A backyard response to the homelessness crisis in New Haven

Mark Colville stood outside Union Station in New Haven and eyed the abandoned lot across the way. It was once subsidized housing—before that, a diverse neighborhood that urban renewal destroyed—but it has sat empty since 2018. “I think I want to make an encampment there, right in front of the train station,” he said. “We would throw it right in the mayor’s face.” 

Mr. Colville is something of an expert on homeless encampments. He and his wife, Luz Catarineau, have spent the last three years operating one in their backyard. 

The couple founded the Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven in 1994. It serves as a center for advocacy inspired by Catholic social teaching and pays homage to La Amistad, a slave-carrying ship that was the site of a mutiny in 1839. An ensuing trial in New Haven guaranteed the formerly enslaved their freedom.

Since 2023 their backyard has hosted six tiny homes and a covered communal space, typically home to roughly a dozen people who would otherwise be homeless. Its title, the Rosette Neighborhood Village Collective, suggests that the unhoused are no less worthy of homes and stability than anyone else. 

Mark Colville’s Style of Service

I first met Mr. Colville on March 27, 2025. He spent the previous evening wearing a toilet seat at a city board meeting to protest New Haven’s lack of public toilets. Mr. Colville has long practiced impossible-to-ignore protests to support his deeply held beliefs. In April 2018, as one of the members of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, he trespassed onto a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine base in Georgia. The police apprehended Mr. Colville as he took a hammer to a display model of a Trident missile, which is capable of delivering over 150 times the payload of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 

Suki Godek, the former resident leader at Rosette Village, said her mother once asked her why she “was working for a domestic terrorist.”

Mr. Colville’s arrest record doubles as testimony of his service. His wild, white hair and wide-brimmed glasses suggest a rogue priest who is dressed in baggy sweaters in place of a cassock and a keffiyeh instead of a collar. When Ms. Catarineau first met him as part of an organizing program in the South Bronx, he was preparing to take his religious vows as a Maryknoll brother. They quickly became friends, but she recalled, “Being a Latina in a predominantly Spanish church, I was like, who the hell is this white guy trying to organize us?”

They have been married for 35 years now and have raised six children, four of their own alongside a niece and a nephew.

Mr. Colville’s advocacy began in the 1980s, when he lived in the basement of St. Luke’s Church in the South Bronx and Ronald Reagan lived in the White House. The latter cut federal social spending and argued charity should make up the difference. “At night, I would open the school gym as a shelter,” Mr. Colville reflected. “We’d be out of there by 6:30 a.m. so that the kids could come in.”

His experience at St. Luke’s taught Mr. Colville two lessons: Homelessness was the sum of society’s faults and fallings, but people and churches could make a daily difference. 

In 1994, the couple returned to Mr. Colville’s home town of New Haven. They opened the Amistad Catholic Worker House within their home as a way to connect their lives and ministry.

In the pandemic-induced chaos of 2020, New Haven closed its homeless shelters. Amistad responded by setting up an encampment in a park by the West River, which Mr. Colville estimated housed hundreds over three years. 

On March 10, 2023, the city announced their intention to demolish the encampment within a week, citing public health violations relating to fire and sanitation. The bulldozers arrived early on March 16 to trash any items that remained. Mr. Colville refused to leave; the police arrested him and removed him on a stretcher. 

That summer, he opened his family’s backyard for people to pitch their tents, housing over 40 people. “It got to a point where it was just very stressful for people living in the backyard,” Ms. Catarineau said. “We had to say, OK, we need to downsize.”

Ms. Godek remembered the chaos more fondly as she began organizing alongside her fellow unhoused. “As the numbers grew, it was just a lot like summer camp.”

Ms. Catarineau added, “I laughed hard when Mark said, ‘Why don’t we build tiny homes in the backyard?’” After a fundraising campaign, they procured the $123,000 necessary to purchase, ship and construct the tiny homes from the Washington-based company Pallet. Mr. Colville proudly contrasted this with the city-run shelter system. New Haven’s newest shelter is a converted Days Inn Motel the city purchased for $6.9 million at $121,000 per room.

Life at Rosette Village

Village life is filled with chores scheduled and organized by the former resident leader, Ms. Godek. Weekly meetings, on Tuesdays at 8:30 a.m., are mandatory for residents. Ignoring chores and continued absence is grounds for expulsion, traditionally debated and voted on at these meetings. “My main interest is in people developing their skills as leaders,” Mr. Colville emphasized. “So they can live in the street as long as they have to, know what their rights are, and connect with other people who can fight together with them.” 

Rosette’s welcome sign reads, “NOTICE: YOU ARE ENTERING A HUMAN RIGHTS ZONE.” The Connecticut State Legislature has recognized homelessness as a public health crisis since June 2023, but Mr. Colville argued that its actions fail to reflect this. “When you’re homeless, you have to present yourself as completely helpless,” he said. “You have to allow your whole life to be managed.” 

From its founding, Rosette Village mirrored the communal responsibility and governance framework of the Catholic Worker Movement. In early 2025, however, the collective registered as a nonprofit organization—a decision that Ms. Catarineau spearheaded and Mr. Colville opposed, believing the formalization was at odds with the original, fluid spirit of the resident-led collective. It promised to streamline the village’s finances, lessening the burden of funding from Mr. Colville and Ms. Catarineau with funds from outsiders.

The change was also ideological. “The ideas we started with changed drastically when it became tax-exempt,” Ms. Catarineau explained. “People started asking for specific things like curfews and no open-door policy,” both of which had been core to Mr. Colville’s founding framework. Ms. Catarineau believes limiting new arrivals protects the safety and integrity of the existing community.

The security of nonprofit status and top-down governance furthered Rosette Village’s desire to be a replicable model. “Our focus is policy change,” Mr. Colville adds. “What we’re doing here, the city or religious congregations should be doing in their vast properties.”

“It’s not just a fun project back there,” Mr. Colville adds. “It is a mandate of our sincerely held religious beliefs.”

While Mr. Colville disagreed with the decision to become a nonprofit, he had no intention of preventing it. “It’s clear to me that the vision has changed,” he adds. “People should be encouraged to keep changing it.” Mr. Colville declined to join the board of the nonprofit, Good Neighbors Community Fund, and took this as an opportunity to refocus his advocacy on the streets.

“If we don’t keep a connection to fighting and what’s going on in the street, then I don’t think that we have much of a future.”

Colville’s Fight in the Street

Every Thursday, Mr. Colville and the Unhoused Activist Community Team (U-ACT) that operates out of Amistad distribute seasonal supplies, informational material, coffee and food—donated or made by the residents of Rosette Village—across the city. 

I joined them on April 10, 2025, a windy, wet evening that felt more like the last whispers of winter than a tease of spring. I rode alongside Mr. Colville, who was playing the Grateful Dead on the radio as background noise.

Before we set out, Sean Gargamelli-McCreight—an organizer for the group—joked that Mark is like a real-life Batman. Mr. Colville added that his butler is just out of sight. As I asked how the group got involved with his work, Nora Wyrtzen—now a senior at Yale—said seeing Mr. Colville reminds her of the power of radical service and kindness.

We began with a trip to a McDonald’s off I-95. After parking in the back of the lot, we made for a gap in the fence. Under the trees and the golden arches themselves sat three tents within the sliver of forest that serves as the highway’s sound barrier. Mr. Colville gave a friendly shout, and one well-mustached man materialized to greet him.

An uncomfortable uncertainty dogs Mr. Colville at every stop of these expeditions: Why are some of the expected residents missing? Have they been evicted, relocated, incarcerated? Something worse?

Mr. Colville is vocal in his criticism of Mayor Justin Ellicker of New Haven and his administration, especially as he advocates for a moratorium on winter tent clearings. “Just from December 1st to March 1st or April 1st would literally save lives,” he argued.

After the encampment settled down at 203 Rosette St., it looked as though Mr. Colville and the city could turn over a new leaf. The city’s zoning board granted them a 180-day approval, backdated to its construction. When this expired in July 2024, the city turned off electricity to the village. The city insists that the homes did not meet the safety criteria for permanent structures. “The city is committed to extending compassion and services to people experiencing homelessness, but must also ensure the places they live are safe, and meet state standards,” Mayor Elicker said in a statement to The Connecticut Public. “These structures are not compliant with those standards.”

In the fall of 2025, the nonprofit reintroduced its contract system for residents. These three-month contracts formalized the nonprofit’s governance by providing conditions for residency, but this proved more complicated in practice than was anticipated.

They were first set to expire on Dec. 16, 2026; the nonprofit intended to leverage this to improve behavior and cycle out some of the village’s longest residing-members. 

Ms. Catarineau routinely clarifies that the village was always intended to be temporary housing and that a new cohort of residents could derive greater benefit from access to the housing, mailboxes and weekly medical check-ins they offer. “I never guaranteed anyone to live here for the rest of their lives,” she said.

In December the nonprofit renewed every resident’s contract until March as they did not feel comfortable pursuing eviction in the middle of winter, especially as most residents had no arrangements for alternative housing. 

Ms. Godek was especially concerned about what this deadline will mean for her: “As soon as we can find somewhere, we’ll gladly leave. But if it doesn’t happen by that date, I’m sorry.” 

While the nonprofit is anxious to avoid more such confrontations, they wanted to maintain control at this junction and feared their repeated contract extensions had reduced their agency. “If we don’t just cut those ties and just do it, it’s never going to happen,” Ms. Catarineau said.

Ms. Godek started a GoFundMe page in December to raise money for her and other residents to move out. The page was up for only a week and collected $180 of its $600 goal before being taken down. Ms. Godek ultimately signed the contract. After another grace period, Ms. Godek and all residents save the three oldest moved out.

The couple fear that because their organization is too small to offer addiction treatment (they do promise to hold a person’s place should they pursue in-patient treatment), the village has become complicit in bad habits. “At some point you have to say this is not a place for people to just nurture their addiction and contribute to a culture of selfishness and theft—things that any community has to be able to confront in order to be a community, rather than a security-based institution,” Ms. Catarineau said.

Mr. Colville adds, “We don’t want these places to become a safe place to kill yourself by drugs.” 

The nonprofit has no intention to pressure the remaining residents out; rather, they intend to shift their focus to New Haven’s elderly unhoused populations, especially those who have worked with U-ACT. In the interim, they are renovating the unoccupied units. 

The Boundary With the Backyard

Mr. Colville and Ms. Catarineau have long struggled with setting healthy boundaries between themselves and the village. The question of what they owe or can offer the community is constantly in flux. “I look at it year to year to see if I have the energy to continue,” Ms. Catarineau said.

In 2025, Mr. Colville and Ms. Catarineau moved out of 203 Rosette St. to separate their ministry and their personal lives. They now live in an apartment at 207 Rosette St., a neighboring house whose backyard also opens onto the village. Their youngest son, in remission from cancer, now lives in the apartment above 203 Rosette St.’s communal floor. The move has done little to keep the couple from next door. 

Rosette Village never strove to be a utopia but rather to engage in daily acts of solidarity and service. “Through this project, we’ve been able to articulate a real narrative about how homelessness is criminalized, about the misery that people go through and the violence in our city,” Mr. Colville said.

He recalled a comment from Robert Dillon, a building inspector for the city of New Haven, for a documentary on the village. Asked if he expected more communities like this throughout the city, Mr. Dillon replied, “I just think it’s a unicorn on Rosette Street.” 

Mr. Colville does not see it so simply. “As a unicorn, as this guy likes to call it, it’s still a success,” he argued. “I’m perfectly willing to defend the backyard to the death.” 

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