Joel Nieves is lucky if he gets two hours of sleep with his CPAP machine before the battery pack dies. “You try to sleep at night and it’s like you’re being smothered,” Nieves, who suffers from sleep apnea and other health conditions, said. Nieves relies on the CPAP machine to keep breathing through the night, but, for more than three weeks, Nieves has been unable to plug the device into the walls of his tiny home after the city of New Haven ordered United Illuminating to cut power to the micro neighborhood where Nieves lives after the units fell out of compliance with the state building code.
As temperatures in July and August soared into the 90s, Nieves described the conditions as a “nightmare.” “Without the power, it’s about 15 degrees warmer inside than it is outside, and with this heat wave, it’s impossible to even function,” Nieves said. “You’re sitting there (at night) and you’re crying because you’re just trying to figure out, ‘Okay, how am I gonna get out of this hole?’” While the heat finally broke this week, tensions between Rosette Neighborhood Village , a first-in-the-state tiny home community for individuals experiencing homelessness, and city hall showed no signs of cooling down.
Mark Colville, who operates the Amistad Catholic Worker out of his home where the six prefabricated tiny-homes have sat in the backyard since October, said the city’s actions are putting residents at risk. “What they’re participating in here is a.