If you build 11,000 square feet of commercial store space in the isolated West Rock neighborhood, customers will come. Won’t they?
The Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) is banking on it. But it’s not quite sure how their plans for 122 Wilmot Rd. are going to work quite yet.
At this month’s HANH board meeting, commissioners approved up to $68,880 for O’Riordan Migani Architects of Derby to devise a plan to build the store space in combination with 37 units of senior housing on this bucolic but isolated stretch of partially abandoned public housing projects by West Rock State Park.
Th 122 Wilmot plan is a crucial part of the West Rock Development plan, HANH’s most recent and ambitious attempt to replace the now-being-razed Brookside and Rockview apartments with a Monterey Place-type rental and homeownership mixed development.
HANH has experienced some setbacks in trying to get the plan going. And the recession makes for bad timing. Still, work on the $144 million West Rock Development enterprise is proceeding with the first phases, including the ground work for 122 Wilmot.
According to HANH Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton (pictured above), the agency hopes to attract a pharmacy, bank, and food store to the commercial plaza. “The right mix of businesses,” she added, “might also serve not only the elderly and larger West Rock residents, but the Southern population as well.”
Jimmy Miller, HANH’s former executive director and now the executive in charge of West Rock, added, “122 is at the very center of the West Rock community. Improving this site is absolutely essential to ensuring the long-term sustainability of the community.”
He said 11,000 square feet of commercial space will “put more eyes on the street, and more eyes on the street will enhance security.”
HANH bought the property from its owners for $750,000 in December. In early 2008 it negotiated the eviction of the only extant tenants in the squat brick building there: three small store-front churches, each of which HANH paid $20,000 for moving and relocation expenses.
Now HANH’s hired O’Riordan Migani to develop a design. It also has an RFP out to fence and light the extensive parking lot around 122, and an additional RFP out to retain a broker to assist in marketing the property to likely future tenants.
The task is not going to be easy. Historically, the lack of stores in the immediate West Rock area has added to the residents’ sense of isolation. However, if the only customers are those in nearby Westville Manor and the future residents of the 475-unit West Rock Development, will that be a sufficient market? What kinds of establishments can thrive out there?
Miller and DuBois-Walton have these questions very much on their minds. In email messages, they both expressed hopes that the stores attracted to the area to serve the frail elderly and larger West Rock community will also appeal to students from nearby Southern Connecticut State University and provide a link to people in nearby Hamden as well. However, Hamden has long erected fences by the edge of the neighborhood to prevent people from crossing the city-town border.
Miller said he hoped that the stores would employ 30 to 40 local people.
Miller said HANH had hoped to have secured leases for at least some of the space before building the facility. But given the current economic downturn, he called that unlikely. “It may be necessary first to build the space in order to attract businesses to the area.”
All the tenants of 122 Wilmot must vacate the premises by April 2, 2009, at which time demolition of the building will begin. The next question: What will rise in its place?