State Street Promise: $5.3M Will Bring ​“Livability”

New Haven will get it right, down to the details.

So promised city leaders Tuesday as they celebrated a $5.3 million grant aimed at helping them redo something New Haven got very wrong a half century ago.

The celebration took the form of a press conference held under the portico of the State Street train station. Officials gathered there to discuss the grant awarded by the state last week to begin the process of reconfiguring State Street from Audubon to George to make the area safer for people to travel and open up room for new development. Click here to read a recent story detailing that grant.

The mistake New Haven made in the mid-20th century, in the popular revisionist view of Urban Renewal, was leveling blocks upon blocks of stores and homes and widening roads to remake the center of the city into a speedway aimed at moving cars as fast as possible through town and back to the suburbs. The stretch of State Street in question was a prime example of that strategy.

This time around, with the help of the state grant, initial estimates envision building up to 447 residential units and perhaps 80,000 square feet of stores on surface parking lots created by the urban renewal bulldozer; and making room for more sidewalks or bike lanes or other pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly ​“infrastructure.”

New Haven won the grant in part by having the right strategy, said Alexandra Daum, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, which chose the recipients of this and 11 other ​“Connecticut Communities Challenge” grants. She said the city’s application emphasized the three key prongs of ​“liveability:” Places to live within walking distance of a local job and other amenities; easy nearby access to a train or other mass transit to work elsewhere (see: ​“transit-oriented development”); and an emphasis on affordable housing.

Any new developments that would rise from parking lots sold by the city under this plan would be covered under New Haven’s new inclusionary zoning law, meaning at least 15 to 20 percent of apartments would have to have affordable rents.

Another mistake attributed to New Haven’s urban renewal planners past was crafting designs ​“from above,” in their planning offices rather in conjunction with the public.

Carlos Eyzaguirre, the city’s current deputy economic development administrator, noted that this grant and the vision behind it grew out of a state-funded public planning process conducted in conjunction with Wooster Square neighbors. (Click here to read about that.) He promised that the city will commence a ​“robust” planning process with downtown and Wooster Square neighbors on the details of this new State Street corridor plan. To get it right.

The state grant requires a 20 percent local match. City economic development chief Michael Piscitelli said that the city’s share will come out of a combination of federal aid and local bonding. The parking authority, which owns some of the lots in the corridor, will play a central role in the project, as well.

Meanwhile, as of press time, no year-2060 press conferences have yet been scheduled for a new generation of officials, informed by yet another reassessment of urban development, to announce they’re ripping up State Street’s 2020s-vintage mixed-use residential-commercial buildings and walkable/bikable streets to reinstate auto speedways and windowless massive ​“brutalist” single-use structures.