Paul Bass Photo
Tammy Chapman carries flowers Monday to plant in a neighbor’s front yard on Winchester Avenue.
Newhallville neighbors incensed by Yale’s decision to pull out of a house-building project will receive a visit from Rick Levin this week — along with a promise to help restart construction.
Levin, Yale’s president, is scheduled to appear at a press conference on Lilac Street on Wednesday.
He will announce that Yale is not abandoning the neighborhood after all. He and Mayor John DeStefano will announce that Yale and the city will pay a not-for-profit builder, Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), to finish a new home on Lilac Street, according to three people familiar with the plans.
Yale architectural students designed the home and were starting to build it; then the university abruptly pulled out last month after two teens attacked an 83-year-old architecture professor on the site. (Read about that here, and some of the reaction here.)
That decision demoralized homeowners who have spent the past few years putting down roots and improving the neighborhood. Before Yale, Habitat for Humanity had left the neighborhood because of crime. NHS is the only quality not-for-profit builder still working there, repairing beautiful old homes to sell to homeowners — amid streets plagued by slumlords who milk rental properties and leave them in neglect (not to mention perpetrators of mortgage fraud).
Yale’s decision to pull out marked a setback for a neighborhood that has fought hard to improve, and had some dramatic successes, according to neighbors. It turns out the perception of that stretch of Newhallville is quite different depending on the vantage point: from the outside, too risky to enter; from the inside, an area showing hopeful signs of improvement while tackling serious challenges.
While Habitat and Yale left, NHS has been seeing empty refurbished homes suddenly start selling, according to the agency’s director, Jim Paley. In December 2010, NHS had four newly built homes it couldn’t sell. Today, those four homes — and three other NHS homes — are on deposit, he said. NHS has even found buyers for three homes it hasn’t yet completed, on Starr and Huntington streets and Winchester Avenue.
And community policing has started to show results in the form of solved crimes and a decline in a “no-snitching” attitude from neighbors, Paley observed.
“The whole perception has changed,” Paley said. “The balance of power is now in the hands of the people,” not drug dealers or gang-bangers.
“We are invested. We know we have a struggle,” said Tammy Chapman (pictured in her dining room Monday), a homemaker who lives with her family around the corner from the Lilac Street in an immaculate NHS-renovated house on Winchester Avenue, with thriving side-yard garden beds. Over the last three years, she said, “we saw the transformation.” Elderly people walk the streets more; neighbors spend more time outside at barbecues, on clean-ups, in communal gardens.
“If we didn’t see the changes happening, my husband and I and young families coming into the neighborhood wouldn’t come,” said Chapman, whose husband works at Yale. “Most of us who have come into the neighborhood do it by choice. It’s sad to me that Habitat that has made the decision to leave, that Yale seemed to have picked up the same intention to leave.”
“I almost felt betrayed” by Yale, said Kali Williamson, whose family bought a home last year at Winchester Avenue and Lilac Street. “I was hurt. I was so shocked by it.”
She and neighbors were happy to see Yale architectural students work on the property, she said. She would stop by regularly and thank them or offer assistance.
She and her neighbors formed a group called Newhallville Community Matters Residents Association to improve the area. They’ve done neighborhood clean-ups. They’ve planted flowers. They designated “street cleaning captains.” They worked with the Promise Land group to win improved street lighting. They held a day of celebratory “food, music and conversations” with neighborhood kids to welcome the Yale building project; they posted photos from the April event on this web page.
After the attack on architectural professor Paul Brouard (pictured), who has overseen students’ affordable-home-building projects in city neighborhoods for 24 years, Williamson and other neighbors sent him a card. They expressed their sympathy and their outrage at the attack. “We apologized to the man,” she said. And she and other homeowners warned young troublemakers on the block that that kind of crime won’t be tolerated.
They’ve worked with police, including new walking-beat patrol officers, to cut crime. As a result, police report they’ve been able to make more arrests. Including the mugging of Brouard; a neighbor called a Newhallville cop with a tip that led to the arrests of the two alleged attackers. (Read about that here.)
Yale tried to keep the attack on Brouard, and the decision to pull out of the neighborhood, out of the public eye. After the Independent reported on it, the move came under criticism.
“It’s disheartening to see what Yale said. Newhallville has its problems; so does every neighborhood in New Haven. They made it seem like something horrible is going on since they came there. This was an isolated incident. It was horrible. It’s not a reflection on the neighborhood,” said Williamson, who works as a receptionist at the Whitney Center in Hamden and is the daughter of legendary New Haven basketball player (and New York Net) “Super John” Williamson.
“I don’t have to live in Newhallville. I choose to live here. They said, ‘This happens to this gentleman; we won’t do anything in this neighborhood.’ They didn’t talk to any neighbors,” Williamson said.
The Community Matters Residents Association wrote a group letter to the Independent challenging the impression of their neighborhood fostered by the Yale decision. They also took exception to critical remarks of the Yale project by two immediate neighbors of the Lilac Street lot, as published in the Independent. “Every resident on Lilac Street had and continues to have the opportunity to be part of this wonderful transformation. Sadly, some do not want to accept positive change. Regardless, the residents of Newhallville will not allow Yale or anyone else to assign a negative character to our community that it does not warrant,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the rain canceled a planned neighborhood clean-up Monday with volunteers from Hopkins School. That didn’t stop Tammy Chapman and Sally Voegeli, a volunteer from (yes) Habitat from Humanity, from beginning to plant new flowers in the yard of Chapman’s elderly next-door neighbor.
That neighbor has the misfortune of renting from Diamond Properties, an outfit run by two of the city’s most notorious slumlords, Michael Steinbach and Janet Dawson. Needless to say, the property is neglected. Chapman and Voegeli decided they could at least brighten the hardscrabble front yard with the new plants.
Tina Jackson wandered over from the house where she rents a second-floor apartment across Winchester Avenue.
She and Chapman resumed a conversation about plans to plant flowers in that front yard, too.
“I’m trying to make it look better. I have mass sun in the morning,” Jackson said.
“We could even do some sunflowers. The kids would like that,” Chapman suggested.
Talk turned to guarding the plants with a small fence, and reminding kids to respect the fence.
“I want some vegetables too. I love tomatoes,” Jackson said.
“We could grow the tomatoes,” Chapman said, “on the pots on the porch.”
The neighborhood has decided that it takes many “small steps” over time to make improvement, Chapman reported. Chalk up two more.
