Thomas Breen photo
Stephen Brown shows neighbors a map and photographs of 320 Canner St., a two-story, single-family home that Yale is interested in purchasing and converting to academic use.
The Yale Divinity School is interested in purchasing a single-family home near its Prospect Hill campus and converting it into an academic building, thereby removing over $18,500 from the city’s annual property tax rolls.
At Monday night’s regular monthly meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street, Karen King from Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs and Stephen Brown from Yale’s Planning Administration informed neighbors that the university is exploring a potential purchase of the two-story, single-family home at 320 Canner St.
320 Canner St.
The home, built in 1986, is privately owned and occupied and has an assessed value of $481,810 as of 2016. At the current mill rate of 38.68, annual property taxes on the home would be $18,636.
King and Brown said that the university has not yet purchased the house. They said that the university is in the preliminary stages of the project, and does not yet have a timeline or any further details on when the purchase and proposed use change would take place.
King said the university is eyeing the Canner Street house because the Yale Divinity School recently absorbed the Andover Newton Theological School, a small, historic congregational seminary based out of Newton, Mass., that is the oldest graduate school in the country.
Yale Divinity School does not plan to increase its student body above its current enrollment of 400. But the new partnership with Andover will bring 20 new students and six faculty and staff associated with the latter’s congregational ministry program to the Yale Divinity School’s campus each year.
Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting at mActivity gym on Nicoll Street.
The building at 320 Canner St. would serve as a cultural center and seminar space for Andover’s students and faculty, and may host a weekly Sunday worship service that would be open to the public.
“The proposal is for Andover to have a sense of identity here in the city in association with the divinity school,” King said.
Brown, who is the associate director of Yale’s Planning Administration, showed neighbors a map and several photographs of the location, pointing out where Yale plans on creating a cut-through path that would connect 320 Canner St. to the divinity school’s Prospect Street quadrangle.
He described the building as a “well-designed” and “well laid-out” house, with a large backyard, a one-car garage, a kitchen, dining, and living area on the ground floor, three bedrooms on the second floor, a contiguous loft bedroom, and a downstairs study.
Yale’s Karen King (right) and Stephen Brown at Monday night’s meeting.
“They’re not going to expand the footprint,” King said about Yale’s tentative plans for the building. “They’re just going to update the inside so that it can be used as a student teaching space.”
“I like the idea from the student’s perspective,” said East Rock neighbor Andreas Erben, “but will this property continue to pay property taxes?”
King said that the property would become “university use” and therefore be exempt from property taxes.
She said that she os not sure if the university would need to seek any zoning relief for the planned change in use. She promised to update neighbors at future ERCMT meetings as to any developments with this project.
Homeless Encampment Cleared
LCI neighborhood specialist Linda Davis (right) and East Rock management team chair David Budries.
Monday night’s ERCMT meeting also featured a brief follow-up from Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist Linda Davis and East Rock alder Anna Festa about the recent clearing of a homeless encampment under the I‑91 overpass near the Ralph Walker Skating Rink.
Davis and Festa said that in mid-December various city departments, including parks, public works, LCI, and the police, worked with the state of Connecticut to clear 14 tons of trash from the encampment. Davis said that the encampment was unoccupied at the time that it was cleared, and that it remains unoccupied today.
Festa told the group that she and Beaver Hills Alder Richard Furlow, city Homelessness Coordinator Velma George, and then-Community Services Administrator Martha Okafor met with state Department of Housing Commissioner Evonne Klein back in December to talk about how the state can best support the city in finding stable housing, employment, addiction treatment, and mental healthcare for its homeless population.
“It’s a very, very challenging situation,” Festa said.