New Haven’s population is on the rise, along with a 17-foot-skinny new Newhallville home that may offer a glimpse of the densely packed neighborhoods of the city’s past — and future.
The new house is going up at 32 Lilac St. between Newhall Street and Winchester Avenue in Newhallville. Workers this past Wednesday installed a pre-fabricated concrete foundation for the one-family home, which is notable for its narrow footprint. The house will be only 17 feet wide and sit on a 35-foot-wide lot.
The house is the latest product of a partnership between Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) and the Yale School of Architecture. Each year, first-year architecture students design and build a house that NHS then sells to a qualifying buyer.
Livable City Initiative head Erik Johnson said the city took a more active role in the process this year, offering the narrow lot on Lilac Street as a challenge to the Yale architecture students. It’s part of an effort to find viable new models for how to build on the many “sliver” lots in New Haven, which proliferated after changes to zoning laws in the 1960s and ‘70s, Johnson said.
A model of the new house.
The zoning changes stated that any new residential lot needs to have 50 feet of frontage on the street. But many existing houses were built on lots with only 36 to 40 feet of frontage. Those are grandfathered in; if houses on those lots are torn down they can be rebuilt. But zoning regulations also require that new houses have 8- and 10-foot side yards, which makes building a new house on a narrow lot a difficult proposition without zoning relief.
“The majority of housing stock is non-conforming,” Johnson said. “So as we’ve taken things down, people have not been able to put housing back in place without a zoning and review process. … The city has sold a lot of former building lots as sliver lots.”
The city now owns 80 to 100 sliver lots. “A couple hundred” more in the city are privately owned, Johnson said. They are sometimes sold to adjoining property owners for use as larger side yards. Or they can remain empty, as a “gap-tooth” in a row of houses. Other times, dilapidated houses can stay standing because “no one knows what to do when the house comes down,” Johnson said.
As the city’s population increases, narrow lots may increasingly be used for building, returning the city’s neighborhoods to the density they once had.
Starting in 1950, when around 164,000 people lived in New Haven, the population began to decline. The most recent decennial census, however, showed a population jump, from 123,000 to 129,000 people.
“Now we’ve come almost full circle,” said Jim Paley, head of NHS. The sliver lots that were once occupied, “well maybe we can build on them” if the population continues to increase, and housing demand grows with it.
The result would be neighborhoods and houses that look as they used to half a century ago. Johnson said he presented that challenge to the Yale architecture students: Design and build a house that is on the same scale as the houses that used to be there, build it on a non-conforming lot, and make it “marketable enough so that the city work with other people to replicate” similar houses “as we try to find new infill housing options.”
The new house, in context.
Johnson said he was also looking for the Yale house design to blend in visually with the neighborhood more than it has in the past. Yale building projects from previous years can be easily spotted around town, looking sometimes like landed spacecraft amid early 20th-century homes.
“One of the criticisms in the community is — these houses are nice but not necessarily contextual to the neighborhood,” Johnson said.
“We shied away from some of the more, shall we say, esoteric designs,” said Paley.
Alissa Chastain describes the design process.
As the architecture students set about designing the house, they built a cardboard scale model of the neighborhood surrounding 32 Lilac St. They left the lot itself as an empty slot on the model, so that different prototypes could be inserted into context.
Architecture professor Alan Organschi (pictured center-left, with faculty member Adam Hopfner) said each of the 50 students in the class came up with a design for the empty lot. Of those 50, eight were selected for further development by teams of six students. Finally, a single winning design was chosen by a jury that included architecture faculty, representatives of the city and NHS.
The winner is known as the “hearth” house. The team sought to offset the narrow length of the house by creating a center of activity in the middle of the house, said Alissa Chastain, one of the students who worked on the house.
Architecture student Mark Peterson shows off the design.
The three-bedroom house is designed to filter light down from the second floor, has sliding doors opening onto a side patio, and movable walls upstairs to allow the space to be reconfigured.
On Wednesday, Adam Hopfner, the head of the building project, stood on the bank of a hole in the ground on Lilac Street as the first panels of the pre-fab concrete foundation were lowered into place. The windows of the house next door were covered with plywood, and three more boarded up houses were in sight on the block.
Hopfner said the new house will go up in just 16 weeks, with architecture students providing much of the labor. He said students also worked to secure about $100,000 in building supplies donations from manufacturers of things like faucets and cabinets. The house will cost under $100 per square foot to build, which Hopfner said is quite low. It would be replicable at around $100 per square foot, he said.
Paley said the house’s total development cost is about $220,000 and it will sell for about $150,000. NHS makes up the difference with subsidies, usually from the state housing credit tax program, Paley said.
“This is the first step of a new relationship with the Yale school of design,” said Johnson. “We’re trying to be smarter about how we can do infill housing.”