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AN ACTIVIST built six tiny homes on his private land to shelter homeless people but received a cease-and-desist letter from the city just days later.
The tiny homes were built in the backyard of Mark Coleville, who founded the Rosette Village Neighborhood Collective and coordinated the tiny home project in New Haven, Connecticut.
Coleville received the cease-and-desist letter on October 27, just six days after the tiny homes were finished.
“This is an emergency,” Coleville told Yale Daily News on Tuesday.
“People need immediate hospitality… They don’t need forms filled out.”
The move to build the homes came after the city decided to bulldoze a tent city located in the area last spring.
He is now afraid that may happen again to his tiny homes.
“Since they’re kicking everybody off encampments on public land, we put one on our private land so they can’t do that very easily,” Coleville told Yale Daily News.
The New Haven City Plan Department asked the group to remove the homes because they violated the city’s structural zoning codes by increasing housing-unit density beyond zoning code limits.
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They said the neighborhood is in a “RM‑2 High-Density Zone” which limits the use of land and buildings in the area, according to city zoning regulations.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker seems the positive intentions for Coleville but wants him to do it legally.
“[The Collective’s] intentions are laudable,” Elicker said, per Yale Daily News.
“But they are doing this outside of the legal framework that community members have spent decades creating.
“We have the same expectation for [the Rosette Village Neighborhood Collective] that we have for every other property owner in the city that follows the law.
“There are laws in place that have gone through extensive community input.
“For one entity then to decide to disregard previous community input and just do what they want to on their property is not fair to the overall community.”
However, Coleville is banking on the city considering the situation a state of emergency so that he can bypass the zone codes.
He has highlighted a statement from Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont who declared homelessness to be a public health crisis.