Yale students and New Haven residents can now search for summer sublets, apply for jobs and sign up for free informal knitting lessons all in one place.
Craigslist.org, a Web site containing local community classified ads and forums for 100 cities in 20 countries, launched a site for New Haven last week. The site, located at newhaven.craigslist.org, will help connect local residents and put New Haven on the map with bigger cities on the site such as Chicago and New York, community members said.
Craigslist is visited by 7.5 million people per month, according to the Web site. It offers listings including jobs, apartments, personal ads and community activities and events.
The idea to bring Craigslist to New Haven was inspired by members of “The Group with No Name,” an online forum of more than 400 New Haven residents. The group was founded by Janna Wagner ’95 in 2000 to encourage young New Haven professionals to socialize, network and become active residents of the community. Wagner said Craigslist is a more formal and wide-reaching version of her group’s objective, and they have begun to refer visitors to their sites to post on Craigslist.
“At some point, all the information about apartments and jobs in New Haven should be consolidated in one place,” Wagner said. “I think Craigslist would be better because people recognize the name, so it doesn’t just depend on who you know in New Haven.”
Because of the site’s global popularity, Craigslist will be useful to both long-time New Haven residents and people moving to the city from out of town, Wagner said.
Although the New Haven site is not currently linked directly to the Craigslist home page, Craigslist President and CEO Jim Buckmaster said New Haven is among the top dozen new cities currently under consideration for linking.
“We prioritize the addition of new cities according to the volume of requests from users, as well as demographic factors such as population and presence of colleges and universities,” Buckmaster said. “Based on the above criteria, we do think Craigslist would be an asset to folks in New Haven.”
To publicize the new site in hopes of eventually getting it linked to the Craigslist home page, INFO New Haven plans to post flyers and posters around the city, and the Yale College Council and Graduate Student Assembly have volunteered to get the word out as well.
Since the site was opened on Tuesday, there have been 35 postings, including several by Yale students. Office of New Haven and State Affairs program director Reggie Solomon, who hsd a part in brigning Craigslist to New Haven, said he thinks the list could become a more expansive version of YaleStation.org, a YCC Web site on which students sell used books and furniture, among other things. YCC President Andrew Cedar ’06 said Craigslist will supplement the services already offered by YaleStation.
“I think it’s a really good service to help students trying with finding off-campus apartments,” Cedar said. “YaleStation will continue to provide housing listings too, but Craigslist is also a good addition to that. The more resources students have, the better.”
Solomon said that when he lived in San Francisco, the city where Craigslist was founded in 1995, he rented an apartment, found a roommate and sold his couch on the site all in one hour.
“I think Yale students and the Yale and New Haven communities will be greatly benefited by having a Craigslist site come to New Haven, particularly during this time of the year when students are searching for sublets, posting sublets and trying to sell furniture and other stuff,” Solomon said. “Craigslist only comes to places big cities where people are educated and tech-savvy, so I think this says a lot about the New Haven population.”