Affordable Housing Urged, Duncan Hotel Redux Blasted

The ongoing relocation of more than 40 people to make way for an upscale hotel downtown has amplified the city’s need to devise a plan to preserve and build more affordable housing.

That was the upshot of a meeting at City Hall Thursday night to discuss the recent purchase of the Duncan Hotel on Chapel Street. Boarders at the 92-room, part-hotel, part-single-room-occupancy (SRO) boarding house learned during the summer that they had until Nov. 11 to vacate the premises.

The majority of those who called the Duncan home have already found new places to live throughout the city and in nearby towns like Hamden. Only eight residents remaining at the Duncan have yet to find a new place to live.

But that Nov. 11 move out date was a sore point for former Duncan residents like James ​“Turtle” Selest, who was among the nearly 45 people who packed the meeting Thursday to press the new owner for a public hearing on the plans to transform the Duncan into a ​“boutique” hotel.

Selest called the move out date ​“inappropriate and unprofessional,” and accused the new owners, the Chicago-based AJ Capital Partners/Graduate Hotels, of ​“rushing people out.” Others suggested that the new owners were only doing the bare minimum to help residents find new homes.

“Nov. 11 is Veterans’ Day and some of the people, in fact, are veterans,” Selest, who served in both the U.S. Army and Marines, said.

Graduate Hotels President Tim Franzen told meeting attendees Thursday that he was embarrassed that Veterans’ Day had been unwittingly chosen as the move out date and that it would be changed. But he wouldn’t budge on whether there would be a public hearing on the plans for the hotel — there won’t be a hearing, at least not before the Board of Alders.

And certainly, there would be no meeting where alders could vote up or down on the project. Franzen can conduct the renovation by right because he said the Duncan Hotel is just that, a hotel, not officially affordable housing.

Selest found housing with the help of a friend from the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), instead of using the relocation services of the Glendower Group, which the developer hired to help people find new homes. He moved to an apartment on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and he said since he moved there he has experienced shootings and drugs being dealt in his hallway. He said he doesn’t feel safe there.

Franzen defended his company’s efforts to help people relocate, including providing help with security deposits and with the cost of moving. He also pointed out that there was no obligation under city law for the company to do that, but they thought it was the right thing to do.

“We have gone above and beyond,” Franzen said. ​“We probably can do more and we will, but to say we haven’t is flatly false.”

That was cold comfort to folks like Selest who suddenly lost their homes, but also the tight-knit community that they felt safe in, within the span of a couple months.

“Chapel West is a safe environment,” Selest said, because of its proximity to the Yale University campus. ​“The only affordable housing is in undesirable locations that are not well policed,” he added. ​“This is unacceptable. There is no real affordable housing in New Haven.”

“What happens with the little people,” Joe Taylor, a renowned collector and archivist who lives at University Towers, said. ​“Look what’s happening in San Francisco. Is that what we’re turning New Haven into?”

Time To Act

Ed Mattison said New Haven doesn’t have to become San Francisco or any other community facing skyrocketing rents and the prospect of gentrification if the city and its leaders act to develop policies that preserve and protect affordable housing.

The former alder and current chairman of the City Plan Commission pointed out that until the 1920s, SROs were the standard living arrangements for adults who didn’t live with their parents. And the city lost much of its SRO stock, particularly in the Hill, in the 1950s and 1960s because of urban renewal. (Read more about that here.) He said there was no use beating up on developers like A.J. Capital Partners.

“All of these issues really present a big issue for the city itself,” said Mattison, who runs a program for Continuum of Care that helps men get into the city’s sober houses. ​“Are we going to have housing policy directed toward making affordable housing possible or turn it over to the gentrifiers?”

Anstress Farwell, president of the New Haven Urban Design League, said her organization is looking into different tools to create permanent, affordable housing, such as community land trusts, cooperatives, and even zoning regulations.

She said one of the current challenges for the city is the building of too much of one type of housing, such as efficiency and one-bedroom apartments at high prices. She also cautioned that the city should be careful of the impact of relocating people who are elderly and medically fragile.

“We haven’t looked at the entire picture of housing needs of the city,” Farwell said. ​“Overall, the city needs to develop a broad housing policy.”

City Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson pointed out that there are cities like Denver that are going their own way when it comes to increasing their affordable housing stock. He said he’s ready to workshop with alders what the city can do to further increase the city’s affordable housing stock. He said Mayor Toni Harp’s administration is working on a grant to preserve 300 affordable units in the new iteration of Church Street South, which will be redeveloped as a mixed-income development.

He said the city, which provides the highest percentage of affordable housing in the state, faces a number of challenges including a changed economy, continued divestment by the federal government in the creation of affordable housing, and battling against communities that don’t want to provide more affordable housing and don’t want people who need to live in affordable housing in their community.

“We open our doors to everyone,” he said. ​“We’re not just doing a good job. We’re doing the best job.”

He pushed back against the characterization that the city has been gentrified, noting that the vast majority of new development downtown has been built on parking lots, displacing cars, not people. He did, however, acknowledge that the Duncan Hotel redevelopment is the one time that development displaced people.

Nemerson said the city’s data shows that rents are going down as the new developments have come online, not everywhere in the city, but in some neighborhoods like East Rock and Westville.

“This is not San Franciso,” he said. ​“This is not New York.”