Building a Home

A Catholic Worker model for housing moves forward.

by

Magazine

Mark Colville, co-founder of the Amistad Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in New Haven, Connecticut, has been described by a friend as “fierce.” That applies to his commitment to defend the rights of the unhoused, as well as to his hatred of what he sees as attempts by city and state bureaucrats to obstruct his work.

Mark and his wife, Luz, founded Amistad thirty years ago in their home, raising their four children there and providing hospitality in the form of breakfast and lunch for dozens of people a day, and shelter for a smaller number. Meanwhile, they worked on the larger issues of human rights, nuclear disarmament, and homelessness.

In March 2023, the city administration swept a homeless encampment that Mark had helped set up nearby in 2020. So he invited those he calls the “refugees” to set up their tents in Amistad’s backyard, joining others who were already staying there.

Seven months later, six tiny, white, prefabricated metal structures providing shelter for eight—“and a door that locks,” Mark emphasizes—were built over a weekend by community volunteers on one side of the yard. (They are not technically “tiny homes” because they lack bathrooms and kitchens, which residents can access in the main house 24/7.) The backyard was dubbed Rosette Neighborhood Village, after the name of their street.

The village is neat and clean. Two picnic tables with canopies hold food that is prepared by the residents or donated; on one side is a coffee station, and a covered shelter in the middle of the yard serves as an emergency refuge for one or two people who have nowhere else to go. Current and former residents come for meals or to just hang out.

Amistad’s neighbors on Rosette Street supported the plan to build the tiny shelters, speaking in favor of them at a New Haven zoning board meeting in January 2024. The board then granted approval to install electricity to provide heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, as well as to power lights and charge phones. Mark says Mayor Justin Elicker then subverted that decision, changing it to a six-month provisional approval based on a technicality, which ended in June 2024. (Elicker says he is upholding the state building code to ensure safety.) As of January 2026, the electricity is still off and residents are using extension cords from the main house to provide power to their shelters.

Mark and Luz have moved from the Amistad house to the house next door, leaving most of the first floor to the backyard residents, who run their own affairs through organization-required weekly meetings, and the sharing of cooking and other chores. The group that supported construction of the tiny shelters has been turned into a nonprofit—the Good Neighbors Fund—to raise money for the village’s operational costs, lawyer’s fees, and to get the electricity turned back on.

“We’re not housing developers or nonprofit managers,” Mark says. “Our mission is to help people assert their right to take refuge in public spaces when they haven’t been provided with adequate housing. We do policy work.” As a prime example, the Colvilles, some of the backyard neighbors and supporters, and two representatives from Yale University’s Program for Recovery and Community Health formed the Unhoused Activists Community Team (U-ACT). The group holds public meetings where members feed all attendees and plan direct action. In one of these actions, members risked arrest by camping on the New Haven Green to emphasize their demand that unhoused residents be allowed to camp on public property—an idea that is anathema to city administrators and many residents.

U-ACT’s four demands for the city are: no eviction from public land; permanent public bathrooms for everyone; public showers; and allowing those evicted from encampments to keep their belongings, or provide a place where they can be stored.

Alexis Terry, who has lived most of her life in New Haven and has experienced periods of homelessness, is a leader of U-ACT. Before Alexis had permanent housing, she stayed briefly at Columbus House, a local nonprofit providing shelter and other services. “I remember going to Amistad on a rainy day after being put out at Columbus House. I remember feeling so much love, and there was so much food,” she says. She calls her current involvement a “full circle moment.”

Mark grew up in Madison, an upscale Connecticut Shoreline town about twenty miles east of New Haven. “I was very religious; all I wanted to do was read the Bible,” he says. In 1984, he graduated from Manhattan College with a degree in religious studies and peace studies. Right after college, he entered seminary to become a priest. Priests focus on administering sacraments like the Eucharist, Baptism, and weddings, and pastoral ministry in a parish setting. He soon realized that the lifestyle of brothers in a religious community, focusing on works of mercy as their ministry and/or manual labor “was more appealing to me, so I switched after a year.”

He was living in the South Bronx, New York City, organizing with South Bronx People for Change, based out of a local Catholic church. “It was a Saul Alinsky approach with a liberation theology twist,” he says with a laugh. In 1986, he met Luz Catarineau, who had grown up in that neighborhood and taken a leadership training course with South Bronx People for Change. They were both involved in a campaign to get drug dealers out of the local schoolyard, and began dating. They were married in 1990 and had two children. Soon after, they planned to move to Brazil as part of the Maryknoll Lay Missioners, a Catholic international missionary program. But their plans were interrupted when Mark’s mentor, the Reverend Tom Goekler, returned from missionary work in Latin America and began urging the couple to move into his family home in the low-income Hill neighborhood of New Haven to start a Catholic Worker house. “We agreed to do it for a year and go to Brazil after that,” Mark says. “That was in 1994.”

As one of the more than 150 community-based Catholic Worker houses across the country, Amistad’s mission is to live the Sermon on the Mount, feeding, clothing, and housing their neighbors while also taking action for fundamental societal change.

In addition to fulfilling the teachings of Jesus to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, Mark was involved in three Plowshares direct actions against nuclear weapons, where participants sneaked into military installations and poured blood and hammered symbolic dents on nuclear weapons parts. He’s served a total of five years in jails and prisons over the past thirty years for protesting war and injustice, including at annual protests—in Guantánamo, Cuba, and in Washington, D.C.—of the detention camp first established in Guantánamo Bay under President George W. Bush and still in use today.

It’s all connected, Mark says. “We draw a straight line between the common table, a stressed neighborhood, and the nuclear weapons-industrial complex. Nuclear weapons are a direct theft from the poor. The way we articulate that is that in our neighborhood, the bomb has already gone off. It’s similar to having a gun. If I point a gun at your head, I’m using a gun whether I fire it or not.”

One of the most important connections Rosette Village has is with Benincasa, a Catholic Worker farm in the town of Guilford, Connecticut, about fifteen miles away, where some residents of the village go to work. This urban-rural interface harkens back to the early days of the Catholic Worker movement, when Dorothy Day inspired houses of hospitality in New York City and many other places, while her co-founder, Peter Maurin, extolled the virtues of rural life and inspired the creation of farms nearby to provide food for urban Catholic Worker house residents, as well as fresh air and new beginnings for their own residents. U-ACT also holds its retreats at Benincasa.

On an early fall morning in 2025, three men from Rosette Village were working on garden chores at the farm. The men come to Guilford a couple of times each week to build not only their income, but also self-respect and community. One of the men, Dave Mirone, says he’s known Mark and Luz since before he became homeless about thirteen years ago. “I stayed in encampments; I don’t like shelters. They’re like jail. Once you go in, you’re locked up,” Dave says. He lived in a tent in Amistad’s backyard, and later transitioned to one of its tiny shelters. He credits Mark and Luz for helping him survive difficult times, including struggles with alcoholism. “Rosette Village gave me a chance to build my life and put myself back together,” he says. “If it wasn’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have made it. I wasn’t doing very well . . . . They gave me a chance so I could straighten up my life, get a job, get right with my medications.”

Dave says he loves the work on the farm, along with his part-time custodial job at a New Haven Catholic school. At the time of our interview, he had just moved into a subsidized apartment a block from a city park: “I love walking there, sitting on a bench, feeding the ducks.” Still, he was visiting Rosette Village a few weeks later, because he felt so comfortable there.

Sean Gargamelli-McCreight moved from New York City to take over the Benincasa property in Guilford in 2021 with his wife and children. He connected with Amistad and Mark and Luz, later helping them set up the tiny shelters. When some residents of Rosette Village expressed interest in working on the farm, he says he didn’t want to be a boss. “So I got together some folks who were interested—who were currently or formerly incarcerated or unhoused, maybe in recovery, and hard to employ in a traditional setting.” Everyone contributed $300 to the farm, agreeing to run it as a cooperative. Everyone makes $20 an hour. All the food they grow is donated to food pantries and a New Haven farmers market; they also do landscaping for private clients.

“Part of what we try to do is find the right task for the right person,” Sean adds. “Everybody has a different gift, a different skill, a different focus, and it’s about building that. So Eddie and Anthony, their ability to hand-weed something and keep the plants around them alive is unparalleled . . . . Dave can operate and fix any machine. Shine has precision and focus, so he’s our weedwacker.”

Asked how it feels to be able to use their gifts in a way that brings them positive recognition, money, support, and praise, Anthony says, “It feels good. In my early life it was always negative.”

The co-op offers accountability and mutual support. “If someone needs a little extra support on a task, these guys are going to jump in and help,” says Sean. “And if someone has a problem, you have to go to that person and talk. We say, ‘Hey, you didn’t pick up your weight on this thing; I need your help.’ I think that creates a different culture than in other kinds of workplaces—you got my back; also, I know that you’re going to hold me accountable. It’s about self-worth. They are worth their place on this planet.”

Operating any collective of people is a challenge, and the additional challenges of drug dependency and mental health issues among the Rosette Village residents compound the difficulty. After recent changes encouraged by the Good Neighbors Fund board members—including Luz—Mark stepped back from decision-making, although he still attends the weekly meetings.

As Mark explains: “The concept here is [supposed to be] that people have their own homes. This is a refugee camp. We would decide together who could come in and who had to leave.

“I stepped back because I’m a Catholic Worker—we challenge the system. We don’t just bring people into our homes and take care of them. We ask, ‘What are these wounds they have and how is the city producing these wounds and how can we stop it?’ ” Mark says Catholic Workers’ purpose is helping unhoused people in their neighborhood “assert their right to take refuge somewhere. The problem is that unhoused people are not considered human, according to law and policy in this city, because there is no legal place for a person who can’t afford an apartment to exist outside of institutionalization, like a shelter.”

Luz says she and Mark have stayed with Amistad for thirty years “because the need just kept growing.” She held down the fort all the times Mark was in jail, and has worked another job in part to provide health insurance for the family, including their youngest son who is in remission from cancer.

She adds, “It wasn’t my dream to have tiny homes in my backyard. The hope was that the city would say, ‘You have a really good model’ that could be replicated elsewhere,” as has been the case in other cities. Instead, Elicker’s administration wants to dismantle the Rosette Village tiny shelters. Supporters of the model are working to get a bill passed in the state legislature that would allow religious organizations to set up tiny homes or shelters on their property. That would legalize the shelters in Rosette Village and get the electricity turned back on.

Since moving next door, Luz and Mark are talking about moving even farther away, because they are still the go-to people for everything that happens at Rosette Village.

“Luz and I are in the process of trying to detach from this place [the Amistad Catholic Worker House of Hospitality] so others can come in and take it where it’s supposed to go in the next generation,” Mark says. “The tiny homes and nonprofit will go on; we will change our roles, to be determined.” They still plan to stay connected to their neighborhood.

They are in the process of discerning next steps with community members. Mark has in mind a certain young couple he hopes will move into the Amistad House and recreate a Catholic Worker community, just like he and Luz did thirty years ago.