Mill River Plan’s Affordability Fleshed Out

Why can’t all six of planned new Humphrey Street townhomes be affordable?

Mill River neighbor Joan Cavanagh asked this question on Friday evening of the developer hoping to build 12 apartments housed within six townhomes at 156 – 158 Humphrey St.

“We have a lot of these units going up with a small number of affordable units, and it prices the rest of us out of the market. Nobody can live here,” Cavanagh said.

Wooster Square Alder Ellen Cupo organized Friday’s meeting to give Mill River neighbors another look at the project. Developer Eric O’Brien of Urbane NewHaven first revealed the plans at the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team in early June.

The Humphrey Street properties are city-owned land. New Haven’s Livable City Initiative asked for proposals to purchase the corner of Mill River and Humphrey Street to promote affordability and clean up what is currently a vacant garage and parking lot. It negotiated a deal with Urbane New Haven.

O’Brien said he is hoping to sell each townhome separately, possibly to first-time homeowners. The purchaser would live in the top two floors of the townhome and rent out the studio or one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor.

O’Brien, who helped develop the adjacent tech hub DISTRICT, has promised to deed-restrict two of the six buildings to be affordable to certain income thresholds. By restricting a third of the apartments, Urbane would provide more affordability than for-profit developers are usually required to do.

“If the city said the project would have to be 100 percent affordable, it wouldn’t get done because we can’t build them at that price. That’s why there are affordable builders who work with government subsidies and government funding,” O’Brien said. ​“We are not taking any subsidies to build this.”

Urbane offered to purchase the plot from the city for $25,000 and estimates that construction will cost upwards of $1.2 million.

O’Brien said that large, completely affordable complexes may not even be desirable for the city and that such complexes have been often torn down in recent years.

“To be fully inclusionary, affordable units would be amongst the market rate, so you get that spread across the city,” O’Brien said. ​“We’re excited about the mix. That’s what we love about this city.”

In response to Cavanagh’s question, O’Brien said two of the townhomes would be restricted to families making 80 percent of the New Haven area median income, which is around $91,000 for a family of four. That would mean the sales price for the affordable townhomes would be roughly $309,000.

The downstairs apartment would be restricted to a family making 60 percent of the area median income. The cost would work out to around $629 a month, including utilities, O’Brien said.

“We need everybody to help with affordability. It doesn’t mean a little piece here, a little piece there,” Cavanagh maintained. ​“Housing should not be exorbitantly expensive.”

Alder Charles Decker, whose ward covers part of East Rock and Fair Haven, said that this is why he is putting his hopes in the city’s new Affordable Housing Commission. He said that the Covid-19 pandemic has slightly delayed putting the commission into motion.

“I hear you loud and clear. We’re not going to get affordability by trying to develop it parcel by parcel. We need a comprehensive solution,” Decker said.

Decker offered that he also thinks the Humphrey Street project has a lot going for it. He then signed off to attend his last videoconference of the evening.

The few other attendees of the virtual meeting asked about details of the project, like whether the lower and upper apartments have separate thermostats. (They do.) One neighbor, Galina Krichmar, asked when and where O’Brien would start listing the townhouses for sale.

When the neighbors had no more questions, Cupo wrapped up and encouraged O’Brien to visit the Fair Haven management team as well. She said that the Mill River area is in her ward but is more part of Fair Haven than Wooster Square.