The protest — which called for Trump and Musk to take their “hands off” — was one of more than 1,300 “Hands Off!” rallies that took place across the country on April 5, with over 600,000 people participating nationwide. Before taking to the streets of downtown New Haven, demonstrators called for “hands off” schools, immigrants, Palestine, healthcare, science and more.

“The backstop for our democracy, and for our Constitution, is now the people,” said the Rev. Allie Perry DIV ’80, who helped to organize the protest. “People are pissed off, and they know that unless we rise up, our democracy will be destroyed.”

Few of those present were Yale students. UNITE HERE, New Haven Rising and the Sunrise Movement were among the participating organizations.

Although several Connecticut politicians, including Senator Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysewicz ’83 and Comptroller Sean Scanlon, asked to speak at the protest, Perry said, organizers were not interested — and instead invited them to listen. 

For around 40 minutes, community leaders of all stripes spoke on stage and decried the Trump administration’s recent actions.

“Our students deserve to learn the truth — honest history about this country — and we will not allow Trump and Musk to censor us and take away our First Amendment rights,” Leslie Blatteau ’97 GRD ’07, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said to the crowd, inciting cheers and applause.

Later, climate activist Sena Wazer ENV ’26 took to the stage to call for “hands off our climate.” While she condemned the Trump administration’s approach to climate change, she also called upon Connecticut officials to do more to protect the state from the effects of warming and pollution.

After Wazer, Tabitha Sookdeo ENV ’27, executive director of Connecticut Students for a Dream and an immigrant from Guyana, denounced Trump’s stance on immigration and the recent slew of deportations.

“We’ve had enough. Immigrants are part of Connecticut’s economic and social fabric. We contribute to the backbone of this country — not billionaires,” Sookdeo said. “We are the working class. We are funding our schools, our healthcare, our infrastructure. We are the backbone of this state, and we will continue to not live in fear.”

While the content of protesters’ speeches and signs varied, demonstrators were united in their opposition to Trump and Musk, the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and their concern for American democracy.

Rob Huffnung, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of New Haven, described a “totalitarian takeover,” while Pam Kruh, who had traveled to the green from Old Saybrook, called Trump “a dictator.”

Longtime New Haven Register reporter Randall Beach, meanwhile, said that he was especially concerned about “the denial of civil rights and free speech.” He and his wife Jennifer Kaylin had just returned from Amsterdam, he explained, where they had visited the Anne Frank House.

“The parallels are unbelievably applicable to what we’re going through right now — students are being pulled off the streets like it’s a fascist dictatorship we’re living under,” Beach said. “It stiffened our resolve to resist, to not collaborate, to not participate.”

The entire crowd began their march just before 1 p.m., marching first down Chapel Street, towards the School of Architecture. They turned right on York Street, past several residential colleges, made another right on Elm Street, and returned to the Green.

All the while, two New Haven Police Department patrol cars drove slowly in front of the marchers. NHPD Lt. David Guliuzza, who oversees the Downtown district, described the coordination between the protest organizers and the NHPD as “pretty good,” and added that demonstrators were “very peaceful.”

Eventually, the protesters returned to the Green, where they formed a circle.

Unlike a demonstration on the Green on the day of Trump’s inauguration, Saturday’s protest was relatively homogenous, and leaned older and white.

Perry recalled her involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, as did Jim Edwards, another attendee.

“I said I’d never protest again. Here I am,” Edwards said.

According to Ward 7 Alder Eli Sabin ’22 LAW ’26, Saturday’s protest augured a shift away from the exhaustion and demoralization that have characterized the first few months of the Trump Administration, and toward a spirit of energized resistance. 

Several protesters expressed hope that the protest might galvanize anti-Trump sentiment across the country.

“You show up, you show up, you show up, and you show that we have power, too,” said Fran Shea, a New York City resident and Connecticut State University alum. “This administration’s approach is to exhaust people. And this will show you, we won’t be exhausted.”

At least one anti-Trump rally took place in each of the 50 states on Saturday.

The post Thousands rally in downtown New Haven in national anti-Trump demonstration appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The metropolitan area has a rental vacancy rate of 3.1 percent, the third lowest in the country, indicating a cutthroat market. Rents have grown 48.19 percent since the pandemic, and the number of people experiencing homelessness in the region more than doubled in the last year, an increase that is directly linked to more expensive rental prices. 

Over 500 on-campus beds are currently unoccupied, according to Ferentz Lafargue, the associate dean of residential college life, and the New Haven housing market is fierce. Nonetheless, more and more Yale College students are choosing to move off campus — twice as many this academic year than in 2019-20. According to Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd, a historic 59 percent of the class of 2026 currently live in off-campus housing. 

Many students move off campus to live with friends from different residential colleges or to guarantee themselves single bedrooms. Others cite concerns about the availability of on-campus housing or the possibility of being forced out of their residential college. 

However, the gradual outpouring of students into adjacent neighborhoods is pushing locals farther away from campus and is one of many factors contributing to increased demand for housing in an ever-hot market, New Haven landlords and residents told the News. With a focus on ensuring residential colleges are a cornerstone of undergraduate life, Yale College administrators are pushing to bring students back to campus. 

An exodus in the wake of COVID-19

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady rate of about 16 percent of undergraduates lived in off-campus housing each year. But during the 2020-21 academic year, an unprecedented 62 percent of students lived off campus due to Yale’s strict pandemic policies. 

This year, about 26 percent of the student body, or 1,757 students, live off campus — a number almost double the 982 students who lived off-campus in the last pre-pandemic year.

Three Yale administrators attributed this recent exodus to off-campus housing directly to the pandemic. 

Because so many students either were required or chose to live off campus during the 2020-21 academic year, a greater number of students were able to pass down their apartments to other students, according to Lafargue. Students often recommend their apartments to younger friends, who in turn take over the lease. This made the transition off campus more straightforward than it was before, Lafargue believes.

During the 2020-21 school year, classes were conducted remotely through a “residential/remote model.” The model meant that first-years got to live on campus during the fall semester and switched with sophomores for the spring semester. The University also adopted strict social distancing policies, including grab-and-go dining hall meals and restrictions on social gatherings of more than 10 people. 

Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis suggested that at least some of the students who moved off campus did so because they were dissatisfied with masking restrictions and dining hall policies. Additionally, the class of 2025 became unusually large after the “COVID bump” — a swelling of the student population because of the large percentage of students that took gap years or deferred enrollment — which increased demand for on-campus housing in the following years, causing more students to move off-campus when residential colleges threatened to reach capacity.  

Lewis largely attributed preferences for off-campus housing to sweeping shifts in undergraduate social habits. In the 1980s, he said, undergraduates could have “keg parties in the [residential] colleges,” and the social scene revolved around the residential colleges. Now, due to legal concerns, the party scene has shifted primarily off campus, with students following, Lewis said. 

New Haven is “a nicer place to live, a safer place to live than it was a few decades ago,” he added, making off-campus housing more desirable. Meanwhile, financial aid has expanded, so more students are likely to be able to afford to live off campus, Lewis said. Students can request a refund of the share of their financial aid that goes toward housing costs to use for off-campus rent. 

According to the Yale College Council’s 2024 fall survey, the most common reasons to move off campus come down to better amenities, the opportunity to live with friends from different residential colleges, concerns about the on-campus housing lottery and the cost of Yale room and board. Lewis cited similar findings from undergraduate surveys, adding that students also like to control what they eat and have their own kitchens.

“It was more likely than not that I would have gotten a single, but I just wasn’t willing to take the risk of three consecutive years living in a cramped double,” Jake Siesel ’27 told the News. “So having the opportunity to secure [a single] months in advance and not be beholden to the lottery system was definitely worth the pain of the [off-campus housing] process.”

Now, administrators are aiming to reverse the push towards off-campus living. 

Lafargue wrote that the College is “actively looking for ways to retain more students on campus,” which includes its efforts to add additional dormitories, Arnold and McClellan halls, to the undergraduate housing inventory and “to create as much parity across the [residential] colleges as possible.” 

In November, Boyd announced changes to undergraduate housing policy that include eventually giving juniors priority over seniors in on-campus room selection. The point, she wrote in an email sent to rising seniors, is to make it “less likely that [juniors] will feel pressure” to move off campus once they have better odds in the housing lottery. Once students move off campus their junior year, it is very unlikely that they will return as seniors, she added, according to “historical patterns.” 

In an email sent to students before spring break, Lewis shared that “enhancing our residential communities” is a part of Yale College’s strategic plan to create “a community of learning.” Lewis has convened a task force within the Council of the Heads of College “to give focused attention” to undergraduate housing.

“I felt like I wanted to live in a place that really felt like a community or with people that I really feel at home with, and I was not getting that through the college system necessarily,” Adam Bear ’27 said when explaining why he’ll be moving off campus next year. He also keeps kosher and finds it “kind of annoying” that there aren’t always many options for him in his college’s dining hall. 

Lewis said administrators are trying to speed up the annexing process, or when students are given on-campus housing outside of their residential college, so that students know earlier if they’re being annexed. He’d rather students find out about annex status and then choose to move off campus than preemptively find off-campus housing to avoid the possibility of annexation. 

If Siesel were certain he would get an on-campus single, that would have “changed [his] calculus slightly.” Yet, by the time the housing lottery draw happens, there aren’t many housing options left in New Haven, compelling students to make housing choices early, he said, suggesting moving the lottery to earlier in the academic year. 

“In an ideal world, if the system were to be different, I’d still be living on campus, but just the nature of how it works makes it much more difficult,” he said.

Regardless, Boyd assured students in the November email that “Yale College has long had enough space to house all eligible students who want to live on campus.”

Students move out, forming an off-campus “bubble”

Undergraduate students who opt to live off campus tend to move into apartments or houses near central campus, with houses providing an option for larger groups of students to live together. 

According to Carol Horsford, the founder of Farnam Realty Group, which manages thousands of units in the New Haven area, the houses and apartments closest to central campus receive the highest demand from students — and are also the most expensive.

Undergraduate students tend to sign leases much earlier than graduate students, Horsford said, with the earliest groups expressing interest almost a year before the lease would begin. 

31 High St., which was historically occupied by the all-gender social group Edon Club, is usually the first of her properties to be snagged, with students expressing interest as early as September or October of the year before they move in. 

When looking for off-campus housing, Siesel, who will be living in 31 High St. next year, prioritized proximity to Yale’s Cross Campus and a space large enough to live with a large group of friends.

In Horsford’s experience, aside from location, undergraduates’ main priorities are in-unit laundry and air conditioning — amenities that are not available in on-campus housing. Most 21st-century students, she said, are accustomed to living with these features, and are willing to pay higher rents to maintain their living standards.

If Yale wants to encourage students to stay on campus, installing central air conditioning could be a good place to start, Horsford suggested.

According to Horsford, a room in one of the houses she manages averages about $1,500 per month, but prices can range anywhere from $875 to $2,000 per bedroom, depending on factors such as location and size of the individual room.

On-campus housing for Yale undergraduates not receiving financial aid costs $11,300 for the 2024-25 academic year. Divided over 10 months — August to May, a standard academic year — this comes down to $1,130 per month. Off-campus students paying $1,500 per month in rent pay $18,000 per year for a 12-month lease, $6,700 more than students paying for housing on campus. Many students, however, look to sublet their rooms over the summer to offset additional costs.

Farnam also owns The Elm apartment complex at 104 Howe St., which is described as “premier luxury off campus living” and is popular with Yale students. A studio at The Elm starts at $1,800 per month, while two-bedrooms start at $3,250. 

Siesel, who does not receive financial aid from Yale, said the additional cost of living off-campus is worth the assurance of getting to live with friends and having a single.

“I do think that your money goes a little further off campus. You can get a little nicer place,” Cyrus Kenkare ’26, who is moving off campus next year, said. 

Although many off-campus options are more expensive than on-campus housing, some students are able to find places that cost about the same as, or even less than, Yale room fees. 

For Bear, ensuring that his apartment would not cost more than an on-campus dorm room was a priority, and he was even able to find options that were “much less,” he said. Like Siesel, he also prioritized proximity to central campus.  

According to Lewis, a study from the Yale College Dean’s Office found that wealthier students are more likely to live off-campus, although plenty of students on financial aid use their room and board refund to pay off-campus rent. 

In 2024, Horsford created Bull Dog Housing, which lists the properties in her company’s portfolio that are typically rented by undergraduate students. Most properties occupy the downtown, Dwight, Dixwell and East Rock neighborhoods. 

Apartment complexes such as Crown Towers, Cambridge Oxford Apartments, The Elmhurst and The Taft are also popular with undergraduates and are located in those same neighborhoods, although the buildings vary in price and luxe.

From Horsford’s perspective, undergraduates are constrained to a “bubble” within a 15-minute walk of central campus. 

Graduate students are more likely to venture farther out, especially because many of the graduate and professional schools are farther away from the main campus. East Rock, Prospect Hill and Wooster Square host a number of these students, who can easily travel to and from campus using the Yale Shuttle.

Last summer, Yale demolished Helen Hadley Hall, a dormitory with 177 single rooms for graduate students. After this, the Yale Graduate Housing Office partnered with University Properties — which manages Yale’s commercial properties, including retail stores, office spaces and residential units — to provide alternative accommodations for graduate and professional students.

Chelsea Company manages 12 apartment buildings, including The Elmhurst, and rents to dozens of Yale students — undergraduate, graduate and professional — each year, according to the director of property management, Neil Currie. Year after year, Chelsea’s buildings have a 100 percent occupancy rate. 

The buildings closest to campus are “almost 100 percent undergrads,” according to Currie, while others house more than 90 percent graduate students. 

Off-campus students heat up local housing market

The gradual outpouring of students into local neighborhoods both fuels competition in the already-hot New Haven housing market and broader demographic shifts in the areas closest to campus. 

Currie, the property manager of Chelsea Company, said that he has seen several New Haven natives choose to live a couple of blocks farther from campus as students have trickled into adjacent neighborhoods like Dwight.

“The average income of a Yale student’s parents is greater than the average income of a New Haven resident, so when looking at what a parent can afford to give their child for living off campus, the deeper pockets can drive the costs higher,” Currie said. “Yale students have a certain budget, and that budget is beyond the range of someone who’s just working in a shop or a restaurant in New Haven. That’s going to push those people further out.”

The average annual income in New Haven is $34,482, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. According to a survey of Yale College’s class of 2028 conducted by the News, approximately 76 percent of students come from households making at least $45,000 per year, with 43 percent of students reporting annual household incomes above $150,000.

However, students’ purchasing power is not the only thing driving prices up, Currie suggested. 

According to Currie, if Yale were to reduce its on-campus housing costs, students, who often do not want to pay more to live off-campus, would be more likely to stay on campus. This decline in demand for off-campus housing could cause prices to fall, at least close to campus, Currie suggested, as the market responds to that shift in demand.

David Schleicher, a professor of property and urban law at Yale Law School, explained that New Haven’s housing market suffers from a simple supply and demand problem. 

“The sense that there is a lack of housing or [that] housing has become either too expensive or hard to find in New Haven — it’s a product of an increase in people wanting it and housing takes a little while to be built,” he said. “So when there’s an increase in demand, you see a spike in prices, or ultimately some kind of limitation on the ability of the market to provide housing.” 

As demand for housing increases, as it has among Yale undergraduates for the past five years, prices will continue to rise until the market responds with more units, Schleicher said.

While the city has a goal to create 10,000 new units in New Haven in the next 10 years, it has also become more restrictive about building new housing, Schleicher said, through more stringent zoning legislation. One ordinance, for example, mandates a minimum quota of affordable units in every new building. According to Schleicher, those types of regulations will ultimately reduce the number of new units that get built.

Currie added that he thinks mandating affordable units will drive up the cost of non-affordable units, so that developers can compensate for the losses incurred by affordable units. 

“If the city had policies that encouraged new construction with fewer hurdles to jump through, that would allow for more housing to be available at the lower end of the price spectrum,” Currie said. 

To Lewis, the number of Yale undergraduates seeking off-campus housing is a “relatively small” portion of the total Yale impact on the local real estate market. However, he said that undergraduates are likely to seek apartments or houses with multiple bedrooms that would usually cater to families or even multiple families. In this way, Lewis said, undergraduates may have a notable impact on the housing market in close proximity to Yale, but he doubted that the impact is felt across the entire city.

Kevin McCarthy, an East Rock resident and former state housing policy analyst, agreed that while the citywide impact of undergraduates living off-campus may be trivial, their presence on the market for large apartments or houses is relevant.

“I suspect it’s fairly common for a group of undergrads to rent a large apartment or a house, and that market is particularly tight,” he said. “If you’re an ordinary family with four kids, finding a three-bedroom or four-bedroom in town is really challenging.”

He added that landlords may be incentivized to acquire housing near Yale or make properties more appealing to students because students tend to be reliable rent payers.

More notable, McCarthy suspects, are the thousands of graduate students who have historically lived off-campus and are often in the position to pay above-market rents. The closing of Helen Hadley Hall last summer, without the creation of any new student housing, has “a negative impact” on the local housing market, he said, “because the students who were moved from Hadley Hall to University Properties essentially pushed out other grad students who would be living in University Properties.”

McCarthy said he voiced his concerns to the Graduate Housing Office, although he added that the people he spoke to did not “seem to care that they’re exacerbating a housing shortage.” The office did not respond to the News’ request for comment. 

Ultimately, it would be in the best interest of both the University and New Haven, McCarthy said, for Yale to reduce the number of students living off campus. 

What can Yale do? 

Eli Sabin ’22 LAW ’26, a New Haven native and alder for parts of Downtown and East Rock, echoed McCarthy’s call for Yale to provide more housing for students, as well as do work to improve the quality of existing units. 

College administrators have been trying to do just that, Lewis said, through recent initiatives such as ensuring that all dormitory common rooms have permanent furniture. 

However, the matter is more complicated than Yale just building more dormitories, Sabin acknowledged. If Yale were to build more student housing, those properties would likely become tax-exempt. Nearly 57 percent of real estate in New Haven — valued at more than $10 billion is tax-exempt already; the University and its hospital system own 43.4 percent of that property for a combined total of more than $4.3 billion tax-exempt realty. 

In contrast, if a new building is built by the private market and occupied by local residents and students alike, then they will all be paying taxes to the city, which would enable New Haven to provide more services to residents.  

According to New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, part of the creation of Yale’s Center for Inclusive Growth is to help New Haven better coordinate with the University as the school’s population grows. While much of the center’s work has focused on creating and supporting small businesses, he said that members of the organization have expressed interest in ensuring that housing becomes an important component of the center’s goals. 

“It’s important that Yale understands that its financial contribution to the city is hugely important to the city’s success,” Elicker told the News. “I think there certainly could be a good role that Yale could play to help support the development of housing.” 

As it stands now, the College is looking to keep more students on campus, through new policies like giving juniors priority over seniors in the housing lottery. It remains to be seen if these moves will help that goal come to fruition. 

“The empty beds speak to Yale’s inability to effectively distribute people to bedrooms and suites across campus, and in an ideal world, there should be no empty beds on campus,” Siesel said. “Yale should take concrete steps to ensure that every single bed on campus is filled.”

Students in their first four semesters of enrollment are required to live on campus unless they are married or are at least 21 years old.

The post A historic number of students live off-campus. The exodus may be straining an already competitive local housing market appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The city was awarded $3.3 million to build a modern food scrap diversion sorting facility at the New Haven Transfer Station, with the intention of creating the infrastructure needed to support a citywide residential curbside composting and food scrap diversion program.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Mayor Justin Elicker said at a press conference announcing the grant’s reception. “One person’s compost could become another person’s opportunity to grow new food. One person’s trash could become another person’s opportunity to have biogas to heat their homes.”

This program, he said, will reduce carbon-polluting methane gas and the amount of trash that goes into landfills, improve local air quality, create “nutrient-rich” compost and capture biogas — a renewable fuel produced by the breakdown of organic matter, such as food waste, manure, and sewage.

According to Mayor Justin Elicker, the cost of processing waste has been rising over time, while the city’s capacity to manage waste has remained stagnant. Five years ago, Connecticut sent about 17 percent of its trash out of state, he said, and it is currently sending 40 percent.

Most of New Haven’s trash, specifically, goes to Bridgeport to be burned, the mayor said, which is “clearly not the best solution for compostables that could be used for such better purposes.”

“Connecticut is facing a solid waste disposal crisis,” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said. “As we have fewer places to dispose of waste here within our state borders, we’re increasingly relying on communities farther to the west of us to accept our garbage, and that comes with uncertainties in the long term as well as the prospect of increasing costs for disposing of waste.”

According to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, his office plans to finish designing the facility this year, to commence construction in 2026. 

Once the new composting facility is built, residents will receive information about composting and disposing of food waste in color-coded bags. The sorting process should be “easy” for residents because food scraps will go in green bags, while trash will go in other bags.

The city plans to provide the green bags for food collection, although it is still deciding whether or not to standardize bags for standard trash. Both will go in the same municipal curbside garbage bin residents already use, and they will be separated upon arrival to the New Haven transfer station.

Trash will continue to be transferred to another facility for processing, and food scraps sorted at New Haven’s new facility will be taken to Southington to be made into biogas or usable compost soil. The cost of transferring compostable material to the Southington facility is about half the cost of disposing of trash, officials said.

Ideally, the collection and sorting process will begin in 2027, Steve Winter, New Haven’s director of climate and sustainability, added.

DEEP tested the co-collection approach of putting both food scraps and garbage in the same curbside container as a part of its three-year composting pilot program in 15 different municipalities. The communities that tested this program were able to reduce the tonnage of trash burned or shipped to another state by 14 percent, Dykes said, while recovering about 20 percent of the organics in their waste.

She expects New Haven to meet or even exceed these figures when it begins its similar program.

“Phoenix-like, we’re rising from the foundation of the former incinerator site, but instead of burning waste, we’re going to be putting in a big conveyor belt that will allow us to pull out those green bags and divert them from the incinerator in Bridgeport,” Winter said. 

This grant is one of nine announced Thursday by DEEP’s Materials Management Infrastructure program, which will provide $15 million total to support Connecticut municipalities and regional organizations for waste management infrastructure.

Dykes described the competition for this grant as “fierce,” with more than 20 municipalities or organizations submitting applications and requesting a total of more than $30 million in funding, which “goes to show” just how many communities are committed to developing sustainability solutions.

“Everyone works really hard to make New Haven a leader in these types of initiatives,” Ward 10 Alder Anna Festa, who chairs the City Services and Environmental Policy Committee, said. “It’s all of our responsibilities to do the right thing for our environment and recycling properly so we can reuse things that we’ve used.”

Coventry, Greenwich, Manchester, Mansfield and Stratford also received money from the Materials Management Infrastructure grant fund, as did the Housatonic Resources Regional Authority, Southeastern Connecticut Regional Resource Recovery Authority and Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments.

New Haven received the third largest grant — Manchester was awarded $4.7 million and the Southeastern Connecticut Regional Resource Recovery Authority got $4.5 million.

Elicker commended state leaders for their commitment to preserving the environment while the country’s “national leadership is actively fighting against any environmental initiative.” Last week, New Haven joined a multi-city lawsuit against the Trump Administration for its termination of environmental grants.

Food scraps make up 20 to 25 percent of the waste stream.

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New Haven United Football Club was officially established last month by Jason Price, a local entrepreneur who owns the arts incubator NXTHVN, as an expansion club in the National Premier Soccer League. Although not considered a professional team because the players won’t be paid, the team will compete in the fourth highest tier in American competitive soccer — a minor league, in other words.

“I purchased it for the love of the game, the love of the athlete and the love of the changing regional soccer ecosystem, but bringing it to a community that I’m involved with,” Price told the News. “I do believe that sport has a way to bring community together [as] something that a lot of communities enjoy rallying around … and since soccer is such a multicultural sport, it brings out a diverse group of New Haven citizens.”

New Haven United will compete in the NPSL’s North Atlantic Conference against at least four other clubs, with the possibility of advancing to a playoff series and even the U.S. Open Cup — a tournament consisting of American teams from four professional leagues and four amateur leagues. The regular season will run from May to July.

According to Price, the roster is made up of aspiring “pre-pro” players from NCAA Division I programs, including a few players from the Yale, Sacred Heart and UConn men’s teams, international players and older players who may have reached the end of their professional careers but can still play at a relatively high level. The NPSL, he said, is “a great pathway” to professional soccer in the United States or abroad.

Conrad Lee ’26, a goalkeeper on Yale’s men’s team, recently signed with the inaugural squad. 

He emphasized how important it is for Division I players like himself to play at a high level over the summer to ensure that they’re prepared for the NCAA’s fall soccer season, though they cannot be paid in a professional capacity in order to maintain NCAA eligibility. During his college summers, Lee has also played for Hartford City FC — another NPSL team — and Ballard FC — a semi-pro USL League Two team based in Seattle.

“I was looking for a place where I can get more minutes and get to play with my [Yale] teammates, as well, because there hasn’t been any kind of amateur setup in New Haven,” Lee said. “I’m lucky enough that they’ve signed me on to their roster for this inaugural season, and I’m super excited.”

Although New Haven hasn’t had a high-level soccer team — or any professional sports team for that matter — in six years, United has an impressive legacy to follow. Elm City Express soccer team won the 2017 NPSL championship in its inaugural season and advanced to the third round of the 2018 U.S. Open Cup. The Express took a hiatus for the 2019 season and was never reestablished.

Considering the legacy of amateur soccer in New Haven and the caliber of the incoming squad, Lee is hoping United will be able to make a run for a championship. 

“Any opportunity that I can get as a player to go and compete for something that means something, not just to the team, but for a place in the community is fantastic,” Lee told the News.

“It’s been very clear from the get-go that this club is going to try to establish that sense of community around the group, and that is awesome to play for when you are a player. When you’re playing for something bigger than yourself, that’s what makes it so much more rewarding.”

Mayor Justin Elicker is looking forward to the club’s first season and its potential impact on the city, and local players, fans and families should be, too, he wrote to the News.

“The arrival of New Haven United is a wonderful opportunity to support and grow the sport of soccer in the Elm City and across the region,” he wrote. “Jason Price has been a strong collaborator with and champion for the city, and we’re confident he’ll build an outstanding soccer program with New Haven United.” 

New Haven United will play its home games in Yale’s Reese Stadium — home to the Bulldogs’ men’s and women’s soccer and lacrosse teams. 

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The largest grant — $6,121,390 — went to the Greater Dwight Development Corporation for the development of two new affordable housing complexes with 11 affordable units and community space for local nonprofits in the Dwight neighborhood. GDDC won the funding on its fifth application, which Mayor Justin Elicker said showed the organization’s commitment to housing affordability in a press conference.

“This is going to help us really have a further impact in the community and really push forward our core values of community service, public service, community risk reduction, upward mobility, recruitment and retention, especially impacting our youth in the city,” Josh Antrum, president of the Firebirds Society of Greater New Haven, one of the community organizations that works with GDDC, said.

United Way of Greater New Haven also received $2 million, which it will use to support a mixed-income housing project on the corner of Chapel and State streets downtown. 

60 of the 76 units at the downtown development will be affordable, with 46 of these being fully subsidized, according to Dara Kovel, CEO of Beacon Communities, a real estate firm developing the housing project. Beacon Communities is partnering with Columbus House, a New Haven nonprofit that provides shelter and services to homeless residents, and United Way to designate 16 units as supportive housing, meaning they will serve people experiencing homelessness.

Rather than developing a new building from the ground up, Beacon Communities will convert a historic building that has been used as office space into apartments, and 20,000 square feet on the bottom floor will be designated for new businesses

“We know that there are too many people in our city and in our region who are struggling to make ends meet, and we also know that housing is the biggest expense that people have in their family budgets,” Jennifer Heath, president and CEO of United Way of Greater New Haven, said. “So when we saw an opportunity to support the creation of more affordable housing, including deeply affordable housing, we knew this was a partnership that we had to be a part of.”

The Mary Wade Foundation was awarded $700,000 to improve the safety and living conditions of its senior living home, while Mount Hope Temple was allocated $250,000 to use for its warming center and food pantry.

The Community Investment Fund grants come amid a deluge of cuts to federal funding, which has left the futures of many New Haven programs uncertain.

“The CIF process has allowed the not-for-profits and the boots on the ground that do the work every day to be recognized both with resources and now financially, and that’s so important,” New Haven state representative Al Paolillo (D-97) said. “The organizations serve all of our communities and all of the people we live next to … and that are the most vulnerable.”

The fund, chaired by New Haven Senator Martin Looney, was established in 2021 to provide up to $875 million over the course of several years to eligible municipalities, nonprofit organizations and community development corporations located in “historically underserved communities across Connecticut.”
In September, New Haven received $5.48 million from the Community Investment Fund for a roadway and streetscape project, renovations to a rehabilitation center, a commercial kitchen and food business incubator, Goodwill research and city research on the use of accessory dwelling units.

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According to the lawsuit, which also names Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Environmental Protection Agency and other members of the Trump administration as defendants, New Haven has received at least three grants totaling more than $30 million from the Environmental Protection Agency in the last year through the Inflation Reduction Act. Since February, however, the city has been unable to consistently access the funds, which finance salaries and operations that are already ongoing, the complaint says.

“It is wrong for cities and organizations to have to be left holding the bank when we have a federal government that, with a binding partnership, is turning their back on our cities,” Mayor Justin Elicker said in a press conference announcing New Haven’s participation in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday — in federal court in Charleston, South Carolina — by New Haven, Baltimore, Columbus, Madison, Nashville, San Diego and eleven nonprofit organizations.

It continues Elicker’s aggressive posture toward Trump, following a February lawsuit filed against the Trump administration’s policies toward sanctuary cities, as well as the city’s signing of an amicus brief supporting lawsuits against cuts to federal research funding.

New Haven was again represented in the new lawsuit by Public Rights Project, a California-based legal organization that has assisted liberal state and local governments in taking on the Trump administration.

In both lawsuits New Haven has joined against recent federal actions, it has been the only New England city among the plaintiffs. Elicker told the News last month that he has tried to rally more mayors to challenge Trump in court, but that many have instead sought to avoid drawing the president’s ire. There is no indication to date that New Haven’s legal moves against the federal government have yielded any adverse impacts or targeting.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin presented the grant freeze as a crackdown on wasteful spending, a move to better steward taxpayer money, promising that his agency would not be “a frivolous spender in the name of ‘climate equity.’”

“The days of throwing gold bars off the Titanic are over. The well documented incidents of misconduct, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud raise significant concerns and pose unacceptable risk,” Zeldin said. He referred a few examples of the “misconduct” to EPA Acting Inspector General Nicole Murley, although none of the examples pointed to New Haven specifically. 

New Haven Director of Climate and Sustainability Steve Winter countered, at the City Hall press conference, that the funds are strictly regulated.

Recent executive orders from Trump, Elicker said, “lawfully defy congressional mandates by freezing, disrupting, and terminating funds that Congress has directed and appropriated to specific grant programs.” 

Many of these grants, the mayor explained, are “reimbursable,” meaning that New Haven spends funds for grant-approved projects with the expectation that it will be reimbursed by the federal government. Now that these funds are currently suspended, the city is in an “impossible situation” because it does not know whether it would get reimbursed should it continue its operations that rely on federal grant financing.

In July 2024, the city was awarded $1 million to help residents switch from heating oil to heat pumps and from gas stoves to induction stoves, to reduce heating costs and air pollution. 

Winter, also a state representative, explained that the city has already begun the project. For now, he explained, the city can keep directing residents to state energy efficiency programs, but it can no longer promise to provide heat pumps or induction stoves while the grant funds are in limbo.

Community Action Agency of New Haven, one of the organizations conducted by the city for the project, has already hired a full-time staffer to help with the implementation of this program, who will have to be laid off if grant funding remains suspended, the lawsuit says. Other partner organizations have billed New Haven for project-related staff time, but without reimbursement, the city cannot continue covering these costs unless funding is unfrozen.

Also in July 2024, New Haven received $9.5 million to fund a shared geothermal heat pump system for Union Train Station and a nearby 1000-unit mixed-income New Haven Housing Authority development. This heat system would provide the lowest possible cost for heating and cooling for both buildings, while also reducing their air pollution and carbon emissions, Winter said.

While the funds for that grant were open as of Thursday’s press conference, Winter explained that they had been frequently “frozen and unfrozen,” making the city’s ability to access the money in the future uncertain. Before moving forward with a design contract with an engineering firm, New Haven wants to be certain that it will be able to receive reimbursement from the federal government.

Most recently, in January, New Haven received $20 million to “improve climate resiliency and quality of life for residents of 14 disadvantaged neighborhoods.” 

The city planned to use this funding to address climate issues, as well as help residents access affordable housing and public transportation and reduce their energy bills. Winter added that funds would also go towards bike lane improvements and community gardens.

“To have that funding inaccessible as we want to begin work on that whole menu of projects really hamstrings us,” Winter said. “We really can’t get started with that work and help our residents in a meaningful way on a day-to-day basis if we don’t have certainty that we can hire people to get this project off the ground.”

Last week’s lawsuit came days after Elicker, Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Richard Blumenthal denounced the Trump administration’s termination of a $500,000 EPA grant to a charter school in New Haven, resulting in immediate loss of employment for over 70 local youth participating in the workforce development program and school staff.

“I was disheartened and thrown off by the sudden cuts in the funding,” Suprya Sarkar, a high school student activist in New Haven Climate Movement, wrote to the News. “The city has been working so hard to implement programs, infrastructures, and community networks that focus on sustainability, so pausing these outlets for change is harmful for the community as a whole.”

Sarkar is grateful that local governments are making an effort to protect citizens from climate change and feels that New Haven is showing that it does not want to regress in combating climate issues. 

EPA administrator Zeldin terminated $20 billion in grant agreements on March 11, 2025.

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The cities filed an amicus brief in support of lawsuits filed by 22 states and associations of medical schools, hospitals and universities against recent cuts to federal research funding. On Feb. 7, the National Institutes of Health announced that scientific and medical institutions would be losing significant amounts of federal research funding. 

Like many of the other cities included in the brief, New Haven is home to universities and hospitals that employ thousands of researchers whose work and jobs depend on federal dollars. The brief explained how these cuts would negatively affect cities across the country.

“New Haven is one the nation’s leading hubs for medical and scientific research. From bioscience to life science to quantum, these industries represent thousands of local jobs and millions of dollars to our local economy,” Mayor Justin Elicker said in a press release. “But, more importantly, this funding is supporting cutting-edge, lifesaving work that is identifying new medical treatments, curing chronic diseases, and advancing scientific discoveries that improve the everyday lives and wellbeing of our residents.”

The NIH’s Feb. 7 decision caps reimbursements for indirect costs, such as lab maintenance, equipment and administrative support, at 15 percent, a significant reduction from Yale’s previous reimbursement rate of 69.7 percent. This decision “would have severe and long-term impacts on our jurisdictions,” the amicus brief reads.

In many of the cities that joined the amicus brief, the research institutions most likely to be harmed are “at the center of bigger biotech and science-based economic hubs,” meaning that the loss of funds could cause cities’ economic systems “to degrade.” 

Yale submitted “a declaration of support” for the brief explaining that research at Yale and other Connecticut institutions benefits patients in New Haven and across the state and generates jobs benefiting the local and state economy.

The brief argues that the NIH’s decision to cut funding is “arbitrary and capricious,” explaining that the NIH failed to consider the “substantial reliance interests” of universities, hospitals and other recipients of indirect cost funding. 

The NIH’s cuts to reimbursement rates were temporarily blocked nationwide by a federal court after 22 states filed a lawsuit against the policy change. 

The mayors’ Thursday brief advocated that the temporary restraining order against the Trump administration “be extended in duration and given nationwide effect.” On Friday, Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts extended the order until she decides on a more permanent ruling.

“We join with cities across the country — in red states, purple states and blue states — to stop this illegal action that will cause layoffs, lab closures and undermine scientific progress in American cities,” said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu — whose jurisdiction spearheaded the brief.

The amicus brief was led by the City of Boston, Massachusetts; the City of Cleveland, Ohio; the Mayor of Gainesville, Florida; the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee; and the Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Two weeks earlier, New Haven Police Sergeant Chris Alvarado flagged break-ins into unoccupied houses at a Fair Haven Community Management Team meeting. Alvarado, who is Fair Haven’s district manager, explained that the neighborhood had been troubled by many of these break-ins in recent months.

Officer Christian Bruckhart, a spokesperson for the New Haven Police Department, described the break-ins as an “endemic” issue in the city.

“These are not problems where we want to have people arrested and put away for the rest of their life,” Bruckhart said. “[But] some of these people [are] in the throes of addiction. They get out and they’re immediately going back to the same thing.”

The break-ins generally fall into two categories, according to Alvarado. The first is homeless people seeking shelter from the cold in unoccupied houses, while the second group is made up of people hoping to steal storm grates, water pipes or anything else that can be sold as scrap metal.

The main targets of these break-ins are foreclosed homes, houses under construction and empty properties owned by the Livable City Initiative, New Haven’s housing enforcement agency, according to Bruckhart.

Alvarado said he and other NHPD district managers are in frequent contact with LCI officials about unoccupied properties that could be impacted by break-ins. LCI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Bruckhart and Alvarado noted that the break-ins are largely perpetuated by a handful of individuals. One repeat offender they pointed to has been arrested for four break-ins in the past three months, most recently on Feb. 1 and 9. When NHPD officers extended city-run social services to the offender, he declined the offer, according to Alvarado.

Since November, the NHPD has used an online portal called Familiar Faces to keep track of people who are repeatedly committing quality-of-life offenses. The portal is still in its trial phase, according to Alvarado, but he hopes the NHPD will soon collaborate with city and court officials to get repeat offenders court-mandated treatment.

“This isn’t for first-time offenders — [it’s for] the repeat offenders … there’s really no other means for them to get better if they’re refusing services and they’re not doing anything to better themselves,” Alvarado said. “At the end of the day, the goal here is to get help. It’s not just to punish people.”

At the board meeting on Tuesday afternoon, Elm City Communities authorized a contract with Spark Security to hire unarmed security guards for a number of their properties. The contract is only for a year, with no opportunity to renew, giving Elm City Communities time to try to address the root of home break-ins.

The city’s crisis support team said they have not received reports of homeless individuals breaking into homes, according to Deborah Cox, who works at New Haven’s Continuum of Care, which manages COMPASS. 

She explained that NHPD would have contacted COMPASS, which offers crisis support to those struggling with mental health or substance abuse, if they thought individuals breaking into homes could particularly benefit from COMPASS’s services, such as getting connected to treatment or therapy. Otherwise, individuals looking for shelter would be directed to one of New Haven’s warming centers or homeless shelters.

The next Elm City Communities board meeting will be Tuesday, March 18. 

Sabrina Thaler contributed reporting.

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Community land trusts are nonprofit corporations typically established by groups that share ownership of property for the sake of creating sustainable models of housing that remain affordable for long periods of time, often spanning multiple generations.

In New Haven, where many apartment complexes are owned by megalandlords with thousands of units, Luke Melonakos-Harrion, the vice president of CTTU, expects CLTs to help diminish price gouging.

“This is the kind of intervention that, if operated at scale, would impact the overall cost of housing in New Haven by just making it a less fertile ground for speculative investors that basically treat the housing in this city as their own personal stock market that booms and busts and mostly just benefits them and not New Haven residents,” Melonakos-Harrison told the News.

Over the last year, CTTU has been working towards establishing its own community land trust and expects to file its articles of incorporation and bylaws within the next few months. However, Peter Fousek, the lead organizer of the union’s land trust efforts, expects that it will be much longer until a community land trust has properties under its ownership.

For Fousek, the CLT model provides an opportunity to establish housing that is affordable for people with low or moderate income. The other purpose, he said, would be to provide training and education around resident self-governance and sustainable collective ownership.

The main selling point is the opportunity to preserve affordability for long periods of time, often by granting 99-year leases — essentially home ownership — to members of the CLT who can pass that lease to future generations.

Julius Kimbrough, the executive director of Crescent City Community Land Trust in New Orleans, said that CLTs assisted members of the land trust find “permanent affordability” in a city facing a housing affordability crisis. An added benefit, he explained, is their ability to promote stability and community culture, while providing that community its own asset that will increase in value over time.

According to estimates by the International Center for Community Land Trusts, the United States currently has 310 community land trusts. For example, in 2020, the East Harlem El Barrio Community Land Trust purchased four deteriorating apartment buildings from New York City for one dollar each. Renovating the buildings’ 38 units into tenant-managed, permanently affordable housing cost approximately $13 million, funded through loans from a nonprofit affordable housing lender and the city’s Housing and Preservation Department.

Although establishing the CLT and its bylaws is fairly straightforward, Fousek expects the CTTU to face challenges acquiring properties.

“Given that this is a tenant union community land trust, the properties that we’re interested in acquiring are properties that our members already live in and that they’re already organized in,” Fousek explained. “Our organized chapter members are interested in buying with their neighbors to become their own landlords.”

But before they can do that, they will have to undergo “an uphill battle” to gather enough capital and acquire subsidized loan packages to make viable offers on the buildings that they live in. CTTU, for example, could acquire loans from the State Housing Finance Authority and Department of Housing or gather donations from local community foundations.

Although he sees community land trusts as a good strategy to secure housing affordability, Fousek is resolute that policymakers and landlords have their own responsibility to help resolve housing affordability crises — a responsibility that organized tenants unions can aim to enforce. 

“If we can’t organize the collective working class power to actually hold power accountable, we’re never going to solve the crisis of housing and homelessness that we are facing today,” he said.

The first community land trust was established in 1969.

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