Beulah Breaks Ground On Affordable Apts.

Faith leaders, politicians, and investors shoveled a pile of ceremonial dirt, breaking ground on a soon-to-rise apartment complex that will be sustainable not only for the earth, but for low-income families.

The ceremonial groundbreaking took place Tuesday afternoon at the intersection of Dixwell Avenue and Orchard and Munson Streets.

For five years, Beulah Land Development Corporation — a nonprofit affiliated with Dixwell’s Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church — has planned to build affordable housing atop the long-vacant lot there at 340 Dixwell Ave.

The forthcoming building will be ​“a home for people who call New Haven home, but who frankly don’t live in homes that respect them,” said Mayor Justin Elicker.

Dixwell Management Team Chair Crystal Gooding praised Beulah for involving neighborhood residents at every step of the design process. ​“It seems like this is actually going to be for the people,” Gooding said. ​“We actually feel like we were involved in the project.”

340 Dixwell will comprise 69 rental units, 55 of which will be affordable for families making 60 percent of the Area Median Income or below. (For a family of four, 60 percent of the county’s AMI would be $61,740 per year.) The first floor of the building will contain retail space.

The apartments will include one, two, and three-bedroom apartments. Twenty of those apartments will be reserved for formerly homeless families.

Five years after the idea was initially pitched to neighbors, Beulah and development partners HELP USA and Spiritos Properties have secured approximately $28 million to fund the project. The project is expected to reach completion in 15 months.

The building will be the first majority-affordable housing complex to be made with a mass timber structure system, utilizing wood from a renewable forest. The timber material stores carbon dioxide rather than emitting greenhouse gases. The building will also be energy efficient based on Passive House standards.

HELP USA’s Dave Cleghorn compared the building design to that of luxury housing, stating that the building will provide ​“dignified homes for people that are from this neighborhood.”

The project at 340 Dixwell Ave. comes as a number of developments with mostly market-rate housing have progressed in the Dixwell and Science Park neighborhoods. The majority-Black Dixwell/Newhallville area is disproportionately low-income.

Beulah has been building affordable rental and owner-occupied housing since the 1997 shooting of 7‑month-old baby Danielle Taft devastated the church’s neighborhood on Orchard Street, at a time when the drug trade thrived in rumor houses on the block owned by absentee landlords.

Bishop Theodore Brooks, a former leader of Beulah, called on the mayor and state officials present to help fill Dixwell with affordable housing. He pointed to an empty lot across Dixwell Avenue. ​“I see land over there,” he said, then, pointing to another spot: ​“I see land over there.”