Nora Grace-Flood Photo
City Plan chief Laura Brown Thursday night: Help us chart city's future.
The city invited the public to a launch party for a once-in-a-decade rewrite of New Haven’s primary land use document — and the community showed up.
More than 100 people piled into a hall at Betsy Ross Magnet School for the launch party Thursday night to pitch ideas for and ask questions about “Vision 2034,” New Haven’s upcoming once-a-decade rewriting of its Comprehensive Plan, which lays out the city’s planning aims for the next ten years.
Think of the Comprehensive Plan as the city’s charter for land use as it relates to economic development and neighborhood planning. The document lays out specific goals, timelines, data and public values in order to guide how the city approaches the development of housing, public services, transportation, parks and recreation, schools, libraries, and climate infrastructure.
The rewrite is an opportunity for the public to both define and reference the city’s common vision of development. It then becomes an official tool to guide government officials tasked with pursuing, approving, and rejecting proposals to build up and invest in the city. The planning process can and should spur edits to other rules and regulations, like the city’s zoning code or affordable housing (“inclusionary zoning”) ordinance.
On Thursday night, city planners set out tables with wings and mac and cheese; a game which let people decorate a shared micro-map of New Haven’s nine squares with imagined infrastructure; and informational pamphlets. It was all part of an effort to get the public excited about and engaged with a lengthy legal undertaking mandated by the state every decade.
Before the hard work starts of actually drafting, editing and passing that plan by 2025, City Plan Director Laura Brown said her team is focused on gaining as much public input as possible to inform the process. She said the document reflects the community’s priorities and can be a tool to hold elected decision makers accountable for enacting those aims.
The city is hiring ten “community navigators” at $25 per hour to conduct community outreach to get input, as well as five students from public high schools to perform the same work across younger populations. Topic-specific teams of volunteers will be selected down the line to collect input on issues like accessibility, sustainability, city services, economic growth, and affordable housing. Click here to learn more about those positions and apply.
Following a presentation on those details by city staff, planners answered questions Thursday night from the public.
Angela Hatley inquired how planners would consider the disparate conditions between neighborhoods in the rewrite.
She offered the city’s accessory dwelling unit ordinance (which seeks to make it easier for people to build addition dwellings on their property) as an example. An upcoming amendment to the law seeks to allow non-owner occupants to increase density as an incentive to get more housing units online. But areas already ripe with absentee landlords and overwhelmed by “close quarters” apartments might be disproportionately hurt by such a change, Hatley argued.
“We plan to do templates of neighborhood plans as part of the process,” replied Planner Esther Rose-Wilen. “We’ll unroll those plans over the following years, and those neighborhoods will get specialized attention.”
Others questioned how the city would ensure public feedback is solicited from members of all neighborhoods — and not just communities like East Rock. Rose-Wilen further promised that geographic representation would influence the hiring and dispersal of community outreach workers.
Stay wary or alert while grocery shopping over the next year, Rose-Wilen told the gathering: “Community navigators” might want to talk with you at school pick-up, outside your church or mosque, or by the doors of Stop & Shop.