In the backyard of a Catholic Worker House, a transitional shelter community offers a new approach to caring for New Haven’s rising homeless population.
When David Minore returned to New Haven in April 2024, he knew he’d be sleeping outside. A decade earlier he had spent a year navigating the city’s shelter system, but disliked its institutional feel: no privacy, strict limits on personal belongings, rigid entry and exit hours. This time, he wasn’t going back to the oversight and curfews. He’d trade a night in a shelter for a night on the streets.
Walking in The Hill, New Haven’s southwesternmost neighborhood, Minore was recognized by a volunteer he knew from the Amistad House of Hospitality, where he used to go for community meals. She invited him back to the House.
Minore, 56, tall with a gentle smile and two missing front teeth, pushed past the familiar gate to Amistad’s backyard. But he didn’t find the empty lot he remembered. Instead, he found two canvas canopies covering communal picnic tables; a central, elevated, 15-by-10 foot wooden gazebo; and six aluminum-framed, tiny homes forming an L-shape along the edge of the yard. Minore had arrived at Rosette Neighborhood Village, a third option for homeless people beyond the shelters or the street. He became its newest resident.
In 2023, New Haven reported 257 individuals on its verified unsheltered list. This number more than doubled to 633 the year after. At that time, the city’s eight shelters collectively supplied only 307 beds. The shelter system’s inability to meet the needs of New Haven’s growing homeless population, however, isn’t fully represented by these numbers. Deterred by crowded dorms, strict oversight, and limited freedom, many people experiencing homelessness nevereven join the weeks or months-long shelter waitlists. For them, the backyard community at Rosette offers an alternative.
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In July 1994, Mark Colville and his wife Luz established the Amistad House of Hospitality at their home on Rosette Street. The Colvilles are part of the Catholic Worker movement, leading lives of “voluntary poverty” and hospitality oriented around the works of mercy, a set of charitable practices–such as “feeding the hungry” and “comforting the afflicted”– emphasized in certain traditions of Christian ethics. At Amistad, they opened their doors to the community, providing free breakfast and lunch to those in need.
The City of New Haven has a policy of clearing homeless encampments by posting a 72-hour eviction notice at the site. After the notice period ends, any remaining tents or structures are removed. When COVID-19 began, however, the city relaxed this policy. As the mayor’s office worked to transfer New Haven’s shelter population to hotels, the city tolerated people sleeping in public spaces, such as outside of City Hall. Sensing a temporary shift in city policy, Mark and an Amistad volunteer identified a lot by the West River off Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. They collected tents and invited homeless community members to start an encampment. Mark hoped that the city would designate that land or another for homeless persons to sleep.
The encampment quickly grew, reaching a peak of roughly thirty-five residents, according to Mark. Although he claims the city directed homeless persons to the site, Mark saw no indication that the long-term policy change he sought was on the horizon. A year and a half after starting the encampment, he feared that it was only a matter of time before the city ordered it cleared in a post-COVID-19 return to the status quo.
Guided by the Catholic Worker philosophy, which calls on each individual to practice the works of mercy directly, Mark refused to wait around. “We don’t need the government or the churches to do the work that our faith and conscience calls us to,” he said. “We simply do it from where we are.”
If the city wasn’t going to safeguard his neighbors’ rights to seek refuge, then he would. In June 2021, he declared his backyard open for public use, stapling a notice on his gate:
WARNING: YOU ARE ENTERING A HUMAN RIGHTS ZONE. By sending the New Haven police to evict our neighbors from homeless encampments, Mayor Elicker has taken a position of non-compliance with the U.N., in violation of international laws to which the United States is bound by congressional treaty. We have therefore established here a zone in which this basic human right is respected, and anyone who enters it is required to behave accordingly. WELCOME.
The notice signaled Mark’s new perspective on what the works of mercy mean today. “We’ve always been involved in human rights work,” he said, “but we hadn’t been directly helping people assert their human right to seek refuge.” Mark believed New Haven’s encampment-sweeping policy violated this right to refuge, recognized in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Homeless people streamed into Mark’s backyard. He estimated that by the end of 2021, as many as twenty-five residents, living in tents and other fortified structures, called the yard home. Community support was high, too. Donations arrived in waves— food, clothes, sleeping bags, and tents—and within weeks, a neighbor built a gazebo in the center of the yard. The Rosette Neighborhood Village Collective (RNV), as it would later be called, was born.
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RNV sought to reimagine what a shelter environment could be, said Sean Gargamelli-McCreight, one of the collective’s co-founders.
“In the social service world, we want to manage everybody’s life. It begins with: you’re poor, your whole life has to be managed, we’ll decide all that,” Mark said, referencing the regimented daily entry-exit schedules and restrictive personal possession policies that typically govern shelters. “At RNV, we’ve really just been trying to set up a space where people can actually live like human beings.”
Today, RNV is home to fourteen residents. Eight live in tiny homes, and six reside in the gazebo. Suki Godek lives in one of the tiny homes. A visual artist with amber hair and blue-gray eyes, Godek had previously lived in the encampment on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. In March 2023, city officials, citing safety concerns—evidence of open fires, propane tanks, and an illegally built shower—ordered the encampment dismantled, as Mark had predicted.
That’s when Godek met Mark. Godek loved the freedom Mark’s backyard community offered. A typical shelter would have forced her to leave her dog—a Jack Russell named Ruckus—behind, to check in most of her belongings upon entry, and to return to the streets each morning. A shelter would also typically set a three-month limit on her stay, which she believes is “unrealistic” if a shelter’s goal is to get people back on their feet and ready to take sustainable next steps. At Rosette, none of these restrictions apply. That doesn’t mean Rosette is anarchic. Residents adhere to a set of community guidelines. They cannot publicly consume drugs or alcohol, must attend Tuesday-morning community meetings, and complete weekly chores coordinated by Luz Colville.
For Mark, weekly chores are central to the ethos of Rosette. “Everybody living here is expected to participate in the work of hospitality,” he said. On a rotating schedule, members cook breakfast and brew coffee for both residents and homeless visitors. Additionally, they heat donated food for lunch or dinner, manage deliveries, and clean the backyard and rear of the house.
The result is a sense of community rarely found in traditional shelters, said Annie Harper, a social anthropologist at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, who researches alternative shelter settings.
Godek’s experience echoes Harper’s observations. “There’s definitely a kind of family feeling,” she said. Robert Harris, who was born in New Haven and raised in Bethany, Connecticut, is entering his sixth month living in a Rosette tiny home. He’s in his forties and has been on and off the streets for a decade.
In 2013, Harris spent four months in an emergency overnight shelter in New Haven that housed seventy-five men in one central room. “That place is like a prison,” Harris said. “Everyone’s got an attitude inside.” Shelters, he said, aren’t an option for him. “So God bless this place right here. I don’t know where I’d be. Likely in a tent somewhere in the woods.”
John Labienec understands Harris’ disillusionment with traditional shelters. Labienec works at Continuum of Care, which operates the city’s only non-congregate shelter, where residents have private rooms rather than shared dormitories and are not forced out every morning. But because of “decades of underfunding,” he said, even a more non-traditional shelter like Continuum has limited capacity to adequately cater to the diverse needs of the homeless community. “Shelters promise to offer the world,” he added, “but with current resources, they often can’t.”
Representatives from congregate shelters Columbus House, Liberty Community Services, and Upon This Rock Ministries did not respond to a request for an interview.
New Haven’s budget for homelessness services increased by 20 percent in the 2025 fiscal year, while its homeless population increased by 146 percent. The disparity will likely grow: the federal government has proposed slashing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s state and local housing and homelessness budget by 44 percent. This change would limit or completely eliminate key grant streams that New Haven relies on for shelters and supportive housing services.
When asked why he returned to the street instead of seeking a bed in a shelter, Minore offered a similar answer to Harris.
“You check in your stuff, and don’t see it until the morning. If you’re a smoker, you get two smoke breaks; after that, you can’t go out. And they kick you out in the mornings, even in the winter,” Minore said. “I felt treated like a thing.” He gestured to the backyard of 203 Rosette from the chair outside of his tiny home. “Here, you’re given kindness and freedom, like an actual human being.”
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Life at Rosette is not for everyone, said Harper, the social anthropologist. “We’ve heard from people who stayed at Rosette for a period of time, and it was really hard for them,” she said. “So they left for a shelter.”
Some of these difficulties stem from the community’s daytime open-door policy. Throughout the morning and afternoon, homeless non-residents are welcome to enter the space for meals and use RNV’s facilities, including a basement laundry unit, a first-floor shower and storage lockers in the yard. Though residents can collectively decide to bar certain individuals from RNV, disturbances still occur. In August, someone stole the house’s window AC unit, and on a Saturday in late September, a woman who had already been banned hurled hot coffee at Minore after he blocked her entry to the house.
Drug use on the premises is also a problem. “Non-residents are nodding out in the hallway, passed out at the dining room table, in the bathroom,” said Strongbow Lone Eagle, who moved into a tiny home last month.
For Lone Eagle, a native Oklahoman with a rugged gray beard and a gentle demeanor, these external disturbances are not the only challenges he’s encountered at the collective. Despite Rosette leaders’ emphasis on shared responsibility, he told me, very few residents help sustain the community. “Last week, I cooked breakfast every day, because nobody else wanted to do it. Many people just don’t show respect for their neighbor,” he said as he picked up a used napkin someone had left in front of his tiny home.
Still, Lone Eagle, who stayed in two shelters in New Haven and was arrested for trespassing while sleeping on the Green, is grateful to be at RNV. “This is the safest spot I’ve had.”
For other residents, Harper said, the difficulty of Rosette is that it provides too much independence.
The degree of freedom residents should be given remains contentious amongst RNV’s leaders. For Mark, it has always been paramount that residents are given the space to decompress and plan their next steps on their own terms and schedule.
But Luz feels that the laissez-faire approach risks enabling rather than empowering residents. “There are some people who just don’t seem to want to move forward,” Luz said. “And it’s because they’re comfortable.” While she’s proud of creating an environment where people want to stay, she also points out that spaces at Rosette are precious and few. “We need to be able to say, you’ve been here for almost two years now. How can we move you to the next level?”
For Luz, more structure at Rosette would mean adopting a system of checking in with residents every three months about their progress in completing important steps towards independent living, such as enrolling in a rehabilitation program or securing the documents needed to apply for a housing voucher. Nobody will be forced out under this arrangement, she emphasized, but enforcing clear expectations would better help residents in “becoming their best selves.”
Luz’s approach seems likely to win out. This January, the collective registered as a 501(c)(3) and Mark chose not to sit on the board.
“I decided that I could fight the new direction, or I could decide to let it ride,” he said. He chose the latter option: “This has become its own movement in the backyard, there’s a lot of younger volunteers that are really engaged, and I would like to get out of the way and let them decide.”
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The challenges at RNV, however, are not only internal. The tiny homes are illegal. Under Connecticut building code, a legal dwelling unit must have both bathing and cooking facilities. The homes, designed for communities with shared restrooms and kitchens, lack both. Throughout 2023, as the collective began thinking about installing tiny homes, its leaders tried to engage state officials. Ultimately, the state and local building departments agreed to grant a 180-day temporary approval permit predicated on their eventual compliance with the Connecticut building code. This was an impossible demand, Rosette’s leaders said, given the nature of the units.
Legal or not, the tiny homes were going up. RNV’s leaders believed providing the dignity of private space as well as more robust shelter from the elements was essential, said Gargamelli-McCreight.
“We came to the decision that, from a human rights standpoint, the units had to go up,” he said. “We’d deal with the legal consequences afterwards.”
In July 2024, the conditional permit expired. The Mayor’s Office directed United Illuminating Co. to cut off power to the backyard. Since then, the tiny homes have been powered solely by extension cords running from the main house. These cords can only run a simple electric heater in each home.
“Winters have been miserable here without the electricity,” Mark said. “Paradoxically, officials argue it’s not safe in these units and then do the only thing that actually makes them unsafe.”
A spokesman for the mayor, as well as officials from the Department of Community Resilience, the City Plan Department, and the Office of Building Inspection and Enforcement, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Managing the summer also proved difficult without a reliable electricity supply. Unable to consistently power an AC unit, many residents said that the tiny homes felt like saunas with beds.
Still, for residents, the benefits of the homes outweigh these hardships.
Minore values the tiny homes’ privacy the most. “In shelters and even tents, everything is open, everybody’s around, there’s no privacy at all. But here, I have my home,” he said. Godek appreciates the ability to cultivate her own space. Over the past two years, she has gradually layered her own artwork on the walls of her tiny home.
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RNV represents a new model of community-based transitional housing for homeless individuals. It joins similar projects in Rhode Island, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, and is now a talking point amidst debates in the Connecticut legislature. During the last legislative session, lawmakers considered two bills related to RNV: one to fund the construction of five hundred tiny homes across the state and another to allow religious organizations to install temporary shelter units on their property. Though neither reached the floor, Representatives Anne Hughes and Tony Scott said they expect both bills to return next session after minor revisions.
The model of RNV is unable to address a rising urban homelessness crisis on its own. “Tiny homes in churches or other organizations are not substitutes for deeply affordable housing or reforms that make evictions and rent hikes harder,” said Colleen Shaddox, chair of Rosette’s 501(c)(3) board, “but they’re one tool in the toolkit.”
Miguel Crooks, who’s been homeless in New Haven for nearly three decades, has slept in Rosette’s gazebo since April.
Though Rosette does not offer formal assistance in the housing process, Crooks secured a housing voucher through the help of nurses from the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center who provide free, on-site care every Tuesday at RNV.
“I’m doing good here,” Crooks said. “But I’ll be even better once I get into my apartment.”
Other residents hope to be on their way soon as well.
Godek, who has long been interested in psychology, hopes to build on connections she’s made with agencies and mental health professionals while at Rosette to form her own addiction recovery community. She envisions an environment “where we could be mainly self-sufficient, put up some of the tiny homes, organize community classes, grow our own food, and have a couple animals,” she said. “That’s what I’m working towards.”
After moving into Rosette, he enrolled at an addiction treatment center, got a job as the morning custodian at St. Martin de Porres Academy, and joined the Whole Earth Co-Operative, a farming and landscape co-op founded by Gargamelli-McCreight. Minore got his voucher approved in May, and is now moving into an apartment by Edgewood Park.
Minore’s excitement is bittersweet. He looks forward to having a place of his own for the first time, but is also hesitant to leave the community he considers family. When he came down with a fever while moving into his apartment, he returned to Rosette for a few nights to recover. “They care about me here,” Minore told me. “They took me in, they gave me a shot. Without this, who knows what could have happened to me out there?”
Minore has promised to visit Rosette every morning before work to brew coffee.
“These are my people,” he said. “This is my community.” ∎
David Rosenbloom is a senior in Saybrook College.
Photos by David Rosenbloom.
A previous version of this article misstated the school that Minore works at. It is Saint Martin de Porres Academy, not Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy.