Munson St. Complex Cleared For Take-Off

A nearly 400-unit upscale apartment complex to be built atop a long-vacant former factory site on the Dixwell/Newhallville border earned a key city approval — as well as words of frustration from city planners over their lack of authority to mandate any kind of rent affordability provisions for the project.

The approval came during Wednesday night’s regular monthly City Plan Commission meeting, which played out over six hours in the groundfloor meeting room of the municipal office building at 200 Orange St.

Commissioners voted 4 – 1 in support of the site plan for 201 Munson St.

That’s the almost entirely market-rate apartment project slated to transform the 12.7‑acre vacant former site of the Olin Chemical Company bounded by Munson Street, the Farmington Canal Greenway, and Argyle Street.

City Plan Commissioner Jonathan Wharton cast the sole dissenting vote.

The project’s now-approved site plan describes 21 three-story townhouses facing Munson Street; a five-story, 371-unit apartment complex directly behind those, bordering the canal trail; a total of 474 surface and covered and townhouse garage parking spaces spread throughout the eastern half of the site; and a sprawling green expanse of lawn that slopes up in the direction of Shelton Avenue.

The apartment building will contain a mix of studios, one-bedroom apartments, two-bedroom apartments, and one three-bedroom apartment, reserved for the building super. The vehicle entrance to the complex will be on Munson Street pointing towards Ashmun Street, and there will be a direct pedestrian connection between a cover bicycle garage on the complex’s eastern side and the adjacent canal trail.

The complex requires no further zoning relief or administrative approvals since the alders approved a zone change for the project nearly two years ago.

Jeffrey Chung of the New York City-based Ironburgh Organization, who gained a stake in the long-delayed project after an ownership shakeup in April, said that the development partners should close on final financing for 201 Munson before the end of the year and that they should begin construction and start depleting the parcel’s towering stockpile of clean fill in the first few months of 2020.

“This could actually be a tremendous good for New Haven,” Westville Alder and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand said about the project’s scale, its proximity to the pedestrian-and-bicycle-friendly canal trail, and its cleaning up and repurposing of a vacant, contaminated former industrial site. ​“As a city, we want more housing and more people here lending vitality to this city.”

“It appears that you’ve done your due diligence in trying to hear what people are saying,” Commission Vice-Chair Leslie Radcliffe praised Chung for his community outreach efforts so far, which included presentations at recent Newhallville and Dixwell community management team meetings and a last-minute meet-up with alders and skeptical neighbors earlier Wednesday morning.

“Nobody’s being displaced in this particular area,” she said. ​“Because there was nothing there” but the memories, and chemicals, of the former Olin factory.

“A Different Type Of Neighborhood”

The majority of the commissioners’ ultimate assent to the site plan didn’t come without a fair share of concerns about the project’s affordability and potential impact on the surrounding neighborhoods.

“This is a different type of neighborhood that’s going to be created,” Radcliffe said. ​“I have questions about what residents you’re going to be serving.”

Several Dixwell and Newhallville neighbors expressed similar apprehension in emails they sent to the City Plan staff requesting that the site plan review for this item be made a public hearing.

“We are extremely concerned with the current exclusiveness and displacement this project will offer,” wrote Dixwell resident Crystal Gooding. ​“Current residents in Newhallville and Dixwell should be able to afford to live in this development and use the amenities and facilities being built in our neighborhood.”

West Division Street resident Lillie Chambers agreed. She urged the commissioners to grant a public hearing to so that neighbors could raise questions about how this project and its rental rates fit within both the primarily working-class Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods to the north and west and Yale’s ever-growing footprint in the Science Park to the south and east.

Chung made a verbal commitment at last month’s Newhallville Community Management Team meeting that 10 percent of the project’s rental units will be reserved at rents affordable to tenants making 80 percent or less of the city’s area median income (AMI).

In a letter submitted to the City Plan Commission, Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winter said that the 10 percent affordable set-aside ​“is significantly lower than I would like to see.”

He nevertheless urged the commissioners not to delay the site plan review so as not to jeopardize the project’s financing, and noted that Chung’s verbal commitment is an entirely voluntary one, as the city does not have an ​“inclusionary zoning” law on the books.

“It is unusual for private developers to offer affordable units and to offer them at these levels of accessibility,” he wrote. Later in that letter he added, ​“However the project proceeds, these commitments must be clearly memorialized and tracked for compliance.”

Other neighbors submitted letters explicitly in support of the project. ​“After receiving many positive comments from our management team members,” wrote Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn, ​“I believe this project will bring economic stability and provide many benefits to the community and the city.” She said the developers have committed to paying for 40 Newhallville and Dixwelll residents to get OSHA 10 certifications so that they can work on this project.

“This development will give neighboring residents the opportunity to get jobs and work that will be life changing,” wrote Newhallville construction contractor Rodney Williams. ​“Being that this project is within walking distance to such a larger eligible workforce, will lend to a more successful venture.”

And yet, to the commissioners’ own frustration, they restrained themselves throughout the hour-long technical site plan review Wednesday night from putting Chung’s prior affordability commitment to paper. They also largely refrained from asking the developer and local attorney Jim Segaloff about rental rates at the prospective complex at all. And they decided not to turn the site plan review into a public hearing.

“Affordable housing, as much as we want it, is not a topic of a site plan review,” Marchand said. That factor is ​“not within our purview.”

While the city has committed to undertake a citywide ​“inclusionary zoning” study that could result in updates to the city’s zoning law that would require new residential developments to set aside a percentage of units at affordable rates, those laws are not yet on the books.

City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison agreed. ​“I think we have a very limited range of questions that we can consider,” he said. ​“I don’t think we have the legal right” to apply affordabiltiy requirements to as-of-right development projects.

Instead, site plan reviews are limited to the technical elements of a prospective development’s physical layout, such as the number and placement of parking spaces, the density and different types of residential units, building height, traffic circulation, lighting, and stormwater management.

“I would encourage you to think about creating deed restrictions that will last for affordable units,” Commission Elias Estabrook suggested to Chung. But he too recognized that that was outside of the scope of the site plan review process. And per the zoning code, the commission could not enforce any rental rate mandates.

Wharton said after the meeting that he decided to cast his ballot against the 201 Munson site plan as a ​“symbolic vote” based on lingering concerns he has with how the sheer size of this apartment project and its overwhelmingly market-rate rents might push out current residents in the Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods.

No Traffic Impact?

Instead of talking about affordability or local labor hiring commitments, the commissioners spent most of the site plan review quizzing Chung, Segaloff, TPA Design Group engineer David Sacco, and Fuss & O’Neill traffic engineer Matthew Skelly about the project’s prospective traffic impact on Munson Street, Henry Street, Ashmun Street, and surrounding city blocks.

They also grilled them on how all these new cars might endanger pedestrians and cyclists on the nearby Farmington Canal Greenway, particularly where it intersects with Munson Street.

Despite the addition of 474 parking spaces to the neighborhood, Skelly insisted that the project will have ​“no significant traffic impact.” Using industry-standard trip generation analyses, he estimated that the residential complex will produce around 146 morning peak-hour car trips and around 174 afternoon peak-hour car trips per day.

The Munson-Henry-Canal intersection averages four crashes per year, he said, and is therefore not currently a ​“problem intersection.”

He said the resulting traffic from the 201 Munson project won’t be heavy enough to cause congestion on the block. And the presence of the Winchester Avenue-Munson Street traffic light just one intersection away discouraged him from recommending any kind of major traffic calming features outside at the intersection closer to 201 Munson.

Radcliffe remained skeptical. Traffic studies are one thing, she said. And lived experience driving through New Haven neighborhoods when there’s a construction project in the works is another.

“Usually what the studies say doesn’t always pan out,” she warned.