In the early morning hours on April 15, after we gathered our belongings and sleepily stepped outside onto the streets across this city, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker ordered warming center staff to lock the doors and those of us who use them to disappear.
With prolonged exposure to high and low temperatures throughout the year, impossibly long waiting lists for shelter beds, and already limited housing options which preclude us from accessing them because of our relationship status, health conditions and pets, we have a resounding question to ask. Where then shall we go?
Through the 2025 People’s Budget, Unhoused Activists Community Team members have called on the Elicker administration and local Board of Alders to fully fund the overnight warming and cooling centers throughout the year until a long term, humane and dignified solution can be adopted to ensure everyone who wants to can be sheltered in New Haven.
We are your neighbors, friends, and family. We serve your coffee, cook your food, care for your houses, repair your cars, and contribute to this city in a variety of ways, but affordability has excluded us from accessing traditional homes like you.
The mayor’s logic is filled with more potholes than the ones he’s left in the streets of New Haven. Even as he shutters the warming centers, if we set up tents and tarps in discrete locations to better protect ourselves and our few belongings, law enforcement officials are rapidly deployed to sweep and seize what little we have. Should we be harassed and criminalized simply because we are unsheltered?
Neighbors like you can help by ensuring civic solution systems like “See, Click, Fix” and Call211 are used to report downed stop signs and broken street lamps not our critical camp sites and temporarily unattended carts stationed next to park benches. Better yet, flood the mayor’s phone and email with demands for more publicly accessible storage and bathrooms!
With these vital emergency resources cut off, hundreds of us have no where else to go. When warming centers are shut down, they don’t just turn off the heat—they turn away human beings and sentence us to uncertainty, instability, and peril.
While a President in Washington D.C. and a mayor in New Haven might endorse extrajudicial policies which attempt to disappear people they find personally and politically abhorrent, we believe the real residents of this city and state stand for more and pride ourselves on values of inclusion, community solidarity, mutuality, and economic justice.
Many of our state representatives agree and are fighting to pass legislation like House Bill 7033, an initiative Justin Elicker has testified against, which would decriminalize homelessness and necessary life-sustaining activities like seeking temporary refuge in an unobtrusive way on public lands.
Show your support and tell your politicians that you believe in humane policies, like HB 7033, which make our communities safer for all of our neighbors.
It’s time for community driven solutions to this collective housing crisis. We need to start by keeping the warming centers open year-round, constructing publicly available bathrooms in highly accessible areas, and decriminalizing our right to peacefully exist and seek refuge outside when no other options are available to us. Until that happens, we’re not solving homelessness—we’re just hiding it.
Just as the need for shelter doesn’t change with the temperature and the rain and wind don’t yield because the calendar says it’s spring, the struggle of being unhoused doesn’t stop just because the mayor and his budget say it should.
The time for common sense, compassion, and solidarity is not seasonal. It’s always, and it’s now. The emergency is tonight.
Sean Gargamelli-McCreight submitted this on behalf of himself and co-authors, the Unhoused Activists Community Team (U-ACT), New Haven.