East River Partners
Proposed State Street apartment complex.
A new 60-unit State Street apartment complex won’t necessarily offer affordable housing. But it also won’t charge luxury prices, instead aiming for a “mid-price” that falls somewhere in between.
Greenwich-based developer Joseph Cohen pitched that price range on Tuesday night to the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) for his new planned development for 294 – 302 State St.
The space is currently a surface parking lot, located right across the street from the State Street train station just south of Chapel Street.
Following up on his presentation before the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) last month, Cohen told the 20 New Haveners who came out for Tuesday night’s meeting that he and his development company East River Partners plan on building a six-story, 60-unit apartment complex with a mix of studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and four-bedroom apartments on the second through sixth floors. The first floor will contain an on-site garage, an amenity space, and retail space.
Cohen said he hopes to be in construction for this project by mid-2019. First the proposed development must come before City Plan Commission for site plan review and an advisory vote before returning to BZA for a vote on a requested special exception to provide 19 parking spaces where there should be 35.
The Four-Bedroom Gap
Thomas Breen photo
Cohen: aiming for mid-price.
“We’re trying to aim for mid-price for the apartments,” Cohen told the group. He said the new apartment complex won’t have any units set aside specifically for affordable housing, but that the units will represent a “discount” on the type of luxury rentals available at the 360 State St. high rise across the street.
“Which is high, high, high end,” said Wooster Square resident Cordalie Benoit about 360 State.
“There’s an arms race for high-end development,” Cohen replied. “Frankly, there’s room for a lot of gradation.”
He said the average size of a one-bedroom apartment at the complex will likely be around 700 square feet. As for the first-floor retail space, he said he hopes to have a café with outdoor seating.
“But it’s market driven,” he said. “We’ll see if a café is interested.”
He said at this point he doesn’t have dollar figures for the projected rents.
Cohen said this apartment complex will fill a need downtown for multi-bedroom market-rate rentals by including 10 four-bedroom apartments. He said that with larger apartments that tenants can share as roommates, “the absolute dollar people have to pay is a little less.”
Going Mod
Downtown-Wooster Square management team.
After the meeting, Cohen, who grew up in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, said construction should move pretty quickly once shovels are in the ground in mid-2019. The reason, he said, is “modular construction.”
“That’s one of the things we’re really interested in pushing the boundaries on with this project,” he said.
Modular construction means that certain parts of the building are manufactured in a factory offsite and then shipped to New Haven. Cohen touted this process as more environmentally sustainable, cleaner, and faster.
“It’s crazy the way we build buildings today,” he said. “You go to a construction site and you see people hanging off of a scaffold in the rain. It’s really, really from the Stone Ages.”
Cohen said East River Partners is currently in conversation with some modular manufacturing companies, including some in western Pennsylvania, that may end up working on the project.