From Campus to Community: The Intersection of Policing, Poverty, and Racial Segregation in New Haven, CT

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 18: Stratification and Economic Inequality

Abstract

This working paper examines how Yale University and local policing practices jointly produce and enforce spatial inequality in New Haven, Connecticut. Over several decades, Yale has transformed downtown into a campus-oriented district filled with high-end amenities, while adjacent predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods remain marked by concentrated poverty, segregation, disinvestment, and heightened police presence. Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews with residents living in neighborhoods bordering Yale’s campus, we explore how proximity to an elite university shapes everyday experiences of space, safety, and belonging. Bridging structural urban scholarship with lived experience, we show how university expansion, tax-exempt property ownership, public-private redevelopment, and overlapping campus and municipal police jurisdictions reinforce a sharp town-gown divide. Residents describe intensive surveillance, hostile encounters, and differential treatment in downtown spaces, where Yale affiliation functions as a marker of legitimacy. Policing communicates exclusion, marking residents of color as outsiders in resource-rich areas of their own city. In response, residents adopt adaptive strategies such as avoiding downtown, signaling institutional affiliation to demonstrate belonging, and engaging in impression management to deflect suspicion. While these strategies facilitate navigation, they impose psychological and spatial costs, limiting access to jobs, amenities, and civic life. We conceptualize these dynamics as a form of spatial injustice characterized by “double abandonment”: exclusion from downtown alongside vulnerability in disinvested neighborhoods. Our findings highlight policing as a key mechanism through which university-driven inequality is enacted and embodied in daily life.

Authors

• Cassi Ann Meyerhoffer, Southern Connecticut State University

• Adam Pittman, Southern Connecticut State University