1,500 Affordable Units Down — 23,500 To Go

New Haven’s region needs more than 25,000 new affordable housing units; 1,500 new units are on the way.

Elm City Communities/Housing Authority of New Haven Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton and the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo offered those and other stark statistics Monday during the latest meeting of the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

The task force aims to issue a suite of affordable housing-specific policy recommendations to the Board of Alders (BOA) by the end of the year. DuBois-Walton and Neal-Sanjurjo provided the task force and the 50 other members of the public who attended Monday’s meeting with a survey of New Haven’s current and latest affordable housing stock.

Some of the units are rentals; some are designed for homeownership. Some are reserved for people earning less than 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), some for people earning up to 120 percent AMI. Some are funded through a mix of private, city, and state investment, some entirely through public dollars.

All are geared towards broadening the number of people in this city who can afford a safe, stable, convenient place to live for 30 percent or less of their annual income.

“We have put together just a sample of the development projects that we are currently working on,” said Neal-Sanjurjo at the top of the presentation, ​“with private and nonprofit developers to create opportunities to fill that 25,000 number, in terms of creating units that folks can afford.”

Apartments reserved for tenants earning 80 percent of the AMI, for example, would be reserved for tenants earning $70,480 out of an $88,100 benchmark for a family of four.

Click here to download a copy of DuBois-Walton’s and Neal-Sanjurjo’s full presentation.

DuBois-Walton said that, according to census data and survey information gathered by Elm City Communities and LCI, 34 percent of New Haven’s current housing options are ​“affordable.” With ​“affordable” meaning that residents spend 30 percent or less of their annual income to live there.

She said there are 57,000 total housing units in the city, 17,000 of which are made affordable through some form of government subsidy, including low-income public housing, housing choice vouchers, low-income housing tax credits, state Rental Assistance Program (RAP) vouchers, and other public subsidies.

DuBois-Walton said that 6,000 of the city’s affordable units are operated by Elm City Communities, the city’s housing authority. Elm City Communities has a wait list of over 10,000 people, she said, and only around 400 families leave housing authority-operated units every year, whether voluntarily or because of eviction or death.

“At that rate,” she said, ​“it would take us 25 years to get through the families on the wait list.”

She said that 41 percent of the city’s households are housing burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their annual income on housing. Fifty-eight percent of city households rent for more than $1,000 per month, while only 22 percent rent for $750 per month or less.

The median rent in the city is $1,090 per month. Based on the city’s median income of $37,000 per household, an actual affordable rent for a two-bedroom apartment would be closer to $750.

DuBois-Walton said that of the city’s 25,062 housing-burdened low-income households, 10,700 families live at or below 30 percent AMI, 6,230 families live between 30 and 50 percent AMI, 5,212 live between 50 and 80 percent AMI, and 2,920 live at greater than 80 percent AMI.

That 25,062-unit affordable housing need, she said, is independent of the 17,000 units currently rendered affordable through some kind of public subsidy.

That’s where Neal-Sanjurjo stepped in, reviewing a dozen different projects that LCI has been working on since 2015 that have contributed nearly 1,500 new affordable units to city housing stock. Projects include:

• Dwight Gardens at 115 Edgewood Ave, developed by NavCapMan LLC. With the help of $4.25 million in federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding, $7.5 million private funding, and $400,000 from the city, this complex will bring another 80 affordable units online by next later this month. (The first phase of the project’s two phases is complete and occupied.)

Twenty of those units will be reserved for tenants earning 50 percent AMI, 20 for tenants earning 60 percent AMI, and 20 for tenants earning 80 percent AMI.

• Judith Terrace Development. ​“One of our strong mandates from the board [of alders] was to look at how some of the empty lots we have throughout the neighborhoods could be used for housing development for homeownership,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

At Judith Terrace in Fair Haven Heights, LCI is almost done building five new two-family homes. She said LCI is working on putting together funding for a phase two of the project, which will include two more two-family homes.

“It will completely transform the Judith Terrace avenue,” she said. ​“It has been pretty much sitting there empty and vacant for almost 15 years. Over the last two years, we were able to receive some state funding and some capital funding in order to build these homes.”

• Thompson Street and Winchester Avenue. Neal-Sanjurjo said that the city has received state Department of Housing (DOH) funding to build 18 new units on city-owned vacant lots: nine units will be for homeowners, nine for rentals. ​“They are on 10 lots that were city-owned parcels sitting right in the middle of one of our more needy areas,” she said. ​“We’re trying to bring back some housing.”

She said the project will use $2.3 million in state DOH money and $1.5 million in city capital funding. Construction, she said, should begin sometime early next year.

• Union Square. Formerly the home of the 301-unit subsidized housing complex Church Street South, the new Union Square development, developed by Northland Investment Corp., would consist of five buildings, 25,000 square-feet of retail space, and 1,100 apartments. Neal-Sanjurjo said that 398 of those units will be affordable, and that the city will be applying for a third time for federal Choice Neighborhood funding early next year.

“We will be bringing back some of our project-based vouchers to the site,” Neal-Sanjurjo said, ​“to ensure that we have a mix of income of families living there.”

• 22 Gold St. Resulting from a Land Disposition Agreement (LDA) between the city and Stamford developer Randy Salvatore’s RMS Properties, this nearly-finished new construction project will contain 2,400 square-feet of commercial space and 110 new apartments: 79 to be rented at market rates, and 31 affordable.

• 49 Prince St. Another gut rehab developed by RMS Properties, the former Welsh Annex School site will contain 30 units of affordable rental housing.

“It is in the process of finalizing the funding required to do the development,” Neal-Sanjurjo said. She said the renovation of the property should be complete by next year.

• 216 Congress Ave. A $19 million project by Salvatore’s RMS Properties that will have 90 units, including 30 affordable units.

• 222 Lafayette. Yet another RMS project, this $21 million development will have 104 new units, including 32 affordable.

• 596 – 598 George St. A brownstone and former medical office space at Orchard Street and George Street that LCI plants to convert into two two-family or three-family homes, pending DOH homeownership funding approval. Neal-Sanjurjo said that LCI will sell the finished properties but place restrictions on the sales in regards to how much the owners will be allowed to charge to rent out the finished apartments.

• 384 Blatchley Ave. A small, single-family property that LCI started building in May and expects to finish in December. ​“It will be sold to an affordable buyer through our homeownership programs that we have at LCI,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

• Hill Central Cooperative. An old co-op at 145 Dewitt St. that Westmount Development is redeveloping into 64 rental units, 100 percent of which will be retained as Section 8 affordable.

• 201 Munson St. A very large development happening on the old Track C of Olin. Neal-Sanjurjo said that the finished project, developed by Eclipse Development, should have 395 rental units, 20 percent of which will be reserved for affordable and workforce housing. The developer is currently working on environmental remediation at the site.

• 240 Winthrop Ave. A site that has been abandoned for two decades that the developer Gambardella is working on to build 145 new rental units, 30 percent of which will be reserved as affordable.

“It has been sitting there abandoned for so many years,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

• West River Housing at 16 Miller St. A private-public partnership between West River Self Help Investment Plan (SHIP) and New York-based National Housing Partnership that will build 56 rental units on Rt. 34. ​“We’re trying to fill in where we can,” Neal-Sanjurjo said, ​“where the city has parcels available, looking at thoughtful development.”

• The old Antillean Manor coops on Day Street, where developer Carabetta will be building 60 rental units, all of which will be affordable. ​“It will remain project-based,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

“Many of you know that New Haven is in a wave of having developers want to do business in this city around housing,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

As far as existing projects with new owners, Neal-Sanjurjo said that the city is working to retain existing affordable housing levels at Beechwood Gardens, where there are 82 affordable units, Ninth Square Residences, where there are and will be 188 affordable units, and St. Martin Townhomes, where there are 63 affordable units.

“For all of us its been a number one priority to retain those units,” she said.

Neal-Sanjurjo said that, since 2015, the city has worked with private and public partners to retain, complete, and propose 1,464 new affordable units.

And at Elm City Communities, DuBois-Walton said the local housing authority serves 6,000 families and 14,000 individuals in 1,849 low-income public housing units. She said that 95 percent of the families that the housing authority serves are at or below 50 percent AMI.

The next Affordable Housing Task Force meeting is scheduled to take place on Thursday, Nov. 15 at 6 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall. Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg, the non-voting facilitator of the task force, said that November’s meeting will focus on homelessness, housing insecurity, and rooming houses/SROs.

Click here, here, and here to download the minutes from previous meetings of the Affordable Housing Task Force.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Neal-Sanjurjo’s and DuBois-Walton’s full presentations.