Ward 21 Race Centers On Streets, Youth

A four-way alder race in the jigsaw-shaped Ward 21 pits a first-term incumbent focused on challenges ranging from street light improvements to affordable housing to climate change against a slate of challengers calling for more opportunities for neighborhood youth.

That aldermanic race in the Newhallville/Dixwell/Prospect Hill ward will see Alder Steve Winter face off against challengers Anais Nunez and Troy Streater during the Sept. 10 Democratic primary.

A third challenger, Eddie Gist, did not succeed in petitioning onto the primary ballot (because of a distant parking space, a delayed elevator, and the letter of the law), though his name will appear on the general election ballot in November as an unaffiliated candidate. Winter, Nunez, and Steater have also all qualified to appear on the general election ballot if they don’t win Tuesday’s primary.

The Incumbent: Lights Are On

Winter, a 30-year-old Rhode Island native and Yale graduate who works for a data aggregator about the electric grid and climate change, told the Independent on a recent walking tour of the neighborhood about both the small-scale and the citywide accomplishments he’s most proud of from his first two years in office.

Standing in the middle of Orchard Place amidst the Florence Virtue cooperative apartment complex, Winter pointed to a simple light pole standing tall next to a smooth stretch of concrete sidewalk.

Those may look like run-of-the-mill streetscape features, he said. But, for the tenants of the Dixwell apartment complex, they represent long called-for and hard-won quality-of-life improvements.

When he first won the alder seat in 2017, he said, ​“one big thing that came up all over the ward was lighting.” Residents didn’t feel safe leaving their homes after dark because of how poorly lit their sidewalks were, he said.

This streetlight spot on Orchard Place in particular, he said, had for five years held nothing more than an orange cone and a sign featuring an image of a skull and crossbones warning of a live electrical wire underneath.

“Working with residents and following up with city staff, we were able to get that fixed,” he said. ​“There was nothing there but a cone for five years. This is a small thing, but it makes a big difference.”

That’s not true just for Orchard Place, but for 50-odd street lamps that have been replaced throughout the ward over the course of his first term, Winter said. He pointed to the stretch of recently fixed up sidewalk next to the lamp as an example of the type of sidewalk improvements that neighbors have long called for, and that many other areas of the neighborhood are still in desperate need of.

He said that he and his constituents have submitted six Complete Streets applications for traffic-calming measures during his first term, and that he helped convince the city transit department to stripe two new bike lanes on Shelton Avenue and on Sherman Parkway.

“It’s more hands on with him,” Florence Virtue tenant Robert Walker (pictured) said about Winter as he chatted with the alder from the driver’s seat of his car. He praised Winter as continually knocking doors throughout the complex, and the ward, not just come reelection time, but throughout his term to stay in touch with residents and hear from them directly about what they want and need out of City Hall.

As he rounded the corner of Goffe Street and crossed over to the St. Martin’s Townhouses complex, Winter spoke of yet another point of pride from his first term: Working with St. Martin’s tenants and legal aid lawyers to make sure that the affordable housing complex’s new owners didn’t relocate the tenants to a hotel all the way in Shelton. 

That’s what the landlords had initially planned to do as they embarked on a comprehensive rehabilitation of the apartments. Winter contacted the New Haven Legal Assistance Association. Together they convinced the landlords to move displaced tenants to a hotel on Long Wharf instead and to increase the per diem stipend each tenant will receive from the landlord during the relocation.

“It was convening people and applying pressure” that tipped the scales on how the new landlords approached dealing with their tenants, Winter said.

If reelected, Winter said, he plans to keep calling for basic quality-of-life improvements and protections for Ward 21 residents, while also pursuing citywide (and further-reaching) issues.

The city Affordable Housing Task Force’s land use and zoning recommendations around minimum lot sizes and mother-in-law apartments are realizable short-term updates to city law that he plans to push for to broaden the city’s stock of affordable housing, Winter said. ​“Those are types of changes we can get started on immediately.”

He also promised to support the City Plan department’s inclusion of affordable housing minimums in the new Commercial Gateway Districts, one of which will be on Dixwell.

The number one concern he hears from residents in the neighborhood, he said, is that there are not enough employment and after-school activities for youth. ​“We can’t wait for the Q House construction to get started,” he said, promising to support the city’s Youth at Work program, and also to promote training programs that prepare youth for jobs in the wind and solar industries as a way to curb climate change and to take advantage of the growing renewable energy job sector.

He said he also plans to talk with his colleagues on the board about introducing a 50 cent fee on Uber and Lyft rides and then dedicating that revenue source towards climate change mitigation efforts, as the Colorado state legislature has recently done.

In the past 19 months, he said, there have been 23 incidents of gun violence in his ward, including the shooting of a 8‑year-old on Thompson Street and the injury of Capt. Anthony Duff and murder of Troy Clark at Dixwell and Henry.

He said he plans to work with the police department and neighbors to see if cameras can be installed at places of particularly high violence, such as that corner of Dixwell and Henry, where there have been two shooting murders in the past two years. There’s already a camera at that corner, he said, but it’s fixed in its position and should be upgraded to one that can take pictures at four different angles.

And as for the Civilian Review Board (CRB), he said, one of the main issues that got him into politics in the first place, he said he is proud of the work he and his colleagues have put in to finally pass a law that creates a police investigatory board with subpoena power.

Now, as alders vet nominees and get the board up and running, the challenge he’s set for himself and his colleagues to make sure that the CRB is ​“impartial in its judgments, thorough in its investigations, and holistic in its view of how to improve policing.”

“There’s an endless number of really substantive issues that need serious attention and energy,” he said about one of the main challenges of being an alder, ​“and trying to decide which ones to focus on” can be ​“both challenging and exhausting.” But that’s what draws him to public service too, he said. Meeting that challenge, and doing so collaboratively with the community he represents.

Gist: Bikes, After-School Programs

Eddie Gist, a 62-year-old assistant director at the McClam Funeral Home on Dixwell Avenue and a Newhallville native who has never run for political office before, said that his top issue if elected alder would be to find, create, push, and promote more after school programs for city youth.

“If these kids have something to do, then there won’t be a lot of crime going on,” he said during a recent interview outside the Dixwell Avenue funeral home.

He said he would work with the city to try to convert the second floor of the former state Department of Social Services building on Bassett Street in a neighborhood hang out and youth activity spot. The city currently plans to turn that building into a worker-owned laundromat.

“Upstairs, make it into an after school program for kids,” he said. ​“They don’t have anything to do. This is why most of our inner city kids is out in the streets, because they don’t have anything to do in New Haven.”

He said he would also advocate for improvements to the park on Bassett Street, and that he is currently trying to get volunteers to donate bicycles and give free bicycle riding lessons to neighborhood youth.

“We’ve got to bring this neighborhood back together,” he said.

Nunez: Paths To Self-Sufficiency

Nunez (pictured), a 32-year-old Townsend Street resident and youth advocate, grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to New Haven nine years ago. She said she is running for alder because she wants to make sure that everyone in her neighborhood is aware of and can take advantage of the vast array of municipal services that helped her lift herself out of poverty.

When she and her kids first moved from Stamford into the Grand Avenue public housing complex formerly known as Farnam Courts (recently rechristened Mill River Crossing), she said during a recent interview, she had no job, no high school diploma, ​“no type of education whatsoever.”

“Through the housing authority,” she said, ​“as well as through the Workforce Alliance and the Cash Assistance Program, I’ve been able to turn myself from poverty to self-sufficiency.”

She said she got her high school diploma from Eli Whitney, where she graduated as valedictorian. She went to Gateway Community College and earned an associate’s degree in early childhood education. And she served as the city’s ​“number one parent volunteer,” and then council president, for the city’s Head Start program, donating 200 volunteer hours to the early childhood education cause.

“The New Haven experience for me has been magical,” she said, and she wants to share her story, and the wealth of local resources that helped get her where she is today, with fellow Newhallville residents.

“I see there is a lot of necessity in my ward,” she said. ​“Being an alder is more than fixing a pothole or how many streetlights you can fix in two years. My number one goal is to share with the whole ward a news marketing letter of all the city programs that are available in this city.” She said she wants everyone in her neighborhood to know about job fairs and rental assistance programs and prison re-entry support facilitated by City Hall.

“Ninety-nine percent of the programs happening,” she said, ​“people don’t know about them.”

Nunez said that she spent the past four years working as a retail store manager for Cricket Wireless in Fair Haven, and just recently started a new job as a center manager for European Wax Centers in Meriden.

“I want me neighborhood to have the same opportunities that I had,” she said. ​“I feel like I would be a great example to those who really need it.”

Maceo Troy Streater, a Dixwell Avenue resident who works at the 180 Center on Grand Avenue, did not respond to multiple requests over several weeks for comment for this article.