Whose Streets?

There's an interesting article in today's times about the competing visions of urban 'redevelopment' held by Yale University and the New Haven mayor's office. The article oversimplifies and/or glosses over Yale's very particular investments in gentrifying and expanding into certain areas on its immediate periphery, neglects to mention the univerities own role in creating the Route 34 connector (see Gordon Lafer's 2002 "Land and Labor in the postindustrial university town: remaking social geography" in the journal Political Geography,) and with the exception to a passage about "low income" New Haveners' calls to rebuild an affordable neighborhood where now rests the Route 34 dustbowl, the voices of working class New Haven residents are completely absent from the piece, silenced despite or perhaps because of how vocal and organized they have been over the last half century to demand a different vision for their city which disrupts the kinds of technocratic teleologies offered here.

Particularly striking, too, was this quote from Karen Gilvarg:

“The streets of their campus are the streets of the city,” Ms. Gilvarg, the city planner, said. “They are part of the public infrastructure, not private roads.”

This is of course not true. In exchange for payments to the city's fire and police departments, widely believed to be insufficient, New Haven, under the Daniels administration, in a deal managed in part by Yale School of Management professor Douglas Rae, sold two of those streets, Wall and a chunk of High Street (aka "Rose Walk") to the university in the early 1990s. Scraps of an already dwindling commons were sold to a very wealth university for a pittance by one of that university's loudest boosters, on temporary leave to work in the office of the city's first black mayor.

In 2005, under pressure from the citywide movement for a "new social contract" led by the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, the university nearly doubled its payments to the city in lieu of taxes, although, as members of the student Fair Share Coalition said at the time, this was not enough.

"This demonstrates the importance of ongoing pressure from students and the community," Eidelson said. "We continue to believe Yale should make up the full difference between the [Payment in Lieu of Taxes] payments New Haven receives from the state and the tax value of the University."

The question that's largely absent from this article, which of course appears in the Business section, is how working class New Haven will make itself heard, will intervene in the intertwined and competing designs on the city's future the article discusses, whether the city will keep on incubating biotech (and yuppies) or whether the same movements that fought for and won the 2005 increase will keep struggling for a very different vision of a socially just city.