Neighborhood Development Plan Sought

Don’t forget neighborhoods.

Alders issued that plea at a public hearing to the city’s economic development team as they pushed for a boom-era strategy for attracting new construction and jobs beyond Downtown.

At the same hearing, a city official made the first public pitch for a plan she said would do just that for Newhallville.

That call for wider-spread economic development came Thursday night in the Aldermanic Chambers of City Hall during the latest Finance Committee budget workshop regarding Mayor Toni Harp’s proposed $556.6 million operating budget for Fiscal Year 2019 – 2020 (FY20).

Finance Committee Vice-Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand joined Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers in pressuring Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana to step up his team’s encouragement of developers to look outside of the city center.

The current Downtown development boom will eventually subside, they warned. And if the city doesn’t have a deliberate neighborhood economic development strategy in place when it does, then city residents will remain stuck living next to empty lots, and city taxpayers will be left holding the bag.

“In my neighborhood, in our little village, there are lots of empty lots,” Marchand said. ​“Many empty lots, underdeveloped land, properties that are currently owned by people who keep them empty, doing nothing. That’s a great concern for us in Westville.”

“If we have these hidden treasures as a city,” Walker-Myers added, ​“we definitely need to be telling [developers] about them. We definitely know how to talk about our Downtown in a very nice way. There’s a lot of opportunities that I think we’re missing.”

Fontana said that his department tends to be in much more of a ​“responsive mode” when it comes to new development in the city. When new builders or businesses approach the city about setting up shop in New Haven, his team asks them a host of questions about if they want to buy or lease, if they want to be near a highway or a bus stop or a train station, if parking is important. The department budgets a certain amount in capital funds every year to help developers who are rehabbing dilapidated properties cover parts of the costs of environmental remediation and flood mitigation.

“We don’t steer them so much as we try to respond to what it is they’re looking for,” he said. Ultimately, the decision as to where to locate is up to them.

Nevertheless, he said, the city is seeing some largely residential developments getting off the ground outside of the Downtown core, with hundreds of apartments planned for 201 Munson St. in Newhallville, dozens of condos planned at the old Lehman Brothers printing plant in Goatville, and 130 artist lofts and affordable apartments planned for the old clock factory at 133 Hamilton St. in Mill River.

“We’re very open and eager to pursue development throughout the city,” he said.

That’s not good enough, Walker-Myers said. She said she can still remember when West River had a vibrant commercial district of small businesses, which are all but gone as Downtown continues to see new shops and restaurants opening on a nearly weekly basis.

“The city needs to be thinking along those lines about how to expand economic development in other areas,” she said. Even as new housing trickles into the neighborhoods, new businesses have been slow to follow.

Fontana said that one answer may lie in the city’s new Opportunity Zones, seven federally designated ​“distressed” areas of the city where investors can receive significant federal capital gains tax breaks if they put their money into new housing or business projects. He said the city’s economic development and city plan departments have recently formed a working group to develop new strategies for promoting investment in the Opportunity Zones, which include Fair Haven, West River, Dixwell, Newhallville, and the Hill.

“We are working on the Opportunity Zone opportunities,” he said.

Laundry Co-Op Pitched

At the same hearing, her first public pitch to alders in support of a proposed worker-owned laundromat at the old state social services building in Newhallville, the city’s anti-blight and neighborhood improvement director argued that a short-term $88,000-plus hit to city tax rolls is worth the risk.

The project, when it gets off the ground, will bring new jobs, businesses, homeowners, and a burst of economic activity to a working-class community ​“that’s been asking for help for a long time,” promised Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo.

Neal-Sanjurjo confirmed that the city is in negotiations to purchase the former state Department of Social Services (DSS) building at 188 – 206 Bassett St. and 218 – 222 Bassett St., which has been empty since 2013, when the state department moved its local offices across town to 50 Humphrey St.

A proposed order is currently before the aldermanic Community Development Committee that would allow the city to buy the 70,953-square-foot building from its New York-based private owner, Time Equities, for the currently negotiated price of $900,000, and then help turn that building into a worker-owned laundromat, fitness center, job training site, and small business hub for the neighborhood. 

Neal-Sanjurjo said her department and the mayor’s office have been working on this economic development plan for the building for the past two and a half years. The end result could transform Newhallville, she said.

“It’s a project that could be an economic turn for that neighborhood. This has come at the request of a neighborhood that’s been asking for help for a long time.”

East Rock Alder Anna Festa noted that the privately-owned building currently is currently assessed at just over $2 million, and provides over $88,000 a year in property taxes. How will this project mitigate that immediate hit to the city’s tax rolls if and when the city purchases the property?

By adding new jobs and new businesses to the neighborhood, and by increasing home values and attracting new homeowners to surrounding city streets, Neal-Sanjurjo replied. ​“It will completely give a burst to a neighborhood that has had none for a long time.”

She said the city is currently working with the Newhallville Community Management Team to set up a new neighborhood development corporation like the Dwight Community Development Corporation. Then, just as the Dwight organization did years ago with the former Shaw’s site that is now home to Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue, the new Newhallville corporation would take ownership of the property.

She said LCI is currently working on finding businesses to lease space in the building alongside a commercial laundromat that could employ upwards of 140 people. She said the city’s economic development department and mayor’s office are currently in conversations with the Cleveland-based Evergreen Cooperative Initiative to build out the laundromat component of the proposed small business center.

“It’s got to be a public private partnership,” Neal-Sanjurjo said. ​“Or it’s not going to work at all.”

Festa asked if the city has any contracts already in place from local institutions interested in using the prospective worker-owned laundromat.

While the mayor’s office is taking the lead on that initiative, Neal-Sanjurjo said, she herself has sat in on multiple meetings with Yale University and with Yale New Haven Hospital administrators about their interest in the project. She said the hospital in particular has committed to supporting the project when it gets off the ground.

“I hope they stick to that commitment,” Festa said.

“We’ll make sure they do,” Neal-Sanjurjo replied.

Affordable Housing Commitment

Neal-Sanjurjo also assured alders on Thursday night that her department is committed to following through on recommendations included in the Affordable Housing Task Force’s final report from January. Neal-Sanjurjo was one of the members of the task force, and helped draft the 44 recommendations for how to increase and improve the quality of low-income housing in the city and in the region over the short, mid, and long-term.

“I think the work that we did at this table through that process was probably one of the best things I’ve done in a long time,” she told the Finance Committee alders, ​“and I’ve been in this work for 35 years. It was thoughtful. It was compelling. And the work that we are currently doing in our neighborhoods is a response to that.”

She said that, in addition to continuing to work on a host of affordable housing and new homeownership developments throughout the city, her department has committed to working with the city’s Economic Development Corporation to find additional resources to fund new affordable housing developments through new market tax credits, Opportunity Zone investments, and new partnerships with market-rate apartment developers.

“It is hard for us to do building,” she said. ​“But it is not hard for us to make partnerships where people are already doing building.”

She said LCI is working with the City Plan department to develop a group that will scope out how to implement formal inclusionary zoning rules, which would require a certain percentage of units in new apartment buildings be set aside at affordable rental rates.

And, she said, her department will prioritize finding a solution to reduce youth homelessness in the city.

“We will commit to figuring out a way to implement these recommendations,” she said, ​“because they are important to the city, and they are important to the people who live here, and they are very important to the region as it continues to grow.”

Westville Alder and Finance Committee Vice-Chair Adam Marchand asked Neal-Sanjurjo if LCI would provide staff support for a new permanent Affordable Housing Commission, if the alders were to vote to create such a body.

Neal-Sanjurjo said that LCI would. After talking with fellow members of the task force and reviewing the work of various city departments, she said, ​“there’s no other department that’s better suited to do it.”