But that vision relies more on people in the community than on City Hall. He has used a series of programs to bring together neighbors. They tell City Hall how they want their blocks to change. Each of these programs has worked in some neighborhoods, not in others. In places like Dwight, Dixwell and Newhallville, a new generation of neighborhood leadership has arisen to replace or at least augment the tired community agencies that learned how to grab government money in the '60s and '70s.
People tend to focus on a theater or a mall to determine a city's success.
LCI celebrated its first birthday last week in a ceremony on the Green. Despite some problems, overall it offers the most vivid example of how New Haven is succeeding, at least in part, in converting past misfortune into new opportunity. The Chapel Street community garden would never have been born without, first and foremost, neighbors like Kim Bennett who had spent years fighting for the building's demolition and drawing up their own garden plan. It also wouldn't have happened without LCI, under which the building finally came down. Another such building came down at the corner of Webster and Winchester, a block from the Elm Haven projects in Dixwell.