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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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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A Moral Call To Action On Poverty

Desmond, Gage, and Salgado onstage at CCA forum at Career.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 - After spending years interviewing tenants and landlords and reporting on urban evictions, Matthew Desmond reached a conclusion that surprised him: Conventional liberal and conservative explanations that heap blame on everything from deindustrialization to out-of-wedlock childbirth overlook the actual root causes of poverty in this country.

Poverty comes not from an absence of resources, Desmond discovered, but from a national unwillingness to confront a profound moral problem. With empathy and effort and understanding, the communal choices that lead to unstable housing for this country’s neediest can be collectively rethought and made anew.

That rethinking about poverty and housing and that moral challenge took center stage Tuesday night in the auditorium of Hill Regional Career High School.

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