CHAPTER 5
On a hot summer night in 1967 several hundred New Haven residents gathered in a school building slated for demolition to make way for a connector highway intended to link the Connecticut Turnpike with New Haven’s downtown and western suburbs. A local Republican advisory committee was the host, and the ostensive topic was new paths to homeownership, featuring a staff member from Illinois senator Chuck Percy’s office. But what drew people to the meeting was urban renewal, the signature program associated with Democratic mayor Richard C. Lee, who as he was running for reelection once again, was touting his record in getting more urban renewal funds per capita from Washington than any other chief executive in the country. Had Lee attended the meeting, he would not have been well received, for hundreds of local residents in the Oak Street neighborhood had already lost their homes to redevelopment and residents in the nearby Hill neighborhood, where further expansion of business and hospital functions was expected, feared the same.
Lee’s 1965 opponent for mayor, Joseph Einhorn, did attend, and partway through the meeting he gained the floor in response to concerns about displacement. Wanting to connect with the overwhelmingly Black audience, Einhorn made a point in describing his own role as a landlord to praise the superintendent of one of his buildings, who, he assured his audience, was a Black man he had always been friendly with. Einhorn appeared to be stumped when a member of the audience shouted out, “What’s his name?” Another participant answered for him, “Tom,” and the crowd roared. The program sponsors were mortified. Nonetheless, I was startled, while giving Hill activist Ronald Johnson a ride home from the meeting, to hear him proclaim that he would have voted for Einhorn if he only could.1 Apparently a past felony conviction barred his participation, but I soon understood better why he would have rejected Lee. Several weeks later, on August 19, 1967, New Haven erupted in three days of violence.
As civil disorders went that summer, New Haven’s experience was relatively short-lived and no lives were lost, but the anger behind them reverberated no less powerfully. Tapping the language as well as the depth of opposition to government policy abroad as well as at home, an open letter issued by Hill neighborhood activists excoriated Lee’s contention in the local paper that he had never imagined violence could overtake his city. “Is our mayor naïve?” they asked. “Has he no idea of the violence, disruption and insecurity that has become a permanent part of their daily lives? Is he unaware of the violence that is daily perpetrated upon them by the Redevelopment Agency?” Describing that agency as “an invading army … intent on a search-and-destroy operation,” they asked Lee, “Do you know what it is like to be relocated three, four, five times? To be compelled to pay higher rent and deprive your children of food and clothing, to be permanently confined to blighted areas and rat-infested apartments? Do you think the cute off-street parking lots, the parking garages, the highways benefit people on welfare or social security? Remember also that you stopped building public housing which provides the only decent apartments families at the bottom of the economic scale can afford.” Claiming that no number of police officers or National Guard “will ever control New Haven,” activists called for an end to “ambiguous press releases and phony promises” and to “puppet committees who come to public hearings with speeches prepared by your staff.” Set up, instead, they demanded, “new priorities based on reality and not on a grandiose vision of a city eroded by highways with a monument to irresponsible government in the center.” A known booster of the mayor, not the least when he was due for reelection, the New York Times disagreed editorially, writing, “To a bitter minority of New Haveners, their city is still no model. But their lawless actions do not mean the city’s efforts have been a failure, much less that it is pointless to extend them.… New Haven and its Mayor are still a model for the nation.”2
Figure 15. AIM Newsletter, August 31, 1967, issued following the social disorders in New Haven and featuring a passionate critique of the Lee administration’s urban renewal policies.
Lee was easily reelected that fall, but the next two years proved to be the last of his eight terms in office. Although it was never completed, the Oak Street Connector was renamed the Richard C. Lee Highway after Lee’s death. For years it eased access to New Haven’s downtown, which despite population losses to the suburbs over a generation, appeared to rebound early in the twenty-first century. As that happened, New Haven, like Milwaukee, attempted to correct a central error of the first urban renewal era—what the Yale Alumni Magazine now described as an infamous example of misguided city planning—by launching “Downtown Crossing,” a series of cross streets intended to make the area east of downtown more accessible by connecting it back to the city’s existing grid. It would also create ten acres of new, developable space, intended to host restaurants, shops, and parks. Like the original plans for the connector, this initiative was advanced in the name of boosting the city’s tax base, a goal that was initially confirmed with a commitment by Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which had left the city for the suburbs in 2000 to occupy a new eleven-story, $100 million building at the heart of the proposed redevelopment area. As was happening in so many aspiring cities, the company received millions of dollars in state subsidies to make the move.3 The Hill organizations that had fought urban renewal in the 1960s no longer existed. Still, questions they had raised years earlier persisted about who would benefit from redevelopment when the city remained burdened by high levels of poverty and social needs.
Although New Haven lacked the visibility of its near neighbor to the south, New York City, where Robert Moses proved the premier figure in remaking the urban landscape with the help of federal funds, in some ways Richard Lee’s New Haven proved more typical and thus nearly as influential. One of a host of secondary industrial cities that emerged throughout Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and a number of Midwestern states, New Haven had thrived for years as part of a network of manufacturing centers. Individual and collective well-being followed from transportation networks—early by water, and later by rail—that facilitated the exchange of goods and supplies. Settlement concentrated centrally until the mid-twentieth century, when federal highway funds for such projects as the Connecticut Turnpike aided the dispersal of residential population and capital investment. A city of some 160,000 from 1920 through the early 1950s, New Haven’s population declined to 126,000 in 1980. An associated loss of two-thirds of the city’s 33,000 manufacturing jobs between 1954 and 1977, without comparable employment increases in other sectors, devastated city finances. Tangible signs of stress became manifestly visible, as department store sales atrophied, real estate prices declined, and the cumulative effects of an inadequate and aging housing stock depressed property tax returns.
Closely connected to Yale University as its longtime public relations chief, though never having attended college himself, Lee utilized his university connections astutely to build an advisory team to address the city’s plight once he gained the office of mayor on his third try, in 1953. The key to his success, he felt, was to effectively tap federal funds for redevelopment and the highways that would connect a revitalized city center with its suburban hinterland. When it became clear that physical renewal was not enough to revive the city, Lee became a pioneer in what he called “human renewal,” setting an example for what would become the federal War on Poverty. Before there was a federal Model Cities program in the mid-1960s, Lee had established New Haven’s reputation as a model for urban revitalization.
Lee’s lead role in redevelopment generated wide praise locally, none less effusive than what appeared in Yale’s alumni magazine, which put Lee on its cover in May 1966 with the headline “Renascence in New Haven.” “In little more than a decade, the City of New Haven has undergone a pervasive dramatic transformation,” an introductory statement asserted under the title “The Old Town Becomes a Leadership City.” “It has changed itself from a blighted, decay-ridden old New England town into a modern and growing urban center—one that in an era of increasing concern over ‘what to do about our cities’ has attracted wide notice all over the country, and indeed, in other countries as well.” The uncritical essay that followed described Lee’s work as staggering to the imagination and credited him with pursuing redevelopment, in his words, as “an investment in human dignity.”4 Such enthusiasm extended widely. Notably, Jeanne Lowe’s 1967 ode to urban renewal, Cities in a Race with Time, described Lee as the first mayor in the country to have made urban renewal the cornerstone of his city’s administration. Claiming that by 1957 New Haven “seemed to have found many ways to pump new life into a tired old city,” Lowe praised the arrival of the eleven-story telephone company office building and three high-rise apartments in the Oak Street neighborhood adjacent to downtown. In that “former slum,” she reported, community services had been cut by half and tax returns had risen fivefold.5 As a typical staging ground for immigrants moving to the city, the area had drawn an influx of newly arrived African Americans as well. As their numbers increased, the area became overcrowded, services declined, and the area’s reputation suffered. For his part, Lee reported how, literally sickened by a 1951 campaign visit to the area, he had determined to remake it, telling Yale political scientist Robert Dahl, “Right then was when I began to tie in all these ideas we’d been practicing in city planning for years in terms of the human benefits that a program like this could reap for a city.”6
Figure 16. Praised as the inspiration for New Haven’s renaissance as a result of his ability to tap federal funds for urban renewal, Mayor Richard C. Lee provoked both disbelief and anger in the aftermath of the civil disorders that wracked the city in 1967. Courtesy Yale Alumni Magazine.
Although Lee inherited a commitment to redevelopment from his Republican predecessor, he seized the opportunity to widen its impact at minimal cost by convincing the state to finance the new multilane connector through the area. With that part of the connector built to the downtown, every structure within the 44-acre Oak Street boundary was demolished, displacing 900 households, 40 percent of whom were minorities. Another 250 businesses, mostly small commercial and manufacturing companies were displaced, many of which never opened again. Although later critics would point to such efforts as the moral flaw of urban renewal, at the time they were warmly embraced. According to the essay Jeanne Lowe wrote that anticipated her subsequent book, Oak Street had become a symbol of New Haven’s “new pride and hope” as the “first integrated step in a grand design which will gear the city to the automotive age, rebuild its rotten commercial core, shore up slipping neighborhoods, and draw back the disenchanted from the suburbs.” Adding a phrase Lee would soon make his own, Lowe commended Lee’s appropriation of federal funds, predicting that if he stayed on course, “New Haven may be the first slumless city.”7
Figure 17. After dropping out of Yale College to found the Northern Student Movement as a counterpart of the Southern Non-Violent Student Committee in the South, Peter Countryman and his wife, Joan, settled into New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, where their activism prompted the Yale Alumni magazine for May 1966 to recount their opposition to urban renewal under the heading “Frustrated Radicals.” Courtesy Yale Alumni Magazine.
Oak Street represented only a small part of an ambitious vision for remaking the core city. The subsequent revitalization of the once predominantly Italian neighborhood of Wooster Square, while taking advantage of revised national policy incorporated in the Housing Act of 1954 encouraging rehabilitation of homes in place of total clearance, preserved a part of the neighborhood. Still, more than 3,000 housing units were demolished, virtually eliminating a segment of the area that had recently witnessed a growing Black presence. Rehabilitation efforts favored homeowners, mostly Italians, while the construction of I-91 served to add to the displacement of African Americans.8 Contentious renewal efforts in the predominantly African American Dixwell Avenue section of the city adjacent to Yale University further roiled housing and development efforts, as did a plan to rebuild a whole section of Church Street downtown. In a little over a decade, as many as 22,000 people were displaced.9 Despite the turmoil that came with such change, Lee and his staff held to their vision. Drawing on a 1910 civic improvement plan updated in master plans prepared in 1942 and 1953 by Yale faculty member Maurice Rotival that would link the city to its surrounding hinterland through a network of highways, Lee envisioned a further set of connector routes that would encircle the downtown—what came to be called the ring road. Such a system, his advisers argued, would bring shoppers back to a rebuilt downtown once older buildings had been cleared and adequate high-rise parking provided. As Rotival described the vision in 1958, “Fresh healthy arteries encourage all kinds of tissue to grow around them.”10
Having emerged from outside the dominant political system, Lee made his peace with Democratic town chair Arthur Barbieri by naming him director of public works, with all the control over patronage that incumbents counted on to keep their party faithful in line. But it was the creation of a nonpartisan Citizens Advisory Commission, and just as important, the army of appointments to advance the redevelopment cause—some seven hundred employees in the newly reconstituted redevelopment agency, almost as many employees as composed the police and fire departments combined—that ensured Lee political dominance. Although Robert Dahl had argued at an early stage in the redevelopment process that Lee’s inclusion of an array of people on key advisory committees, including redevelopment, constituted a pluralistic approach to governance, subsequent commentary made clear that Lee used the redevelopment authority in particular to push through his agenda in a clear demonstration of what Norman and Susan Fainstein call an executive-centered coalition. Other critics agreed, with Alan Singerman going so far as to describe the redevelopment agency as a new form of a political machine and Douglas Rae likening it to the Kremlin.11
Although the high visibility of the city’s renewal efforts ensured Lee’s reelection every two years, advisers sensed a possible problem in the Black community. As New Haven’s Black population grew in the 1950s, from 9,600 to 22,000, or 15 percent of the total, Mitchell Sviridoff, head of the state AFL-CIO and an informal adviser to the mayor, expressed his concerns. While he described the majority of African Americans as responsible citizens, he pointed to a group he classified as “immoderates” who, he warned, “all too frequently assume dominant leadership in the Negro community.” Pointing to “a latent bitterness and hostility of extraordinary intensity,” born not out of any singular policies but as a product of ongoing discrimination, he argued that it was imperative that the city “detect the sore spots and at least attempt to initiate positive programs and policies in consultation with a wide range of leadership from the Negro community.” Failure to act, he claimed, invited explosion, “with the leadership inevitably passing into the waiting hands of the ‘irresponsibles.’ ”12
The message was not lost on Lee, who had already been thinking about the need to match urban renewal with a people-oriented approach and had formed the basis for such action when the Ford Foundation named New Haven in 1961 as one of six cities to test a more comprehensive approach to urban poverty. It was with a $2.5 million Ford grant the following year that the city announced the formation of Community Progress Incorporated (CPI) as an agency independent of the government but every bit in sync with the Lee administration. As Lee put it in his preface to one of the agency’s founding documents, “Opening Opportunities,” “In Urban America, despite great material wealth, there are many obstacles to the achievement of this goal. Most visible are the blight and obsolescence of the environment of a large portion of all but the newest cities. Equally present are social, economic, and cultural obstructions which prevent people from attaining a full measure of personal fulfillment.” Henceforth, the physical renewal that Lee’s staff had described as opening opportunities for city residents, would be complemented with programs specifically directed at improving social welfare. Appropriately enough, Lee named Sviridoff CPI’s executive director. The organization eventually spent $22 million, the bulk in federal funds in addition to the $5 million it received from the Ford Foundation. Every much the tightly controlled organization as the city’s renewal agency, by 1965 CPI had a staff of three hundred employees working on a budget that reached $7,700 for each lower-income family it served that year—more than twice the annual income of most such families.13
Aimed at better utilizing service provision for the ultimate assimilation of the poor into mainstream society through a host of discrete educational and social welfare initiatives, CPI sought local advice without initially incorporating representatives of their clients into its formal decision-making. According to Russell Murphy’s participant-observer assessment of the program, the New Haven official most responsible for planning the organization, Howard Hallman, believed the poor were ill-equipped to participate in decision-making “because poverty is a disability that precludes meaningful participation in planning.” When CPI was designated the city’s community action agency as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, it reluctantly expanded its board of directors from nine to sixteen and agreed to add one other member expressly representing one of the seven neighborhoods it was serving.14 An internally circulated 1967 memo at the Ford Foundation—still one of CPI’s major funders—made clear that such actions were not sufficient to change the organization’s culture. Pointing to a strategy of “producing results through carefully controlled services,” the report faulted CPI for discouraging social action because “it would pose threats to the coalition.” “Unless the people are involved as decision-makers,” the authors asserted, “the projects are nothing but souped-up versions of the welfare game which has limited success in the past and has fallen into disrepute.… The more CPI attempts to deliver without indigenous participation in planning and execution the more it is likely to fail. No amount of technical expertise and public relations can make the control approach work.”15 At the time the memo was written, Sviridoff had recently joined the Ford Foundation as vice president for national affairs.
It was not surprising, then, both as incidents of displacement mounted and the civil rights movement turned more militant in New Haven as elsewhere, that resistance to urban renewal mounted. Republican candidates for mayor began to claim they would do better, either by speeding up the process or targeting it more effectively. Residents, fearing further displacement, challenged the whole system, none more visibly than those in the Hill neighborhood. Two organizations took the lead. The first, the Hill Neighborhood Union (HNU), was founded in 1964 by two Yale undergraduates, John Wilhelm and Jake Blum, who moved into the neighborhood to organize its residents. While members of the redevelopment authority dismissed their standing, HNU managed to help coalesce neighborhood opposition to displacement, even as it pursued a number of tangible benefits for the area.16 The following year a new organization formed that soon absorbed the HNU, the Hill Parents Association, which aimed its criticism initially at the governance of the Hill’s Prince Street School but quickly widened its scope to take on Lee’s ambitious renewal agenda. The driving force in the organization was Fred Harris, a New Haven native in his mid-twenties and the son of a waiter at the Yale Faculty Club who grew up in public housing. As Hill Parents Association cochair, Ronald Johnson also sparked the antirenewal effort.17
Lee and his agents used every device at hand to quell opposition, not the least to blunt the threat of those Sviridoff had labeled “immoderates,” a designation the mayor was quick to apply to Fred Harris and his Hill allies. In the months leading into the summer of 1967, the Lee administration bickered with the Hill Parents Association over a proposed summer grant, only releasing it at the last minute, with the clear belief that it was the best way to preempt trouble. At the same time, contrary to Lee’s spoken comments after the 1967 uprising, his administration had taken steps to prepare for possible violence. In addition to directing more police resources to the Hill area, city officials considered adopting a sophisticated tracking system under development by IBM. Although the ostensive purpose was to provide services, such a system would have kept an eye on what might have been considered troublemaking as well. When violence eventually erupted, Harris tried to serve as peacemaker, asking the New Haven police and accompanying National Guard members to put their guns down while organizers sought to calm residents and get them back in their homes. The city rejected Harris’s overture, and violence continued for two additional evenings. Once calm was restored, the police turned on Hill activists, breaking into Harris’s home and accusing him of stashing heroin and harboring a stolen typewriter. Ronald Johnson was charged with conspiring to bomb some government buildings downtown. Although his conviction was overturned by the Connecticut Supreme Court two years later, the Hill Parents Association was effectively destroyed.18
Opposition to urban renewal continued after the riots and Lee’s departure from office two years later, spurred in large part by the American Independence Movement (AIM) formed by Yale sociology professor Robert Cook. An independent candidate for Congress in 1966, when he convinced Fred Harris to run on his ticket for a seat in the state assembly, Cook and his organization linked criticism of urban renewal with opposition to the Vietnam War. In several issues released after the August riots, the AIM newsletter reprinted the Hill activists’ open letter to the mayor and called for support for those arrested. Writing in the August 31 issue, Cook declared that “when confronted directly with the militant demands of the people—in Detroit, in Vietnam, or New Haven—the humanitarian veneer of official liberals is exposed as they resort to violent suppression. It is as though the police of New Haven were told to ‘go get ’em.’ ” AIM continued to oppose renewal efforts in the Hill neighborhood, reporting in 1969 a citywide protest addressed by Fred Harris who, referring to the mayor, declared, “The man downtown is devious to get what he wants. He doesn’t try to find out what the people here want, because he doesn’t want to lose his power. He doesn’t really want Model Cities to succeed.”19
Lee declined to run for reelection again in 1969 and never sought the higher office so many expected him to pursue.20 CPI continued to operate, existing on various grant extensions until 1976, when its functions were transferred to other agencies. By 1974, urban renewal too as a program was dead, a victim of the Nixon administration’s substitution of a revenue-sharing approach for the number of categorical grants like those for urban renewal that had been so generously designated for New Haven. Allocations from subsequent community block grants initially maintained the same balance as had previously existed between redevelopment, social services, and economic development, albeit at lower funding levels. But under weakened requirements for citizen participation, the balance of policy direction tipped toward the very elites that Dahl claimed had been marginalized in the modern city. Such a direction was telegraphed through a major study and plan for the central business district (the Halcyon Report), which urged the creation of a climate favorable to economic growth. By the early 1980s, the underlying cleavage of economic interests in the city had crystallized between expenditures aimed at capital accumulation and those aimed at housing and social services. While the city did not ignore the latter needs, it increasingly cast its larger goals in terms of capital accumulation through an expanded tax base that could be provided only by attracting new businesses and upper-income residents to the city.21 This set the stage for city development after Lee: one absent his charismatic and ultimately polarizing presence, but one that carried forward much of the same redevelopment agenda, with equal attention given to preempting civic dissent.
New Haven’s modern renaissance coincided with that of a number of other cities that found their location and urban assets becoming increasingly attractive to younger professionals. The good news started to appear in the early twenty-first century and accelerated at least in part in New Haven after the 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center. Young people were coming to New Haven seeking affordable housing and decent transit access to New York City employment. Demand for housing was sufficient enough downtown to prompt construction of new residential towers as well as the conversion of other buildings to residential use. Between 2000 and 2016 the city counted 6,900 new residents, a larger increase than in any other municipality in the region.22 As the population became concentrated downtown, the number of restaurants and leisure-time venues proliferated, creating just the kind of density and diversity of attractions that Richard Florida had been arguing were necessary to attract the presence of “the creative class.” Explaining how New Haven “came back from the brink,” the lead essay in a 2009 Yale Alumni Magazine pointed to the opening of trendy restaurants and distinctive cultural events as signs of the city’s recovery. A travel writer for the Washington Post broadcast the transformation nationally by commending the conversion of once-vacant factories to art studios and coffee shops, galleries popping up in abandoned churches and parking garages, and restored Victorian homes dotting “quaint main streets and city squares.”23
The Yale Alumni Magazine’s enthusiasm for the city’s renaissance was not incidental. For more than a dozen years the university had made New Haven’s revitalization a priority. Moved by a combination of factors, including the death of a Yale undergraduate just off the campus at the hands of a local teenager in 1991 and the ongoing deterioration of the physical city, not the least in areas bordering the campus, the university, under the leadership of its new president, Richard Levin, established a new office of New Haven and State Affairs shortly after he took office in 1993.24 For the first five years of its existence, under the direction of Linda Lorimer, a former president of Randolph-Macon College, the office focused on working more closely with New Haven government and forming partnerships with a number of New Haven nonprofit organizations. In 1998, the effort took a new turn, as Levin named Bruce D. Alexander, a longtime senior executive with the Rouse Company in Baltimore, as the new head of the office and just one of seven officers of the university.
Having served with his wife as a VISTA volunteer in Washington shortly after his graduation from Yale College in 1965, Alexander returned to Yale with a well-honed social conscience. But his job with Rouse had been to put in place a number of Rouse’s urban commercial centers, including Baltimore’s Harborplace, so Alexander’s skills for negotiating with community groups were well tested in the cause of advancing proposed capital investments. Already well known to the university as a consultant to the effort to upgrade the nearby commercial Broadway corridor running through the heart of the campus, Alexander threw the university into commercial real estate. The creation of a University Properties Arm quickly impacted the city, adding greatly to a 34 percent growth in retail sales in the years between 1996 and 2002. In the process, Yale became the city’s largest taxpayer, reaching a level of $4.5 million in 2009 despite receiving tax exemptions for the vast majority of its expansive facilities at the heart of the city.25 As of 2018, Yale Properties had accumulated 110 store and restaurant tenants and 500 residential properties. Many of the national chains that now dominated Broadway and the hip restaurants that prompted the Washington Post travel writer’s praise were Yale tenants. More critically, Alan Mallach wrote, “These areas have now been redefined as the turf, not only of the university, but of a privileged social and economic class, as clearly as if one had built a wall with checkpoints around them. In microcosm, The Shops at Yale are a mirror of the way in which social and economic polarization is embedded in the new urban economy.”26
Figure 18. Broadway’s commercial corridor in New Haven, 2016, featuring Urban Outfitters among other tenants sought by Yale’s property arm. At the end of the block the California-based outdoor apparel company Patagonia replaced the longtime Au Bon Pain outlet in 2017. With its foray into commercial real estate, Yale became New Haven’s single largest taxpayer, though the vast majority of its property remained tax exempt. Alexander Garvin.
City officials, including Mayor John DeStefano, generally welcomed Yale’s physical expansion. DeStefano was elected to office the same year Levin became Yale’s president, and his twenty years as mayor coincided with Levin’s own tenure. DeStefano, asked shortly after he took office about Yale’s purchase of a downtown office building that would result in the city losing revenue as the building converted to tax-exempt status, replied with typical equanimity and without objection: “It allows my largest employer to grow. You want your largest employer to grow.” When the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation foreclosed on sixteen properties in the Chapel Street district in the mid-1990s, on Yale’s western border, DeStefano encouraged the university to buy the entire lot as opposed to the properties being sold individually. And when the university sought to close three streets that ran through campus to automobile traffic in 2006, the city accepted in return a pledge from Yale to spend up to $10 million on public improvements, including street and sidewalk repairs and development of the Farmington Canal Greenway near campus.27 Just how important such cordial relations with the city could be surfaced in 2008, when Yale’s intention to build a $430 million cancer center at the edge of the Hill neighborhood ran into a serious obstacle: New Haven’s reengaged and reorganized union movement.
For more than a quarter of a century, Locals 34, representing Yale clerical and technical workers, and 35, representing blue-collar employees—organized under the leadership of the hotel and restaurant workers, now called UNITE HERE—sought recognition at Yale. Their central argument was that as New Haven’s largest employer the university had an obligation to help grow the city’s middle class by providing decent wages, a reasonable enough request since Yale, having provided only 5 percent of city jobs in 1965, by 1995 provided twice as many jobs as all city manufacturing employers combined. The union won its first contract in the 1980s and blocked a proposal in 1996 to prevent Yale from outsourcing employment of its dining hall workers, a move that would have cut wages by nearly $4 an hour and allowed employees to be laid off for the twenty-two weeks of summer break. Had these demands been enacted, annual dining hall earnings would have fallen from $23,000 to $10,000 per year, the equivalent loss of between four hundred and six hundred jobs.28 Seeking to enhance its leverage in that effort, UNITE HERE took its campaign to local neighborhoods and institutions, including prominent clergy and the local NAACP, as a prime example of what has come to be called “social movement unionism.”29 As the president of Local 34, Laurie Kennington, put it, “We’d come to a consensus that if we were an island of prosperity in a sea of struggle, that wouldn’t be sustainable. We had to bring the other folks along with us.” That partnership formalized over the next several years with the formation of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE) as a permanent adjunct organization to UNITE HERE affiliates 34 and 35. Headed by Andrea van den Heever, a former secretary in Yale’s Department of Economics before being elected as a full-time organizer, and the Reverend Scott D. Marks, the pastor of a Dixwell Avenue church—both of whom had played key roles in the 1996 strike—CCNE pledged to reduce income inequality, build power, and combat economic, social, and racial injustice in Connecticut by fusing the cause of its members with that of the city’s beleaguered neighborhoods.30
As Yale New Haven Hospital readied its plans for a new cancer center in 2004, CCNE came to the support of District 1199 of the New Haven Health Care Employees Union, which had been unsuccessfully attempting to organize service workers at the hospital for years. Seeking to blend neighborhood concerns about the hospital’s physical expansion and its record of aggressively pursuing repayment of local residents’ medical debt in court with the ongoing unionizing effort, CCNE decided to use city permitting and zoning requirements as leverage to secure its demands. Seeking to deepen the effort to enlist neighborhood support the unions had employed in 1996, CCNE spurred the formation of a formal coalition of some twenty community organizations under the umbrella Community Organized for Responsible Development (CORD). Using door-to-door canvassing and mass turnouts at rallies and Board of Alders meetings, CORD pressured the city into holding up permits. Inspired and informed by the way activists in Los Angeles had forged a formal community benefits agreement in 2001, CCNE, armed with eight hundred survey results of neighborhood concerns, secured an unbinding resolution from the Board of Alders for predicating development of the new facility on acceptance of such an agreement.31
For months, Yale New Haven fought the organizing effort. Upset especially with the union attempt to leverage its demands by bringing forth community concerns, hospital vice president Vin Petrini complained, “We think tying the approval of the cancer center to a union organizing campaign is simply wrong. We’ve met with CORD, we’ve met with dozens of community groups. We’ve put millions of dollars on the table in new community benefit payments, which would cover everything from affordable housing and day care to community health infrastructure improvements and education.”32 For his part, Mayor DeStefano faced mounting public pressure to remove the obstacles to constructing the widely anticipated building. Having received a critical endorsement from UNITE HERE in his hard-fought primary campaign for governor, DeStefano was now called upon to get the unions to back off. After enlisting Bruce Alexander’s intervention to no immediate effect, DeStefano finally threw himself into negotiations, arriving at a compromise resolution in March 2006. In return for a pledge by the hospital to remain neutral during an anticipated campaign to organize service workers along with a package of community benefits, the union agreed not to further oppose permits authorizing the project. As New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass gushed, “All the recriminations on all three sides—the city, the unions, the hospital—evaporated like a puddle in the mid-summer sun Wednesday.”33
The peace did not last, however. Even as the date set for union election approached, reports that the hospital had violated a provision written into the agreement not to initiate one-on-one conversations related to unionization with workers prompted an independent arbitrator to cancel the election. Although Richard Levin issued a statement criticizing the hospital’s actions, ones that ultimately cost the university a $4 million fine, he did not fire the new head of the hospital, even after she turned her back on demonstrators protesting the hospital’s actions. Facing more overtly political pressures to respond, DeStefano, having lost his campaign for governor and facing the prospect of continuing as mayor, denounced the hospital actions as “a premeditated, methodical, comprehensive undermining of virtually every aspect of that agreement” and openly questioned the appropriateness of special tax breaks the hospital was receiving. Under the circumstances, it appeared that local residents had been the ones to gain from concessions in place, including the hospital’s promise to hire a hundred New Haveners a year, many from the surrounding Hill, Dwight, and West River neighborhoods; to establish a citizens’ “advisory committee” to monitor Yale New Haven’s free care policies; to invest at least $100,000 a year for five years in a “career ladder program” for local citizens; to make a voluntary tax payment to the city the way other major nonprofits had agreed to do; to make twelve traffic-signal improvements in the area around the cancer center; and to contribute $100,000 a year for five years to the Mayor’s Youth Initiative.34 But past history left residents skeptical, and it was not long before further developments surrounding the cancer center construction confirmed their fears.
Even as the cancer hospital controversy raged, a Boston-based developer, Intercontinental Properties, had been buying up properties across the street from the hospital, an area of small businesses and modest homes that had been believed exempt from hospital expansion under the agreement forged in March. Seeking to introduce a mixed-use development in that location, Will (William J.) Smith, speaking for the developer, sought a change to the same zoning category that had authorized the cancer hospital’s construction. Fearing further intrusion into the Hill area and seeking some form of compensation to ease the effect, area representatives raised the prospect of securing community benefits of the kind that had come with the cancer center. Speaking out at a city planning meeting in June 2007, Alderwoman Jacqueline James asked pointedly, “When we were considering Yale’s cancer center, you commissioners had many more questions. What were going to be the give-back to the community, the benefits? Where are your questions for this developer from Boston? It’s just not credible they can come in, invest $10 million in our neighborhood and then be coy and say they can’t tell us what their plans are! We’ve had so many homeowners displaced already. Something is wrong here.” Despite her concern, James refrained from further criticism at a subsequent meeting of the Board of Alders. The reason, she later revealed, was that she believed she had Smith’s support to preserve and convert to a community youth center a building within the development area that had once been home to the Black Panthers in the 1970s. A year later, after the Intercontinental proposal had cleared every regulatory hurdle, news headlines reported the demolition of the building in question. Claiming she had been double-crossed, Jones denounced the developers, asserting, “If you’ll lie to kids, you’ll lie to anybody. We weren’t asking for a million dollars. We were asking them to give us back what was ours. It was part of our history. Part of our culture. Part of our community.” Months later, Intercontinental abandoned its plans for the site altogether, selling the cleared area to Yale New Haven Hospital for $14.6 million, a profit of $1.7 million. Company officials gave no reason why Smith had left the company. While a Yale spokesperson said the hospital had no immediate plans for the site, other observers concluded that Smith had acted as a stalking horse for the university and that James had been duped. The property eventually hosted a contested parking garage that had been envisioned from the start.35
The fight over the cancer center left union organizers and their neighborhood-based allies short of their goals. If the mayor had once been seen as an ally to both groups, it appeared he could no longer be counted on. DeStefano, seeing the prospects for growth again, embraced the downtown redevelopment that was boosting the city’s external reputation. At the heart of that shift was the effort to “fix” the failures of the Oak Street Connector, making its redevelopment the linchpin in a new growth coalition. Envisioning what it described as “a dramatic transformation of the district, the Hill-to-Downtown Community Plan, as released in 2013, called for the conversion of land dominated by surface parking lots to “a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use district, combining new homes with growing medical and research uses, served by new retail and entertainment venues, walkable streets and new public spaces.”36
The new redevelopment initiative focused on “connectivity,” linking the expansive Yale hospital facilities back to the downtown, making in-town residences more accessible to users of the city’s train station, and upgrading the physical environment of the still predominantly poor and overwhelmingly minority Hill neighborhood. The new vision for the existing six-lane connector was to reclaim some ten acres of land from expressway ramps and stubs to make it available for development for additional residential and retail as well as health care and research facilities. Newly purposed city streets would be designed at a scale suitable and safe for multiple forms of transportation: pedestrian, bike, and public transit as well as automobiles. “With housing and shopping linked to nearby transit and more comfortable streets for pedestrians and bicycles,” a development news site asserted, “the project will encourage increased physical activity and reduce air and noise pollution associated with automobile travel, supporting the City’s sustainable growth objectives.”37
The state initiated the process in 2002 when it sold the land that had been set aside but never used for the extension of the connector. The completion in 2005 of a Pfizer Pharmaceutical research facility in the former planned right-of-way stirred interest in further development. A concept plan focused on converting the highway to a four-lane boulevard became an official city objective as an infill strategy. Utilizing an initial $16 million Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Downtown Crossing, as it came to be called, was advanced in the name of the familiar goal of boosting the city’s tax base, an objective that was initially confirmed in 2000 with Alexion Pharmaceuticals’ commitment to leave the suburbs to occupy a new eleven-story, $100 million building at the heart of the proposed redevelopment. As incentive to return to the city the company received a ten-year loan of $20 million at a rate of 1 percent with principal and interest deferred for five years; loan forgiveness of $16 million to $20 million based on the creation of two hundred to three hundred full-time jobs; a $6 million grant for laboratory construction and equipment; and Urban Industrial Sites Reinvestment Tax Credits of up to $25 million.38
As part of a single $135 million redevelopment project, the city planned the equally ambitious rehabilitation of the Union Station area as well as the nearby site of another urban renewal failure, the New Haven Coliseum, which was torn down in 2007 to make way for mixed-use housing, hotel, and retail. While the latter project fell victim to the Great Recession and still awaited a suitable development project in 2018,39 plans associated with the station moved forward. The city proposed the station’s renovation with the inclusion of new retail outlets, a second high-rise parking garage, and a new street as a gateway to downtown to overcome obstacles in the existing street grid. In place of one of the city’s most troubled publicly assisted housing projects—Church Street South directly across the street from the station—the city supported yet another mixed-use development. Designed by the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Charles Moore, Church Street South had opened in 1969 as a privately owned and managed, project-based, low-income housing development. Although the project was federally subsidized, the Department of Housing and Urban Development failed to oversee maintenance, and when poor upkeep and significant environmental problems mounted, support grew for the relocation of its tenants and reconstruction on the site. City government wanted to ensure that at least 10 to 20 percent of the new units would be affordable to those at or below median income, but such hopes rested on federal or state funding, neither of which were immediately available to reassure existing residents that they might stay in the area.40
Such redevelopment plans fit the goals of growing a vibrant downtown and attracting more affluent taxpayers. Other neighborhood initiatives advanced, most particularly school reconstruction, one of DeStefano’s signature efforts during his many years in office. Union supporters were not convinced, however, that either kind of effort was sufficient to address the city’s persistent poverty and high levels of crime, which reached a peak in 2011. That year, UNITE HERE chose not to endorse anyone running for mayor, turning its attention instead to candidates running for alderman. When union candidates won seventeen of eighteen contests in the thirty-person body, they effectively took control of the city’s legislative body.41 While critics scoffed that union success came at the sacrifice of larger objectives, CCNE responded by laying out a broad rationale for union efforts in a forty-page assessment released in December that year and authored by Mandi Isaacs Jackson, a UNITE HERE employee and recent Yale PhD recipient whose 2008 book had detailed the perverse effects of the 1960s renewal effort on New Haven’s communities of color. Insisting that all future development include community impact reports, community benefits agreements, and jobs programs, the report demanded that new investment not be made at the expense of the city’s poorer residents. “What does it mean,” the report asked, “for professionals, managers, academics, scientists, and the affluent to be the target audience for particular changes in landscape, economy, and culture, while the poor, the unemployed, the low-wage workers, and the uneducated are viewed by policymakers as a major obstacle to these changes?” With access to good jobs, it asserted, “and a voice for all communities, New Haven’s renaissance can lift up the whole city, and secure a strong economic future for the city itself, the businesses and industries who chose to locate here, and everyone who calls the city home.” Acknowledging the potentially positive effects of school reform, the report nonetheless pointed out that such efforts could reach only a limited audience, stating, “A City serious about a middle class renaissance cannot afford to write off a few generations of service workers and hope that providing their children better schools and a tuition grant will revitalize those areas of the city that lie outside the corridors of high-end development.” In addition to educational reform, it insisted, New Haven needed a “jobs pipeline”: training, apprenticing, and mentoring residents for work that paid enough to support their families.42
CCNE’s emphasis on job training came from hard experience, as detailed in its December 2011 report. In addition to citing the disappointing end results of the effort to unionize Yale New Haven, it detailed the redevelopment of the city’s last active manufacturing site—Winchester firearms. Closed permanently in 2006, the sprawling facility in the Newhallville section of the city—one of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods—had benefited from a series of subsidies, resulting at least in part in restoration of a good part of the extant plant as a science incubator under Yale’s auspices, without, however, lifting the fortunes of nearby residents. When the prominent downtown developer of the Alexion site, Carter Winstanley, proposed to convert an abandoned 150,000-square-foot office building to a start-up financial services company, Higher One, the Board of Alders granted support on the basis of Winstanley’s promise “to find permanent jobs for local residents and set aside affordable housing.” Instead, the company utilized federal stimulus funds to support training for only fifteen temporary jobs to remediate the site. Although every candidate for a job took the requisite training, only one candidate for a position was actually hired, and that only temporarily as the power over employment went to a Massachusetts subcontractor who brought in workers from out of state. The $18.5 million in job-creation tax breaks the company received carried no requirements to train or hire locally or to garner community support. To company plans to add two hundred to three hundred housing units to accommodate workers, CCNE retorted, “Given the company’s unwillingness to commit to any permanent jobs and failure to follow through even on creating temporary jobs, it is not unreasonable to expect that those units will be occupied by financial services professionals moving in from elsewhere, leaving Newhallville residents in the cold.”43
Demonstrating his adeptness, DeStefano proposed a jobs initiative of his own in his state of the city address given early in 2012. But CCNE wanted something more tangible than DeStefano could deliver through job fairs and attendant publicity. Taking the model UNITE HERE had implemented for prospective hotel employees in Las Vegas and extending the Local Resident Training Program unions had forged in 1987 to prepare women at Gateway Community College for clerical positions at Yale, the Board of Alders sought a broader path to employment at the university. Given their power over development procedures, the board’s position carried weight, and Yale, with Bruce Alexander playing an active role in a working group to design the plan, signed on quickly as it announced in March 2012 its commitment to hiring out-of-work New Haveners, even as it struck new contracts with Locals 34 and 35.44 According to press reports, Yale agreed to train and move lower-level employees into higher-paying positions, giving New Haven residents priority for filling newly opened starter positions. The university agreed as well to create a custodian-in-training program and a painter’s apprentice program to help “pipeline” graduates find long-term jobs. Launched officially in 2013 with a number of local partners besides Yale, New Haven Works, as the program came to be called, was intended through partnership with potential employers to overcome the limitations of previous training programs that failed to place their graduates.45
Beyond its effort to cut unemployment, the Board of Alders focused on a number of related social concerns, pressing for the restoration of community policing and seeking to capture for poorer residents some of the benefits that flowed from New Haven’s revitalization. Typically, it viewed development prospects for what they might throw off in the way of community benefits. In reviewing Downtown Crossing, for instance, their chief liaison with the effort convinced developer Carter Winstanley to give $150,000 to a training program at the city’s Gateway College to prepare workers for the new businesses moving into his building rather than pressing him and other officials for pedestrian and bike amenities sought by designers. They also rejected funds for a planning process to introduce a trolley system downtown, a favorite project in other cities such as Detroit and Milwaukee whose downtowns were gentrifying.46 Although DeStefano’s own initiatives did not directly clash with that of the Alders, with his powers newly circumscribed, he chose not to run for an eleventh term in 2013. His successor, long-term state senator Toni Harp, won the Democratic nomination in a crowded field. With union support, she was elected as New Haven’s first female mayor in November.
The dilemmas of how best to sustain a renaissance, let alone ensure that its benefits extended widely, became evident in following years. Disappointed repeatedly by unfulfilled promises for benefits from redevelopment, Hill residents reacted negatively to plans to remake much of their neighborhood. Developer Randy Salvatore planned to redevelop 11.6 acres: building up to 140 apartments; 7,000 square feet of store space; 120,000 square feet of research space; and 50,000 square feet of offices between Congress Avenue and Church Street South. With a long history of displacement in the area, Hill residents understandably received such plans critically. “You talk about connectivity. You want to connect commuters [to the new biomedical jobs] and leave the jobs in my neighborhood … for low level jobs,” Hill alderwoman Dolores Colon objected at a 2013 public meeting. “You talk about residential and mixed use, but I haven’t seen anything. As an Alder, that’s my trepidation. I hope you bring in jobs that will help kids not to be tied to their kitchens or mops.” Long neglected after the owners refused to include assurances that new housing on the site would include provision for 30 percent affordable units, the site finally gained approval from the Board of Alders when Salvatore agreed finally to precisely that goal. Opened to occupancy in 2019, Salvatore’s “Luxury” Parkside Apartments, promising access to rooftop grilling and table tennis as well as bike storage and a dog run, rented studios for $1,700 and a three-bedroom unit for $3,875. Thirty-three of the one hundred units were deemed affordable at 80 percent of median income.47 At Church Street South, the city asked developers to set aside 10 percent of new units below market rate, but such actions remained voluntary, falling well short of the needs of an estimated 57 percent of city residents earning more than the federal poverty level but unable to pay for all of their essential costs. With the project under private ownership and plans to convert the area to market-rate housing and associated retail, Mayor Harp concluded in 2016 that she had no choice but to partner with the owners to ensure that new housing on the site would include some affordable units. That task proved all the more difficult when the Department of Housing and Urban Development rejected a joint “Promise Neighborhood” grant for the site.48 Efforts not just to ensure affordable housing but job training for local residents in the construction of new homes at a remaining Winchester site off of Munson Street faced similar obstacles.49
CCNE, the unions, and a new associated activist partner, New Haven Rising, established to build a permanent base outside the traditional political structure, kept the pressure on employers and developers to open their doors to New Haven job seekers, and by 2017 New Haven Works had met its goal of placing a thousand of its trainees in jobs, though critics questioned whether local hires included those most in need.50 But such news was tempered by the unsettled economic environment that pervaded the state and much of the nation. In April 2016 the Yale-nurtured start-up Higher One, which had already broken its promise to hire locally, dissolved. Although some of the company’s workers remained in place as part of a new Bankmobile or as part of a remaining division designing software under the old company name, their future prospects were anything but certain.51 Then, without advance warning, Alexion announced it was moving its headquarters to Boston from its new building anchoring the heralded Downtown Crossing site. Again, some workers were to be left behind, but the company nonetheless abandoned a major downtown investment, one that left owners of luxury apartments and upscale restaurants worrying whether demand for their services would continue. Crying betrayal, public officials sought to retrieve portions of the state subsidies that had fostered the company’s location in New Haven, ultimately managing to secure only $26 million of the larger package of subsidies the state had showered on the company.52
New Haven’s dilemma came into particularly sharp relief in the last months of 2018. Prompted by the conversion of the Duncan Hotel from an unofficial downtown boardinghouse to a boutique hotel facility, the Graduate, aimed at attracting visitors to the downtown area and the Yale campus, the city formed an affordable housing task force, with the mission of seeking new options for affordable living and securing additional single-occupancy units. Residents and housing officials alike painted a dire picture of struggling residents competing for shelter even as higher-end housing options continued to expand. Among the grimmer realities were the 41 percent of city households that were housing burdened, paying more than 30 percent of their annual income on housing, and a waiting list of over ten thousand people seeking affordable housing units administered by the city’s housing authority, with only some four hundred people a year being accommodated.53 The task force’s report, delivered in January 2019, was ambitious, calling for new inclusionary zoning, an affordable housing trust fund, greater cooperation in opening up and expanding affordable housing in suburbs where only an estimated 7 percent of housing was considered affordable, and forming a permanent Affordable Housing Commission under the auspices of the Board of Alders.54 No doubt, even a portion of such efforts would prove costly, and in that light the dialogue surrounding a growing budget deficit was instructive.
Facing the prospect that the city’s bond rating would be downgraded, officials addressed the issue by citing new development as the factor that would close the city’s budget gap. Pointing both to expiring subsidies to new construction downtown and the prospect of other subsidies expiring down the road, they identified $12 million in immediate returns toward the projected $30 million deficit ahead. Other funds, they asserted, would come from the growing appreciation of New Haven’s appeal to outside investors. For this, they cited particularly Yale’s growth and its ability to attract investment in biomedical research, among other factors. But Yale’s tax-exempt status, city economic development administrator Matthew Nemerson admitted, limited its potential contribution. Acknowledging that knowledge centers needed to be encouraged, he nonetheless asserted, “We can’t have an expansion of hospitals and colleges if in fact there’s nothing in it for the host community. We won’t build prisons without giving the host communities benefits.” Yale’s annual voluntary payment of about $8.6 million helped the city, he affirmed, and the university helped bridge the city’s operating budget gap the previous year by increasing the contribution to $11 million. Nonetheless, outside evaluators remained concerned. As chair of the Independent Financial Review and Audit Commission, Mohit Agrawal admitted that New Haven was growing, but pointing to the city’s high property taxes and crumbling infrastructure, he asked, “Is the tide raising all boats?” A poverty rate of 26.1 percent in 2016 and a growth rate of 1.9 percent, as opposed to the 4 percent targeted for necessary revenue growth, further buttressed his reasons for concern.55 Those worries only deepened over the year, as the municipal deficit grew to $50 million.
Reacting to an 18 percent property tax hike in 2018 and possible corruption in her administration, voters turned out Mayor Toni Harp in November 2019 in favor of forty-four-year-old Jason Elicker, whom Harp had defeated six years earlier. A former alder who had spent the past five years as director of New Haven’s fledgling land trust, Elicker had to defeat Harp, who had the backing of the Working Family Party and UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, in the general election after defeating her in the Democratic primary.56 Although the contest was racially charged,57 it was Elicker who took most seriously the recommendations of the affordable housing task force, making them a priority in both his campaign and his inaugural address in January. Embracing the growth that promised to bring in further tax revenues in the future, he nonetheless asserted that it must be inclusive and equitable, noting, “We will not be passive observers of this change. We’ve got to ensure that growth benefits everyone in our community.”58
To some degree, the prospects for growing the city out of its deficit seemed promising as Elicker took office in January 2020. According to his designated economic development administrator Michael Piscitelli, private developers had completed or begun construction on over 1,655 new market-rate housing units in New Haven in 2019. Another 1,937 market-rate units were also planned. With construction on Yale’s $838 million Neuroscience Center about to commence, plans finally approved for the former coliseum site, and additional hotels either already open or planned for the near future, Piscitelli could point to signs that the city’s near-term growth was guaranteed.59 Extending and deepening investments in social needs, Elicker acknowledged in his ensuing state of the city address, however, required measures well beyond those in place. Calling the city’s condition “precarious,” he devoted the major portion of his address to the need to increase affordable housing through adoption of new inclusionary housing measures and by advancing an affordable housing trust fund that could be extended to the region, where considerably fewer affordable housing options were available. As the many thoughtful comments posted to the New Haven Independent report of the address confirmed, none of Elicker’s proposals were sufficient to meet the immediate need or likely to be adopted even in the long run.60 The challenge to advance equitable growth thus remained very much a work in progress.
Elicker concluded his inaugural address with a pointed directive, claiming, “Success requires a strong partnership with Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital. And it requires both the University and Hospital to think deeply about what it means to be a non-profit, what it means to be a member of the New Haven community and commit to doing your part. Our challenges are your challenges. Our home is your home.” Clearly, he was right in expecting Yale to continue to play a crucial role in determining the fate of the city. As much as any university-based city, New Haven illustrated the importance of “eds and meds” to revitalization. By 2017 Yale’s grants to buy homes in New Haven had reached $31 million, assisting 1,200 faculty and staff, lifting property values, and adding to the pool of human capital located within city boundaries. Its considerable financial contribution to the New Haven Promise program launched in 2010 ensured that graduating New Haven high school students with a B average would have the funding necessary to access a college education.61 Still, there were limits to the university’s generosity. In 2016 New Haven’s representatives in Hartford attempted to revise Yale’s exemption from real estate taxes as they covered activities not serving an educational purpose. Supported by UNITE HERE and the Board of Alders, the measure failed in the face of strenuous objections from Yale.62 The university also continued successfully to resist the organization of its graduate students and hospital service workers into unions and appeared to fall well short of its commitment to hire locally at the hospital.
In defense of their wage policies, both Yale and Yale New Haven cited the constraints of their nonprofit status, and yet as Gordon Lafer pointed out, Yale’s endowment in the year before the 1996 strike registered a profit of $1 billion, only $171 million of which went into the university’s operating budget. With another $159 million considered the level of reinvestment necessary to maintain the real value of the endowment against inflation, he estimated the university gain came to $700 million, or nearly $2 million a day. Boosted by government policies opening opportunities in the global economy, Yale, Lafer contends, benefited financially from the very economic trends that were undercutting New Haven’s economy. At Yale New Haven, CEO Marna Borgstrom received nearly $3.85 million in compensation, while more than ten executives collected over $1 million in compensation apiece, according to a 2017 Politico report, which concluded, “Even compared to some other teaching hospitals, whose economic success often stands in sharp contrast to the poverty of their host cities, Yale New Haven dominates the New Haven economy, while paying proportionally little back to the city.”63
Defenders of Yale-driven redevelopment claimed that New Haven’s twenty-first century renaissance was not aimed at attracting commuters to the city, as had been the policy in the 1960s. “Now the whole city is becoming a place where you can live,” Matthew Nemerson asserted, adding that every neighborhood needed to have great restaurants, places for different generations to live, entertainment venues, and other amenities that make for a high-quality life. But as Mandi Jackson reminds us, the period of urban renewal is not only in the past: “Plans for urban redevelopment cannot be separated (then or now) from the constraints and effects of persistent segregation, economic and educational inequality, and the ever growing social, cultural, and geographic gap between rich and poor.”64 Progressive on so many issues relating to greater opportunity for individual advancement, Yale remained sufficiently committed to its role in a growth coalition that its record in the twenty-first century differed in detail but not entirely in kind from that compiled a half-century earlier by its favorite son, Richard C. Lee.