Thomas Breen photos
Here comes the neighborhood: Potential buildings to come (in white) to transform the Ninth Square. (Cafe 9 is at center near bottom.)
Housing authority head Karen DuBois-Walton: "We need to be building more housing. That is how we move forward."
Builders are ready to un-pave parking lots — and erect hundreds of new mixed-income apartments downtown.
Two dozen officials announced that news Tuesday afternoon alongside developers during a press conference heralding newly inked agreements to redevelop a car-centric stretch of State and George streets.
Lot A, at State and Fair.
Lot B, on George between State and Orange.
The press conference took place in a sun-drenched spot of a publicly owned parking lot on State Street just north of Fair and George streets. It marked the latest step in a decades-long process of turning the Ninth Square into a busy mixed-use neighborhood, in part through a new effort to undo Urban Renewal-era planning mistakes by building on car-centric stretches of asphalt.
The city landed a $5 million state grant in 2022 to kickstart an overhaul of much of State Street downtown by narrowing the roadway to reduce car speeds, and by creating half a dozen developable lots to be sold to builders interested in converting space currently reserved for cars into new places for people to live and shop.
Mayor Justin Elicker announced that the city has now signed two memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with two different development teams who plan on constructing more than 450 new apartments and 7,200 square feet of commercial space atop two existing surface lots.
Those developers are a partnership between Gilbane and Xenolith for one lot, and a partnership between the Glendower Group and LMXD for the second.
These developers have nine months under the agreement to refine their building concepts, meet with the public to present their plans, and then ultimately work with the city to come up with Development and Land Disposition Agreements (DLDA) to be reviewed and voted on by the alders. Those to-be-written DLDAs will include all of final terms of each deal, including the sale price for the lots in question.
The first developable lot includes two acres that spans the State-Fair parking lot, as well as northbound travel lanes and a public greenspace between Fair and Chapel.
The city has signed a MOU with Providence, R.I.-based builder Gilbane and New York-based affordable housing developer Xenolith. Those companies plan on constructing 279 new apartments on that site — including 70 below-market rentals.
Twenty percent of the project’s apartments will be reserved for tenants making between 30 and 50 percent of the area median income (AMI), which currently translates to between around $34,850 and $58,050 a year for a family of four. Another 5 percent of those apartments will be reserved for tenants making no more than 80 percent AMI, or $92,900 per year for a family of four.
The projects would build on mixed-income apartments constructed on other Ninth Square blocks during the 1990s, and more recent apartment complexes under construction on the former Coliseum site as well as across the railroad tracks at Fair, Chapel, and Olive streets.
The city has signed a separate MOU with the Glendower Group, the nonprofit development wing of New Haven’s public housing authority, in partnership with the New York-based developer LMXD to build up a second set of nearby publicly-owned parking lots on the northern side of George Street between Hertz’s rental car agency and Orange Street.
That roughly 0.84-acre site will be built up into roughly 175 apartments, with around 51 set aside at below-market rents. Housing Authority President Karen DuBois-Walton said that the affordable units in this apartment complex to-be will be supported in part by federal Section 8 rental subsidies.
“The housing authority, you are on fire, with the clock factory, Church Street South,” and even more development projects to come, Elicker said to DuBois-Walton. “Just incredible.”
DuBois-Walton stressed that the housing authority and its related agencies believe that the best way to address Connecticut’s housing crisis and the problem of housing affordability is by building more places to live. “We need to be building more housing. That is how we move forward.”
She added that the housing authority currently has 40,000 people on its waitlist. “That’s the reel,” she said: the proof of the need for lots more places for people to live.
Elicker agreed, stating that Connecticut needs 90,000 new residential units “to be able to support the demand for housing.”
“I say, let’s keep this party going,” Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Arlevia Samuel said about all of the new apartments being built around town. “Let’s get the parking lots filled in.”
Elicker said that, if all goes well, construction for these two projects should begin in late 2025 or 2026. And the city will have another six lots further up State Street to try to sell to developers for still more housing in the area to come.
Mayor Elicker leads Tuesday's presser.
Gilbane VP Roj Robinson.
More, more, more housing, planned for State-George parking lots.