Ground Broken On 96 New Apartments

An $18 million infusion to a long-stalled downtown development means that 96 new apartments will finally soon rise at the site of the ex-Harold’s Bridal Shop — the latest step in a builder’s journey that began with a love for Louis Kahn’s architecture. 

That developer is Jay Hakimian, one of four partners in the New York City-based firm The Hakimian Organization.

On Tuesday, Hakimian joined Mayor Justin Elicker, local architect Ken Boroson, Downtown / East Rock Alder Eli Sabin, and a host of others to celebrate the groundbreaking for a new seven-story, 96-unit apartment building at 19 Elm St.

That big hole in the ground used to be home to Harold’s Bridal Shop. Hakimian’s company purchased the property — and the city-approved site plan for the project — from an affiliate of MOD Equities for $4.85 million in August 2022. They then demolished the ex-Harold’s building in January 2023.

On Tuesday, Hakimian said that his company has now secured enough financing to actually begin construction. City land records show that an affiliate company of the Hakimian Organization pulled a $18.63 million construction loan in July from the South Norwalk-based Silver Heights Capital.

Hakimian estimated that the new building will take roughly 18 months to construct. It will contain a mix of one‑, two‑, three‑, and four-bedroom apartments, and will have ground-floor commercial space.

The building will also consist entirely of market-rate rentals, as its city approval predates New Haven’s inclusionary zoning (IZ) law, which would otherwise require such a downtown development to set aside 15 percent of apartments at below-market rents. Hakimian and his partners declined to say how much these new apartments might cost to rent. ​“There’s a pretty wide range,” he said.

“Market-rate units are also a very, very important element to making our state more affordable,” Elicker said. There’s a need for 90,000 new places to live across Connecticut, he continued, to address the state’s housing shortage. ​“The more units that are online, the less pressure on the market. We have a real supply problem right now.”

With such uncertainty in the nation’s housing market right now, in particular in regards to high interest rates, city Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli said, this project demonstrates developers’ ​“market confidence in our city.” 

Piscitelli, Elicker, Boroson, and Sabin all mentioned a host of other housing projects going up around town — including 166 new apartments almost open at Chapel and Orange Street, 102 new apartments that recently opened at Orange and Elm Streets, and the new mixed-use development to come at the former Church Street South site across from Union Station, which Elicker said could contain upwards of 1,500 to 2,500 new residences.

When explaining why his organization is interested in building in New Haven, Hakimian spoke about the city’s market appeal for a housing developer — it’s right between two major cities, at the intersection of a number of transportation networks. ​“There’s a beautiful charm to the city,” he added.

Plus, on a personal note, there’s the architecture.

Hakimian first fell in love with city building design in 2010, when working on a thesis about sacred architecture while a student at the New York Institute of Technology.

He was writing about Louis Kahn’s never-built Hurva Synagogue when a professor told him to check out New Haven if he wanted to see in person some of the 20th century architect’s extant masterpieces.

So Hakimian and a friend drove to New Haven for the day to take a look at the Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street, among other buildings. He was captivated by the design of the building, the interplay of light and shadow. He drove back to New Haven after the semester ended to spend more time with the city’s wealth of modernist architecture. 

“There’s an amazing variety of styles in small, concentrated areas,” he said. He also credited contemporary builders in New Haven as generally ​“having a commitment to quality here.”

Hakimian knew this was a city he wanted to build in, and kept pushing his partners to invest in New Haven — culminating with what will now be 96 new apartments on Elm Street.