Thomas Breen photos
What's that, Spinnaker VP Frank Caico? Why it's ...
... more and more and more apartments on a rebuilt Audubon.
Another 60 high-end apartments are now available to rent on a transformed Audubon superblock.
Wait, hold on a second: Half of those newly opened residences have already been snapped up, by more and more people able to afford monthly prices of $2,500 and higher.
That’s the latest development at a collection of apartment buildings called The Audubon New Haven.
A Norwalk-based developer named Spinnaker Real Estate Partners has built up The Audubon over three phases. (Spinnaker is also behind the revived Coliseum site redevelopment, a new 185-unit project on Fair Street, and a long-stalled hotel development on Elm.)
The Audubon is located on a 3.3‑acre downtown superblock bounded by Orange Street, Grove Street, State Street, and Audubon Street, that — as recently as 2018 — consisted of nothing but surface parking lots.
That was then.
The development’s first phase included 269 apartments and 5,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, all wrapped around a 650-space parking garage.
The second included another 135 apartments and still more ground-floor storefronts.
The third phase — which Spinnaker VP Frank Caico showed the Independent during a walking tour on Monday — includes still another 56 apartments and four rental townhomes, built on the north side of Audubon between Orange and State. It opened in February.
A 1-bedroom apartment at 29 Audubon St.
These apartments don’t come cheap. According to The Audubon’s “community manager,” Taylor Abercrombie, rents for the complex’s studio apartments (around 500 to 600 square feet) range from around $2,000 to $2,400 per month.
The one-bedrooms (around 700 to 800 square feet) rent for around $2,400 to $2,900.
The two-bedrooms (around 1,000 to 1,200 square feet) rent for around $3,000 to $3,400.
And the three-bedrooms (around 1,200 to 1,400 square feet) rent for as high as $4,600.
The Audubon also includes two-bedroom townhomes, which cost nearly $6,000 per month in rent.
Despite those prices, people keep moving in. Lots and lots of people.
Caico said that the complex’s phase one and two buildings are “effectively stabilized,” meaning that more than 95 percent of those 400-plus units are currently rented out.
The 60 new rentals that came online in February as part of phase three are roughly 50 percent occupied, he said. Abercrombie said The Audubon hopes to have the whole phase three building completely rented out by May.
That may sound ambitious, she said, but it’s also realistic. She said there were seven tours of The Audubon by prospective renters on Monday alone.
Two-thirds of the complex’s residents are affiliated with Yale University or Yale New Haven Hospital, she said, including many graduate students and hospital residents. (She said that The Audubon does not rent to college undergraduates, as a precautionary measure against too much partying.)
Caico and Abercrombie touted the complex’s amenities — communal gyms and co-working spaces, pool tables and virtual golf driving ranges, a dog park and a ground-floor swimming pool, rooftop patios with garden beds and grills and views of East Rock and the harbor — as distinguishing The Audubon from its (ever-growing) competition. Plus its location right downtown and close to Yale and the hospital and the (ever-growing) life science companies based out of the (ever-growing) biomed lab and office towers.
“This whole site was large parking lots, very underutilized,” Caico marveled while walking along a stretch of Audubon now flanked on both sides by brick-fronted Audubon apartments and townhomes, and including new sidewalks and street lights. With the completion of the phase three building on the north side of Audubon, he said, “now we’ve been able to complete the street.”
A rooftop patio at 29 Audubon.
Caico credited the staggered construction of so many of New Haven’s newest luxury rental buildings as one reason for their apparent success at finding renters (that along with the pull of New Haven, and Yale and the hospital). Hundreds if not thousands of apartments have recently or are soon to come online on Olive Street and Winchester Avenue and in the Hill and, of course, on Audubon. But they didn’t open all at once, stretching instead across a number of years.
“Most of it is happening in phases,” as opposed to a sudden glut of housing built in some growing cities in the Southeast like Charlotte, he said. “It’s very healthy. They’ve all been absorbed [by new renters]. It speaks to the health of the local economy.”
Abercrombie added that many of The Audubon’s residents stay in the complex for around two to four years, usually in line with the duration of their stay at Yale or the hospital.
Full Apartments, Empty Shops. For Now
Empty storefronts at State & Grove.
And what about all the ground-floor retail space that Spinnaker was required per the city’s zoning code to build as part of this complex?
Those spots, like so many around town (and the country), have been much harder to fill.
A Grove Street storefront is currently occupied by a gym called Orange Theory. A restaurant space at the corner of Audubon and Orange used to house El Segundo, which recently closed; that spot will soon be home to a new Japanese restaurant and market.
That leaves three other large sidewalk-facing storefronts on Orange, Grove, and State still empty. Caico noted that The Audubon could have had to have even more ground-floor commercial space on Audubon Street as part of phase three, but the developers won zoning relief from the city before building to allow for just residential instead.
“Traditional brick and mortar retail nationally has struggled,” Caico said. He said that such uses as “food and beverage,” fitness, and “personal services” tend to be the most successful. But even so, three commercial spaces in the complex remain empty — though he said some prospective tenants have recently toured the spaces.
“It can be counterproductive” to have “more space than there’s demand,” he said. That can result in “the opposite effect” of what zoning rules requiring ground-floor commercial seek to accomplish — that is, an activated streetfront and a bustling city. He said leasing offices and gyms and other building amenities on the ground-floor can serve a similar purpose to commercial space, minus the trouble of finding a commercial tenant.
But for now, The Audubon is still looking for businesses to move in to available ground-floor spaces. Even as more and more renters turn out for the residences above.
