SRO Moratorium Revived Amid Critique

Giving the public just a few hours’ heads up, city alders revised and revived a proposal to declare a moratorium on converting single-room-occupancy buildings into market-rate housing — then spent four hours debating whether they’ve overstepped.

Throughout the extended back and forth among lawyers, alders, and members of the public both in support of and in opposition to the proposed moratorium, several basic questions arose again and again over the course of the hearing:

• Why pass this legislation now? What is the urgency, given no evidence of any new pending or potential conversion plans?

• What is the law’s intended purpose?

• Might it contain hidden agendas or produce unintended consequences?

Those were the key questions asked and debated in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall on Tuesday night during the Legislation Committee’s public hearing on a proposed temporary moratorium on the conversion, demolition and rehabilitation of boarding-house units, or SROs (single-room-occupancy housing). If passed, the temporary moratorium would be added as an amendment to the city Zoning Ordinance.

Alders waited until Monday afternoon to quietly release a marked-up new version of the proposal, giving people who have participated in the debate little to no chance to review the changes before the hearing. That revived criticisms the alders have heard over the past two years for springing on the public at hearings detailed and controversial proposals for fundamentally changing how government works without first consulting parties who might have different opinions or giving them a chance to review specifics in advance. (Click here for a story about one such example.)

Read the full text of the new version of the SRO proposal here.

At the end of the night, the alders decided not to vote yet on the proposal. They kept the debate open until the next committee meeting.

The Back Story

The night of heated and unfinished testimony was the latest chapter in a months-long debate about the future of SROs and the role they should play in providing affordable housing for New Haveners. The debate was sparked back in Aug. 2017 when Chicago-based AJ Capital Partners bought one of downtown’s last SROs, the Duncan Hotel, and then alders allied with the UNITE HERE union, which was seeking to pressure AJ Capital to agree not to stop them from organizing their employees, submitted the moratorium bill.

SROs are basic, unadorned bedrooms with no kitchens and no bathrooms. They are like hotel or motel quarters in that tenants can live in for weeks, months or years at a time.

Historically, SROs have served as affordable housing options for single individuals who want to live alone, but lack the means, interest or ability to rent or purchase a full apartment or house of their own.

When AJ Capital Partners purchased the Duncan, they announced that they planned on investing $35 million in renovating and converting the 92-room building into an upscale university-themed ​“boutique” hotel.

The developers worked with the city’s housing authority to relocate the 45 tenants then living at the Duncan. Last November former Downtown Alder and UNITE HERE staffer Sarah Eidelson introduced proposed legislation that would temporarily halt the conversion of any SROs in town.

Eidelson and her co-drafters said that the moratorium would give alders time to research and develop a strategic policy for how New Haven should regulate and protect this specific type of affordable housing going forward.

Opponents of the legislation argued that the moratorium was specifically designed to punish the new owners of the Duncan for refusing to sign a neutrality agreement with UNITE-HERE, a hotel workers union that also represents the influential blue-collar and clerical workers unions at Yale University.

In November, the Duncan’s new owners rushed to secure the necessary building permits for their project before the proposed legislation could be discussed and voted on by the alders.

In January, the City Plan Commission voted to recommend that alders reconsider and update the legislation according to public testimony and legal ambiguities, even though the City Plan staff recommended that the commission advise the alders to drop the proposal because of its ​“fatal flaws” and complained that the union-affiliated alders made a point of not consulting with staff about how to make the proposal conform with zoning law.

The New Version

The changes to the original proposal, released hours before the hearing Tuesday, address concerns about the legislation being unclear, retroactive or in any way targeted at the Duncan— which the document does not, claimed Keith Ainsworth, the lawyer hired by the alders to look into the legal viability of the proposed moratorium.

The updated document extends the definition of ​“Boarding-House Unit” to include rooms that have been let to the same person or persons for more than 30 days at a time during the previous six months ​“from the date of the attempted or actual conversion, demolition or rehabilitation described herein.” (The bold content is new.)

Ainsworth said that the new draft removes any language that would invalidate existing permits or permits that have already been issued.

He also said that the Petition For Relief language was removed, so that the alders were not tempted to constantly grant exceptions to the moratorium during the six or nine months of its enactment, and that the Building Official should be in charge of interpreting and enforcing the law.

“The proposed ordinance meets legal muster,” he said. ​“It’s a good moratorium. It covers what you need to cover.”

AJ Capital attorney Carolyn Kone, on the other hand, said that there was still enough ambiguity in the document to keep her concerned that it may apply retroactively to the Duncan. She said that, since the Duncan has let rooms for over 30 days at a time in the past six months, it could get caught up in this legislation.

She said that, even though the Duncan developers already have the necessary building permits and do not need a new site plan, as they can build as of right, she would not want this moratorium to trip up them in acquiring any new permits that they may need for construction.

“I think it’s fine that it’s not the legislative intent” to affect the Duncan, she said. ​“But then clean up the ordinance, take out hotels and motels, and I can sleep at night.”

Gentrification Targeted

On Tuesday night, Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg, who took the lead on promoting the temporary moratorium after Eidelson left office earlier this year, began the Legislation Committee hearing by arguing that the proposed amendment represents a chance for alders to leverage half a year’s worth of public attention focused on the Duncan, and thereby on SROs, and use it to further the city’s commitment to affordable housing.

“Right now, there’s no policy in place to protect boarding houses from lucrative redevelopment,” he said. ​“This moratorium will give us the opportunity to implement a long overdue, long-term strategy before remaining SROs are converted and redeveloped, and to study how we can maintain and increase our stock of affordable housing.”

He said that the conversion of SROs is ​“textbook gentrification” by eliminating historically affordable housing and replacing it with non-affordable housing or something other than housing altogether.

He said that the moratorium would allow New Haven to call time out and pause certain kinds of development so that the city can collect its bearings on just what to do about SROs.

“I know we all look forward to using this moratorium to capture momentum from the current public attention,” he said, ​“and craft responsible legislation that will update city policy and ensure that New Haven remains an affordable place to live.”

However, over the course of the hearing, he repeatedly stated that the proposed moratorium was not designed to affect the current plans to convert and develop the Duncan Hotel into a ​“boutique” hotel.

He stressed that the developers of that project already have the necessary building permits in place, and that the proposed moratorium is not intended to target or hinder that particular project.

“This is not about the Duncan,” Fair Haven Heights Alder and Legislation Committee Chair Rose Santana said to corroborate Greenberg’s point at the top of Tuesday night’s hearing. ​“The permits have already succeeded. They already have them. This is for upcoming projects that may incorporate some units being turned into different types of housing other than SROs.”

Not So Sure

Despite the alders’ attempts to point the conversation towards the role that SROs play more broadly in the landscape of affordable housing, a vast majority of the nearly 20 members of the public who testified on Tuesday night spoke out in opposition to the proposal.

They said that the moratorium at its best is unnecessary, unclear and a distraction from the work that a new Affordable Housing Task Force will need to do after its members are appointed and approved. At its worst, they said, the moratorium would have a chilling effect on new and existing developers who are already wary of the mayor’s proposed 11 percent tax increase for the coming fiscal year.

“This legislation is a job killer,” said Garrett Sheehan, the new president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce. He said that the proposed moratorium creates confusing hurdles for developers interested in building in New Haven, and that it sends a discouraging message to potential investors by implying that the rules can change at any minute.

“This could have a chilling effect on people coming into town,” said local attorney James Segaloff. He praised the alders for looking to address the affordable housing crisis in town, but said that they also must balance that concern with the cost of stalled economic development.

“We need to consider how tax base expansion is needed to support affordable housing,” said New Haven Urban Design League President Anstess Farwell. ​“By keeping the tax based expanded, we can avoid tax increases, which we know hurts low-income people the worst.”

She agreed with the concern over the dearth of affordable housing in New Haven. She said she is eager to work with the new task force to come up with ideas to address that lack. She said that the proposed moratorium strikes her as a distraction from that vital work.

A trio of alders also testified in opposition to the amendment on Tuesday night, citing similar concerns with the relevance and potential known on effects of the moratorium.

“I see absolutely no need for this complicated proposal,” said Downtown Alder Abby Roth. She said that it would put undue pressure on the task force to focus on the relatively narrow slice of affordable housing that SROs constitute.

She also said that she has asked Alder Greenberg if there are any examples of New Haven SROs besides the Duncan that are currently in danger of conversion or elimination. She said that he has not been able to provide her with an example.

“We should just let the task force move forward with that broad goal of taking a look at the broad range of issues affecting affordable housing,” she said.

East Rock Alder Anna Festa and Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter agreed.

“Families typically won’t be well served by SROs,” Winter said. ​“Look at a wider array of housing.” He also said that this legislation sends the wrong message to businesses interested in investing in the city.

He said he supports the general concept of moratoria; one such moratorium protected a Boulder, Colorado, coop he used to live in. But the New Haven proposal doesn’t seem to make sense given that no current SROs are under a conversion threat, he said. He advocated letting the newer affordable housing task force take a broader approach.

Four out of the nearly 20 speakers testified in favor of the proposed moratorium. Their arguments in support had less to do with the specific protection of SROs and more to do with their belief that this legislation would ultimately lead towards stronger safeguards for affordable housing as a whole.

Edgewood Alder Evette Hamilton testified alongside Alison Parks, a former resident of 66 Norton St. who has been living out of a room at the New Haven Inn with her two children for three weeks since the city condemned that 41-unit apartment building as on the brink of collapse.

“The need for legislation that speaks to affordable housing in the City of New Haven is imperative,” Hamilton said, ​“not only for SROs.” She said that Parks came home at 5 p.m. one day to find that she could no longer live at her home. She said that Parks has struggled to commute without a car from from her motel in Amity to her job at St. Raphael’s campus of Yale-New Haven Hospital, which was within walking distance when she lived on Norton Street.

Hamilton said that, if there were any SROs downtown or in Edgewood, Parks would have gladly paid for one instead of moving out to the New Haven Motel for nearly a month.

“Everything was in my reach,” Parks said. ​“Not it’s just uncertainties.”

Abby Feldman and Ian Skoggard, activists with the UNITE HERE-affiliated advocacy group New Haven Rising, also spoke out in support of the moratorium. They said that a pause on potential SRO conversions will give alders needed time to think through a broader set of regulations and proposals for how to protect and encourage safe, convenient affordable housing.

“Sometimes you need a deadline to make sure things get done,” read written testimony that Feldman submitted for the hearing.

Legal Process

Much of Tuesday night’s public hearing focused on procedural concerns and rebuttals from AJ Capital attorney Kone and alder attorney Ainsworth.

In line with her testimony at January’s City Plan Commission meeting, Kone argued that the proposed moratorium is still too vague in its definitions, and that it should explicitly exclude hotels and motels from its provisions.

She said that, even though her client already has a building permit and a rooming house license for the planned new hotel, she is not sure if the law as written would prevent it from getting other needed permits, or if it would require it to apply for a different type of rooming house license. Even though the Duncan already has permits and doesn’t need a site plan, it suggested that ancillary outstanding permits might denied under the moratorium because of vague language in the new version of the proposal. And she questioned whether the language might require the hotel owner to obtain a new kind of rooming license.

She also argued that the alders had not given adequate public notice after making substantive changes to the proposed amendment that they released just a few hours before Tuesday’s hearing.

And she said that Alder Greenberg and Beaver Hills Alder Richard Furlow should recuse themselves from the Legislation Committee’s vote on the matter because of their previous advocacy for the bill in question.

Ainsworth argued that Kone’s interpretations represented a misreading of case law. Her arguments along with much of the oppositional testimony given on Tuesday night represented ​“an attempt to intimidate the committee to stop the process you’ve engaged in,” he testified.

He said that the alders clearly noticed the public hearing, and that the updates to the drafted legislation only narrowed the group of people affected by the bill.

He said that the alders were well within their legislative right to issue a temporary moratorium. The proposed amendment does not actually deprive anyone of a use, he said; it only controls a use for a limited period of time.

He also said, so long as each alder was not unduly prejudiced and was open to suggestions and feedback and criticism regarding the legislation, there was no need for any of them to recuse themselves from a vote.

“Don’t be afraid to follow the process,” he said.

By 10 p.m., the alders voted to close the public hearing, and then voted to reopen it so that they could extend the hearing, and push off the vote, until next month’s Legislation Committee meeting on April 10.

Westville Alder Adam Marchand said that he would support keeping the public hearing open for another month, and commended committee Chair Santana for allowing the public a maximum of opportunities to voice their opinions on the matter.

But, he said, he was confident based on Ainsworth’s testimony that the alders could have voted on the measure without needing to further amend it or send it back to the City Plan Commission for another review.

“I do not agree with the assertions made by some tonight that there is a problem with the procedure,” he said. ​“But, I am happy to support the motion so moved.”