An interesting and well written article on New Haven's Renaissance.
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2009_05/new_haven.html
Then . . . and Now
How a city came back from the brink.
May/June 2009
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Mark Alden Branch '86, executive editor of this magazine, lives in New Haven.
Maybe it was the first time a house in New Haven sold for more than a million dollars (2003). Or the opening of the first trendy restaurant where it was hard to get a table (Roomba, 1999). Or the first time the Metropolitan Opera performed on the Green during the International Festival of Arts and Ideas (2000).
Everyone who's been in New Haven long enough has a story about a moment when a light clicked on -- a moment when they recognized that the "New Haven Renaissance" was maybe something real, something more than wishful propaganda put out by the chamber of commerce, the city government, and a public relations-conscious university. You can't blame a New Haven veteran for being skeptical: civic boosters have been touting the city's comeback for about as long as it has been in decline, and for years the gains seemed illusory or insignificant.
But whenever the tipping point happened, there is little doubt now that New Haven is a healthier, more prosperous, more fun, and safer city than it has been in the memory of most alumni. "When we use the word 'spiral' in speaking of our large cities," wrote the Hartford Courant's Tom Condon two years ago, "it is almost always preceded by 'downward.' In New Haven, they are saying 'upward.'"
The most dramatic difference is downtown. Alumni who remember Chapel and College streets as the virtual boundaries of civilization -- especially after dark -- are amazed to see restaurants, clubs, a new movie theater, and sidewalks filled with people on Temple and Crown streets. There are now 120 restaurants in the center of town, offering a range of cuisine that sounds like roll call at the United Nations. (See "It's Not Just Pizza Anymore.")
Those who experienced lower Chapel Street only as an uneasy route to Wooster Street pizza can hardly fathom the 32-story, 500-unit luxury apartment tower going up at Chapel and State streets. Some 6,000 people now live in downtown New Haven in converted office buildings, new apartment buildings, and pricey lofts.
And even those who are young enough to know about the transformation of the Chapel and College street retail area in the 1980s might be surprised by the increased volume of Talbots-clad suburbanites going in and out of the Chapel Street boutiques and, to a lesser extent, the more youth-oriented stores on Broadway.
Changes like these have left many New Haveners pleased about their present city and optimistic about its future -- despite the current global economic recession. "The outlook in town has improved tremendously," says Michael Morand '87, '93MDiv, a Yale associate vice president who collaborates with community leaders on projects of mutual interest. "There is a positive attitude that was not present at all 20 years ago."
President Richard C. Levin '74PhD is even feeling cocky enough to take on Harvard in an area where the Crimson have always had the edge. "I would dare say that today if an alien were dropped from Mars and got to sample Harvard Square and Chapel Street -- without being told where he was -- he would come away saying that by far the most interesting, safest, cleanest, most active, most vital urban location is New Haven." (So far, though, the city's marketing efforts have been confined to this planet.)
That's not to say that the city's problems have disappeared. Beyond the thriving downtown and a handful of wealthy neighborhoods, New Haven still resembles any number of post-industrial American cities: disproportionately poor, with too much youth violence and too few opportunities for the products of a broken public education system. But the city's successes to date have begun to instill a confidence among community leaders that even these seemingly intractable problems might be addressed.
How did New Haven go from being an Ivy League punch line to a place where well-heeled Shoreline suburbanites come for a dose of urban glamour? A reduction in crime and an increase in civic leadership from Yale are part of the answer, but another part is a surprising new affection for cities among young adults who were raised in the suburbs.
Doug Rae, a Yale professor of management and political science, has studied New Haven as a scholar and has also helped run it: he was the city's chief administrative officer from 1990 to 1991. His 2003 book City: Urbanism and its Endexamined New Haven's decline as a manufacturing city. For Rae, some of New Haven's turnaround is attributable to changing American attitudes about the city. "The geist in American life was still resolutely anti-urban in the 1980s and the first half of the '90s," says Rae. "But the kind of culture captured in Seinfeld -- which is fundamentally urban in a way that New Haven is urban -- is on the uptick. The phrase I use in City about 'the end of urbanism'? I'm ready to take back some of that. I think there is a new era of urbanism in places like New Haven. It's not based on people having compelling reasons to live near where a factory is; they're making a voluntary choice based on where cultural amenities and neighborhoods they want to live in are located."
Much of the growth in downtown housing -- and the reason for developer Becker + Becker's gamble on those 500 luxury apartments at Chapel and State streets -- is the neighborhood's proximity by rail to white-collar jobs in Fairfield County and even Manhattan. "Compare New Haven with other suburbs in the 70-mile arc around New York, and we look pretty good," says Rae. "We're a hell of a lot more interesting than most of Westchester County."
So after years of watching people and capital flee to the suburbs, New Haven is in the unexpected position of becoming a bedroom community for a suburban workforce that prefers to live in the city -- so much so that the city's new popularity among the well-heeled has begun to concern community activists. "The risk of the development that's been going on downtown is that as it attracts high-income residents to the city, people of color, particularly low-income people of color, are forced out," says Andrea van den Heever, who is president of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, a community organizing group allied with Yale's labor unions. "Not because of any policy decision, but simply because it becomes too expensive a city to live in." That caveat aside, van den Heever -- who has lived in New Haven since the early 1980s -- says that the transformation of downtown is "really gratifying."
The nationwide urban renaissance never would have gotten off the ground, though, had it not been for a dramatic drop in urban crime from its alarming peak in the early 1990s. And in New Haven, the stage was also set by a new age of cooperation between Yale and the city, based on a belated realization by each party that it could not well survive without the other.
A hundred years ago, New Haven was a busy industrial city full of immigrants lured by factory jobs. By coincidence, the city also housed an elite university, but the two rarely paid much attention to each other, except for occasional riots and tax disputes. Beginning after World War I, manufacturing jobs left the city, and a shrinking tax base led to higher taxes, which led to more urban flight and a downward spiral into decay.
After World War II, New Haven fought back with a bold program that sought to save the city by remaking it for the automobile. With the help of federal dollars and input from planners who wanted to make New Haven a model for urban renewal, the city went for broke. The entire Oak Street neighborhood and a significant portion of the center city were bulldozed in order to build highways, high-rises, an arena, and a downtown mall. But all those moves are now seen by urban design experts as exactly the wrong ones. At best, the changes did little to stem the flight to the suburbs and rejuvenate the city. At worst, they eliminated a big part of the urban fabric of small-scale buildings and walkable streets and that is now a city's best drawing card.
A 1967 riot in the city seemed to mark the effective -- if not the actual -- end of the experiment in urban renewal. Richard C. Lee, who was mayor from 1954 to 1970, oversaw much of the change. "If New Haven is a model city," Lee said frequently by the end of his tenure, "God help America's cities."
The first glimmers of a turnaround for New Haven came in the 1980s, when local developer Joel Schiavone '58 started buying and renovating retail and apartment buildings on Chapel and College streets. Schiavone's plan was 180 degrees different from those of the 1950s and 1960s: small-scale, based on the city's urban assets, and privately funded. And it helped New Haven remember what there was to like about cities: one-of-a-kind shops, cafe tables on the sidewalk, the pleasure of people-watching.
At the same time, though, the rise of gangs, crack, and guns in some neighborhoods were making the city a dangerous place for everyone. Crime had been on the rise since the 1960s, but as in other cities, the crime rate in the late eighties and early nineties rose dramatically and alarmingly, and New Haven's already unhealthy reputation got worse and worse.
There were 37 homicides in New Haven in 1991, a number that anyone could see was a sign of serious trouble. But the murder that captured Yale's attention -- and sparked a fundamental change in the way the university thought about its hometown -- was the February 17 killing of sophomore Christian Prince '93. Prince was shot while walking alone after midnight on Hillhouse Avenue. A local teenager was tried twice for the crime but convicted only of conspiracy to rob Prince.
A Yale student had not been murdered in New Haven since 1974.
The crime shocked the Yale community. Despite the high level of violence in the city, a Yale student had not been murdered in New Haven since 1974. The fact the shooting happened on campus, a block from the president's house, only heightened the sense that New Haven was no longer safe for Yalies. The city's problems were now undeniably Yale's problems.
Yale's first response was to address the immediate issue by beefing up police and security forces, installing emergency telephones around campus, and discouraging students from walking alone after dark. But both the reality and the perception of New Haven's safety were a problem for Yale: how could a university recruit students and faculty to a place where they might fear for their lives?
When Levin became president of Yale in 1993, he hit the ground running, announcing at his first news conference that he intended to expand the steps toward engagement with the city that had begun under his predecessor, Benno Schmidt '63, '66LLB. It was Schmidt who had broken ground with the city government in 1990 by agreeing to make the university's first voluntary payments to the city for services: $1.1 million per year earmarked for the cost of the university's fire protection. (The voluntary payment has increased over the years -- it is $5.1 million in 2009.)
To spearhead the new town-gown efforts, Levin lured former associate provost Linda Koch Lorimer '77JD away from the presidency of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, making her a vice president as well as secretary of the university. During Lorimer's tenure, Yale established the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, launched the Yale Homebuyer Program to provide cash incentives for employees to buy houses in New Haven, and began building partnerships with local government, schools, and neighborhood groups. Five years later, in 1998, Bruce D. Alexander '65, a retired real estate developer who had been advising Yale on the redevelopment of the Broadway district, moved up from Maryland to be Yale's first full-time vice president for New Haven and state affairs.
At the same time that Yale was trying to find ways to make New Haven a better place for its students and faculty, the city was taking steps of its own to deal with crime and blight. In 1990, chief Nicholas Pastore led the New Haven police department into a much-lauded experiment in community policing: a return by police to walking beats and building relationships in New Haven's neighborhoods, in order to prevent crime instead of just responding to it. (The city has since backed away from some aspects of community policing, including beat-walking: observers disagree about whether community policing was responsible for bringing the crime rate down, but Doug Rae argues that the police presence helped give homebuyers confidence in some neighborhoods that were previously thought marginal.) In 1996, the city launched the Livable City Initiative, which expedites the renovation or removal of blighted housing.
It's hard to summarize Yale's strategy for its engagement with New Haven, as it is less one big idea than a thousand small ones, incremental initiatives that are designed to promote economic development, social change, and general quality of life in the city. "You can try the grand-slam approach to urban revitalization -- a megamall or a stadium -- but if you can hit enough singles and a couple of doubles, you'll get more runs on the board," says Michael Morand.
Yale's most visible hits have been in the area of real estate development. In the last 15 years, the university has helped convince the Omni hotel chain to take over a shuttered hotel on Temple Street, redeveloped the Broadway retail district with a mix of local stores and national chains such as Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, taken over Schiavone's Chapel Street properties (after he lost them to the FDIC in bankruptcy), and invested in the Ninth Square housing and entertainment district. Despite the fact that its academic properties are tax-exempt, Yale's commercial holdings are enough to make the university the city's biggest taxpayer, paying $4.5 million in property taxes this year.
Through its University Properties arm, Yale runs its retail and residential holdings with an eye on more than the bottom line. Storefronts have on occasion left vacant for a year or more, waiting to land the right retailer to complement a location. Yale requires lessees in some areas to stay open in the evenings so as to keep the streets livelier and safer at night, and its lease with the Broadway grocery store Gourmet Heaven even requires the tenant to have fresh flowers for sale on the street. (University Properties is not universally admired: some former tenants have complained that the requirements are too onerous for small family-owned businesses. A six-year feud between the university and the owners of the restaurant Roomba over access to a Chapel Street alley resulted in a lawsuit.)
All this is in addition to the university's own construction boom. Unlike in past decades, when New Haven was wary of Yale's expansions into the city (which removed property from the tax rolls), the university's latest construction efforts have been largely welcomed by city government. In part, this is because Yale has been more sensitive about where and what it proposes to build: many of its new buildings are on land the university already owned.
Yale has leveraged its academic building projects to help bolster the neighborhoods around the university. The most notable illustration is the area north and west of the Grove Street Cemetery. ("We try not to say 'behind the cemetery' anymore," says Alexander, urging a less Yale-centric frame of reference.) The area was once a sketchy no-man's land of vacant lots, with Yale and the cemetery on one side and the Dixwell neighborhood's Elm Haven public housing project on the other. Students used it, at their peril, as a shortcut to Science Hill.
In 2003, the blighted Elm Haven project was replaced with a lower-density, mixed-income HUD project called Monterey Place. (As a result, says Mayor John DeStefano Jr., "the biggest reduction in our calls for service in the police department has been from Dixwell.") Meanwhile, Yale had acquired a former commercial laundry building in the area, at Lock and Canal streets, and held a series of meetings with local residents about the site. "I had a list of things Yale needed to build," says Alexander, "and the one that sounded best to the neighbors was a headquarters for the Yale Police." The Rose Center, which houses not only the university police but also a community center, opened in 2006. (See "The Anti-Ivory Tower Brigade.") On the same block, Yale is now building a new headquarters for University Health Services. Like the Rose Center, the health services building will be active 24 hours a day, an improvement for a once-shadowy pocket of the city. (The two new residential colleges that Yale announced last year -- but has since postponed -- are also to be built in the area.)
Local journalist Paul Bass '82, who has covered the city and the university since the 1980s in the New Haven Advocate and now the online New Haven Independent, cites Yale's activity in the Dixwell area as the kind of cooperation he couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. "For a lot of years, Yale gave me more stories than I could cover about how they were screwing the city," says Bass. "Suddenly, even though I try, it's hard to trash someone who's been doing everything I've been asking them to do for years."
Another dependable source of criticism of the university -- its labor unions -- has gotten quieter lately, too. On April 14, the university and the unions announced with pride that they had arrived at a three-year contract (see "Yale and Unions Make a Deal -- Nine Months Early") -- nine months before the old one expired, and without even the slightest public threat of a strike. (The relationship is as frosty as ever at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where management has bitterly fought unionization. The hospital is separate from the university, although Yale doctors practice there and Levin and other Yale officials sit on its board.)
Yale has also been active in pursuing new jobs and industry for the city. The most notable area is biotechnology, which dovetails with Yale's strength in biomedical research. (See "Company Town.") But Yale faculty, students, staff, and alumni have also developed other kinds of new businesses, many of them through the Yale Entrepreneurial Society and the related Yale Entrepreneurial Institute.
And just in case someone hasn't gotten the word about New Haven, Yale helps pay for Market New Haven, a nonprofit public relations and advertising organization charged with improving public perception of the city. "I've never been in a city where the image so lagged the reality of the city," says Alexander. "But if I can get someone to New Haven, the city is an asset in recruiting."
Dean of undergraduate admissions Jeff Brenzel '75 says that admissions surveys suggest that "New Haven is no longer a negative factor in the decision-making for the great majority." Brenzel says that the city and students' engagement is actually a draw for some applicants. "A significant number of students tell us that they choose Yale -- and New Haven -- specifically for this reason," he says.
Not all of the change in the city has Yale's name on it: New Haven has been pursuing a program of downtown redevelopment in the past few years with the aim of undoing much of what was done in the urban renewal years. Mayor DeStefano says the city first worked on filling up empty buildings downtown. Disused office buildings were turned into housing and lab space, and restaurants and clubs began to take former retail space. New downtown housing was built in the Ninth Square area southeast of the Green. The obsolete Veterans Memorial Coliseum was torn down in 2007; a mixed-use project with housing and a new home for the Long Wharf Theatre is slated for the site. On the site of the Chapel Square Mall's two abandoned 1960s department stores, the state is relocating Gateway Community College. And with the completion of those projects, DeStefano says, "we will confront something I don't think we would have imagined confronting 15 years ago: that the central business district is basically filled."
That prospect has city planners looking for new building sites. A strip of land west of downtown that was cleared to make way for the Oak Street Connector -- a freeway that was never completed -- will be redeveloped with medical offices, housing, and retail. And the part of the freeway that was completed -- carving a massive gash between downtown on one side and the medical center and train station on the other -- may be replaced with surface streets, opening up ten acres for the development of new buildings to stitch the city back together.
Outside of downtown, the city and state have spent $1.5 billion renovating or replacing nearly every public school building in the city. Private dollars have spurred new interest in neighborhoods such as Westville, whose small retail district is acquiring an artsy feel, and the banks of the Quinnipiac River in Fair Haven, where Joel Schiavone and others are reviving a scenic maritime village seldom seen by most Yalies.
But these improvements -- and everything Yale has done to make the city more attractive to the people it wants to recruit -- have done little to move the needle for New Haven's large underclass. The percentage of families in poverty in the city has not changed substantially, and the performance of the city's schools, despite a few good and innovative exceptions, remains inadequate by most measures.
Andrea van den Heever says that since education and training are the keys to reducing poverty, the city has to step up and fix its public schools. "I think that the city government and the mayor's office in particular have really failed to come to grips with what it means to have a public education system that is not fulfilling the potential of the young people," says van den Heever. "The result is that even the New Haven residents who do work at Yale are forced into the lower-skilled jobs."
Mayor DeStefano acknowledged the schools' problems in his State of the City address this year. "We, like many places across America, can point to schools that are great here and there," said DeStefano, "but district-wide reform -- excellent performance across an entire district -- has yet to occur here or anywhere else." DeStefano is said to be ready to roll out a major reform package for the schools, but he declined to discuss specifics.
To explain in part the persistence of poverty, city leaders cite a high concentration of publicly financed housing in the city -- among the highest in the nation, says Doug Rae. New Haven is one of the places where Connecticut's poorest residents can find a place to live, and even if people in public housing find their way to prosperity and move out, Rae argues, there are others ready to take their places.
But van den Heever says that "creative solutions" can be found to bring quality jobs to New Haven's poorest residents. She says that while Yale can't fix the problem alone, the university should do its part by investing more time, money, and expertise in the public education system and by working with its unions to make job training available to residents.
One program that has met with some success is the city's Construction Workforce Initiative, which offers training in building trades for people living in public housing. Contractors working on construction projects for the city and Yale are asked to meet a goal of 25 percent New Haven residents on their crews. As a result, New Haven now has twice as many residents in building trades unions than Hartford or Bridgeport.
DeStefano says that "there is a lot of mobility" in New Haven's poorer neighborhoods these days. "These neighborhoods are not static places. They're very different than the neighborhoods I was mayor of 16 years ago," he says. "In many ways their needs, challenges, and opportunities have changed a great deal." One change is the large number of immigrants -- many of them undocumented -- from Latin America. (The city's Ecuadorian population is now big enough that Ecuador has established a consulate in New Haven.) The city's welcoming attitude toward undocumented immigrants has been controversial -- especially its Elm City Resident Card program, which provides identification cards to help immigrants open bank accounts or get library cards. But DeStefano says that immigrants and their strong work ethic have helped to energize the city's neighborhoods. "You can go to Grand Avenue in Fair Haven and you won't see a vacant storefront."
What happens to New Haven now that the boom years for the national economy are over? Has the growth and change of the last decade or two been a bubble, or will it be sustainable in the lean years? Although both the city government and Yale are facing budget cuts right now -- the city's more severe than the university's -- the long-term prognosis may actually be better for New Haven than for a lot of places. The city has already mourned the loss of its manufacturing base, and its major industries today -- education and healthcare -- are somewhat recession-resistant. The housing boom in New Haven was more measured and less frenzied than in the Sun Belt, and although there is a foreclosure crisis in poor neighborhoods, housing prices in other parts of town have held their own. The city's cultural and entertainment industries may even benefit from the recession as people opt for shorter vacations closer to home.
Mayor DeStefano says he is confident about the city's ability to weather the recession. "My residential occupancies and commercial occupancies are strong, and my major employers, while they've slowed their rate of growth, are still growing, and I think are well positioned to grow at the same pace that they had been before this past fall," he says. "While it's a time of some stresses and some compromise, fundamentally I can't imagine an American city that's as competitive as we are."
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2009_05/new_haven.html
