west-coast transplant / law student / adoptee
As a south-floridian, New Haven is a novelty. People say hello when you walk past them. The trees can't hide the seasons change from you and there isn't a pair of sandals to be found. In the midst of this tiny New-England utopia, I sat down with Katherine to discuss the obvious, what she a Yale grad was still doing in town when so many after her had promptly departed.
"In none of these cities could I find the sense of community, the sense of ease and the sense of tangible relationships that I found here."
On New Haven
"When I moved to New York, I immediately felt this sense of loss. Like, yes I guess I can have this job and I can live wherever I'm going to live. Some nights I felt secure in that. But most of the time, it felt like an extended internship of sorts. There was an air of temporariness that never put me at ease. Whereas when I would come back to New Haven, and sit down in this park specifically, I would immediately think "yeah, I'm home."
I found something in New Haven that I maybe would have found elsewhere. I've tried. I just have not been all that successful. It's big enough here to begin to observe how cities work, how people relate to each other in communities. It is urban enough to present the problems and contradictions that urban populations have to really work together to parse out. But it's small enough for those kinds of conversations to happen on the ground. People are readily available to sort of jump in and get their hands dirty without necessarily hoping to be prized for that kind of engagement. In many ways, New Haven is its own small city universe unto itself. If you get involved in politics good for you but you're not on your way to becoming president (laughs.) You're just being a good citizen."
On southern California
"I grew up in souther California, San Diego specifically. I was not a big fan. The ocean, the weather and the lifestyle that complemented it never really appealed to me. I always felt like an outsider for not wanting to go to the beach; for not wanting to be outside. I'm actually very uncomfortable in the sun. And where it's sunny, you know, 90 percent of the year isn't really my cup of tea. Apart from the lifestyle and the weather, there were certain attitudes in Southern California that I just didn't find resonated with the kind of person I wanted to grow into. There was a sense of intellectualism that I felt all Southern California lacked and an engagement with ideas, sort of nerdy ideas, that people around me didn't necessarily want to partake in."
On developing relationships
"It's the small low-level relationships provided by close-knit communities like these that weren't
within my scope of understanding growing up in California. I don't think it's because I'm super special but I found that I was able to make these sorts of connections with neighbors, with shopkeepers, and folks in the community who eventually had become my second parents or adopted big sisters or best friends. We have virtually no relation other than the fact that I frequent their businesses or I walked past their store. These are the things made me fall in love with New Haven. And these are the things that have kept me here."
On tension
"There is a lot of tension between new and old residents. There's always been. This is an old neighborhood that we're sitting in right now. This used to be the Italian neighborhood a long time ago. People purchased houses around 1900 and held onto them for a little over a century. Then in the 1970s, when there was a lot of urban decay and a big decline in urban populations, people came into New Haven were like, "hey there is a bunch of cheap property, let's go buy it." There was tension between the families who had been there for decades and the new residents.
Now there is tension between the families from the 70s and the 1900s and new residents. They look at new construction in this area as like a really disgusting thing. They're like, "yeah this is our neighborhood this is where we walk our dogs, this is a historic neighborhood. The tool of historic preservation has never been stronger and its a surprisingly effective tool to deter new development and new residents.
The problem though is that this is an awesome neighborhood. Most of the buildings are old and we're very much at capacity. And so something has to give. There are a bunch of new projects coming down the pipeline and people like developers who are interested in capitalizing on New Haven's so-called Renaissance and it's like quickly gentrifying downtown. They believe that this is a neighborhood they can develop a bunch of luxury apartments in and have it be a new hub for 20-somethings or millennials in Connecticut. When the old residents found out, they went ballistic.
So the question must be asked, what is like the soul of this neighborhood? What kind of evolution is permitted or desired? What kind of development is good development? These are questions affect people's lives very deeply. At the root of it there is a very primal human sense of this is my territory, this is my home base. And those are valid. But every decision has huge political and economic ramifications, so we are going to work through it.
I think that the tensions that I just outlined are both positive and negative. I think it's really positive that a place has tension. If it didn't have tension it would be a sleepy little town where nothing happened. Too much tension, however, and it becomes like a war zone. It's a delicate balance."
"What do you want? If you are beating your brow to make a certain amount of money to live a certain type of life with certain comforts, you have to ask yourself what kind of life you truly want. I answered it for myself. It's here. It's right here."
On rediscovering home
"When I graduated from Yale, I got a fellowship to go to Spain for a year and I moved there in late 2014. I spent 9/10 months out there and then started thinking about where I wanted to move to when I got back to the states. This is a monumental decision for me. I don't have a home in Southern California anymore. My parents lived in China for the majority of my undergrad experience so wherever they were it didn't matter. That wasn't my home like I needed. I needed to find where I wanted to put roots down. I decided that I was going to move back to New Haven and sink roots and that was going to be my home base.
At one point in my life, I lived in Napa. It's basically just one big strip mall. It was one thoroughfare with like a bunch of district malls with like Marshalls, T.J. Maxx and the big grocery store which was tantamount to like a stop and shop. That was the heart of the city. There was no sense of history. There was no sense of future. There was no sense of community. Even though Napa was a beautiful place, and it has great wine and is breathtaking and colorful, I didn't give a shit.
I couldn't care about it because the things that the things that I was looking for did not exist or had been replaced by targets and Wal-Marts and thoroughfares and to car dealerships. There are lots of places we can't really develop the sense of home. There just isn't any sweetness to it you know? Those are the places where I think it's harder to cultivate a sense of home. "
From San Diego, CA
Lives in New Haven, CT
