Thomas Breen photo
Broken past, fixed future for 596 George (pictured)?
The city has abandoned plans to convert a long-vacant duplex on George Street into owner-occupied housing — and is now looking to sell the boarded-up brick buildings to a local nonprofit with the goal instead of creating affordable rentals for veterans.
Thomas Breen file photo
596-598 George St.
Livable City Initiative (LCI) Acquisition/Disposal Specialist Evan Trachten talked through those latest plans for 596 – 598 George St. during last Wednesday’s most recent monthly online meeting of the City Plan Commission.
The late-19th century building in question sits at the corner of George and Orchard streets. The city has owned it since 2018, when it bought the property from Yale New Haven Hospital for $1 with the goal of turning it into six units of housing — including a total of two ground-floor owner-occupied dwellings and four upstairs rental apartments. The never-built homes were to be made available for purchase to families making up to 100 percent of the area median income (AMI).
These six years later, on Wednesday night, City Plan Commissioners voted unanimously in support of a different plan: to sell the still-vacant property to the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress, Inc. for $6,000. That Hill-based nonprofit hopes to rehabilitate and convert the site into six units of rental housing for tenants making no more than 80 percent AMI. That currently translates to an annual income of $92,900 for a family of four.
The proposal now heads to the LCI Board of Directors and then to the Board of Alders for review and a potential final vote.
“We did some due diligence and we realized that it’s probably not the best site to make owner-occupied housing,” Trachten told the commissioners on Wednesday.
Why? “Because we struggled to find off-street parking” for the prospective new owner-occupied homes. “As many of you know, this is kind of a busy, congested area.” So instead, LCI has looked in recent years to develop owner-occupied housing elsewhere — including upcoming projects on Starr Street in Newhallville and Grand Avenue in Fair Haven.
The George Street duplex wasn’t in “great shape when we got them from Yale,” Trachten said. LCI has “spent some money to shore them up” in the interim.
And now, in collaboration with the area’s alder and community members, LCI has decided to try to sell these buildings to the local veterans housing nonprofit, which will offer six rental units reserved at 80 percent AMI for 20 years. That nonprofit will have a total of 24 months to complete the renovation, per a term applied by LCI’s Property Acquisition & Disposition (PAD) Committee after it voted on April 25 to endorse the sale. They’ll also have to show proof that they have the funding needed to do the rental housing conversion before the city formally sells the property.
“I’m hopeful we can get the buildings saved and have them rehabbed” by the time or soon after Yale’s new neuroscience center opens, Trachten said.
But something needs to be done. “The buildings are just languishing there,” he added. “I get phone calls all the time from investors that want them. I think it’s in our fiduciary responsibility to get them back on the tax rolls and make them affordable and not turn them over to just make them market-rate rentals.”
City Plan Commission Chair Leslie Radcliffe praised the new affordable-rental-housing plan as “wonderful.”
“Those two brick buildings, they’ve been with us forever at that corner. They’ve also been empty forever,” she said. “To see them not be torn down, to see them be in a position now where they can be used for affordable housing,” and for veterans at that, is encouraging.
Do the buildings have any “structural issues” that the commission or the city needs to worry about? asked Commission Vice-Chair Ernest Pagan.
Trachten said that, based on his understanding of the work that the city and city-hired contractors have done there in recent years, “I don’t believe they’re in any danger of collapse.” But they will be costly to renovate.
Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers and Hill North Community Management Team Chair Howard Boyd both wrote letters of support to the PAD Committee in March, urging them to advance this proposed sale.
“Supporting NVCLR’s initiative goes beyond just addressing a social issue; it’s an investment in our collective future,” Boyd wrote. “By empowering veterans to lead stable and fulfilling lives, we contribute to the overall strength and well-being of our community.”
The property’s were vacant long before the city acquired them from the hospital in 2018. YNHH took over the property in 2012 as part of its acquisition of the old Saint Raphael Hospital. In 2015 and 2016, Dwight and West River neighbors successfully rallied against the hospital’s plan to demolish the buildings to make way for a new Habitat for Humanity home-build, arguing instead that the historic property should be preserved by the hospital or a new owner.
In 2017, the city cut a deal with the hospital whereby the city would rehabilitate each property and sell them as two separate three-family residences to buyers who commit to living in each buildings’ respective ground-floor units for a minimum of ten years.
The buildings themselves were first constructed around 1885, and were once the offices of obstetrician-gynecologists Drs. Bernard Conte and Marianne Beatrice, who were both attending physicians at Yale-New Haven and St. Raphael’s for over four decades.
