by | Apr 11, 2025 8:03 pm | Comments (3)
Laura Glesby Photos
CCA's Juan Vega unveils the new street sign at Davenport and Ward...
...in honor of Rev. Bonita Grubbs, center, who turned 70 on Friday.
The corner of Davenport and Ward now officially bears the name of a cornerstone of New Haven’s fight against poverty.
by | Apr 4, 2025 4:45 pm | Comments (19)
Thomas Breen photo
At work this week on 96 new downtown apartments.
The logo for September's "pro-homes" YIMBYtown conference.
Expand housing in industrial zones.
Make it easier to build small-scale developments.
Pull back on parking mandates.
Double down on mother-in-law apartments.
Those are a few of the zoning changes that sit at the top of the respective wish lists of two local housing-policy aficionados when asked what would make New Haven a city that truly supports build build building.
by | Apr 2, 2025 3:48 pm | Comments (16)
Thomas Breen photos
Cars parked at 80 Elm ...
Thomas Breen photo
... to facilitate the construction of a different downtown development.
The fence is open and cars are parked on an empty Elm Street lot near City Hall.
Might this mean progress on a long-stalled downtown development?
Yes … just not the one you might think.
by | Apr 2, 2025 1:48 pm | Comments (1)
Laura Glesby File Photo
Tim Maguire, new executive director of Y2Y.
Two partnering youth homelessness nonprofits are now under new leadership.
Continue reading ‘Youth Homelessness Orgs Announce New Directors’
by | Apr 1, 2025 9:52 am | Comments (16)
Thomas Breen photo
1447 Chapel, home to a "cordial" rent-hike dispute.
A 75-year-old tenant’s monthly rent will increase by $100 — after the Fair Rent Commission chipped away at the landlord’s compromise proposal of $150, following an initial suggested hike of $350.
by | Mar 28, 2025 11:54 am | Comments (11)
Paul Bass photo
Reinvention team: LCI's Rosario, Brennan and Williams at WNHH FM.
Rosaly Rosario discovered that a rundown vacant house on Sylvan Avenue wasn’t so vacant after all.
by | Mar 27, 2025 11:51 am | Comments (17)
Thomas Breen photo
Brewery Square: $24M renovation, 17-year tax break deal in the works.
A Fair Haven brewery-turned-apartment complex on the Quinnipiac River is on the brink of getting a new owner, a new tax break, and a new boost in affordable rentals.
by | Mar 27, 2025 9:45 am | Comments (27)
Abbey Kim Photo
Jorell Alford, Mell Savage, and other U-ACT organizers listen to Elicker's budget presentation.
Unhoused activists took their proposed “People’s Budget” directly to Mayor Justin Elicker Wednesday evening — bringing signs, printed copies of their proposal, tents, and calls for more money for homelessness services to the latest city budget town hall meeting.
Continue reading ‘U-ACT Confronts Mayor With "People's Budget"’
by | Mar 24, 2025 5:01 pm | Comments (19)
Laura Glesby Photo
Mell Savage on being unhoused: "Their entire life is in their backpacks."
Nora Grace-Flood File Photo
More Pallet "Tiny Homes" proposed.
A coalition of unhoused activists marched into City Hall to meet the mayor’s proposed city budget with a spending plan of their own, as summarized by a song: “More housing, defund the police!”
by | Mar 24, 2025 11:36 am | Comments (12)
Thomas Breen photo
50 Liberty: Another new owner, another sale way above tax appraisal.
A Fairfield County investor has purchased a three-family house on Liberty Street for $492,500, marking that property’s fourth sale in as many years.
The seller sold it for $182,000 more than he paid for it — while the city taxes it as if it’s worth half as much as the actual sale price.
Continue reading ‘Investor, Not City, Profits On 4th Resale’
by | Mar 21, 2025 4:21 pm | Comments (0)
Louis Gill.
Columbus House announced Friday that Louis Gill will be leading the homelessness services nonprofit as chief executive officer, effective May 1.
by | Mar 21, 2025 4:01 pm | Comments (11)
Thomas Breen photo
126 Sheffield. The fire department found it is "very well possible" that someone in the basement "improperly discarded a cigarette end at the floor near the wall that surrounded the oil tank."
File photo
City fire investigator Reyes (second from left) with property manager David Kone, at the scene of the Jan. 31 blaze. One of the six tenants displaced in the fire, who is now homeless, previously lost his home in a different Xu-house fire.
Either a cigarette or mixed wiring could have ignited a mattress in a basement of a Newhallville three-family house that burst into flames earlier this year.
Those details are included in a newly released report that sheds light on what may have caused just the latest of five fires in two years at different properties controlled by Bethany-based landlord Jianchao Xu.
Continue reading ‘FD Report: Latest Xu-House Fire Began With Burning Basement Mattress’
by | Mar 17, 2025 12:56 pm | Comments (16)
Thomas Breen photo
More apartments, fewer bedrooms, coming to Henry St.?
The new owner of a pair of historic Dixwell row houses is seeking permission to reconfigure them into more apartments — raising concern from at least one neighbor about the impact on neighborhood parking.
Continue reading ‘More Apartments Sought For Dixwell Row Homes’
by | Mar 14, 2025 2:08 pm | Comments (24)
Thomas Breen photos
Perlich, at 414 Chapel: "Somebody just has to do it."
Former mill building. Future apartments?
Jonathan Perlich walked down the vast, empty fourth floor of a 19th-century mill building — beneath wooden beams and beside exposed brick walls interrupted by window after window after window.
Outside the sun shone on the newly built warehouses and boarded-up factories that stand east of Wooster Square.
Despite a years-long delay, Perlich insisted, this industrial-turned-office-turned-vacant building near the Mill River will be converted into 87 new places to live.
Continue reading ‘Builder Plots Factory-To-Apartments Revival’
by | Mar 13, 2025 8:06 pm | Comments (6)
contributed photo
Rendering of 410 Orchard St., one of the two new developments to be built by GDDC.
City officials, state lawmakers, and local nonprofit leaders gathered at the corner of Edgewood and Orchard Thursday morning to celebrate a $9 million state boost to various affordable housing developments across town.
by | Mar 12, 2025 1:20 pm | Comments (36)
Thomas Breen photos
Farnam's Carol Horsford (right) with CT Tenants Union Prez Hannah Srajer: Don't protest the wrong people.
1455 State's Lauren Palulis (at mic): "Our electric bills have been insanely high."
(Updated) “We have bills here that are sky high,” Lauren Palulis said, as she confronted her temporary landlord with a copy of her apartment’s $702.38 electric bill for the month of January.
“Call the electric company and PURA” if you have complaints about the cost of electricity, replied her landlord for-now, Farnam Realty’s Carol Horsford. Make sure the city’s Building Department properly inspected the complex’s insulation. But don’t protest a group that has no power over the price of power.
That scene — and reckoning over rising utility costs — played out during a protest on the sidewalk in front of Farnam Realty’s downtown office at 107 Whitney Ave.
by | Mar 11, 2025 9:50 am | Comments (12)
Abbey Kim file photo
The city's newest tenants union members, on Goffe St. in February.
HARTFORD – A proposal to expand eviction protections for rent-paying tenants took a big step forward as state legislators voted to advance a “just cause” bill out of committee.
by | Mar 5, 2025 1:51 pm | Comments (21)
Thomas Breen file photo
City Building Official Robert Dillon (right): Olive & Wooster is a rooming house.
Thomas Breen photo
The luxury rooming house at 87 Union St.
A luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals is an illegal rooming house, and the building owners could face fines for running it.
That’s according to New Haven’s Building Department, which filed a Cease and Desist order accusing Olive & Wooster, one of the new high-end apartment complexes in Wooster Square, of violating the city’s zoning ordinance by running portions of the building as rooming houses.
Continue reading ‘City Orders Luxury Rooming House To "Cease And Desist"’
by | Mar 4, 2025 3:23 pm | Comments (10)
Thomas Breen photos
Judge Stone: Landlord's "primary motive" wasn't retaliation.
Shelly Thompson, Yonatan Zamir, Jeffrey Taylor, and Vorcelia Oliphant-Macher round out a two-day eviction trial.
A two-day eviction trial that revealed how emotionally fraught a long-term tenant-landlord relationship can get has culminated with a judge ordering the renter to leave because her lease has expired.
The legal debate at the trial centered on what counts as landlord “retaliation.” The judge found that a tenant can’t succeed with such a defense unless she proves that a landlord’s “primary motive” in taking her to court was to punish her for speaking out about housing code concerns.
Continue reading ‘Judge Rejects "Retaliation," Approves Eviction’
by | Mar 4, 2025 1:57 pm | Comments (2)
Thomas Breen photo
LCI's Brennan: "We will not be trying to enforce the judgment against the former owner."
LCI plans to walk back a $2,000 fine it filed against the wrong landlord — as it moves ahead with converting $21,700 in other court-approved civil judgments into property liens.
by | Feb 27, 2025 6:44 pm | Comments (31)
Nora Grace-Flood file photo
Rolling up a mattress before bulldozers come in to demolish a Lamberton Street homeless encampment.
File photos
Garrett, Elicker: Neighbors, but not friends (at least in regards to H.B. 7033).
HARTFORD — New Haven and Hamden might be neighbors on a map, but at a Thursday hearing at the state Capitol, the two municipalities were far apart as their Democratic mayors presented dueling testimonies about a state bill on homelessness.
Hamden’s Lauren Garrett threw her support behind the proposal, which would bolster a homeless person’s ability to sleep on public land without fear of penalty.
New Haven’s Justin Elicker, meanwhile, came down hard on the bill, which he warned would allow for permanent encampments.
by | Feb 24, 2025 4:03 pm | Comments (3)
Laura Glesby Photo
Tim Maguire at a fall Board of Alders meeting.
Tim Maguire is stepping down as executive director of Youth Continuum after helming the homelessness services organization for a year and a half.
by | Feb 24, 2025 1:57 pm | Comments (12)
Abbey Kim file photo
Robert James (right) leads petition procession to the front office.
Elderly renters at a church-owned apartment complex on Goffe Street marched down their building’s hallway holding signs reading “Respect Seniors,” “Justice Matters,” and “Help Us Stay Safe.”
They then delivered a petition to the front office announcing their new status as a tenants union — and demanded a collective bargaining agreement.
by | Feb 20, 2025 4:10 pm | Comments (14)
Thomas Breen photos
Ocean workers clear Monterey-adjacent encampment ...
... which LCI's Taylor Munroe said has been the subject of neighbor and SeeClickFix complaints.
Wynter and two fellow Ocean Management workers hauled a mattress, a bicycle, two shopping carts, a frying pan, a wicker chair, a pile of clothes, and a host of other belongings and debris from a Dixwell Avenue homeless encampment Thursday and into the back of a U‑Haul.
The truck was parked on the sidewalk in front of the decrepit former Monterey Jazz Club — a long-vacant building that the Elicker administration tried to buy two years ago, but that still remains rundown and under megalandlord ownership.
by | Feb 19, 2025 2:47 pm | Comments (18)
Thomas Breen file photo
Olive & Wooster: If it quacks like a rooming house ...
Is a luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals actually an illegal rooming house?
A legal aid attorney argued that it is, as she defended a tenant facing eviction from one of the new high-end apartment complexes that have popped up in recent years on the downtown edge of Wooster Square.