Thomas Breen photos
Plans for redeveloped Winchester Avenue.
New York builder Alex Twining Wednesday with Newhallville’s Addie Kimbrough.
Graffiti on the side of the Mansfield-Munson former factory building.
Hundreds of new apartments. Tens of thousands of square feet of office and lab space. Ground-floor retail up and down Winchester Avenue.
Science Park’s redevelopers unveiled those plans to Dixwell and Newhallville neighbors as they prepare to embark on the next stage of turning the former Winchester Arms factory complex into a research, residential, and shopping hub.
Science Park Development Corporation President David Silverstone and Twining Properties CEO Alex Twining made that pitch Wednesday night during a community meeting held outdoors in the Winchester Works Courtyard at 115 Munson St.
Roughly 50 people turned out to learn about the next chapter in the ongoing overhaul of the factory complex that for much of the last century served as the sprawling industrial and economic anchor of the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods.
In the Winchester Works courtyard.
Surrounded by the upscale Winchester Lofts apartments on one side and the Winchester Works research and office complex on the other, Silverstone and Twining said that, starting in early 2022, their companies — along with the Larchmont, N.Y.-based L&M Development Partners — will start building on remaining developable land in Science Park.
Twining said the first development will bring roughly 300 new apartments and ground-floor retail space to the surface parking lot at 315 Winchester Ave., between the Winchester Lofts and 5 Science Park. That proposed development should be compliant with existing zoning laws, he said, and likely won’t require any zoning relief.
The second development will see another roughly 250 apartments and more ground-floor retail built on a surface lot at the corner of Division Street and Winchester Avenue.
The third development will see up to 400 new apartments built at the corner of Munson Street and Mansfield Street, at the site of a soon-to-be-demolished section of the former Winchester Arms factory building. He said that development will require an update to an underlying Planned Development District (PDD) set of zoning regulations.
And the fourth development will see tens of thousands of square feet of new office and lab space built atop a surface parking lot on Munson Street between Winchester Avenue and Mansfield Street, just across the street from Winchester Lofts and Winchester Works.
Twining Properties
Redevelopment plans for Science Park.
The former Winchester Arms factory complex.
Along with the construction of those new buildings, Silverstone and Twining said, this redevelopment project will see the reopening of a long-closed section of Sheffield Avenue that will run from Newhallville into Science Park, as well as the reopening of a street called Mason Place.
Depending on available financing, they said, the various redevelopment projects — collectively known as “Winchester Center” — could take between five and 10 years to complete.
It should result in the creation of roughly 2,000 temporary construction jobs and $490 million in construction-related economic output, the two redevelopers said. It should also add another 1,900 permanent jobs on top of the 1,600 that exist in Science Park today, let alone adding hundreds of more places for future residents to live.
New York builder Alex Twining greets the neighbors Wednesday.
The plan is to “take all of these parking lots and put buildings on them like there used to be,” Twining said. But instead of having industrial factory buildings lining Winchester Avenue, he said, this redevelopment project will bring offices and apartments and shops and lab space.
“Our hope is to bring back what this place was,” which was one teeming with people and economic activity, Twining said. “The opportunity is sitting there. We just have to exploit it.”
While the initial stages of the redevelopment of Science Park focused on attracting employers to new office space and residents to the roughly 160 apartments at Winchester Lofts, Silverstone said, this next stage of construction seeks to build out the former factory area into a “tech-residential-community center.”
20% Affordable
Developer Sam Chapin.
The former Winchester factory building at Mansfield and Munson, slated to be demolished.
Twining and L+M Development Partners Senior Director Sam Chapin said that 20 percent of the new apartments built out as part of this redevelopment project will be set aside at affordable rates, with the rest rented out at market rates.
Chapin said that “affordable” in this context means that these apartments will be open to residents earning an average of 60 percent of the area median income (AMI) — which, in the federally-defined regional area that includes New Haven, means families making $55,800 per year.
Chapin said that the affordable set-aside in each of these residential projects — including in the first 300-unit development, to be built at 315 Winchester Ave. — will be funded with federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC).
The federal government now allows builders using LIHTC funding to do “income averaging,” Chapin said. That means that the redevelopers will be able to use those tax credits to subsidize apartments for renters making between 30 percent and 80 percent AMI, so long as the total affordable subsidy averages out to 60 percent AMI across the entire project.
“Private financing can only cover so much,” Chapin said when asked if the development team would be open to increasing the affordable apartment set-aside to 25 percent of the entire project. If the redevelopers bump up that set-aside from the current planned amount of 20 percent, then they’d have to find more public subsidies to make that happen.
Connecticut’s population grew by only 1 percent over the past decade according to preliminary new census numbers, one attendee said. Where do the redevelopers expect people will come from to live in all of these planned new apartments?
“We want to make these apartments to be a wide range of apartment types and rental rates,” Twining said. Ideally some current residents from the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods will be able to live in these units, he said, along with some of the thousands of new people ideally who will be working at the new jobs created in Science Park thanks to the coming office, research, and retail space.
What about all the ground-floor retail being built? asked another attendee. Given all of the difficulties brick-and-mortar retailers have had staying in business thanks to online shopping and the pandemic, who is going to fill all of these storefronts?
“We’re going to have to charge very low rents,” Twining said. “And it’s likely going to take quite a while” to fill these shopping spaces.
“But if we subsidize the risk, that will help them out.”
Silverstone (pictured) added that the Science Park redevelopers hope to bring in locally owned retail outlets to operate these new spaces planned for Winchester Avenue.
“The emphasis is going to be on locally owned retail,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to have a Macy’s” on this block, he said. “We’re not going to have a Lulu Lemon. We’re gonna have local.”
“I see this project as a huge opportunity for mentorship,” said Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris (pictured).
“In our neighborhood, there are a lot of young people who want to be where you are in 30, 40 years,” she continued. “Can you imagine taking a 16 year old and mentoring them for a decade? … That would give some hope, some accountability, and some sustainability to this project.”
Silverstone praised Harris’s comment as offering a “creative approach” to including the surrounding community in the coming large-scale redevelopment. “Let’s talk about it,” he said.
What About Gentrification?
Graffiti on the side of the Mansfield-Munson former factory building.
Bassett Street resident and Newhallville Community Management Team Treasurer Carlota Clark (pictured) praised the redevelopment project as breathing new life into currently empty parking lots and a dilapidated former factory building in the neighborhood.
Besides all of the apartments and offices and ground-floor shops planned for this project, Clark said, what she would most like to see included in this redevelopment is a new grocery store.
“It would be nice to have a supermarket,” she said. Right now, Newhallville residents have to cross the town line into Hamden to pick up groceries.
When asked if she’s concerned that the flood of new market-rate apartments to the area will drive up rental prices overall and result in gentrification, she said, “Truth be told, the neighborhood is going to be gentrified anyway. There’s not too much we can do about that.”
She said apartment rates in New Haven are still significantly less than what she was paying a few years ago in New York City. She said she herself got priced out of her former neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, which ultimately led her to move to New Haven in the first place.
Fellow Newhallville resident Nina Fawcett (pictured) offered a similarly fatalistic take on Winchester Center’s likely impact on rising rents in the neighborhood.
“This looks like it’s going to be a ‘stay and play’” site that “I’m thinking is going to exclude Newhallville,” she said. “Gentrification is going to keep going up the street.”
“I’m all for making things nice and having livable space,” she continued. “But is this livable for the community? Or are they making it ‘Rich People Park’?”
Local contractor Charles Hewitt and New Haven Regional Contractors’ Alliance Managing Director Walter Esdaile (pictured at center and right), meanwhile, were more hopeful on the potential impact of the neighborhood-wide redevelopment project.
These projects are huge job opportunities for Newhallville and Dixwell residents who work in the construction trades, Esdaile said.
“And if you develop,” added Hewitt, “that helps, because people want places to live.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Wednesday night’s presentation.