by Dereen Shirnekhi The New Haven independent
Dominique Daniels on the steps of City Hall: Where the bag at?
Dominique Daniels and his fellow unhoused activists had a resounding message for the city Wednesday morning, as they rallied in the cold rain against the closure of the city’s warming centers for the season: “There’s nowhere to go.”
Daniels was one of around 30 people to rally on the steps of City Hall at a demonstration held by the Unhoused Activist Community Team (U-ACT). The activists had started the day with breakfast at Varick Church on Dixwell Avenue, which closed as a warming center earlier in the day. They then marched downtown to City Hall, and then held a supply drive afterward on the Green.
Funding for the city’s other remaining emergency warming center, the 180 Center on East Street, was extended so that it will remain open through April 30. The city’s warming centers opened in November and peaked at a total of six, according to Mayor Justin Elicker.
“I’m always worried, where am I going to sleep at night?” Daniels told the crowd.
He described people being cruel to him for his sexuality, and for being homeless. “Do you know how embarrassing, how lonely, how incompetent I feel?” In reality, as a queer and Afro-Latino person, “I just want respect.”
The last time Daniels had his name on an apartment lease, it was about ten years ago, on the west side of town. Daniels has been organizing with U-ACT for about a year, and said that doing so while being unhoused has shown him “the lack of funds, the lack of compassion.”
The pride center’s closing, Daniels said, was hard, as it was a place for unhoused people to hang out for the day. (Fortunately, the pride center will be opening back up in May.)
Daniels called on the city to do more to support its unhoused residents and provide places for them to go: “Where the bag at?” he asked. “Where is the money?”
Roosevelt Watkins said that as he walked to City Hall from Varick on Wednesday morning, “what I didn’t see is people carrying a lot of hope.”
The unhoused, he said, were worse off than “the dog you left at home — since it was raining, you brought the dog inside.”
“Imagine if you didn’t know where you would be sleeping,” Watkins said.
U-ACT organizer Strongbow Lone Eagle said that while the city opens warming centers for the cold, that’s not enough. “What about the heat? People can die from heat exhaustion. Where is some place you get out of the rain?”
This summer, the libraries, which double as cooling centers, are “going to be bombarded,” he said.
Lone Eagle praised the work of U-ACT, Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, and Fellowship Place. “What is [Mayor Justin] Elicker gonna do now?” he asked. “What has he been doing?”
Alberto Pablo, who has lived in New Haven since he moved from the Philippines in elementary school, has been homeless since 2019. Wednesday’s rally was the third U-ACT event that he has been to — at the encouragement of Jamilia James, who runs a weekly program for the unhoused at Ives Main Library on Thursdays called “90 Days To GOD.” James also performs gospel music under the name 4EVA.
Pablo said he has a disability. “I get lost a lot,” he said, and he can get nervous around people. It makes it hard to get a job, though he’s looking for one.
James, who said she has been supporting the homeless her whole life, said that mental health support is crucial for unhoused people. Even if they’re provided an apartment, she said, “they’re gonna end up homeless again because you didn’t walk with them all the way.”
Emcee Sean Gargamelli-McCreight led the group in singing:
The emergency’s tonight
Now we’re fighting for our lives
No one’s free
‘Til everyone’s alright