New Haven resident Strongbow Lone Eagle spent the Fourth of July weekend seeking shade and water. Unhoused for nearly two years, Lone Eagle is an advocate for the homeless community and works with the Unhoused Activist Community Team (UACT).
Lone Eagle said the city didn’t do enough to support residents without air conditioning during the weekend’s heat wave.
On Friday and Saturday, both days with “feels-like” temperatures above 100 degrees, the city had a single cooling center open – a meeting room in a city building at 200 Orange St.
“The city, the police were just sitting in their parked cars on the Green,” Lone Eagle said. “[They] just stayed in the car all day, didn't mention any people sitting around in the shade, that 200 Orange Street was open. It was very, very poorly done, and it was basically only on the internet people would find out about it.”
At the urging of unhoused advocates, New Haven kept city hall on Church Street open for extended hours during the weekend.
Initially, there were no cooling center plans aside from the Orange Street meeting room open on July 3, according to UACT’s Sean Gargamelli-McCreight.
“There was no plan in place until people on the front lines sort of said this is a problem, their health is going to be affected, and we know what the risks are associated with prolonged exposure to these high heats,” Gargamelli-McCreight said.
New Haven’s libraries often act as cooling centers, but they were closed Friday and Saturday for the holiday as staffing on the holiday presented an issue, Mayor Justin Elicker said.
Keeping city hall open late was a direct response to advocates, Elicker said.
“We had a conversation with them and thought they had good feedback, and we tweaked the plan because of it,” Elicker said. “Because of the way the building's laid out, you need a lot of staff to come in, and it's just not practical, given the relatively low level of need.”
Advocates say the lack of cooling centers is the latest example of how New Haven officials feel about homeless residents.
“Their lack of priorities demonstrate that unhoused residents in the city of New Haven are not something that they necessarily care about,” Gargamelli-McCreight said. “It definitely gives an indication of where their priorities lie, and it doesn't seem to be with the health and well-being of all residents in this city.”
Lone Eagle wants city officials to be more prepared about the risks of heat exposure and how to better care for residents during heat waves.
“They need some kind of training as far as extreme heat and extreme cold weather protocols,” Lone Eagle said.
Elicker said the advocates that took issue with the city’s heat response represent a small portion of New Haven residents. About a dozen people visited the city’s cooling centers on Friday and Saturday.
The governor’s extreme heat protocol does not require Connecticut towns and cities to set up cooling centers during heat waves, Elicker said.
“If that was actually a requirement, we'd see a lot of our surrounding towns do that, and they don't really do that,” Elicker said. “It's an important detail that we work really hard as a city proactively to do what we can to support people and keep people safe.”
