Whose New Haven? Reversing the Slant of the Knowledge Economy

J. Cersonsky: Whose New Haven?

“THIS WILL BE THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ANNOUNCEMENT EVER MADE IN NEW HAVEN.

“The announcement will be viewed by every student at every New Haven Public School because the subject of this event will completely change their lives, their families and their neighborhoods.”

So wrote Jessica Mayorga, New Haven’s outgoing Director of Communications, on November 7, 2010. Two days later, Mayor John DeStefano, Yale President Richard Levin, Connecticut Governor-elect Dannel Malloy, and media from across the region gathered at the downtown Cooperative Arts Magnet High School. Despite Mayorga’s enigmatic press release, what they unveiled was something the mayor has long claimed “makes cities great.” The news was the founding of New Haven Promise, a privately funded program that offers students living in New Haven a grant covering at least a portion of tuition at any state college so long as they maintain a 3.0 high-school GPA and an admirable behavioral record. New Haven’s is the latest in a string of Promises that began in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2005. Yale has agreed to bankroll Promise with up to $4 million for each of the next four years.

In the several days following the announcement, campus and city newspapers hummed with commentary. Public school children and Yale alumni rained emphatic approval, ranging from “really excited!” to “This is exactly what we need in an economic recession.” Yale undergraduates and law students were credited for their “key role” in writing Promise policy—which, for them, had “special meaning.” The excitement continued in a follow-up panel discussion the next week. The mayor joined with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to present a multipart program, called Promise Partnership, to help local students prepare for and apply to college.

Then the endorphins settled.

Three months removed from City Hall’s broadcast, most talking publicly about Promise agree that it’s a good idea. Considering the buzz surrounding education reform, the insolvency of local government, and Yale’s largess, who wouldn’t? New Haven faces a $31 million budget gap, and Yale’s economic power is unparalleled among local private actors. As a billionaire broker of investment in education and New Haven’s largest employer, Yale dominates the creation of knowledge and wealth in the city.

But corporations, even nonprofit ones like Yale, have complicated goals. To the bewilderment of those who heard about it, the University quietly announced the elimination of its Urban Teaching Master’s Program and undergraduate Teacher Preparation Program just days before introducing Promise. Michelle Shortsleeve, a teacher at the charter New Haven Academy trained with the help of Yale funding, spoke ambivalently about the package deal. “We are so psyched about the Promise grants,” she told the New Haven Independent. And yet, “Yale sends a clear statement…‘We will gladly throw money at this problem of underperforming urban schools in New Haven, but we won’t get our hands dirty—Yale people shouldn’t be teachers.’” Of course, the $16 million total that Yale has pledged to Promise is pocket change compared to its $16 billion endowment.

Meanwhile, Yale and City Hall quietly conspire toward “neighborhood change” that doesn’t look so rosy for New Haven’s underprivileged majority. Education reform is only one plank of a broader and bolder plan to develop New Haven into a very specific kind of place. In order to assess the future of New Haven’s knowledge economy, and the full thrust of New Haven Promise, you have to take a look at what’s hiding behind City Hall’s all-caps hyperbole.

GO TO a dinner party in town and talk up New Haven. Chances are you’ll encounter some version of New Haven’s most powerful political myth, maintained and reproduced by most students, Yale administrators, political leaders, and local well-to-do. According to the myth, New Haven began to succeed in the mid-1990s once Mayor DeStefano and President Levin started working together to relax the town-gown antagonisms of their forebears. This “new age of cooperation,” as Mark Alden Branch, class of 1986, put it in the May/June 2009 edition of Yale Alumni Magazine, spelled a revival of New Haven’s blighted shopping and restaurant district, an explosion of cultural and artistic attractions, and a reduced fear that students would be shot and killed when venturing off campus.

As the myth has it, New Haven is an urban community with a small-town spirit, where neighborly residents know each other and mostly get along. By working together—to improve bike lanes, build community gardens, and use energy efficiently—residents can ensure New Haven’s continuing success. Neighborliness also entails faithfulness to the institutions whose wealth clearly redounds to the city’s advantage. As these institutions grow, so does the city—so it’s safe to entrust Yale and Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven’s bastions of nonprofit power and “good citizens,” with the city’s economic future. The question that Mayorga poses in her press release—“What does it take to help move an entire city forward into a new generation?”—has a simple answer: progressive government and intellectual capital working together to expand each other’s wealth.

Yet this is only one narrative about New Haven. A second is less well-known to students and leaders, who are inspired by the publicity machine and intellectual credibility of the first. This second New Haven is a mostly poor, racially diverse city of 125,000 where visions of progress come in more than one form, and where promises of “growth” and “development” invite community mobilization and debate to match the press conferences and blueprints at City Hall. Here, Yale and City Hall are “change agents,” but their entrepreneurship comes in better and worse forms, depending on where the benefits accrue. The bearers of political and economic power conveniently don’t see it this way. On the one hand, theirs is a vision whose standards few would reject in the abstract—capital accumulation, grand-list growth, quiet streets, and beautiful apartment buildings. And yet because these voices speak more loudly than others, newfound wealth is distributed unevenly. The idea of a classless utopia becomes a vehicle for regressive class politics.

Mainstream rhetoric around New Haven’s economic development betrays its class bias rather transparently. Branch’s Yale Alumni Magazine article begins with a list of moments when he realized that New Haven had improved since he was a student—namely, the first million dollar home, the first opening of a trendy restaurant where it was hard to get a table, and the first time the Metropolitan Opera played on the Green. This upper middle-class vision mirrors Yale’s own promotional literature. In one pamphlet entitled “Contributing to a Strong New Haven,” Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs extols “New Haven’s renaissance” and speaks of its efforts to “bring suburbanites from the region back to the city.” City Hall’s sell is predictably similar. In its 2010 marketing brochure, “A City on the Move,” the Office of Economic Development invites people to “discover” this “thriving” city, yet it bases its sunny income and demographic statistics on the much wealthier and largely suburban New Haven County and state of Connecticut. Indeed, as the New Haven Independent sympathetically notes, New Haven Promise “is meant to encourage families to move into New Haven.”

“It All Happens Here,” says infonewhaven.com, and billboards across the region. The question is, for whom?

THE MYTH of a classless urban utopia harks back to the postwar era, when observers of manufacturing-based growth in America began to believe that prosperity would obviate concerns about inequality. A suddenly healthy economy called for wealth to be shared by a plurality of forces competing on an equal playing field, rather than redistributed by a central authority. Likewise, “industrial democracy” was no longer a shop floor goal for a proletariat exploited by management, but an ongoing process of high-level negotiation between business and labor over the growing pie. Who Governs?, the famous empirical analysis of pluralism in New Haven published by Yale political scientist Robert Dahl in 1961, expresses this optimism. In Dahl’s telling, power was dispersed across different social classes and economic interests. Inequalities existed in social standing, legitimacy, wealth, and knowledge, but they did not fall fully on any one group. Mayors and city councilmen played the role of enlightened technocrats, managing competing claims from society’s various sources of power.

In today’s American city, Dahl’s analysis runs dry. Decades of economic growth have contributed to income inequality and political marginalization rather than expanding the middle class, suggesting that we need an urban vision that is less technocratic and more critical of capitalist elites. But in New Haven, the tradition spearheaded by Dahl is still dominant. For Yale students, the largest source of critical insight on New Haven is Douglas Rae’s City: Urbanism and its End, written in 2003. Rae stepped down from his Yale teaching post to serve as New Haven’s Chief Administrative Officer from 1990 to 1991, and his book is now the foundation for a popular urban studies course he developed called “New Haven and the American City.” In City, Rae embeds over three hundred years of New Haven history in a story of the triumphs and travails of post-industrial cities. At first glance, Rae appears distant from Dahl. He is pointedly critical of Dahl’s pluralist thesis for imputing to City Hall a power to mediate among a plurality of interests that it didn’t—and doesn’t—have. Instead, says Rae, New Haven and city government have fallen victim to macro forces, like the growth of suburbs and big box retailers, which have destroyed “civic fauna” and “sidewalk democracy.”

Despite the broad desirability of what Rae claims has been lost—urban community—his political biases seep into his prescriptions. Rae’s hero is Richard Lee, mayor from 1954 to 1970 and the face of New Haven’s urban renewal, which cost three times more per capita than any other city in the country. While Lee was wrong to cut apart the city and divide it with interstate highways, Rae argues, these were only one high-minded administration’s tragic mistakes, and mostly insofar as they reinforced suburbanizing and deindustrializing trends and hurt the city’s tax base. Otherwise, New Haven should continue to engage in managerialist, supply-side growth politics. Rae blithely disparages Yale’s grassroots unions and their public sector allies—“bureaucratic potentates” and a “major irritant” whose demands amount to “endless waste.” And though he bemoans New Haven’s monarchical Democratic machine, he says that renewal-bred grassroots opposition—“street-fighting pluralism”—has made New Haven an “unproductive urban arena.” In other words, democracy beats monarchy, but not in my anti-capitalist ghetto backyard. If the slums don’t want to be cleared, they’re standing in the way of progress.

Indeed, as Mandi Isaacs Jackson documents in Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven, the policies of the Democratic establishment of the 1950s and 1960s were met with militant contestation from pockets of organized community members. Organizations like the American Independent Movement and Hill Neighborhood Union constructed alternative cartographies of neighborhood improvement and waged protests against tenant removal and intrusive “public safety.” Mayor Lee, like New York urban planning magnate Robert Moses, conducted urban renewal by way of forcing consensus and delegitimizing dissenters. Jackson exposes New Haven’s Redevelopment Agency as a puppet organization that could fulfill the necessary citizenship participation requirements under federal law while bypassing activist demands in the community. Citizens were recruited to parade in celebration of redevelopment and to build a temporary “Progress Pavilion” where architectural plans could be showcased, but were excluded from important decision-making meetings. The mayor partnered with IBM to design an Urban Management Information System, which sought to make poor and resistant neighborhoods “knowable” to the public, in an effort to maintain “very minimum” opposition to slum clearance. The fragility of public opinion following the start of the 1967 urban riots gave the administration a decisive opportunity to appropriate renewal for its own ends. Seven hundred people were jailed, community organizers were accused of communist affiliations, and the police covered up the role of suburban vigilantes in provoking the majority of the violence in the Hill neighborhood. If only, Lee seemed to say, the suburban population would move in and take over. And if only the community would stop objecting to being rent in half and scattered to the fringes of the city.

UNDER THE veil of uncontroversial goals like “economic development,” the undemocratic politics of the Lee machine continue to haunt today’s New Haven, a city that now specializes in what Mayor DeStefano calls “eds and meds.” Ironically, agents of the University-led growth machine define their reforms against Lee’s destructive failures, at the same time that they threaten to replicate them.

Most striking is the city’s plan to reconstitute the area currently occupied by the Oak Street Connector. The Oak Street neighborhood was a noted “slum,” which the Lee machine razed in order to build a highway running west from I-95. After funding dried up, the project was abandoned, leaving a visible scar separating the Hill neighborhood from downtown. In the throes of recession, City Hall has outlined an ambitious plan to refill the area with a new-urbanist mix of business, biotech, retail, and residential space. The plan’s proponents are given to catchy slogans like “remapping the street grid” and “re-stitching the urban fabric.” But what exactly is urban fabric? In the tradition of Jane Jacobs, most would agree that social geography is as important to urban policy as physical space. But because the finished product is far off, few are talking about the project’s long-term impact on the affordability of nearby housing, and few are considering its effects on the job market for residents of the surrounding community. At a recent meeting of the Hill South Community Management Team (CMT), one resident stated the issue bluntly: “They can only offer so many jobs that we can qualify for here.” When the same woman added that “people will drive into the city and never see a city street,” another rejoined, with forty years of hindsight, “That’s already happened.”

In Dixwell and Newhallville, two of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods, the mayor, the University, and Boston-based Winstanley Enterprises have collaborated on another large project to redevelop an old Winchester rifle factory as a set of high-end offices and biotech labs. While promoting the project as a means of stimulating business and reinvigorating a forgotten neighborhood, they have avoided the question of whose neighborhood it is. In “The False Promise of the Entrepreneurial University,” a working paper at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin Center for Economic Development, urban scholar Marc Levine finds that research park development has no meaningful correlation with any core measure of city or regional economic well-being. According to Levine, such development tends to canalize employment into high-skilled sectors that are inaccessible to virtually everyone who hails from “the community.” Nonetheless, project leader Carter Winstanley told a recent gathering of the Dixwell CMT, “Our hope is to get as many people into this as possible.” To that end, the city has procured some $120,000 of federal stimulus money to train and pay fifteen local residents to remove lead and asbestos from the old Winchester plant. This effort echoes others by the city, like the Construction Workforce Initiative, to incorporate underserved populations into new capital projects. Ultimately, such initiatives are bad excuses for localist development. If local hires can’t work in the buildings that they’ve built, the promises of “economic recovery” and “neighborhood stabilization” ring hollow—especially when only a handful of residents benefit in the first place. Said Lateefah Williams, vice chair of the Newhallville CMT, “We need more than fifteen jobs.”

Mayor DeStefano would seem to agree. In his 2010 State of the City address, the nine-term mayor emphasized, not for the first time, the need for “New Haveners, especially our kids and our most vulnerable populations, to take advantage of growth in the city.” Without doubting the mayor’s sincerity, I question his affiliations. So long as the mayor and his voting base submit to the whims of the corporate nonprofit sector, the goal of correcting imbalanced distributions of wealth and opportunity will remain an afterthought to high-tech gentrification, not the central objective of economic development that it should be. School reform and job creation will take the form of replacing current residents with a richer population, rather than meaningfully addressing poverty itself. New Haven will be what the mayor says it is—an “open, welcoming, progressive, fair community”—but only for those who can afford to live there.

This has become painfully clear in the wake of promises made in 2006. That year, an ad hoc committee of several hundred local residents called Community Organized for Responsible Development (CORD) won a two-year fight to get the city to sign a community benefits agreement with Yale-New Haven Hospital, the city’s second largest employer and, like the University, tax-exempt. According to the agreement, the hospital could build a new cancer center in the Hill neighborhood if it increased its voluntary tax contribution, established a citizens’ advisory committee to monitor free-care policies for the uninsured and underinsured, hired 100 neighborhood residents per year for five years, and agreed to sit alongside local residents on a planning committee at City Hall to oversee new medical building developments. While the hospital has paid its bills, it has used devious documentation practices to shirk its hiring pledge and, in violation of a separate agreement with 1199SEIU, has engaged in willful intimidation to crush its employees’ attempts to unionize. Even worse is City Hall’s silence. The mayor has ignored petitions by CORD calling for a review of local hiring data, and the medical area planning committee, which is supposed to be convened by the City Plan Commission, has never met. With no enforcement mechanism—that is, no will to enforce pro-community development—the community benefits agreement, let alone labor law, reads like a dead letter.

CITY HALL and the University should be praised when they exploit the capacities of the Yale-run knowledge economy to generate educational and occupational opportunity for those who don’t have it. But if the lessons of history continue to go unlearned, we can expect New Haven’s “progressive” change agents to gentrify, Yalify, and downtownify its neighborhoods and its job market, until the city’s poorer residents are so marginalized and ghettoized that college is more pipe dream than promise. “Stimulus” and “innovation” are superior to mayoral cronyism and partisan plutocracy, but only if New Haven continues to pressure its leaders to provide good jobs and create policies that will spread wealth instead of siphoning it off.

Historically, much of this pressure has come from labor-community partnerships. When CORD fought for a community benefits agreement around the hospital’s new cancer center, it joined in solidarity with workers at Yale and at the nonunionized hospital. Since 2000, the nonprofit Connecticut Center for a New Economy has worked to forge alliances like CORD under the banner of a “new social contract” for the New Haven community—a “New New Haven,” as Mayor Lee’s advertisements had it, but one that does not involve creative destruction. CCNE’s vision was first articulated in a report called “Good Jobs, Strong Communities,” which advocates good jobs for local residents, through unionization and card-check neutrality, as means of stabilizing households and neighborhoods in a service economy that continues to grow with new University and hospitality developments. “Good jobs” need not be occupationally different from those pushed by Yale and City Hall; what matters is that growth and development come with benefits and assurances for existing residents. To these ends, organizations such as Yale Locals 34 and 35, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, the Undergraduate Organizing Committee, the Elm City Congregations Organization, New Haven Peoples Center, New Haven Central Labor Council, Greater New Haven NAACP, and Unidad Latina en Acción have fought together for living wages, labor contracts, fair housing policies, and affordable healthcare—and against regressive entrepreneurialism rubber-stamped by the runaway growth machine.

It is no accident that each of these organizations employs community organizing as a means—and a goal—of progressive struggle. Building an alternative consensus in New Haven requires the sort of “collective self-confidence,” as historian Lawrence Goodwyn once put it, that arises from contestation at the points of production and residence—where the fruits of political action and economic development are realized.

The gentrification of Trade Union Plaza, detailed by Jackson in Model City Blues, puts this intersection of community and economic development in bold relief. In 1969, the New Haven Central Labor Council developed TUP as a nonprofit housing collective which would primarily serve single black working mothers. In 2001, new, private ownership moved to eliminate units financed by project-based subsidies in order to “diversify” tenancy—that is, to remove unwanted elements and attract a wealthier, more transient population of students and professors. Reacting to her impending ejection and the fracturing of a long-standing community, one tenant organizer cited by Jackson insisted, “We are New Haven. We’re part of New Haven. Why should we be kicked out?”

Cities, Mayor DeStefano told the Yale College Democrats in September, “allow us to do things that we can’t do ourselves.” As municipal and state budgets continue to suffer, and as calls for “neighborhood change” invite enticing capital investments, we must interrogate the meanings and myths of shared struggle. In some sense, President Levin is right to say, in “Contributing to a Strong New Haven,” that “the future of the University is inextricably tied to the strength of our hometown.” But the class boundaries of the Levin-DeStefano New Haven are, or should be, open to question. In order for the residents of this city to benefit from its promises, progress will have to look a lot more like grassroots organizing—street-fighting pluralism—than a press release.

James Cersonsky is a senior at Yale University, a New Haven community activist, and a blogger for the Nation