Boarded houses, abandoned buildings, and graffiti are commonplace in New Haven. In a partnership with Yale, the city began to combat these symptoms of urban blight when the Board of Aldermen approved a $2.5 million grant from the federal government in early April. The money will be applied to the revitalization of the Dwight neighborhood.
Mayor John DeStefano, Jr., has taken these efforts one step further with his "Livable City Initiative," a plan to target blighted buildings for rehabilitation or demolition. DeStefano and Yale are trying to fight urban blight on two fronts: community based development, and a new vision for the city as a whole.
Earlier this year, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros visited New Haven to award $2.5 million to Yale to help redevelop and invigorate the Dwight-Edgewood neighborhood near campus. "This is the most expansive way the University is working with one area. It's a major concerted effort," University Secretary Linda Lorimer, LAW '77, said. Lorimer added that the University is working hand-in-hand with community leaders on a neighborhood-revitalization level, an economic level, and a human-development level.
Neighborhood revitalization is the most striking area of cooperation. Under the guidance of Yale's Urban Design Workshop, residents are working with professors and architecture graduate students to redesign their neighborhood. In late September of 1995, 250 members of the Dwight community participated in a design workshop to create a vision for the area's future. The clinic brought community members together with architects and planners to visualize what they wanted.
On the economic level, the Regional Growth Partnership, a coalition of business leaders, elected officials, and University professors is working together to bring economic stability and job growth to the neighborhood. "I would hope that in five or six years, we'll be able to sustain ourselves," Linda Townsend-Maier, director of the Dwight Central Management Team, said.
Education is the focus of the human development component. Projects have started to bolster public education in the neighborhood, including an after-school reading room.
Michael Haverland, ARC '94, workshop coordinator, said that rather than looking to address specific problems, the project takes a longer-term approach. "The project seeks to be proactive, rather than reactive," Haverland said.
Additionally, the University has plans for a Joint Community Development clinic to bring together law, architecture, public health, and management professors to aid community leaders. "This will address the issues of blight, education, youth, retail, and urban development," Cynthia Farrar, special assistant to the secretary, said. "In every case, we are going to make faculty and professors accessible to the neighborhood."
The project is unique because of the close relationship between members of the community and the University. "What's different about this project is that we don't just read about it in the newspaper. People are actually involved in what's happening," Townsend-Maier said.
DeStefano has proposed a second unique approach to the problems of urban blight with his Livable City Initiative. This project seeks to combat blighted housing by decreasing the amount of bureaucratic red tape that the city must cut through to acquire and demolish buildings. It also decentralizes the process in order to empower community leaders.
Despite criticism that the Initiative steals power from the Board of Aldermen, the program is making progress through city legislature. "There have been a lot of compromises made to ensure that there is no perception or actuality of aldermanic powers being unnecessarily usurped," Alder Josh Civin, CC '96, said.
The original proposal declares the blight problem a State of Emergency, thus giving the city broadened powers to identify blighted buildings and do with them what it sees fit. The Board of Aldermen retains the power of approval, but the process is streamlined.
The project's neighborhood-based approach distinguishes it from previous efforts to deal with blighted housing in New Haven. Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo, special assistant to the Mayor, characterized other efforts, such as the Yale Homebuyers' Program, as "helping residents to become homeowners," and "piecemeal community development." The new proposal insures that neighborhoods have the elements necessary for change.
The vision presented by the project is one of a less-dense city. With a loss in population, there is no longer a need for the current glut of housing space. Citing New Haven's decline in population and rise in blighted housing, DeStefano said, "We have, in the midst of gloomy census figures, an opportunity to create neighborhoods where people have room to breathe." Community leaders can identify abandoned or blighted buildings, and build them up into valuable community resources, or demolish them to make room for parks and more green space.
DeStefano is concurrently proposing the first major overhaul of the city plan in 50 years. With its revised zoning laws, the new city plan complements the Livable City Initiative by making the city more spacious. "We're realizing that population loss is not such a bad thing, if it makes for more livable neighborhoods," Sullivan-DeCarlo said.
The Livable City Initiative augments intensive community efforts such as the Dwight redevelopment by providing an institutional structure for community leaders to interact with the city's Livable City department. Although the process has yet to be formalized, both DeCarlo and Civin expressed their support for community involvement in shaping the future.
As for continued University involvement in efforts to aid New Haven, Lorimer said, "Other projects will emerge, and Yale will be opportunistic and attentive to them."
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
This article may be freely distributed electronically, provided it is distributed in its entirety and includes this notice, but may not be reprinted without the express written permission of The Yale Herald, Inc. Write to herald@yale.edu for additional details.