Builder Starts At Odds With Neighbors

The city has found a developer who seeks to remodel a vacant Fair Haven school into an apartment complex — but who has started off on a bad foot with neighborhood leaders.

The plan involves the circa 1915 Strong School at Grand at 69 Grand Ave., just up the hill from the Quinnipiac River.

The city has been trying since 2010 to find someone to revive the decaying 33,000 square-foot three-story historic gem to bolster the revival of that stretch of Fair Haven.

A 65-year-old retired Litchfield-based psychoanalyst named Ted Lazarus has submitted a plan to the city to buy the school for $500,000 and then spend $16.7 million converting it to 37 one-bedroom apartments (some of them two-story) ranging from 370 to 718 square feet. Working along with the development arm of Meriden’s housing authority, he’d convert the gym into a community space open to local groups, add a fitness room, and turn the roof terrace into ​“an outdoor living room” for ​“sunbathing, board games [and] outdoor cooking.” The plan also calls for upgrading the playground and installing solar panels on the roof and a geothermal heating and cooling system. (Interspersed in this article are project drawings prepared by Newman Architects.)

Deputy Economic Development Director Steve Fontana, the point person on the project, said Lazarus has stated an intention to build senior housing on the site, with rents comparable to what the market brings in Fair Haven. On Linked In, Lazarus wrote that his company ​“develops and manages affordable supportive housing and is committed to the revitalization of distressed urban neighborhoods.” He stated in a resume attached to the proposal that he ​“owns and manages 24 units of supportive housing in Bridgeport; and 65 multifamily units (scattered) in Waterbury.”

“We think it’s a bonafide proposal from a bonafide developer,” Fontana said of the Lazarus’s plan for Strong.

Lazarus has previously entered in an agreement to rehab two former schools into senior housing in Bristol. His new Strong School proposal includes a letter from Wall Street-based Aegis Capital Corp. expressing interest in providing up to $18 million in financing. Lazarus would also seek federal and state historic tax credits. He envisions closing on the deal with the city by May 2017 completing the project by May 2018. (He failed to meet a similar projected deadline in Bristol.)

Lazarus submitted his Strong School plan in response to a city request for proposals. A city committee will review and vote on the plan; committee members include city economic development chief Matthew Nemerson, Alders Richard Furlow and David Reyes, architects Craig Newick and Ken Boroson, and activist Jane Coppock. They have scheduled a public hearing on the proposal for Monday, Nov. 7, at 5:30 in Meeting Room 3 on the second floor of City Hall. More specifics on Lazarus’s plan are expected then.

The committee plans to hold its own meeting on whether to accept the proposal two nights later at the same time, in Mayor’s Conference Room 2.

Leaders of a Chatham Square group, the part of Fair Haven that includes Strong School, criticized the plan. They also accused both Nemerson’s office and Lazarus of shutting them out at every step, then presenting with a plan that fails to meet their neighborhood’s grassroots vision for future development

Lazarus declined to give his side of the story to the Independent. Nemerson said the city worked as hard as it could with neighbors, but needed to advance a viable plan to restore the school and get it back on the tax rolls.

SPACeD Out

Under the banner of a group called SPACe (Strong Performing Arts Center), Chatham Square neighbors worked on their vision in community meetings and came up with a plan for the Strong School. The plan called for turning the school into a home for arts groups and other nonprofits — to use as offices, for classes, and for performances.

The idea was to generate more activity in the neighborhood and bring in more people who would patronize area restaurants, the way Audubon Street arts facilities have boosted that part of town, said one of the main organizers, Lee Cruz.

Cruz and other neighbors put together a plan to do that the first time the city sought proposals for Strong School. They were the only group proposing to buy and renovate the building then.

Nemerson and his team concluded that the plan lacked financing as well as enough of a revenue stream to be viable. SPACe revised the plan to include revenue-generating housing. SPACe proposed to pay the city $250,000 and then spend $7.5 million converting the 1.055-acre site into a community arts center with a 100-seat theater; six 2,400-square-foot three-story townhouse apartments renting for $2,350 a month; six smaller ​“penthouse apartments”; and office space for arts organizations and other nonprofits.

Nemerson gave the group a couple of extra months to find solid financial backing as well as needed architectural and engineering support. When it couldn’t, the city rejected SPACe’s plan in November 2014 and set out looking for a new developer.

Cruz argued that the city should have given his group more time as well as help to make the plan work.

“We bent over backwards to give them extra time and keep them in the process,” Nemerson said Thursday. He said after SPACe’s plan fell short, he gave the group an extra year to improve the plan with the city’s help.

“He didn’t give us a year,” Cruz responded. He said that once the city rejected SPACe’s plan, Nemerson gave it two and a half months to pull together needed financing — which Cruz said was insufficient time.

In any case, with no approved developer in place, Nemerson assigned Fontana, his deputy, to work on the project. Fontana found developer Lazarus. He sought to get Lazarus and SPACe together to join forces on the project.

According to Cruz and fellow SPACe organizer Christel Manning, Lazarus invited them to his office to discuss the plan. They said Lazarus told them he intended to turn the building into apartments and offered them use of the gym. He also demanded that they write a letter to the city stating they supported his proposal, and only his proposal.

Cruz and Manning said they didn’t want to do that, for two reasons.

They felt the proposal should include a scaled-down version of their original idea of turning at least some classrooms into offices and practice space for community nonprofits. Offering use of the gym to community groups is nice, Cruz said, but other nonprofits in the neighborhood, like the Mary Wade Home, already do that. The neighborhood’s vision of the school building’s future use went beyond that.

And Cruz said, ​“we didn’t want to be in a position not to work with someone else” if another developer had a plan more in keeping with the neighborhood’s vision.

How To Lose Friends & Not Influence People

Once Cruz and Manning declined to write the letter, they said, Lazarus refused to have any more to do with them. They said they sought details on his plan, only to be rebuffed. In October, they invited him to a Chatham Square neighborhood meeting to discuss his plans, the way, for instance, Mary Wade Home recently discussed its expansion plans — and won neighbors’ support — before submitting them to the city for approvals. In general, developers have made a practice in New Haven of first consulting with neighborhood groups on potential projects before submitting requests for city approvals.

Manning emailed the invitation to Lazarus on Oct. 17. She wrote: ​“We’ve been told that you responded to the Strong School RFP, and we would love to learn more about your proposal. We have our monthly neighborhood meeting Wednesday evening at 6pm and we would like to bring information about your proposal to the community that accurately reflects your proposal. It would also be useful to know your target population for the building. We can make assumptions based on our initial conversation but we would rather not do this. Just to be clear, we do not need budgets or financials. Our meeting is this Wed, Oct. 19, at 6 pm.”

On Oct. 18, Lazarus emailed Manning in response to the request to meet with neighbors.

“Coincidentally, I just spoke to Steve Fontana at the city development office and he advised me of the city’s plans to hold a public hearing on the subject of our proposal within the next couple of weeks. I think that would be the most efficient way for our proposal to be presented to anyone interested in the development plans,” he wrote. He was a no-show.

“He doesn’t seem really interested in working with the community,” Manning said during a visit to the school earlier this week.

Reached by phone Thursday, Lazarus neither confirmed nor denied their account. He also refused to discuss his proposal.

“We have that proposal in at the city. It has not been addressed by the city. There’s a meeting on the seventh of November. I don’t really feel comfortable commenting to the press before that,” Lazarus said.

He extended an invitation: ​“If you want to come to the meeting and participate in a public session, you’re welcome to.”

The city’s Fontana said that Lazarus was willing to incorporate the neighbors’ idea into his proposal but wanted a guarantee in return that the neighbors would support his project so that he ​“wouldn’t be used as leverage” for potential competitors’ plans. Cruz argued that ​“no community is going to say, ​‘We don’t know who’s in the horse race, but because you’re the first horse, we’re going to bet on you.’ We want to work with whoever gets this building.”

Nemerson defended his office’s approach to the Strong School project.

“Steve [Fontana] went out of his way to try to make a shidduch [match] between” Lazarus and the Chatham Square neighbors, Nemerson said in an interview. ​“We tried to get them to work together. Ted [Lazarus] wanted to work with them. They didn’t want to work with” Lazarus.

“People don’t get vetoes over process. We try to bring people together,” Nemerson added.

Nemerson said the city has ​“a responsibility to taxpayers to move this project along. We spent a year and a half with a very engaged community response that was put together by the neighborhood, and nothing came with it. We extended and extended. We had no choice but to out and find new developers.”

After failing to win exclusive support from SPACe, Lazarus contacted Justin Elicker, executive director of the New Haven Land Trust, which has a community garden across Perkins Street from the school. Elicker said Lazarus asked him to sign on as a supporter of his plan in return for office space. Elicker declined.

“I said I wanted to be working with Lee and community members on the project,” Elicker said Thursday. ​“If it’s not the [neighborhood]‘s plan, I said, it’s not the right fit.”

The proposal Lazarus finally submitted promised community use of the remodeled gym but did not list a community supporter.

“Total Disrespect”

Manning and Cruz said they found Nemerson and his staff equally determined to leave neighbors out of the planning process.

They said they kept asking to see Lazarus’s proposal, to no avail. They saw it only on Thursday after the city released the proposal to reporters after receiving a state Freedom of Information Act request from the Independent.

Manning said that approach is consistent with Nemerson’s response to her group’s original efforts to have its plan for Strong School considered a couple of years ago: ​“Matt didn’t even want to meet with us to discuss the proposal; he was just going to reject it.” She argued that the city’s process is focused on getting in a developer to pay for the building ​“rather than being driven by a vision for our community.”

“Total disrespect,” Cruz said of the city’s and developer’s approach to the neighborhood.

Steve Fontana responded that he would have been happy to provide Cruz and Manning with a copy of the proposal — if they had asked him. Cruz originally requested the proposal from city Purchasing Agent Michael Fumiatti in an Sept. 30 email. Fumiatti responded on Oct. 6 that he was forwarding the request to ​“economic development.” 

“If Lee had just said, ​‘Steve, if you have it, would you send it to me,’ I would have said, ​‘Sure,’” Fontana said. He said he believes it’s a good idea for the public to see the proposal before the Nov. 7 public hearing. He said Cruz never called or emailed him. Cruz insisted that he did call Fontana and failed to reach him or get a response.

Meanwhile, Strong School has deteriorated, Cruz said. Vandals have broken windows, continually sprayed graffiti, and destroyed part of the inside. The city was slow to respond, he said, so neighbors sometimes took action on their own.

“We have picked up the garbage. We have covered over the graffiti,” Cruz remarked. ​“We care about our community.”