The Right to a Roof
“I was homeless for seven years. That’s a long time,” said Quentin Staggers, pausing to adjust the hood of his bright blue sweatshirt. On Nov. 6, he finally received housing in Fair Haven, but the new apartment hasn’t taken Staggers away from New Haven’s homeless community. “The whole time I was homeless, living on the Green, I always saw the injustice, I always felt that I wanted to be heard.” Now, he’s organizing the homeless community to fight for better services, and a seat at the decision-making table in city government.
Staggers was one of the community leaders who led a crowd of a hundred in a march through downtown New Haven called Housing Not Jails on Nov. 1. Members of the New Haven homeless community and their allies marched to lift the voices of the homeless community and demand change. The march started at the intersection of Olive and Chapel Streets, where people gathered carrying megaphones, wearing T-shirts made for the event, and holding colorful signs that read, “Housing is a Human Right;” “Housing Justice not Incarceration;” and “Provide Housing Now.”
The march, led by and meant for the homeless community, received funding and support from the Connecticut Bail Fund. Launched in 2016, the Fund posts bail for those who cannot afford to, including many homeless individuals arrested on small infractions or outstanding tickets. As well as posting bail, the Fund has started an advocacy group called the Participatory Defense team, which includes Staggers along with other local residents. “Community members have knowledge and experience of these systems and their own lives, and can organize around that,” said Patrick Sullivan, JE ’18, co-founder of the CT Bail Fund.
Demonstrators marched to the mayor’s office to present a set of proposals written for the action by Staggers and the Bail Fund. Published as a petition on Change.org, it is addressed to “whoever wins the upcoming New Haven mayoral election,” and demands a public response by Dec. 1, 2017. At the time of publication, the petition has received 286 signatures.
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Mayor Toni Harp has not always been open to direct input from the homeless community. Last year, she put together a committee on homelessness that did not include any homeless or previously homeless members, Staggers reported. “How can they base their judgement with nobody who’s ever lived it, or come close?” Speakers at the march, who were almost exclusively homeless or previously homeless individuals, echoed his sentiments. They spoke about their challenges finding housing and avoiding incarceration and police harassment, highlighting how much more the city needs to be doing to support them.
For the past year, Staggers has been reaching out to Mayor Harp with ideas about how to connect homeless New Haven residents with housing. “I was reading the newspaper one day, not long ago, and I read that there are 739 vacant apartments and properties in New Haven,” he recounted. Staggers began researching who owns those properties; he figured out that the city owns several hundred, and New Haven’s banks own most of the rest. “I had six dollars in my pocket. It really shows who owns what.” He caught the bus to Goodwill, bought a button down shirt, and went to TD Bank to pitch his idea. “There are lots of homeless people who are certified — as roofers, electricians, carpenters, everything. I said give them the houses, to live in and fix up.” Despite some willingness on the part of the bank, Staggers recounted that Mayor Harp dismissed the idea. “You want to hear about stigmatization? When homeless people move into a building, it becomes a zoning issue. Ms. Toni Harp said we’d be a liability.”
The march’s name comments on the proliferation of vacancies that Staggers noticed, but it is not the first of its kind. In San Francisco, for example, the Homes Not Jails movement advocates for housing rights primarily by using squatting — illegally occupying and inhabiting of vacant buildings — as an activist tactic. According to the San Francisco Tenants Union, Homes Not Jails has focused on advocating for legal rights for squatters, including protection from arrest as trespassers. In New Haven, however, the movement hopes to set up a council of homeless and previously homeless individuals, within the city government, to oversee the implementation of improved housing and service programs.
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Many demonstrators spoke about an immediate need to improve access to safe and sanitary shelters. The Grand Avenue homeless shelter, run by Emergency Shelter Management Services, garnered particular attention during the march for it’s unsanitary conditions. Marchers broke out several times into loud chants of “No bed bugs,” referencing the pests that make stays in the shelter particularly unpleasant. The march petition demanded that the shelter be “destroyed and replaced with humane shelters” with more hygienic accommodations.
Responding to these long-standing complaints, Aaron Greenberg, Alder of Ward 8, where the shelter is located, said, “It’s well known, among the homeless community, among city officials, and among the NHPD that many individuals would rather sleep under a bridge or on the Green that at the shelter, it’s that unsanitary and unsafe.” In the next eight to ten months, Greenberg said, property where the shelter is currently located will be incorporated into the Farnam Courts Redevelopment Project. But despite this planned move, the city has not yet found a new location or made concrete plans to improve the management of the shelter.
Unlike men who may choose not to stay at Grand Avenue, many women lack the option of a bed in a shelter altogether. “There aren’t enough beds for women in drug treatment centers, there’s no halfway house for women in New Haven, and there isn’t any emergency shelters for women or families,” explained Beatrice Codianni, director of the Sex Workers Allies Network, after the march. While there are shelters in New Haven that serve women, they don’t have enough room. For example, three women’s shelters in New Haven run by New Reach have a total capacity to house 33 families and up to 18 single women, but as of November of 2016 the shelters had a waitlist of more than 200 families and individuals, according to WTNH Connecticut News. When asked, two alders, as well as a representative from the mayor’s office, said that there are no plans to build any new shelters for homeless women.
Even if there were no shortage of beds, homeless women who are engaged in sex work would still be ineligible to stay at shelters because of their often erratic hours, says Codianni. Deprived of the option of a shelter, “they’ll either pay someone $20 to stay on their couch, or they’ll go home with someone, with a client, or whatever they can do to get housing, and none of it is stable or safe.”
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Those who remain on the streets face a different set of problems, particularly in their interactions with the police. In Connecticut, according to a 2016 Yale Law School Report, many homeless persons face a dilemma where “in order to survive, they must break the law.” The report calls this the criminalization of homelessness, explaining, “Whether by sleeping on a park bench because they lack shelter, in contravention of parks regulations; standing in a city plaza because they have no place else to go, in violation of loitering or trespassing laws; or holding a sign because they need money to eat, in violation of panhandling laws.” The report cites case studies like the experience of Zoe, a New Haven woman who was charged with disorderly conduct for urinating on the Green and ended up spending more than a month in jail. As one protester pointed out, there aren’t any public restrooms on or near the Green, leaving few options for people forced to sleep there.
The Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights, a bill that passed in the Connecticut Legislature in 2013, is designed to prevent police harassment. It guarantees the right of homeless persons to “move freely in public spaces… without harassment or intimidation from law enforcement officers.” The demands of the march called for mandatory training for all NHPD officers on the Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights, but until that happens, Staggers is working to educate his community on their own rights. Over the past few months, he has handed print-outs of the Bill to homeless people on the Green, to help them in their interactions with the police. “One of my friends, the police told him to leave the Green so he showed them the Bill of Rights, and they ripped the paper up.” Staggers smiled and continued, “Next time, I’m making laminated copies.”
The City of New Haven has taken some steps to respond to low-level crimes, like disorderly conduct, with community policing solutions rather than arrests. The Project Green Thumb initiative led by police sergeant Roy Davis is one example. “Instead of tickets and infractions for low-level, quality of life crimes,” explained Alder Greenberg, “they took a non-punitive approach and connected individuals to housing and social services, as well as levying small community service requirements.” Greenberg added that New Haven is also in the process of implementing Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), a program that has already helped other US. cities to reduce recidivism for low-level offenses.
Staggers, for one, is skeptical that programs like these represent a step in the right direction. “With LEAD, they bring people to Columbus House to talk to a social worker there. It’s a way to give police more power, more authority to bully people, force them into their car and bring them over there.” About the social services that LEAD supposedly helps homeless people access, Staggers added, “Give me a card. I can make an appointment for myself.”
Many protesters agreed that police do not need more opportunities to apprehend or intimidate. The Sex Workers Allies Network (SWAN) ran a successful campaign last spring, seeking justice for 13 sex workers who were arrested by the NHPD in a sting. “You can’t arrest away sex work, you have to get to the root of the problem,” said Codianni, director of SWAN. Outside of formal arrest cases, she cited other examples of police harassment; “Police are fining sex workers $90, just for walking down the street… One woman was on her way to buy cigarettes, she told the officer that, and she was intimidated, told that she couldn’t come back down that street.”
From the courthouse, the march continued down Elm Street past the ornate buildings of the Yale Campus. Chants of “Tax Yale” rang out loudly as students and other passers-by turned their heads to watch. The taxation of Yale, the march’s final demand, is an issue that has garnered increasing attention in recent years, including two bills that were proposed to the Connecticut legislature in 2016.
As an educational non-profit, the university only pays property taxes on buildings that it categorizes as non-educational, like the Shops on Broadway, and does not pay taxes on the $25.4 billion endowment. The contrast between Yale’s immense wealth and the poverty of some New Haven residents is stark; from the perspective of the Housing Not Jails movement, Yale should be obligated to contribute more significantly to city services. The University, however, has been extremely hostile to efforts to change their tax status; Greenberg, who lobbied in favor of the property tax bill, explained that University lobbying halted the bill’s progress. “I was deeply disappointed,” he said, emphasizing that the bill “would have made it marginally more possible for the City to grow and expand along with the University.”
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While taxation issues at the state level are out of Mayor Harp’s control, her office does have the power to influence many of the other demands put forth by Housing Not Jails. But as Dec. 1 rapidly approaches, it remains unclear if Mayor Harp will engage with the demands. A representative from the mayor’s office acknowledged that she was aware of the march, but declined to comment on whether Harp would be issuing a public response. The representative was quick to mention that the city pays more than a million dollars annually to services related to homelessness.
But stories from the demonstration testify to the inadequacy of current services, and that homeless people ought to have a greater say in the implementation of that funding. Staggers is planning a Homeless Town Hall on Nov. 30, where he will gather concerns and proposals from members of the homeless community to bring to Mayor Harp when he meets with her in December.
The warming shelter that operated last winter won’t be opening this year, so Staggers has begun meeting with local churches and asking them to open their doors as emergency shelters this winter. “I’ve got to make a difference before it gets cold.” Especially with the gap in city services, Staggers worries that freezing temperatures may once again prove fatal. “I’m not going to leave anyone for dead,” he said firmly. “I’m a stone away from being back out here. This is my community.”