Tom’s Vision
New Haven is a city with so much potential, but not enough opportunity.
- We only have two major employers – Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital
- We have a housing crisis, and property taxes have increased by 40% in our poorest neighborhoods
- We are greatly in need of an increased tax base and increased revenue for our city
- We are failing our largely Black and Hispanic public school population
- We don’t feel safe in our streets
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can leverage our incredible assets to develop our city, attract employers, and create wealth in Black and Hispanic communities by growing and fostering small businesses. We can use the immense human capital within our city to have a stellar public school system once again. And we can make New Haven affordable, safe, and inclusive for people of every neighborhood.
Issues
Our school system had the worst chronic absenteeism of any city in Connecticut last year, and is in desperate need of teachers. Parents are not being engaged, and only 8 out of 44 of our schools have parent associations.
We must do better. We need a Mayor who will be hands-on with education, ensuring that district leadership has the rigor, accountability, and transparency that our families deserve. We can enact smart and proven policies to help train and recruit a more diverse teaching workforce, incentivize the best teachers to teach in our worst performing schools, ensure every student is engaged, and expose students to careers in growing technology industries.
So many of our residents do not feel safe walking outside at night. Crime has increased under our current administration, and we are not seeing the effective gun violence measures that New Haven needs and deserves being implemented.
We must do better. We can go beyond conventional approaches to crime by investing in preventive measures to disrupt cycles of violence before they occur, and strengthening our approach for getting illegal guns off of the streets.
Our city faces a housing crisis. Rents are skyrocketing, and property taxes have increased by 40% in our three poorest neighborhoods - Newhallville, Fair Haven, and the Hill - destabilizing both homeowners and renters.
We must do better. To immediately address this destabization, Tom will freeze property taxes. We must establish rent stabilization, create incentives to encourage more owner-occupied housing purchases, and update our zoning code to make new housing more easy affordable to create.
The most extreme racial disparity in New Haven is that of Black business ownership - Black residents are 22x less likely to own a business than white residents. Fueled by the history of redlining and discrimination, our majority-Black and -Hispanic commercial corridors need renewed investment, and we must strive to address the racial disparities that still plague our city.
Tom is the only mayoral candidate with a plan to economically develop New Haven - and grow our city’s wealth and employment opportunities in a way that benefits those who need it the most. We want to establish a community-based business development initiative, working with commercial corridors like Dixwell Avenue and Grand Avenue while providing needed support to minority entrepreneurs to build centers of economic and cultural excellence in our city.
New Haven needs jobs - and Tom has the experience attracting employers, creating jobs, and economically developing cities like New Haven.