The New Haven Green, a seventeenth-century park, is bordered on one side by courthouses and modest government offices, including the distinctive striped façade of New Haven’s city hall. On the opposite side are the lavish gothic buildings of Yale, the Ivy League institution with an endowment of forty billion dollars. Balancing the interests of both the town and the university falls in large part to New Haven’s Board of Alders, a council of thirty members. The board assembles twice a month, and typically there are many more alders in attendance than members of the public. But at a meeting in early February, on the second floor of city hall, the alders were outnumbered. The crowd crammed into the pews and stood along the back wall to hear the mayor, Justin Elicker, give his annual State of the City address.
Elicker, a spindly Yale alum in a midnight-blue suit, proclaimed that New Haven, having survived the pandemic downturn and a sixty-six-million-dollar budget deficit, was “outperforming the state at large and every other major city.” The recovery was real, though the median household still had an income of about forty-nine thousand dollars, and one in four residents lived at or below the federal poverty level. Yale, the city’s largest landowner, is a nonprofit and thus exempt from paying taxes on school property. (The total tax break for Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital would cover most of the city’s education budget.) In 1990, the university started to make an annual voluntary payment, usually a symbolic fraction of what it would otherwise owe. Elicker explained that things were beginning to change. In 2022, “we nearly doubled Yale University’s annual voluntary contribution—from thirteen million to twenty-three million,” he said. One cause, according to the mayor? “Decades of grassroots organizing by Unite Here.”
Unite Here is a North American labor union, with roots in the garment and hotel trades, that’s known for its willingness to…
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