80 Relocated After Apartments Condemned

Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018 - 

Eighty New Haveners had 45 minutes to pack up their belongings and flee their homes Thursday night when officials temporarily condemned a 41-unit apartment complex on Norton Street because of unsafe conditions.

Representatives from the city’s fire department, police department, building department, and Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, were on hand to help the owner’s representative, Mendy Katz, alert his tenants that they had to pack just their essentials and vacate the building’s premises within the prescribed 45 minutes.

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City Tackles Car-Tinkerer’s Mess

Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - 

The city is taking a Quinnipiac Meadows homeowner to court for consistently failing to clean his yard of the heaps of used cars he likes to fix up and race.

The city, acting through its anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), placed a lien on the home of Kenneth Woodward, Jr. at 236 Cranston St. on Jan. 3 for Woodward’s alleged failure to pay $5,800 in fines related to turning his lawn into an unlicensed junkyard. LCI has been assessing the fines at $100 a day since Oct. 25, 2017.

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Downtown, Homeless People Counted

A man who reconnected with his Columbus House case worker on the Green during Tuesday night’s Point-In-Time (PIT) homeless count.

Tuesday, January 24, 2018 - 

Late Tuesday night outside the bus stop at Temple Street and Chapel Street, a man with a thick, matted beard and a blue hoodie beneath his winter coat walked to the edge of the sidewalk to give an old friend a hug.

The man with the beard, who said that he was a former professional boxer who has struggled with alcohol abuse and with his mental health, has been chronically homeless in New Haven for over five years.

The friend he saw on Tuesday night was Stephanie DeMusis, a case manager in outreach and engagement at Columbus House who used to work with the man before he left her care and fell out of touch.

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Not-For-Profit Seeks Support To Keep Rebuilding In Hill

Hill North Management Team Chair Lena Largie (right) and Hill Alder Ron Hurt.

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018 - 

A city not-for-profit that has spent nearly 40 years rehabilitating historic houses and supporting stable homeownership in the city’s poorest communities is looking for another round of federal grant money to help it continue its housing renovation and education work in the Hill, Newhallville and Dwight neighborhoods.

Bridgette Russell and Elias Estabrook of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) made that pitch during the Hill North Community Management Team’s regular monthly meeting in the cafeteria at Hill Regional Career High School on Legion Avenue.

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City Prepares To Clear Mill River Homeless Camp

Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - 

The city is planning to clear a large Mill River homeless encampment near the Ralph Walker Skating Rink sometime before the beginning of the new year.

Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist Linda Davis delivered that message to the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) on Monday night during the team’s regular monthly meeting at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street.

Davis told the team that the city’s Homeless Outreach Task Force plans to clear out a homeless encampment that has been active for months under the I-91 overpass sometime “before the first snowfall.”

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Concrete Revelations

Hopkins describes some of the architectural details of Church Street South.

Monday, August 21, 2017 - Jonathan Hopkins stood on a grassy hill overlooking a nearly vacant housing complex and pointed out some of its buildings’ distinguishing architectural characteristics.

A mixture of smooth and rough concrete blocks at the end walls mimicked a Colonial brick feature called quoining. The two-over-two double-hung windows with lintels and protruding cornices recalled a popular type of Georgian window design. The individual staircases and private outdoor spaces provided a modicum of privacy for tenants when the 301-unit complex was more fully occupied.

This coherent and innovative architectural design is still visible, Hopkins argued, if you look closely at the buildings themselves that comprise Church Street South, the notorious subsidized housing complex near Union Station that has been almost completely vacated after decades of mismanagement, crime, and neglect have reduced the complex to a dangerous state of disrepair for its recently-evacuated, low-income tenants.

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