After several months of community mobilization, Yale – New Haven Hospital has now agreed to remove most of liens it placed on the homes of those in New Haven unfortunate to be both poor and sick. This is a great step forward in the struggle for a Hospital that deals justly with its employees and its patients. Check out CCNE’s new report for more on the issue.
Tag Archives: New Haven
Yale Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs (currently serving also as VP for Finance and Administration) Bruce Alexander showed up today at a student press conference calling on him and President Levin to extend Yale Homebuyer Program to Fair Haven and thus cease red-lining that poor and predominately Latino community out of Yale’s full benefit package. Alexander committed himself and Levin to push the Corporation to extend the program, a huge victory for our student coalition (the Undergraduate Organizing Committee, the Pan-Ethnic Coalition, Dwight Hall’s Executive Committee, MEChA, Concerned Black Students, Yale Peace, SLAM, and Jews for Justice) and for the broad social movement that been fighting this fight already for years. Now we have to keep the pressure on to follow through, and to keep moving forward for greater justice in this community.
The polls open for the New Haven Aldermanic elections in another ten hours. As I’ve noted here before, Ward One, where I and the majority of Yale undergraduates live, is made up almost entirely of students and represented by one, which provides a unique opportunity to engage with local politics. The race tomorrow pits an incumbent who’s worked to use that seat to build strong coalitions of common interest and shared vision with people and movements throughout the city against a challenger who believes that seat should be the Yale Corporation’s bulwark against the frustration of the rest of the city. Ben Healey’s built a strong record of progressive struggle and real change over the past years, advancing clean elections, living wages, environmental justice, domestic partnership, and the right to organize. That’s why Mayor John DeStefano and a diverse group of student leaders came out to stand with an enthusiastic crowd in support of Ben. And that’s why students – LWB readers included – should and will turn out tomorrow to re-elect him.
Zach agrees that to see the Editorial Board of the YDN slamming University Properties for the vision for New Haven suggested by replacing a supermarket with a specialty running gear store, but faults me for not noting that they passed up the opportunity to Yale’s entire colonial project in the city. I guess I figured that was assumed until noted otherwise. I mean, I’d like to see the YDN come out for dismantling the Yale Corporation and replacing it with a Worker’s Co-operative, but they’re even less likely to give me that than that pony I asked them for (not that I’d have anywhere to put it). As I see it, for an editorial board closely aligned with and fairly uniformly supportive of the leadership of this University to take it to task for acting like New Haven belongs only to “upper-middle-class Yalies, wealthy suburbanites and runners who demand a certain kind of windpants,” is a real victory and a bad sign for Yale’s colonial project.
Perhaps in anticipation of their departure at the end of the week, the YDN Editorial Board has printed an unusually articulate, compelling, and critical editorial in today’s paper, discussing University Properties’ choice to replace Krauzner’s on York Street:
We fear, in particular, that Sound Runner’s inapplicability to much of the community, apart from the serious runners in need of serious running clothing among us, reflects University Properties’ questionable motives for its selection of what retailers and restaurants fit best in the area surrounding Yale. The coming of this retailer typifies a development scheme that seems aimed to serve a dual purpose in the city: gentrifying for the sake of an image and further narrowing the level of clientele who will be drawn to the area. Despite what the newly unveiled roster of stores may seem to indicate, Broadway and New Haven are not just commercial destinations for upper-middle-class Yalies, wealthy suburbanites and runners who demand a certain kind of windpants.
If Yale’s vision for New Haven is drawing the ire of the Yale Daily News (as well as Republican economists), one wonders what kind of support it has left…
Alyssa Rosenberg has a great piece in today’s YDN sharing her experience of the support she and her coalition, Project Orange, received from Ward One Alderman Ben Healey and her critique of his challenger, who’s running against him in the general election as an independant. Alyssa demonstrates what Ben attested to in last Tuesday’s debate: that Ben motivates and mobilizes students in our ward not through mass e-mail or newsletters – as Dan is saying he should – but by working with and empowering students on the grassroots level to fight for change in the city which is our home.
A few other moments which stood out from the debate:
Dan maintained, at various points, that
1. Ben imposes needs on students rather than finding out what they want, whereas Dan’s agenda is based on what’s really important to students.
2. Students need Tweed – New Haven Airport to get jet service.
3. If you asked most students “what Tweed – New Haven airport was, they wouldn’t have any idea.”
It seems to me only any two of these assertions, logically, can be true.
Dan tried to demonstrate his devotion to poor kids in New Haven by discussing his work as a gym teacher in one of their schools and joked that “They gave me a run for my money – literally and figuratively.” Many of Dan’s supporters in the room laughed. I guess those of us supporting Ben didn’t get it.
Dan said the New Havener he most looks forward to working with should he be elected is Yale’s own Vice President Bruce Alexander, and tried to smear Ben based on a derrogatory comment made by a supporter of Ben’s, who isn’t in his ward and doesn’t work on his campaign, on his website (not mine) criticizing Alexander. Ben sensibly replied that he doesn’t take responsibility for every comment on a website of someone who supports him, and challenged Dan to explain an e-mail sent to Dan’s supporters by his campaign manager which read, in part:
the incumbent guy is a tool of the unions, he gets a ton of money from them, and he consistently votes against yale on everything. he thinks that the workers should get whatever they want, and he is a HUGE supporter of the strike…
the problem is this: because he is a union supporter, we’re afraid he’s going to have a bunch of strikers at the debate tomorrow and that they will drown out Dan and generally be jerks…
i’m just trying to ensure that it doesn’t turn into a big picket inside. Second floor, Slifka, bring your friends/suitmates, go yale!
Besides the misunderstanding of the way Yale’s union work (the debate was held in a neutral, non-struck space) and classist assumptions behind them, and the unwarranted and nasty attack on Ben’s integrity, the e-mail includes a flat lie: that Ben’s received money from organized labor. When asked to respond, Kruger suggested that he had no responsibility for the words or actions of his Campaign Manager.
As has been noted, Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs didn’t do well on primary day. It has a lot invested, it would seem, in the November election, which pits an incumbent who’s a strong ally of the growing movement throughout this city for just partnership between Yale and New Haven against a challenger who argues that rather than paying taxes on its for-profit properties, Yale should simply make donations to support projects New Haven suggests to it that Yale approves of. Should be an interesting race.
Looks like Aldermen Mae Ola Riddick, Hazellann Woodall, and Lindy Lee Gold, all of whom received significant support from Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs in exchange for consistent opposition to the movement to bring together the New Haven community to demand real partnership with Yale, have all lost in primaries today. This is good news for New Haven, and in the long term for Yale as well. This is bad news for Alexander, Morand, and Levin.
Back in New Haven for the year, and ready to bring some light and some truth to the Yale Corporation. Two and a half days until the strike deadline, and there’s little in the way of signs of movement on Yale’s end. Tomorrow morning at 10:30 will be a press conference calling on Yale to settle or submit to binding arbitration to avert a strike; it’ll be headlined by Connecticut’s own Joe Lieberman. I’ve never wasted many kind words on Joe Lieberman – I think his political record overall demonstrates a lack of courage masked in the rhetoric of bipartisanship and a disturbing conservatism masquerading as “moral clarity.” One of my first posts on this site was a somewhat rambling but earnest criticism of Joe as he prepared to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. One of hte few virtues of a (happily, quite unlikely) Lieberman primary win would be a tremendous organizing spike for the Green party; it would, however, represent the final kiss and death for the Democratic party’s organizing among its base (read: everyone to the left of the DLC), which – as much as some posts here might suggest otherwise – is not something I want to see. All of that said, it should be noted to Lieberman’s credit that while he pursues an agenda in Congress generally deaf to the interests of the American people – including those of us in the Connecticut – he’s frequently lended his symbolic support to much more progressive initiatives here on the local level. Damning by faint praise? Yes (also damning by harsh but deserved criticism). But Lieberman’s support for David Lee’s Yale Corporation candidacy, ECCO’s sustainable housing work, and organized labor in New Haven – while deeply inadequate on the scale of the damage done by his work on the national level – should be noted among the few progessive moves for which he can be credited. Not coincidentally, these symbolic moves at home cost him very little with his neoconservative/ neoliberal sponsors and supporters on the national level.
Josh Eidelson 