Thomas Breen file photo
794 Dixwell, now owned by Clifford Beers.
A mental healthcare provider has closed on its purchase of a former charter school property in Newhallville, making official a two-year-long effort by neighbors to stop that site from becoming a methadone clinic.
According to a deed filed on Thursday on the city’s land records database, Clifford W. Beers Guidance Clinic Inc. has purchased the former Elm City College Preparatory middle school building at 794 Dixwell Ave. — along with a half dozen smaller adjacent parcels of surface parking lots on Dixwell Avenue, Elizabeth Street, and Cherry Ann Street — from APT Foundation Inc.
While the text of the deed itself does not include the final sale price for this transaction, Clifford Beers Community Health Partners CEO Alice Forrester told the Independent that the property deal went through for $2.725 million.
The sale took place roughly two years and three months after APT bought that same collection of properties in December 2021 for $2.45 million.
At the time, APT — a healthcare nonprofit that specializes in treating people addicted to opioids, alcohol, and other substances — planned to convert the 1931-built school building into a new home for the outpatient medical services, including a methadone clinic, and administrative offices that it currently operates out of rented space at 1 Long Wharf Dr.
Years of pushback by a coalition of Newhallville neighbors on either side of the New Haven / Hamden border ultimately led APT to drop that plan and agree to sell the ex-school property to Clifford Beers instead, as APT looks to relocate to a future Long Wharf location as part of Mayor Justin Elicker’s revitalization efforts in that neighborhood.
Clifford Beers, meanwhile, plans on signing a two-year lease with a different charter school, the Rev. Boise Kimber’s planned new Edmonds Cofield Academy, which will operate out of 794 Dixwell (before potentially buying and moving to a vacant former public school building in West Hills.)
Clifford Beers’ Forrester told the Independent that her agency intends to make some immediate repairs, including adding a new roof, before the school opens.
She also said Clifford Beers “hopes to be able to put school readiness classrooms on [the] first floor” of 794 Dixwell. The agency needs “capital improvements to bring [the] building to code” for a use other than a school. “That will take lots of work and investment over [the] next few years.”
She said Clifford Beers will be “actively seeking dollars for that phase 2 for the building,” and noted that her clinic has “worked closely with the community and will continue to do that to vision opportunities in the space that will benefit the Newhallville/Hamden community.”