“New” Church St. South Goes Nowhere Fast

As new architectural drawings have people talking about plans to rebuild rundown Church Street South, a tenant leader wondered when the pictures will become reality at the prime piece of real estate across from Union Station.

“No one should be living in these apartments any longer,” said Jissette Chona (pictured), a tenant organizer at Church Street South, a 301-family, privately owned subsidized housing complex.

Chona, 37, grew up in the concrete ​“jungle,” as it’s known, and returned there to raise her three daughters. Now she’s head of the tenant advisory board that’s talking to the landlord, Northland Investment Corporation of Boston, about plans to tear down the complex and turn it into a mixed-income development on much-coveted real estate. The project would cost an estimated $500 million.

She spoke last week on the heels of a meeting in City Hall concerning the fate of her longtime home. At a meeting with local politicians Wednesday, Mayor John DeStefano and top city officials distributed new architectural drawings that he said aim to start a discussion about what the city wants to see at that site. The drawings scattered throughout this story represent an early concept plan.

Northland, which wasn’t present at the meeting, has canceled recent meetings with tenants regarding the future plans, according to Chona. Northland is in the final stages of foreclosures on two of its major office towers in downtown Hartford, CityPlace II and Goodwin Square, according to the Hartford Courant.

Northland was also chosen as the city’s preferred developer to build a new home for the Long Wharf Theatre on the grave of the New Haven Coliseum, but later abandoned plans amid the recession.

The city housing authority is now teaming up with Northland on a plan to remake Church Street South. The city didn’t select Northland as a preferred developer, as in the Coliseum site — the partnership took hold because Northland bought the complex from another private landlord in July 2008 in the hopes of steering a redevelopment.

Three and a half years later, despite the new drawings, the redevelopment remains a theoretical hope. Officials have been talking about plans to remake the development in one form or another for at least a decade.

Chona said there are ​“a lot of rumors” among residents that the redevelopment ​“is not going to happen.”

Chona said she wants to see the development reborn, and she believes it will be. Her neighbors are still living with leaking roofs, mice, mold and drafty windows, she said. The apartments haven’t been significantly improved since they were built in 1969, she said.

“The conditions of the apartments are really bad,” she said. ​“No one wants to live like this.”

Those conditions were revealed last January, when a poorly installed furnace leaked dangerous levels of carbon monoxide into the air, sending four adults and one child to the hospital. At the time, the city had been chasing after the landlord to eliminate a deadly CO threat.

Northland was shamed into fixing up the apartments after that widely publicized episode.

In an emailed statement Friday, Northland Senior Vice President Peter Standish affirmed his company’s commitment to redeveloping the jungle.

“The fact that the city’s apartment vacancy is currently the lowest in the country” — the greater New Haven metro market has a 2.1 percent vacancy rate, according to a recent study — ​“suggests that the area is severely undersupplied,” Standish wrote. ​“The Church Street South property offers an ideal opportunity for a mixed income, mix-used, transit oriented development.”

Standish said the company is in the financial position to handle the development and is proceeding with plans to do so.

“We are currently in the master-planning phase for the project,” Standish said.

The ​“master-planning” is being funded by a $1 million grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Northland applied for the grant along with the city and the Housing Authority of New Haven; the goal was to come up with a plan to reconfigure the two developments across the street from Union Station: Church Street South and the Robert T. Wolfe housing complex.

The grant application offers a preliminary vision of the project as a mixed-use development with 600 – 800 residential units and 200,000 to 400,000 square feet of office and retail space. About 20 to 30 percent of the residential units would be set aside as affordable housing for households with less than 60 percent of area median income. Click here to read the proposal.

As redevelopment plans await, Northland is collecting about $220,000 per month from the federal government for the 301 subsidized units, depending on how many are filled, according to HUD spokeswoman Rhonda Siciliano. Church Street South operates as a project-based Section 8 site.

Mayor John DeStefano said last week that he doesn’t blame Northland for the delay in getting the project off the ground.

“It’s been a hard process” for the city, the neighborhood and the developer to come to an agreement on what the site should hold, DeStefano said. ​“The issue is building consensus.”

Jimmy Miller, the housing authority’s deputy executive director, said a project of this magnitude typically takes three years just for developers to figure out whether it’s feasible. While the city has been talking about redeveloping the project for 10 years, Miller said conversations with this developer began only last April.

There is ​“almost no” source of public funding except state tax credits, Miller said, and those total only about $6 million for the entire state per year. The developer needs to figure out whether it can provide enough of a return for its investors, or else the project won’t happen, he said.

“What is the return on investment? That’s what this is all about,” Miller said. To answer that question, the developer has to evaluate a range of other factors including environmentals, traffic, zoning, and whether the market will support more apartments, he said. Another factor is finding homes for all 300 families who would be displaced. Miller said the DeMarco Management, the property manager at Church Street South, is launching a survey on the relocation needs of its tenants.

“The decision has not yet been made about the feasibility of that development,” Miller said.

The mayor said he isn’t worried about the company’s financial shape in the wake of the foreclosure proceedings in Hartford. ​“I did not get a sense they’re in financial distress at all.” Northland’s Hartford properties are held in limited liability partnerships, which protects the company, he said. He said he’s optimistic that a mixed-income project can work in that space.

DeStefano briefed neighborhood aldermen Wednesday on what he called an early ​“concept” of what Church Street South could become. The drawings he circulated showed a six-story high apartment complex looming over the historic train station.

They showed Columbus Avenue (pictured), which is currently closed to traffic for one block, reopened as a city street. They showed a ​“pedestrian plaza” across from the train station and a small park on South Orange.

Aldermanic President Jorge Perez was one of four Hill aldermen briefed on the proposal.

“We didn’t like it,” he reported. He said aldermen are concerned about the density and lack of open space. There was ​“hardly any space for kids to play.” The plan showed only one-to-two bedroom apartments; Church Street South is home to many families.

“We want them to go back to the drawing board,” Perez said. ​“They need to come back to the Church Street South community” with the proposal and with a ​“comprehensive relocation plan” for the 300 families that live there.

“The plans are horrible,” added Alderwoman Dolores Colón, whose ward includes Church Street South. ​“They don’t take into consideration what the residents have come up with.”

Residents surveyed close to 200 people about what they’d like to see in a future development, including more playground space, Colón said.

“The architectural plans that the company has so far just completely dismissed it.”

Chona said tenants want to make sure there’s a playground and enough parking spots. She’d like to see a job-training center. Most of all, residents are anxious about the relocation process if the complex is torn down and rebuilt. People who live there would like a guarantee they’ll be able to come back.

Mayor DeStefano said any proposal would retain the 300 units of subsidized housing somewhere in the city; the question is what form that would take.

Some of Chona’s concerns seem to be aggravated by a lack of responsiveness from the company. She said the residents advisory board last met with Northland in October. The company then canceled three meetings it had planned with the committee and with residents, she said. Northland also failed to follow through on a promise to bring tenant leaders on a field trip to another Northland housing complex in Washington, D.C.

Standish couldn’t be reached to address those specific concerns. ​“We have been meeting with the residents at Church Street South on a regular basis and even more frequently with the Residential Advisory Committee and will continue to do so,” he said.

Meanwhile, DeStefano acknowledged that conditions at the complex need to improve.

“I don’t think anyone thinks it should linger as it is,” he said. ​“Something has got to happen.”

The easiest solution, he said, would be to spend $5 million to $6 million on a short-term fix. DeStefano said he is not advocating that path, because the building would only hold together another five years. ​“A five-year fix is not a sustainable development.”

Alderwoman Colón said that might be necessary if the company waits much longer while residents grapple with dilapidated homes. Last year’s snows hit the complex hard, she said. It became common for residents even on the first floors to have leaks in their ceilings.

“If they don’t plan to redevelop right now, they need to spend some serious money to make some real improvements on the property,” Colón said.

“If you’re not going to tear them down, fix them.”