by Laura Glesby
City Coordinator for Homelessness Velma George-James couldn’t stop a nationwide tide of homelessness from rising in New Haven. But she could make sure that people without a place to live had access to a warm shower.
“Sometimes you lose all hope, but something about that water being splashed on your face… it helps you to open up, to feel like a person again,” said George-James.
As George-James prepares to retire next week, she reflected on the meaning of “something as simple as a shower” in the face of a vast housing crisis — one of many immediate and often-overlooked needs that she sought to meet during her time at City Hall.
Over her ten years at the helm of the city’s Office of Housing and Homelessness Services, George-James bumped up again and again against a housing scarcity that won’t go away overnight.
So without losing an underlying conviction that “the key to homelessness is housing,” George-James increased city attention to the short-term needs of community members facing long-term hardship.
One example of that work is the mobile shower van Power in a Shower, which George-James worked to bring to New Haven in 2022. Now, community members can access free showers at four locations across the city, three days a week.
“When people go in and they come out, oh man, you see a big difference in their disposition,” George-James said.
A shower might last 10 minutes, but “it helps them to face another day,” George-James said. “You gotta get to that tomorrow.”
The Office of Housing and Homelessness Services was a one-person office when George-James was first appointed to the role in 2016. The office had largely operated as a funder of nonprofit agencies, according to George-James, who said she came with a goal of “making the city a part of building the system.”
Liberty Community Services Program Manager Sylvia Moscariello described a stronger capacity for collaboration under George-James’ leadership. “The boundaries between the agencies kind of were erased,” she said. “We are a system of care together. We meet regularly as a team.”
George-James “became a glue,” she added.
Moscariello worked with George-James to build out the city’s system of “Navigation Hubs” in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic: a set of seven places in the city, including at Liberty, where anyone can walk in and spend time for various portions of the day. Like Power in a Shower, the hubs aim to meet the urgent, basic needs of people living on the streets.
A community member can seek out longer-term housing and case management support at the Navigation Hubs, but they can also receive “very practical, immediate responses” to the day-to-day challenges of living on the street, said Moscariello. They can find a snack to eat, a bathroom to use, relief from the stormy weather, an outlet to charge their phone, a place to set down their belongings for a moment, and depending on the location, a laundry machine or an onsite medical provider. They can’t bring in drugs, but they don’t have to be sober in order to walk through the doors. “Sometimes they may just need to just sit down for a little bit,” George-James said. The hubs provided a network of places for people to simply be, without facing accusations of loitering.
“There’s no other place to get that,” said Moscariello, who commended George-James for “recognizing that people need their basic needs met while they are in such a deep crisis. Living an unsheltered life is a deep crisis.”
Meeting those short-term needs, George-James said, “helps you get to the long-term
Velma George-James at Fepo Coffee on Tuesday. (Laura Glesby photo)
George-James’ legacy also includes stewarding the city’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the realm of homeless services. As public health experts urged the public to “social distance” and stay home, those who did not have a home to stay in faced a particular risk of exposure to the disease. George-James leveraged relationships with local hotels to “de-densify” congregate shelters across the city at a time when many hotels had shut down. She worked with social service providers to stay open on the front lines of a frightening public health crisis. “With the work that we’ve been able to do, I could not have done it without the awesome partners that we have in this city,” said George-James. “They are the life’s blood of this work.”
As the widespread urgency of the pandemic began to subside, George-James also played a key role in stewarding the city’s purchase of the former Days Inn hotel at 270 Foxon Blvd., partnering with Continuum of Care to found New Haven’s first non-congregate shelter.
George-James embedded field outreach and one-on-one assistance into her office’s day-to-day work. She said she often found herself mediating between people sleeping on the streets and neighbors unhappy about the presence of encampments near their homes. With hundreds of people now on the shelter wait list, there’s no designated space in warmer months that can accommodate a rising group of people without shelter.
George-James described often advocating with neighbors for delaying encampment evictions, because “when we break up encampments,” case workers often lose touch with encampment residents. “If you’re close to housing them, it delays their process,” she said.
At the same time, she and other city officials were firm about not allowing people to use kerosene heaters and other potential sources of an uncontrolled fire. In the cold, she said, “we had five warming centers open this past winter… Are they ideal? No. But it basically helps keep people safe and out of the elements while we try to work out actual housing,” George-James said.
On top of street outreach, George-James said, her office receives daily requests for help with everything from finding housing to securing a short-term hotel to resolving a dispute between a client and a nonprofit provider. She was eventually able to double the size of the office with the addition of Community Outreach Worker Shaunette James in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“It’s gonna be hard for us to find a replacement that can do close to as good a job” as George-James, said Mayor Justin Elicker.
“She’s always the integrity in the room making sure we’re putting compassion to the forefront of our decisions that impacts people in our community,” he said.
In an email, DESK Executive Director Steve Werlin wrote that George-James has “always been a strong advocate for critical, City-funded, basic needs services in New Haven, and a passionate public servant. She’s a connector who knows everyone, and believes deeply in the power of teamwork and cooperation.” He wrote that “even in instances when she and I didn’t see eye-to-eye, Velma always approached disagreements with grace and openness, eager to understand others’ perspectives and, whenever possible, respond accordingly.”
George-James has worked at the city for 28 years in total. She spent the first 18 of those years as a Neighborhood Specialist with the Livable City Initiative, the city’s anti-blight agency, identifying development and revitalization goals in Dixwell, Newhallville, and the Hill. She can now walk by blocks in the city that have born out those goals, from a Newhallville community garden greenhouse to a row of affordable homes by Rosette Street. Prior to joining City Hall, she worked in local nonprofits including Christian Community Action and the Connecticut Mental Health Center, providing both homeless services and mental health support.
Her last day at City Hall is April 21, and her formal date of retirement is April 25. She plans to revitalize the girls’ mentorship program she founded, the Daughters of Hope, in partnership with her church community. And she’ll be moving with her husband to the Caribbean, where they plan to spend part of each year going forward, while returning to the New Haven area periodically. (George-James was born in the Virgin Islands, where her mother still lives.)
She has long-term dreams, but for her first day of retirement, she has a smaller goal. “Oh my goodness,” she said, “I’m gonna sleep in… I’m just gonna sleep until I’m ready to get up.”