Where do plans from Elicker’s last State of the City stand?
Ahead of Monday’s State of the City address, the News reviewed what became of the plans Mayor Elicker outlined in last year’s speech.

Daniel Zhao, Senior Photographer
The annual State of the City address in early February lets the mayor tout his achievements and outline his priorities for the coming year, before television cameras and the alders who will judge his budget proposal in the spring.
In last year’s address, Mayor Justin Elicker emphasized affordable housing initiatives and his vision for New Haven to grow inclusively into “a city of 150,000 thriving people.” He also called New Haveners “gorge and diverse,” quoting Cosmopolitan magazine, and paused his speech for 25 minutes due to disruptive protests by advocates of a Gaza ceasefire resolution.
Now, Elicker is preparing to deliver his sixth State of the City speech on Monday, after a whirlwind month that included an early push for education investment in the just-started state legislative session and a barrage of local concerns stemming from Trump administration policies. Elicker is running for a fourth two-year term this year, without any announced challengers to date.
The News examined how some of the goals Elicker set out in his Feb. 5, 2024, address have panned out so far. While many initiatives proceeded apace last year, some efforts to increase housing access and contend with homelessness met resistance from alders or criticism from activists.
Affordable housing
Already, Elicker said last February, the city had “approximately 3,500 new housing units in the pipeline, and approximately 1,400 — 40 percent of them — are affordable units.” His spokesperson could not provide updated numbers by the publication time of this article.
“It’s just an idea of what could come,” Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow, who represents Ward 27, said of those statistics. “That may not come true,” he added, citing stalled developments in his neighborhood of Westville.
In last year’s State of the City, Elicker presented one concrete idea to clear the way for more housing units: expanding eligibility for property owners to build accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. “This new legislation would permit homeowners at 23,000 different properties citywide to, as of right, have the option of adding another residential unit to their property,” Elicker said.
The legislation ran into skepticism from the City Plan Commission and from alders, including Furlow, who opposed extending ADU rights to big landlords. It has rested in limbo in the board’s Legislation Committee since an April committee meeting.
“There are some communities that are saying, ‘Don’t allow people to build ADUs if it’s not owner-occupied property,’” Furlow said. He first wants to regulate short-term rentals like Airbnbs.
City Plan Director Laura Brown said on Thursday that the expanded ADU ordinance amendment was just “one piece of the puzzle and not an end all, be all” for affordable housing. Her office had no plans to modify and resubmit the proposal unless alders act, Brown said, and it has done “early drafting of an Airbnb regulatory structure.”
Other housing-related proposals that Elicker put forward in the speech last February have materialized. Under a new director, the Livable City Initiative has doubled down on enforcing the housing code through fines, leaving affordable housing development to another city department. The city passed legislation to strengthen LCI’s muscle against noncompliant landlords and to let more renters form legally recognized tenants’ unions.
Homelessness
Turning to the rise in homelessness in his speech, Elicker promised “compassion, care and holistic services to individuals experiencing homelessness.” And he highlighted a new shelter in Quinnipiac Meadows, a converted Days Inn on Foxon Boulevard that he said “will have 55 private rooms and serve up to 110 individuals.”
It has 51 rooms, most of them occupied by two people, and the shelter housed a total of 94 people as of Thursday, a spokesperson for Continuum of Care, the nonprofit that operates the facility, told the News. In the coldest winter temperatures, the city’s warming centers are required to be open to all.
But a vocal set of activists, allied with Yale students, has protested Elicker’s approach to the homeless population, criticizing the city’s sweeps of their encampments — most recently in October on the Green — and its legally mandated July move to cut off electricity from a cluster of tiny homes behind the Amistad Catholic Worker House in the Hill.
The New Haven Register reported in November that the city’s homeless population surged to over 600 people in 2024, more than two times the previous year — outpacing a nationwide increase.
Public schools
Last February, Elicker touted a decrease in chronic absenteeism — counting students who have missed at least 10 percent of school days — from a peak of 60 percent during the 2021-22 school year to 33 percent by fall 2023. The number dropped further to 29.5 percent by November 2024, per NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon.
Elicker’s address also touched on new education projects, such as career training for high schoolers in the 101 College St. biotech building and two “full-service community schools” in Fair Haven with new staff and programming funded by a five-year grant from the Department of Education.
At the Fair Haven School, the initiative’s first year has brought a care coordinator who helps families at home and a popular fencing program, according to Ward 14 Alder Sarah Miller, who previously worked for the nonprofit that manages the program. She said it is on track to expand to the second school, the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration.
Unmentioned in Elicker’s discussion of education at last year’s State of the City were twin problems that have dogged the district this school year: budget shortfalls and deteriorated facilities. In response to acute needs, he sent New Haven Public Schools $8.5 million and has called for more state funding.
Infrastructure projects
The speech did feature references to several infrastructure projects that have since reached various phases of planning or construction.
Elicker promoted the city’s “most ambitious bike and pedestrian project yet” — connecting the Farmington Canal Trail to the Shoreline Greenway Trail in East Shore.
“The city is deep in the design phase of the project and engaging with stakeholders, and also finalizing the purchase of a small parcel of property on the trail,” city spokesperson Lenny Speiller wrote to the News on Thursday.
The mayor said last year that the city would in 2024 “begin construction of our newest flagship park”: the Long Wharf Park and Waterfront, a $12.1 million state-funded upgrade of the stretch of land between I-95 and the Long Island Sound. Preliminary work on adjacent Long Wharf Drive started in the fall, Speiller said.
Elicker skipped his written remarks about environmental sustainability last year after the long interruption by pro-Palestine protesters, but the city is sticking with his objective of “new solar resources and canopies atop our schools and even atop our city landfill,” as the official prepared speech read. Those are slated for installation in the coming year.
Looking ahead to 2034
This month, New Haven marked its 241st year as an incorporated city. In last year’s State of the City speech, Elicker set his sights on the upcoming 250th anniversary, asking, “In what type of city do we want to live in 2034?”
The city coordinated its regular ten-year comprehensive planning process to anticipate the milestone, calling the initiative Vision 2034. Residents have weighed in on their top priorities during a series of meetings in the past year.
Staff are currently drafting the plan, City Plan Director Brown told the News, and next month the city will open a survey to collect more feedback on the main goals before presenting the plan to the Board of Alders in May. Among the ideas that have emerged repeatedly during the process, Brown said, are an emphasis on “accessibility in all different forms” and tending to New Haven’s parks. Elicker reestablished a separate Parks Department last year.
“And then also housing, I’d say, was a resounding theme,” Brown said. “How do we address the short-term needs for housing, longer-term needs for housing, and create the kind of housing that residents want throughout the various neighborhoods?”
She hopes that Vision 2034 will prompt an overhaul of the zoning ordinance in line with the city’s priorities — well beyond accessory dwelling units.
Elicker is scheduled to deliver his 2025 State of the City on Monday evening at City Hall.
Zachary Suri contributed reporting.
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