“People here have been promised things that just never happened,” Erik Clemons said, looking at the city-block-sized building site around him. “This neighborhood has been lied to so many times.”He’s standing next to New Haven’s Dixwell Avenue where his company, ConnCORP, is building an ambitious, $200 million, 8-acre economic development project that’s designed to do […]
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“People here have been promised things that just never happened,” Erik Clemons said, looking at the city-block-sized building site around him. “This neighborhood has been lied to so many times.”
He’s standing next to New Haven’s Dixwell Avenue where his company, ConnCORP, is building an ambitious, $200 million, 8-acre economic development project that’s designed to do no less than combat poverty in this underinvested neighborhood.
Over the last year, this effort has cleared away a blighted shopping plaza, an Elks Club hall and numerous other buildings to create space for what’s to come: mixed-income apartments, a food hall, performing arts center, retail space, grocery store, health center, child-care facility, and a new home for Clemons’ community-building organization, ConnCAT.
For Clemons, central to this development — called ConnCAT Place on Dixwell — has been talking to the people who live here about what they want. It’s a process that hasn’t always been easy.
His team has occasionally been treated with suspicion and pushback from neighbors.
“We were very intentional about community engagement,” he said. “We would hold forums — there was, like, 250 people there — and they voiced their opinion about the project, about us. We never wavered in our mission. We never went away. And everything we said we were going to do, we have done.”
Among the key issues he’s run up against is the fear that such a large-scale project will gentrify this disinvested neighborhood, forcing out residents who have lived there for years as it raises property values. That has led to a re-evaluation of the percentage of affordable housing that will be included in the plan, which he now hopes will be above 20%.
Growing up poor
One reason Clemons is so passionate about local engagement is that he came from a community that has a lot in common with this one.
“I grew up in Norwalk in the housing projects,” he said. “And grew up very poor.”
He describes himself as raised by community; going through evictions, moving schools and, in his final year of high school, living with his math teacher and her husband.
“I didn’t do well in school — actually hated school — but I love to learn,” he said.
After high school he got a job with the post office, got married and had four daughters. He’d been in that post office job for more than a decade when he started to think about his legacy.
“What was my contribution to the world? What have I done that would inspire my children?” is the way he puts it.
And so, then in his mid 30s, he went to college. First, Housatonic Community College, and then transferring to Southern Connecticut State University, where he graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
Although he kept working as he was earning his degree, he gives credit to his wife Sharon for holding things together in that period.
“She was really the bedrock of our family in terms of really supporting us and allowing me to chase the dream of being educated and hopefully working with young people,” he said. “My dream was to teach young Black children who are in the conditions I was able to overcome.”
Inspiring advancement
“You’ll see natural light wherever you are, bright colors, art on the wall, jazz — you hear the jazz being played? That’s intentional,” Clemons said as he walked around the New Haven headquarters of ConnCAT, located in a 23,000-square-foot space at Yale’s Science Park. “Folks who are coming from conditions that are not conducive somehow are inspired because of this place and how it feels to them — that it speaks to the soul.”
Right after college, Clemons worked at training organization Job Corps, and then was recruited to be executive director of LEAP, an organization that mentors young people through neighborhood-based programs — and where he himself had done a college internship.
It was while working at LEAP that he was tapped to lead a new effort that was being incubated partly through the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven. Its founders, including current board chair Carlton Highsmith and now Chief Operating Officer Paul McCraven, dubbed it ConnCAT — the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology.
ConnCAT’s mission is to inspire, motivate and prepare youth and adults for educational and career advancement through job training and youth programs. It was modeled after the Manchester Bidwell Corp., started in Pittsburgh by MacArthur Fellow Bill Strickland.
ConnCAT debuted in 2012, beginning with training programs in phlebotomy and medical billing, connecting unemployed and underemployed adults with opportunities at nearby Yale, as well as an after-school and summer program for kids.
It’s since branched out with Biolaunch, which provides lab technician training through a partnership with Yale scientist and entrepreneur Craig Crews.
It also boasts an 8,000-square-foot commercial kitchen connected to a café, which offers trainees — many of whom are returning from incarceration — skills in food-and-beverage operations and advanced culinary skills, along with a national certification.
The kitchen program also has flourishing externship programs in several local restaurants, and is developing a catering business.
Economic infrastructure
As ConnCAT proved its impact, its leaders, including Clemons, started thinking about the future.
“What could be the next iteration of impact that we could make to ensure that we are creating a world outside of this building, that is conducive to the hope that people have now?” he said.
That led to the launch of ConnCORP, the Connecticut Community Outreach Revitalization Program, a for-profit arm of ConnCAT focused on economic development.
The centerpiece has become the effort to build ConnCAT Place on Dixwell.
So far, $13 million has been spent to acquire the 11 parcels of land and demolish the existing buildings. Demolition began last summer, and new construction broke ground in October 2024.
Architecture firm HGA, led by Peter D. Cook, created the design. The development will happen in two phases.
The first phase, expected to cost more than $60 million, will have as its centerpiece a new 69,000-square-foot headquarters for ConnCAT. Additional tenants include a child mental health and family center run by the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, and a day care provided by the Friends Center for Children. Phase one also encompasses a 186-unit, mixed-income apartment tower, grocery store and food hall for local restaurants.
The second phase is expected to bring a 350-seat performing arts center, 60,000-square-foot office building and up to 15 townhomes.
The project has so far raised $49.8 million, including a $16 million grant from the state of Connecticut and a $10 million loan from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund.
It has also received donations and philanthropic dollars. Clemons and his team are continuing to fundraise.
“He’s just really able to communicate the vision and give you a sense that if you come on in, it will happen,” said Alexandra Daum, Yale University’s associate vice president for New Haven affairs and University Properties. “He’s going to do good things with your money.”
Daum first worked with Clemons when she was commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development. The state invested its $16 million stake through DECD’s Community Investment Fund. Daum is continuing to partner with him in her role at Yale, which has already leased a significant amount of space in the flagship building planned for ConnCAT Place.
“Eric’s done a great job of just plugging along, and one foot in front of the other and not giving up, which is the key in these very complicated, very expensive projects,” she said.
Sheena Strawter-Anthony, director of impact investment strategy at the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, says backing a Black-owned project was an important part of her organization’s decision to invest.
“We’re aware of the unconscious biases that are in this industry,” she said. “There are fund managers who continuously outperform, but yet they can’t attract the capital because of the way they look. We didn’t want that to be a hurdle.”
For Clemons, the project is all about using economic development as a weapon against poverty.
“What’s important to me is that we address it, and that we create conditions that allow people to reauthor their story, to recast their lives,” he said.
And, standing on the leveled site where the project will take shape, he envisions a future model for communities around the country.
“That is the hope: that you can create economic infrastructure, capital formation in communities, while at the same time build community,” Clemons said.
