Perkins Eastman
Envisioned stormwater ribbon park anchoring new Long Wharf design.
Thomas Breen photo
City Assistant Director of Comprehensive Planning Aïcha Woods and Economic Development Officer Carlos Eyzaguirre.
A plan to redevelop Long Wharf into five new walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods is almost complete, laying the groundwork for a potential 20-year overhaul of the current sprawling, disconnected, and underused stretch of city waterfront.
That was the word during Tuesday night’s regular monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) on the second floor of City Hall, as city plan and economic development officials gave an update on the months-in-the-works Long Wharf Responsible Growth Plan.
City Economic Development Officer Carlos Eyzaguirre and Assistant Director of Comprehensive Planning Aïcha Woods told the roughly 50 neighbors present that the city has finished a 150-page final draft of the recommended plan.
Tuesday night’s Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team meeting.
City officials plan to hold a workshop on the Long Wharf plan with members of the City Plan Commission (CPC) on Wednesday night, and will hold a public hearing for the plan at CPC next month. Eyzaguirre, Woods, and Acting City Plan Director Mike Piscitelli said that they hope to have the city formally adopt the plan as one of its neighborhood-specific development guidelines before the end of the year.
“It’s an incremental plan,” Woods said. “It’s a 20-year vision. But we know there’s a lot of interest and potential projects in this area.”
Eyzaguirre said that the plan came out of a nearly $1 million grant that the city received from the state Office of Policy and Management (OPM) in 2016. Half of that money, he said, was spent on capital improvements to Long Wharf, such as repared sidewalks, Americans with Disability Act (ADA)-accessible ramps, electrical hookups for food trucks previously run off of generators, and two-way protected cycletrack.
The other half has been used over the past 11 months to work with the Perkins Eastman global architecture company EE&K to draft a development plan for the neighborhood. That’s the plan that the city is wrapping up right now.
“It’s a 300-acre site,” Eyzaguirre said, “of which 150 acres are underutilized. … There’s still a lot to do.” He said that Long Wharf is currently home to over 5,000 jobs as well as internationally recognized manufacturers like Assa Abloy and the city’s most expensive medical office building at 1 Long Wharf Dr.
Over the course of three community meetings held in the Hill, the city and its design consultants came up with a plan to carve up Long Wharf into five distinct districts all connected by a new, linear stormwater park. (Click here, here, and here to read about those meeting.)
Woods.
“This is a plan that proposes creating walkable neighborhoods around each of these assets,” Woods said about the New Haven Food Terminal, Assa Abloy, Ikea, the Boat House, and other current landmark occupants of Long Wharf, “and taking an infill approach to development over time. It’s putting together a vision of these five different walkable districts that each has a particular character.”
The new Long Wharf districts would include a market district, an “innovation” district, a harbor district, a parkway district, and a “gateway” district.
Woods said that the new plan envisions 7.7 million square feet of new development, including potentially 4,600 units of residential development, 360,000 square feet of commercial office development, 320,000 square feet of retail, and 440 new hotel rooms.
All of this is contingent, she said, upon new and existing private developers buying into the city’s 20-year vision for the neighborhood if and when the city chooses to formally adopt the framework.
Anstress Farwell.
“Does this go to the Board of Alders for adoption into our comprehensive plan?” asked DWSCMT board member Anstress Farwell. “My impression of it is that it’s a very, very loose framework that can have a lot of improvisation.”
Piscitelli said that he will talk with City Plan commissioners during Wednesday’s workshop about whether or not the city should adopt the plan as part of its New Haven Vision 2025 citywide comprehensive plan, or whether it should adopt it as a looser, nonbinding, but nevertheless officially-sanctioned vision for the neighborhood.
Mohit Agrawal.
Mohit Agrawal, the chair of the city’s independent Financial Review and Audit Commission (FRAC), asked if the project depends entirely on private investment, or if the city is looking for more state dollars as well to bring this plan to reality.
Piscitelli and Woods said that the prospective residential and commercial development is all contingent upon private investment. But the public infrastructure improvements, particularly to build out the stormwater parks, seawalls, and other coastal resiliency measures, will almost certainly rely upon city, state, and federal funding.
Acting City Plan Director Mike Piscitelli.
“We know we’ve got to do a series of interventions to save what we have and build upon it and grow,” said Piscitelli, noting Long Wharf’s increased vulnerability to flooding and storm surges due to climate change. He said that the engineering and parks departments have already secured $4 million in state funds to build out “living shoreline” flood protections on the waterfront.
Woods said that that new parks, bike lanes, and walkways will also go a long way towards connecting Long Wharf to surrounding neighborhoods like Wooster Square and the Hill.
“One of the goals is to increase the connections for the rest of the city,” she said, “so that this becomes not just a cool place for people to see from the highway.”
Perkins Eastman
From the Long Wharf plan.