crew will spend the next few weeks fixing them. (It will take months for one part: putting in speed bumps and speed tables to slow down traffic at eight locations requested by neighbors.) Some specific plans are already in the works: installing 22 lights between Division and Ivy on the Farmington Canal Trail; raised crossings at Thomson, Hazel, and Ivy streets; and two four-inch ducts to boost internet connectivity.

Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn called next week’s planned sweep ​“a blessing from heaven.”

“I think the idea is great for them to do that walk-through,” Clyburn said. ​“I’ve been asking them to do this for a long time,” to have cops and inspectors and other city workers combine their information to brighten dark corners and clean up the streets.

The staffers will also start making use of a new app developed by the city’s GIS staffer, Alfredo Herrera. The app is called ​“Citistat” — named after two other city initiatives, the crime-focused ​“Compstat” and troubled-student-rescue ​“Youth Stat.” Like those two efforts, this one seeks to bring different government agencies together to solve emerging problems before they grow bigger, through collaboration, community input, and sophisticated analysis of data. (That’s often called the ​“broken windows” strategy of community action.)

For weeks the administration has studied the data it collects on Newhallville: landlord inspection reports from LCI, for instance, fire marshal inspections, tree-trimming or light-repair requests, trash complaints, police incidents. That information is scattered rather than kept in a single place. The new app will enable city workers from different departments to call up a property address and access all the relevant information.

City development chief Matthew Nemerson said the information has traditionally been collected on a software platform called ViewPermit, used by ​“60 to 70” Connecticut municipalities. Though the program has been updated, it still can’t accomplish the central-repository function. So Herrera tinkered with an app from a company called Esri to create the new app.

Citizens already have an ​“external” platform for communicating with city officials about problems needing fixing, Nemerson noted: SeeClickFix. Rather than try to replicate that successful system, the new effort aims to add an ​“internal” process for coordinating solutions.

Post-Industrial Challenge

If the visiting city staffers do knock on Alberta Nelson’s door seeking suggestions, she said she’ll respond, ​“Number one: They should put some speed bumps out on the street. The cars come too fast!” Not to mention motorcycle or dirt-bike posses doing wheelies.

Number two? ​“Make sure people take their garbage cans where they’re supposed to and keep their papers in their yards!”

Nelson and Levon Quattlebaum can also tell the city their work histories: a story linked to the rise and decline of homeownership in Newhallville.

They both retired form unionized factory jobs. That enabled them to afford to own and keep up homes.

And they weren’t alone. Right down the street the Winchester arms plant — now gone —had as many as 19,000 workers in its heyday. Not surprisingly, Newhallville used to have the city’s highest percentage of African-American homeownership. Apartments in homeowner-occupied buildings once comprised 70 percent of the the heart of the neighborhood targeted in next week’s sweep, according to Nemerson; today, more than half the housing units, 370 of the 700 housing units are non-owner-occupied.

Nelson retired from a job as a supervisor at a Pratt & Whitney factory (first in North Haven, then East Hartford). Quattlebaum retired in 1998 as a polisher at the Sargent hardware factory on Long Wharf. He later visited to observe the robot that succeeded him in the job.

“He don’t take a smoke break. He don’t take a lunch break,” Quattlebaum observed. ​“He got a robot arm — he picks up a door cover, like he’s looking at it,” then polishes it. The factory, he noted, is now ​“full of” robots.

They’ve stuck with the neighborhood since retirement and done their parts too keep it up. They’ve seen advances and setbacks. The 1980s-‘90s crack plague and the mid-aughts foreclosure-spawning recession, and mortgage fraud or neglect by property-flippers, led to longtime owners losing their homes and blight consuming blocks. On the other hand, Quattlebaum spoke of how police and neighborhood efforts have succeeded in taming street violence on his block, which used to be ​“like a war zone.” First-time homebuyers have in some parts of Newhallville organized to beautify their blocks and address crime. Owner-occupants like Nelson have held on, lovingly maintaining homes and caring for New Haven’s widest selection of stunning community gardens and greenspaces.

Nelson and Quattlebaum are members of a vanishing generation. Newhallville probably won’t see a wave of human unionized factory workers buying large portions of the housing stock again. Keeping a historic neighborhood evolving in the right direction will take new strategies — which the quest beginning next week will need to find.