If They Don’t Fix It, Take It Away?

A mayoral challenger embraced the idea of claiming blighted properties for city ownership by way of eminent domain, as part of a campaign push to use local government’s powers to support new housing and deter dangerous building decay.

Liam Brennan participated in a campaign conversation with incoming Boston City Planner (and celebrated local children’s author) Abdul-Razak Zachariah, moderated by Narrative Project founder Mercy Quaye, that streamed live on Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday. Brennan is one of four Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for mayor in the Sept. 12 primary.

The conversation focused primarily on how New Haven can overhaul its zoning code to support more affordable housing development and make better use of small land parcels and vacant lots throughout the city.

As the dialogue drew to a close, one viewer, James Ramsey, asked on Facebook whether Brennan supports government acquisition of certain properties under eminent domain.

“If elected, what will you commit to re: the conversion of empty (and other) lots to housing?” Ramsey wrote. “[L]egally, one possibility that municipalities and their housing authorities have, for example, is exercising eminent domain to acquire and redevelop un- or misused property.”

Brennan replied that eminent domain ​“holds huge potential” as a tool for promoting decent housing. He acknowledged that the tool has a sordid history; Black landowners have been disproportionately targeted by eminent domain — which is the government seizure of private property for public use — across the country. The tool allowed governments including New Haven’s to clear low-income housing for suburb-oriented Urban Renewal projects in the mid-20th century.

“In the past, eminent domain has been used to destroy housing… for cars and for wealthy, white communities,” said Brennan. Still, he argued, ​“it is a tool that’s hugely important, if we have the right values and if we engage the community properly and if we are doing it to create housing.”

Brennan continued: ​“If a landlord is not keeping its property up and they’re just extracting wealth from the residents and letting the property fall apart,” the city should ​“blight or eminent domain those properties — take them over for the public good.”

In a phone interview after Wednesday’s Facebook livestream event, Brennan pointed to a dilapidated building on the corner of Shelton Avenue and Ivy Street in Newhallville, across the street from a playground, as an example of a property he’d seek to claim for the city if elected mayor.

That building, 256 Shelton Ave., has a crumbling roof and broken windows. It belongs to a corporation affiliated with the Northeastern Conference of Seventh Day Adventists. It’s controlled by the Hamden-based Mount Zion Seventh Day Adventist Church. It once served as a community center, but it has sat unused for a decade. 

Brennan said that eminent domain could be used to take further action against negligent landlords, especially those who have been fined by the Livable City Initiative’s housing code enforcers numerous times yet have failed to take adequate care of their properties.

Brennan said he’s heard from a resident who lives near the old church building that kids have broken into the building. ​“They can hurt themselves,” Brennan said.

Mount Zion representative Kirk Gordon explained in a follow-up interview that the church plans to demolish the building within the next few months, as long as the proper city approvals come through. He said that the church officially contracted a demolition company last week.

The process has taken a while, he said, because of the building’s historic status and because of an initial failed attempt to partner with the Livable City Initiative (LCI) to rehabilitate the building.

“Our long-term plan is to rebuild a community service center there,” Gordon said: a place for Newhallville residents to access computer trainings, food distributions, substance use awareness classes, and medical and dental services, among other programs.

“We are working to figure out how we are going to get the funding to do that,” Gordon said.

Upon hearing about these plans, Brennan said in an interview, ​“I definitely don’t want to single out that property or the owners of that property necessarily. I think as a first step the city should try to work with the owners. What I mostly want to do is for the city to be very proactive about this.”

He said he selected the Shelton Avenue property because ​“that is one that neighbors have complained about as being a detriment to the general area, something that’s kind of going to waste. But if it’s going to be a community center for folks,” he’d support the church in making that happen. 

Brennan added that eminent domain could still be a tool at the city’s disposal in this case ​“in the event that something doesn’t happen in the near term. You can’t drag this on forever because it does affect the general community.”

Sliver Lots & Housing Thoughts

During Wednesday’s livestreamed discussion, Zachariah delved into research he had done amidst his urban planning studies on ​“sliver lots” — small parcels of land that, under current zoning regulations, would be too small to support housing developments. 

Specifically, Zachariah examined five sliver lots nearby the Learning Corridor, the section of the Farmington Canal Trail traversing Shelton, Hazel, and Ivy Streets in Newhallville. Those areas included some vacant lots and some areas currently being utilized as community gardens.

“Newhallville is the highest rent-burdened neighborhood of New Haven. 68 percent of the neighborhood is rent burdened, spending 30 percent or more of their annual income on rent,” said Zachariah. He suggested that the city could sell those sliver lots to a single affordable housing developer in one package, rather than finding purposes for the lots individually. 

In his research, he modeled visions for those lots that would entail preserving the community gardens’ size as well as some that would shrink them.

Also during the conversation, Brennan argued that the city’s spatial requirements for new buildings are too restrictive. 

Brennan pointed to regulations mandating that new residential buildings be constructed on lots at least 5,400 square feet in size, while also requiring that those buildings take up no more than 30 percent of the lot’s space.

Those rules prevent the city from building much-needed housing on smaller lots, while also limiting the amount of housing that can be constructed in the lots that are big enough, Brennan argued.

“It takes a huge upfront investment to get a [zoning] variance to build,” said Brennan. ​“It costs time and it costs money,” often involving legal representation and meetings before the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) without guarantee of an approval. ​“If we can take all of that out and make it easier to build some things without doing all that, we open up less fancy developers to develop things for a different set of the public.”

“If we made rules that you can build a house on this much space, it can use more of the space, smaller landlords can do that,” he said.