Allan Appel Photo
At 2019 opening for the first iteration of 169 Plymouth student-built home.
The newest addition to New Haven’s affordable housing stock will be a 400 square-foot dwelling cheek by jowl to the railroad tracks in the Hill.
If innovative plans go right, it’ll be just as quiet, or noisy, as if it were 20 feet farther away.
That preview of the latest installment of Yale School of Architecture Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, an annual student-designed and built home in a low-income New Haven neighborhood, debuted Tuesday night before 35 people at the Hill South Community Management Team gathering on Zoom.
First-year architecture students from Yale build every foot of concrete, every board and nail of the home produced each year. Then a low-income family, or two, move in.
Over the last several years the homes have been built in the Hill for the clients of the Columbus House homeless assistance agency, on Button and Adeline streets and at 164 Plymouth St.(Click here to read about the latter house and how the process works.)
This year’s project, a resumption after the pandemic, involves not constructing a distinct new house but rather adding a single stand-alone dwelling unit to the house that already exists on Plymouth, explained the project’s director, Yale architecture professor Adam Hopfner.
In response to past critiques of the program for not sufficiently involving community members in the process, neighbors are now part of the selection process of the student team design chosen to be built.
And now there is even more consultation. “We wanted to share our intention with the neighborhood,” said Columbus House CEO Margaret Middleton.
Hopfner explained that the site, a combination of three lots, is big enough so that building proposed can be constructed as of right, without special permissions. The issue pending before the Board of Zoning Appeals in the near future will be a variance request “to see if we can move the building further back and closer to the train tracks to give more space for the dwelling that’s already there and rear yards of the adjacent property, so we wouldn’t be imposing the building on an abutting rear yard. We’d love your thoughts.”
Neighbors present Wednesday turned out to be all supportive, not only of this project but of the aesthetics and usefulness of the previous homes.
One neighbor, Thomasine Shaw, asked about vibrations so close to the tracks that are busy with Amtrak and Metro North trains.
Hopfner replied, “We are looking at ways technically [to address the issue], different foundation systems, for example, that would resist the transfer of vibrations.” Counter-intuitively, he said, the noise and vibrations are not that different beside the tracks or 20 feet away.
Without taking a formal vote, attendees gave a big thumbs up to the project. Middleton thanked people for the kind comments on the beauty of Vlock houses and invited the group to the open house, likely in the late summer or early fall, on Plymouth Street.