The New Haven Green, a seventeenth-century park, is bordered on one side by courthouses and modest government offices, including the distinctive striped façade of New Haven’s city hall. On the opposite side are the lavish gothic buildings of Yale, the Ivy League institution with an endowment of forty billion dollars. Balancing the interests of both the town and the university falls in large part to New Haven’s Board of Alders, a council of thirty members. The board assembles twice a month, and typically there are many more alders in attendance than members of the public. But at a meeting in early February, on the second floor of city hall, the alders were outnumbered. The crowd crammed into the pews and stood along the back wall to hear the mayor, Justin Elicker, give his annual State of the City address.
Elicker, a spindly Yale alum in a midnight-blue suit, proclaimed that New Haven, having survived the pandemic downturn and a sixty-six-million-dollar budget deficit, was “outperforming the state at large and every other major city.” The recovery was real, though the median household still had an income of about forty-nine thousand dollars, and one in four residents lived at or below the federal poverty level. Yale, the city’s largest landowner, is a nonprofit and thus exempt from paying taxes on school property. (The total tax break for Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital would cover most of the city’s education budget.) In 1990, the university started to make an annual voluntary payment, usually a symbolic fraction of what it would otherwise owe. Elicker explained that things were beginning to change. In 2022, “we nearly doubled Yale University’s annual voluntary contribution—from thirteen million to twenty-three million,” he said. One cause, according to the mayor? “Decades of grassroots organizing by Unite Here.”
Unite Here is a North American labor union, with roots in the garment and hotel trades, that’s known for its willingness to strike. Its divisions in New Haven have grown to encompass some eight thousand people who work at Yale. The earliest effort began in 1941, with Local 35, when mechanics in the campus power plant organized and later fought to bring in custodial and dining-hall workers. In 1984, the union struck for ten weeks to support receptionists, librarians, and laboratory researchers in their formation of Local 34. Most recently, after several failed attempts stretching across more than three decades, graduate-student teachers finally won their own union, Local 33.
The mayor credited the unions for holding the university accountable, but the gesture was also politically expedient: the Board of Alders is dominated by members or allies of Unite Here. In a 2011 campaign nicknamed Aldermania, the unions ran a slate of candidates to win a majority on the Board. The idea was to bring working-class residents into government and turn the board into more than a rubber-stamping mechanism for the mayor. Weeks of door-knocking during the sticky summer heat paid off: seventeen of eighteen candidates endorsed by the union won their elections. They were Black and white and Latino; there was a Yale janitor, a Yale library assistant, and a Yale undergraduate. The majority has held ever since.
Tyisha Walker-Myers, who became an alder in the 2011 election, is now in her fourth term as president of the board. During the State of the City address, she sat to the right of Elicker, wearing glasses and long braids. She grew up in West River, a predominantly Black neighborhood, as factories in the area were shrivelling. She attended Albertus Magnus College, a local Roman Catholic university in New Haven, but felt out of place—“I was the only minority”—and left without a degree. In 1998, she got a job in a dining hall at Yale, her first real experience of the university beyond the monied shadow that it cast over her home town. “If you came on campus and weren’t supposed to be there, you were going to be chased out by security,” she recalled. She became a shop steward in Local 35, then took a full-time job at the union. Her jump into local politics—the alder gig was technically part time and came with a tiny stipend—still felt like an odd fit. “People believe politics is crooked,” she said. “I’m not a politician because I don’t lie. I’m very straightforward.”
Across the country, Unite Here invests heavily in electoral politics. One of its locals, the Culinary Union, in Las Vegas, has played a big role in keeping Nevada blue. In California, María Elena Durazo, a former Unite Here organizer, is a powerful member of the California Senate and has served as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. But it is in New Haven that the union has come closest to functioning like an actual political party. The Yale locals’ effort to put members in office was part of a larger mission to bridge New Haven’s town-gown divide.
It was a daunting, aspirational program: to jumble the boundaries of race and class and élite education. Some experiences would never be shared. In Elicker’s speech, he arrived at the topic of gun violence. It was just a month into the new year, and five residents of New Haven, which has a population of a hundred and thirty-nine thousand, had already been killed—all people of color. (White people make up about forty per cent of New Haven; the rest are mostly Black or Latino.) The first victim, Dontae Myers, was twenty-three when he was shot, on New Year’s Day. His brother, Dashown, had been killed in similar circumstances, in 2020—and a community group started by Unite Here, called New Haven Rising, organized vigils after both of their deaths. The boys’ mother, LaQuvia Jones, was Walker-Myers’s best friend, as close to her as a sister. The mayor paraphrased something that Jones had said: “When you pull the trigger, you don’t pull it on a target. You pull it on a community. You pull it on anyone who loves that person.”
In January, the planning for Dontae’s funeral had awkwardly coincided with celebrations at the union. A few blocks from city hall, grad students in jeans and shabby-chic sweaters were gathered in the basement of a Methodist church, which rents space to the union, to watch a live feed of the National Labor Relations Board certifying ballots for and against Local 33. The viewing party was largely devoid of suspense (the yes vote was overwhelming), but the room still whooped when the union was proclaimed official. There was a feeling of resolution. At the same time, the result would test the durability of the Unite Here model. Graduate workers had built their demands on the struggles of Locals 35 and 34: New Haven’s working class. These fellow-unionists expected fealty to labor—and to the needs of the city’s residents—over Yale. It was more than a decade into Aldermania, which was now a mature political experiment in a stubbornly unequal place. Could the Yale unions find enough common ground between graduate students and custodians and billing clerks to keep the experiment going?
The town-gown divide is almost as old as the college town itself. In a fabled instance from the mid-fourteenth century, students at Oxford accused the owners of the Swindlestock Tavern of serving subpar alcohol. Townies came to the tavern’s defense, and the conflict erupted into a three-day riot that killed nearly a hundred men. Much later, the U.S. imported many aspects of the physically and socially cloistered British university system. Town-gown relations proved manageable when the college was just one piece of the local economy. The strain sharpened when cities that once boomed with manufacturing became overly dependent on higher education.
By the seventies and eighties, New Haven’s factories were shutting down. Workers turned to jobs in health care and the service sector, and Yale became one of the city’s top employers. (Its sister corporation, Yale New Haven Health System, is the largest private employer in Connecticut.) Yale expanded in enrollment and physical size, and its endowment grew at a rate that’s difficult to comprehend, doubling since the Great Recession. New Haven, meanwhile, stayed relatively poor: the nonprofit DataHaven found that between 1990 and 2017—a span of nearly thirty years—the median household income decreased by about two thousand dollars. Four-fifths of higher-wage jobs are held by suburban commuters who don’t live in the city.
Yale made some efforts to be a good neighbor: it set up an Office of New Haven Affairs, redeveloped a commercial corridor downtown, and established a first-time-home-buyer subsidy for university employees, many of whom came from the surrounding community. Still, the Yale unions saw a need for more ambitious redistribution. They pushed initiatives that had little to do with contracts or other typical union fare, provoking accusations of “machine politics” and undue influence from their critics. “This particular vision of industrial unionism is pretty unique and not something you see very much at other unionized institutions of higher ed,” Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, a historian of Local 35 and a former member of N.Y.U.’s grad-worker union, told me.
The unions pressured Yale to deliver more voluntary payments to the city and scrutinized Yale’s requests for building permits. They established a local-hiring program run in partnership with the university, which, in 2015, promised to hire a thousand residents from New Haven, half from majority-minority “neighborhoods of need,” within five years. When Yale failed to keep pace, the Board of Alders convened a hearing that overflowed the aldermanic chambers. Walker-Myers, the board president, accused Yale of inflating its statistics with short-term construction jobs. A university representative promised to “think of systemic changes” to reach its goal. (In 2021, that goal was met.)
