There’s a section of Manchester, Center City, shaped by history and perpetuated by vested property interests, that isn’t like surrounding communities. It’s where Amoskeag’s unskilled laborers, often new immigrants, found their first foothold in tenement housing 150 years ago and where today’s zoning laws stand like invisible walls to consolidate the city’s lowest-income residents.

Carl Connor tries his best to share the wisdom and love he rarely got from grown-ups when he was young, and which he regrets not being around to give to his own son, to disadvantaged youths starting to get into trouble in the Queen City. After Jaden’s death, Connor became a Street Outreach Worker for the non-profit MYTURN and its Project Connect program, which seeks to support young people, divert them from the justice system and set them up for success. Outreach workers like Connor mentor troubled youths and try to keep them from potential run-ins with the law.

Joseph Lascaze grew up in Manchester with relatives who emigrated from Haiti. He remembers dribbling soccer balls with his cousins outside his uncle’s house on Laurel Street, playing basketball with friends at Pulaski Park and visiting a Union Street store for its Latin soft drinks after church. Nearly everywhere he went, he would see police scouring the center city.

In Manchester, center city is notorious for its high crime rate and low-income, high-density housing. But a nonprofit and a neighborhood initiative are trying to change that with community engagement and beautification initiatives that include installing artwork throughout the neighborhood.

The persistence of center city’s crime issues is easy to spot in the last decade of crime data from the Manchester Police Department (MPD). According to the collaborative’s analysis of calls for police service between 2006 and 2020, the number of crimes reported per resident was significantly higher in center city than anywhere else in Manchester (see map). Compared to the suburbs in northwestern and northeastern Manchester, parts of center city reported roughly five times as many calls for service.

The Ghalleys’ apartment sits near the top of Douglas Avenue in Manchester, just before it exits the Piscataquog neighborhood to meander through Notre Dame. A large pile of trash—the accumulated refuse from six families in a city with only two collection days a week—sits outside.

Banks have a simple answer when confronted with high denial rates for Hispanic mortgage applicants: You don’t know the whole story.

So many factors go into consideration of a mortgage, refinance or home equity loan that bank officials say it is difficult to find two equally situated applicants, one white and one Hispanic, to prove discrimination.