Sylvan Lebrun, Contributing Photographer

Holding signs and passing around petitions, a crowd of over 50 elected officials, activists and Newhallville residents gathered at 794 Dixwell Ave. on a cold Saturday afternoon to send a message — the APT Foundation’s methadone clinic will not be welcomed in their neighborhood. 

The protest took place outside the planned site for the methadone clinic, a building that once housed Elm City College Preparatory Middle School. The APT Foundation, which currently operates two outpatient methadone clinics in Long Wharf and the Hill district, purchased the building in December 2021 with plans to relocate services from their Long Wharf location to Newhallville.

Until the New Haven Independent reported that the clinic was moving in January, the residents of Newhallville — including Ward 20 Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith — were not informed of the purchase. In the month since, the community has organized to prevent the APT Foundation from moving into their neighborhood, citing concerns for public safety based on the foundation’s tumultuous track record in the Hill neighborhood, where the clinic became a hotspot for violence and public drug use and solicitation. 

“We are sympathetic to the needs of those who are in need of some type of assistance,” Imam Saladin Hasan from Newhallville’s Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan Islamic Center said during his speech at the press conference. “But we don’t want our children living under conditions where everyone they see or deal with needs some type of help. You’re interfering with progress. Trauma is real and our youth continually are traumatized…You do not set up trauma sites in communities that are traumatized.” 

Community gathers to say “Stop APT”

Plans for the new clinic involve the transfer of almost 400 patients to Newhallville to receive their methadone, a substitute drug used to treat morphine and heroin addiction. The 15 speakers at Saturday’s gathering attacked the APT Foundation for their failure to give the community prior notice and their history of being a “bad neighbor” in the Hill, accompanied by cheers of “Stop APT” from the crowd.

Imam Hasan said that the APT Foundation will ensure the high quality of treatment and care inside their own property, but “once it leaves this building they could care less…it’s the community’s problem, it’s our babies’ problem.”  

He shared concerns that the clinic would also lower the property value in the historically Black residential neighborhood, providing a list of alternative non-residential New Haven locations that the APT Foundation could consider relocating to instead.

Saturday’s gathering, which lasted over an hour, was attended by local residents as well as three state senators and representatives. Both New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett were in attendance, as the proposed clinic would sit near the border of the two towns. Over a dozen cars were parked around the block honking their horns in support, carrying elderly and immunocompromised residents who did not want to join the crowd. 

Jeanette Sykes, Newhallville resident and founder of the leadership nonprofit The Perfect Blend, emphasized at the start of the event that the opposition to the APT Foundation is not about an opposition to drug addiction treatment, but rather about “a lack of respect for our community…and we want to demand the respect for our community.”

“Newhallville is a historic neighborhood in the city of New Haven,” Avshalom-Smith said in an interview with the News. “It has even today some of the highest rates of Black homeownership. And I asked Lynn from APT if she did any research on our neighborhood before deciding to purchase a building there, and she said no, they did not ‘characterize the neighborhood’…know the history of where you’re going, or have the common decency to speak to the tax-paying residents there and inform them of what your plans are.”

He added that the APT Foundation’s proposed location is in a neighborhood where the residents are primarily elderly people who “don’t even lock their doors.”

Newhallville resident and senior citizen Mary Gates, who was introduced at the press conference as a “matriarch in our community,” shared her fears that the new clinic would bring an influx of crime as it has in the Hill, threatening the safety of elderly people and children.

“Elderly people like myself…we won’t be able to come out here and sit on our porches like we used to, entertain each other from across the street,” Gates said. “What’s going to happen is when we come home from work at 11 or 12 o’clock at night, we got to worry if we have to duck and dodge a bullet, or if there’s somebody out here in our streets lurking to rob us.” 

Lossie Gorham, who has lived on Basset Street in Newhallville for 30 years, told the News that she already feels “imprisoned in her home” due to the pandemic and the threat of gun violence in the community, and said that the new clinic would only bring more fear to her life. 

Pat Solomon and Katurah Bryant, members of the steering committee for the movement against the APT Foundation, shared that their work had begun the day after the news came out in a Zoom meeting with over 200 participants. Committee meetings have continued every Saturday since. 

According to Ward 20 Co-Chair Barbara Vereen, the petition to stop the clinic’s move has already gathered 700 signatures — copies were available for signing at the protest as well. The movement has also involved letter-writing campaigns and phone calls to local authorities.

State Rep. Robyn Porter, who attended the protest along with Rep. Toni Walker and Sen. Gary Winfield, shared that she had been told on Friday that the APT Foundation would have to obtain a new license in order to move from Long Wharf from Newhallville, and go through the Board of Zoning Appeals in the process. 

This was news to Porter and the organizers, who had originally been told that the license would simply transfer. Porter told the crowd that in light of this, they had the opportunity to “make sure that we’ve got players on our team and we’re doing what we need to do to shut it down.”

Elicker delivered a speech about the need for compromise with the APT Foundation, but he was met with hostility and shouts of “shut it down,” “Black people aren’t experiments” and “stand up for the people, Justin!” from the crowd. 

“I want to be real with people because you know, I’m not going to stand up here and give promises I can’t deliver on,” Elicker said. “The city can’t just decide to put it somewhere else…I can stand up here as a politician and say ‘we’re gonna stop this thing,’ I could do that. But in reality, I legally cannot do that.”

He emphasized that the APT Foundation had “control of their property” after purchasing it, after which a resident retorted, “you have control of the city!” In the end, Elicker promised to work with the APT Foundation and the steering committee to find a solution, noting that Lynn Madden, APT Foundation CEO,  had not submitted paperwork to the city yet, which he took as a sign of her willingness to work with the residents.

Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett spoke immediately after Elicker and shared that she had written a letter of concern to the state commissioner of public health, promising to “stand with [the community] and fight.” Her speech was received with cheers, and a call of “that’s what leadership looks like.” 

With no clear end in sight to the conflict, Remedy Sharif, a New Haven Rising organizer and director of outreach for Ice The Beef, encouraged the community to keep their resistance to the clinic going, noting that “consistency is the key.”

“Mr. Mayor, we respect you and appreciate you for just showing up,” Sharif said. “Now we need to see you as a man, as a father, not as the Mayor of New Haven but as the father I watch carrying his children on his shoulders when you come to events…It is your responsibility to tell these people hell no. Because you’re a father, because you care. Because our children have been traumatized for too long by the colonizers of this country and the colonizers of our community.”

Paul Joudrey, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine and a Yale Drug Use, Addiction, and HIV Research Scholar, said that the issue of methadone clinic location stems partially from the fact that methadone treatment for opioid addiction is segregated from the rest of the healthcare system.

“People’s understanding of methadone is still … old view of addiction that was more punitive…criminal issue.” Joudrey said. “From a public health perspective…in a different healthcare system, where methadone treatment was allowed to occur in the same clinics and other health care treatment is delivered, you wouldn’t have this question about where to locate methadone clinics, because all clinics would be methadone clinics.”

What Happened in the Hill Neighborhood

The Foundation’s Legion Clinic on Congress Avenue is a regional clinic that serves people from New Haven and nearby counties. 

At Saturday’s protest, Hill North Community Management Team Chair Howard Boyd said that Madden and the APT Foundation team “never stepped out of the door and asked, what can we do to help?” with crime outside the clinic, as the local police department and fire department had to “work overtime” in the area.

“I can’t get kids or parents to walk down their street because of the trash, the syringes, picking up syringes every day,” Boyd said. “Our kids have enough stuff in their minds, enough trauma…they seem to give [methadone clinic patients] the treatment to help them and they put them right out the door.” 

“The APT Foundation does a great job with their treatment.” Jose DeJesus, treasurer of the Hill North Management Team, said. “But the problem is that it always brings secondary problems. You have problems with people loitering…drug dealing, drug use… dirty needles around the school… fights… stabbings… shootings. And all of this is attributed to the crowd of folks that are not necessarily APT foundation patients, but they run in those same circles.” 

According to DeJesus, there are 20 to 30 people in the corner of Davenport Avenue Baldwin Street at 5:30 a.m. using drugs and drinking. The New Haven Independent reported that a man was stabbed 16 times outside the clinic in 2017. 

DeJesus said that he is not against the clinic, but that the problem is that it is regional, and therefore will attract people from outside the community. He urged the APT Foundation to open more clinics in other counties so that each area had its own. 

“The neighborhood will be better if other cities and towns in Connecticut would put a methadone clinic in their town,” DeJesus said. “We’re not anti-treatment, we want more treatment. And we need more treatment in the areas where these people live, so they don’t have to commute to Congress Avenue.”

Angela Hatley, who has lived in the Hill for over 30 years, agreed with DeJesus. Hatley told the News that a few years ago, she called an ambulance for a woman who did not live in Hill, but the woman collapsed three houses down from her house and started taking off her clothes and “doing drug scratch.” 

“I would wholeheartedly support Newhallville to keep them out.” Hatley said. “It should not all be one city to take care of an entire region’s problems.”

APT Response

In response to concerns about crime levels in the Hill neighborhood, Madden said they have made a number of operational changes, including changing hours of operation so that the surrounding area is less congested when school buses and others may be present. Additionally, APT has built another clinic outside of New Haven, it has transferred some patients to another program and, at the request of the city, it has paid for a police officer to be stationed near the clinic. 

In an email to the News, Hill North and Hill South District Manager Justin Marshall wrote that in his time leading the neighborhood, he has “developed a great relationship” with Kathy Eggart, director of the APT foundation. 

“I understand that she is trying to help people with substance abuse problems and she is doing everything in her power to get those people the help they need,” Marshall added.

The New Haven Independent reported on Feb. 14, 2018 that the APT Foundation has been paying for an off-duty New Haven police officer to be stationed outside of its primary methadone dispensary at the clinic in Hill, from 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., Monday through Friday.

DeJesus and Hatley both acknowledged that APT is trying to address the crime brought by the clinic. However, Hatley told the News that the increase of security around the clinic only pushed those activities from the clinic and deeper into the neighborhood. 

Madden also told the News that the building on Long Wharf will be mostly used for administrative offices, and only less than half of the space will be used for patient care. 

“I live in New Haven and there is drug dealing in my neighborhood, without a drug treatment program being located here.” Madden said. “So the idea that somehow drug treatment programs are the cause of drug dealing, I think is an unfair inference.” 

The APT Foundation purchased the building at 794 Dixwell Ave. for $2.45 million.