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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Woman Takes LEAD On Familiar Turf

LEAD’s Minardi and Murphy at Hill North meeting.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - Rasheen Murphy grew up in the Hill in the early 1990s. She saw friends and family struggle with drug addiction and fall victim to violent crime and incarceration. She had her first child at age 15, while still a student at Wilbur Cross High School.

Twenty years later, Murphy still lives in the Hill and is about to start working with the city and the police department to help keep low-level, non-violent criminals in her neighborhood out of jail and away from some of the challenges that she and her peers faced while growing up on those same city blocks.

On Tuesday night at the Hill North Community Management Team’s monthly meeting at Career High School, Murphy introduced herself as the neighborhood’s community liaison for the city’s new grant-funded Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which is slated to begin in the Hill North, Hill South, and downtown neighborhoods in November.

New Urban Farm Opens In The Hill

Sharic James.

Monday, May 22, 2017 - Leslie Radcliffe, whose family has a history of heart disease, started growing her own beans, peppers, kale, and tomatoes in 2013 after suffering three mild heart attacks over the course of 13 months.

Four years later, she stood before a quarter-acre plot of recently spread compost and organic topsoil behind Hill Regional Career High School to help usher in a new urban farm specifically designed to help Hill residents like her grow fruits and vegetables, eat more healthfully, build community around nutrition, and moderate diet-related chronic diseases.

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Non-Jail Program For Low-Level Offenders Pitched In The Hill

Brown explains Albany’s LEAD program during Hill North CMT meeting.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017 -  

The police get a call from Walmart that somebody has been caught shoplifting. The officers run the offender’s criminal history, and quickly find out that he has a 40-page rap sheet. Not 40 arrests; 40 pages.

Will one more arrest put this guy on the straight and narrow? Or is there another route, away from prison and toward social services, that would better change behavior, reduce recidivism, protect the community, and save the taxpayers money?

This was the central question under discussion Tuesday night during the Hill North Community Management Team’s monthly meeting at Career High School.

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Shelter Change Draws Local Opposition

Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - A plan to change a small Hill homeless shelter into a rent-subsidized residence for young people who have aged out of the foster care system is meeting with opposition from neighbors worried about parking and crime problems.

That opposition surfaced at a Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) public hearing at 200 Orange St. on Tuesday night on New Reach Inc.’s request to convert its Careway Shelter at 223 Portsea St. in the Hill’s Trowbridge Square area into a more conventional affordable housing residence for previously homeless and at-risk young women.

New Reach came up with the new plan two years after losing city funding and embarking on an effort to rethink how to house people who are, have been, or at risk of becoming homeless.

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Murphy: I’ll Vote Yes On Some Trump Picks

Murphy at Monday night’s town hall at Daniels School.

December 20, 2016 - Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy lifted two fingers to count out the tests he’ll be using when Congress is asked to vote on each of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

“Number one, you can’t be a radical,” he said. “Number two, you should have some level of experience in the field in which you’re going to be leading.”

Then Murphy gave a New Haven audience a head’s up: “I know that I’m going to vote for some of his nominees who I disagree with, because I think the president has the right to put people around him who are going to carry out government according to his wishes. But there is a line, and already many of these nominees have crossed that line.”

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Bike Co-op Adds The Silver Screen

Audience assembles at Bradley Street Bike Co-op (Thomas Breen photo)

September 19, 2016 - Halfway through a presentation on the many ways that the Hill neighborhood has changed over the past 100 years, architect-in-training Jonathan Hopkins paused to ask the question that everyone in the audience had been considering for the past hour and a half.

“Why the city chose the site they ended up choosing for the new John C. Daniels School, I’m not quite sure,” he mused. “Because there were obviously people living there. We just watched a documentary about them.

“On the one hand, I can understand why the city wanted to remove vacant buildings from the neighborhood. But the school project simply didn’t accomplish that.”

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