Making Meaning: A Conversation with Caroline Tanbee Smith

Caroline Tanbee Smith (BA ’14) is the current alder of New Haven’s Ward 9, and a former chair of the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team.

YL
Was there a process through which New Haven transitioned from being your college town to being your hometown?

CTS
I would go for a run and see a neighbor on their porch, and then go for a run again the next day and see the same person and wave at them—that feeling of building a relationship over time with someone I’d never met before but saw almost every day. I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, but my life was school, my family, and sports, so I hadn’t experienced that as a community, and fallen in love with a place.

I guess it’s the theme of the volume, which is love. I think really authentic love is something that requires time. You can have chemistry, you can have all the right things in the right place, but at the end of the day, time is one of the most important ingredients of love.

YL
What are some things that become possible once you’ve established that time-based relationship with a place, that aren’t possible when you’re here as a student?

CTS
I think it’s really possible to be a good, thoughtful steward while you’re here [as a student]. It’s just that change is really hard and change takes time. So big changes, being able to contribute to big ideas, is something that requires, more than anything, a ton of relationships.

YL
Can you tell us about some of your recent work and the relationships that you’ve seen between physical maintenance and community maintenance?

CTS
Ward 9 is two neighborhoods, parts of East Rock and Fair Haven, with I-91 as the spine. In Ward 9 alone, there are four underpasses that divide these two neighborhoods. One of the underpasses is a large area of neglect and illegal dumping. There’s runoff from the highway, and pipes go straight into the river. A project we’ve been working on is to take that neglected underpass and transform it into an asset that connects our two neighborhoods as a community park. Of course, it would create its own set of maintenance questions. If we build this over the next five years, who is the steward of it? Nonetheless, it’s an investment to mitigate some of the impact of lack of maintenance.

On the policy side, I’ve been pretty obsessed with the permanent licensing process for small businesses. There are a lot of barriers to entrepreneurship, so I’ve been deep diving with many entrepreneurs in the city to look under the hood and say, can we improve our permit and licensing process to make it easier and more streamlined? The biggest part of this process has been cultivating the belief that it should change, and that it can change, and that as a result, we can have an even richer, more inclusive small business ecosystem.

YL
What you’re describing is like enriching and tending to the soil.

CTS
Cities dream of cultivating the kind of organic entrepreneurial energy we have here. People want to build things. To whatever degree we can cultivate that, or nourish the soil of that, is a huge boon.

YL
In a New Haven Independent article from 2017, you said, “I do know that people fight for what they love. The question is, how do you get people to fall in love with a city? How do you make them fall in love with its people? How do you create spaces where people can become friends and build stake in each other and be able to connect in a variety of ways?” How would you answer some of those questions today?

CTS
I think that there’s so many things you can do on a small scale that contributes to that, but a question that I am still evolving is, how do you do it at scale?

On the most micro level of getting someone engaged, getting someone to fall in love with the community, frankly, it’s sitting across the table from a neighbor who might disagree with you on something, and you both showing a large level of respect through disagreement.

On a slightly larger scale, campaigns are tremendous moments to get a ton of people engaged in a process. When I ran last year, I took it as an opportunity to have a ton of backyard gatherings, chances for people to get to know the city and get to know their street and get to know their neighbors. A lot of people all across the city are doing really thoughtful work to engage people, on an intimate neighborhood level, that contributes to all of those questions that I was asking.

What does it mean to do that at scale? Maybe the best answer is a lot of small but authentic, meaningful orbs doing it all at once—decentralized, tailored to the person, tailored to the street. And maybe the role of government is to create the conditions for those micro moments of love and connection and neighborliness to happen as much as possible.