The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
What one video says about Valentine’s campaign
It’s no secret that Bobby Valentine has traversed the city of Stamford talking about boosting home ownership in his run for mayor as an unaffiliated candidate.
He promises to help residents buy houses and condominiums, rather than supporting policies that require set-asides for affordable rentals in newly developed apartment buildings.
The question is, what is he saying about the city’s renters? That’s nearly half of all residents by some counts, including lowincome families and rich folks decamping from New York.
A 28-second video clip that I obtained has turned that question into an issue in the campaign between Valentine and state Rep. Caroline Simmons, the Democrat, two weeks before Election Day.
Here’s what Valentine said:
“Because if you’re not owning, you’re not caring. And I don’t want, I don’t mind having people in our city who are just renters, but I know that of those 10,000 new people who came here over the last six years, came to Stamford, and they’re renting in our community, I know that they’re not leaving the community better than when they got here.”
Strong words. What’s the context? That’s the issue.
To the Simmons campaign, those 64 words are proof that Valentine, the former Major League Baseball player and manager, and successful local restaurant owner, favors the oldline homeowners of Stamford — many of them in the less urban parts of town where he has owned a house for 20 years. They show contempt for renters of all economic levels, Simmons’ campaign and some of her supporters say.
“Tying a person’s value to whether or not they own property is a sentiment from a bygone era,” state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, a Simmons supporter who watched the videotape before I received it, said to me. “It invokes a history of systemic inequality, socioeconomic inequality and discrimination against various constituencies. It has no place in Stamford, especially a place as diverse and with such forward thinking. This is not indicative of who we are as a growing, vibrant city.”
That criticism, the Valentine campaign says, makes false assumptions based on an incomplete clip.
“That little snippet takes the discussion about living and being part of our community completely out of context,” Dan Miller, Valentine’s campaign manager, suggested Monday. “We absolutely, clearly, are not favoring anybody.”
The real subject, he said: “How we have to move forward in a positive way to encourage home ownership…It was not about the people, it was about the apartments.”
It’s human nature for renters to “take a little less care” of rental cars or, in an apartment, kitchen cabinets, Miller said. “It wasn’t disparaging renters.”
We can’t turn to the full video for more answers. An edited version with only those 64 words — which I reported above, word-forword -- is all I received from my source, a Democratic Party activist in another town, who has volunteered for many campaigns, including Simmons’ run for mayor. The person, whom I agreed not to identify, said she did not shoot the video and received it from someone who is not with the Simmons campaign.
The event, held Sept. 27, was in the yard of a private house in a nearby town, not Stamford, for a politically interested audience that included supporters of both candidates. It was not a fundraiser for Valentine.
These words sound bad in any context. Valentine surely must realize they shouldn’t have come from a guy with 71 years of life experience, most of it in Connecticut’s second largest city — arguably the most ethnically and economically diverse city in the state — at the moment when he’s asking the whole city to vote for him.
Saying thousands of people who rent apartments “are not leaving the community better” paints an overly broad picture even if, as Miller says, Valentine was talking about the massive growth of upscale apartments, not the renters.
Of course, sweeping statements, as we’ve learned in our hopelessly broken national politics, can work.
“This shocking video shows Bobby Valentine taking a page right out of Donald Trump's playbook by trying to divide and demonize certain groups of people,” Simmons’ campaign manager, Lauren Meyer, said in a written comment to me. “It’s part of a pattern of divisive tactics: in recent days he's also attacked Caroline Simmons for where she lived as a child, insinuating there's
something wrong with anyone who was born outside Stamford and then chose to make their home here.”
Valentine has made an issue of the fact that Simmons, a 35-year-old Harvard graduate, grew up in Greenwich. Simmons has shot back that she speaks for all Stamford residents, not just those born and raised in the city.
What lurks underneath that spat? Same forces as the rent vs. own battle: Charges of elitism (“She grew up in a life of privilege,” Miller said to me) vs. charges of cronyism, as the Simmons campaign suggests Valentine operates through his network of old pals.
Miller countered Meyer’s comments by saying, “Our campaign is much more diverse and inclusive and our administration will be much more diverse and inclusive.” As for renters, Miller, who’s in finance professionally, rents in a building where, eight years ago, he met Valentine -himself a renter at the time,
as he returned from a stint in the Boston Red Sox dugout and gave the people leasing his house more time to live there.
Paris, the recently elected state representative who supports Simmons, also rents, as a 30-year-old who has lived in Stamford on and off for his whole adult life after moving from Arkansas. “There’s no separating the issue of home ownership from racial inequities that are in our country,” Paris said, suggesting an undertone of Valentine’s remarks. “Fiftyeight percent of black American households are rented.”
Miller quickly points out that Valentine has lived in five different Stamford neighborhoods, and that his comments in the video clip were about the apartments for wealthy, mostly white people living in luxury buildings near the harbor.
I agree that’s what Valentine appears to be talking about. But that’s bad enough, and it still leaves room to wonder about his view of all renters, in all income levels.
The Valentine campaign had to know it needed to dig out of a hole when I asked Miller over the weekend for a response to the video. Miller told me he’d call back Monday and he did — precisely one minute after the campaign issued a lengthy statement from Valentine about the need for diversity in rental housing.
“It is clear that our city must be more conscious of the full spectrum of housing needs,” Valentine said in the release, noting that Stamford’s boom has been “heavily weighted to smaller, higher-priced rental units.”
He added, “Our rental community is part of what makes Stamford vibrant, and we respect that it is the right choice for some residents.”
An enlightened comment for sure. Heartfelt, or a crafty pivot from a shocking video? We will never know.