Thomas Breen file photo
Columbus House CEO Margaret Middleton: Bracing for “silver tsunami of people experiencing homelessness.”
A leading provider of local homelessness services is tearing down its one-story office space — and building 80 bedrooms in its place in order to better accommodate a changing landscape of unhoused New Haveners.
Columbus House, which already owns a shelter on Ella Grasso Boulevard, pitched a plan before the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) last Tuesday that would almost double the nonprofit’s total number of beds in that stretch of the Hill.
Ben Trachten, the land use attorney representing Columbus House, said the idea is to construct a three-story building at 592 Ella T. Grasso Boulevard with 80 one- and two-person bedrooms, each paired with private bathrooms. That space currently hosts the nonprofit’s administrative offices and is next door to their extant shelter space, which accommodates up to 90 people in communal rooms with beds backed up against other beds.
That plan, which arrives amid a spike in the number of people experiencing housing instability alongside a shortage of affordable apartments, promises to up the amount of non-congregate, individualized shelter spaces offered in New Haven. Read about the anticipated development in more detail here.
“The way shelters are structured right now, people are choosing to stay outside,” Kelly Fitzgerald, the senior director of financial stability at the United Way of Greater New Haven, said in favor of the project during Tuesday’s public hearing, which was held online via Zoom. Columbus House’s new shelter, she said, would provide “a safe, dignified place for people to stay.”
Read here about a growing number of people facing a lack of housing in the region, and read more here about how and why many are seeking refuge outside a bureaucratic and overloaded centralized shelter system. Read here about separate plans by the city to increase non-congregate shelter by converting a Foxon Boulevard hotel into shelter rooms here.
Columbus House's current shelter beds, as last photographed in July.
Residents at the new site at 592 Ella T. Grasso will not have their own kitchen, but instead access meal services through the adjacent shelter. Columbus House Chief Executive Officer Margaret Middleton said that includes cold dinner and hot breakfast.
While those staying at the shelter are expected to have 24-hour access to their rooms, Middleton said rules concerning potential curfews or pets, which typically govern other shelter spaces and have caused many to opt out of seeking formal shelter and remain on the streets, have yet to be determined.
The floor plan for the upcoming shelter.
In order to move forward with that project, Columbus House needs zoning relief in the form of three variances for land use specifications and two special exceptions for parking adjustments. In other words, they need permission to develop a “boarding house” in an otherwise industrial zone; to maintain only 1,600 square feet of open space where 4,650 square feet is typically required; and to establish only 3,586 square feet of common amenity space where 4,650 square feet is mandated as well. They are also seeking a waiver to allow for zero parking spaces where 28 are typically required and no loading spaces where one is usually expected.
Middleton said the new shelter structure is designed to respond to current and anticipated constraints around homelessness, including a large number of senior individuals expected to lose housing down the line – which she called the “silver tsunami of people experiencing homelessness” — as well as a rise in diagnosed mental illnesses and the threat of future pandemics.
Columbus House Chief of Real Estate Carl Rodenhizer, client Michele Pappacoda, and CEO Margaret Middleton during Tuesday's meeting.
Michele Pappacoda, a client of Columbus House who’s been staying at the shelter since June, said that “the biggest problem right now is that there’s a lot of mental illness … It’s important that clients with mental illness have their own rooms so they feel safe.”
She noted that as a shelter stayer who receives medications from a visiting nurse, a private space to meet with healthcare professionals is crucial, especially as more seniors find their way to shelters and require additional medical care.
“There’s more elderly coming in,” Pappacoda observed, “and more and more elderly with electric wheelchairs that are not fitting through doors.”
Middleton said that while residents would be assigned first-come, first-served by the Coordinated Access Network, the centralized waitlist for people in need of shelter, the new shelter will be especially useful for people with psychotic spectrum disorders or autistic clients who struggle disproportionately in crowded facilities. Families, life partners, and people who do not identify with the standard gender binary will also have a chance to find individualized housing they otherwise can’t find in shelters typically segregated by sex.
Hill Alder Evelyn Rodriguez also testified in support of the project during Tuesday’s BZA hearing: “This is making it more attractive for the unhoused to say, ‘I think I can stay here and get some support,’ instead of, ‘I don’t want to stay here, I’ll stay on the streets or somewhere else unsafe.’”
The zoning relief application now advances to the City Plan Commission for further review before returning to the BZA for a final vote.
See below for more recent Independent articles about homelessness, activism, and attempts to find shelter.
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