Bassett St. Co-Op Laundry Plan Axed

City plans to convert a long-vacant publicly owned building on Bassett Street into a worker-owned laundry have fallen apart — leaving the fate of Newhallville’s former ​“State Building” in limbo, and prompting the city to look elsewhere to build up the commercial laundry co-op.

The city concluded that retrofitting that property would cost millions of dollars more than building a facility from scratch.

The property in question is the 46,119 square-foot vacant office building at 188 Bassett St. near the Farmington Canal Trail.

That site, which used to house the state Department of Social Services area welfare office, has been dormant ever since the state moved those services to Fair Haven in 2013.

Starting under former Mayor Toni Harp and former Livable City Initiative Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, the city has spent the past three years trying to transform the derelict space into a worker-owned laundry that could generate between 40 and 150 jobs.

In October 2019, the city purchased the vacant building for $900,000 from a New York City-based holding company. In May 2020, the Board of Alders approved allocating nearly $1.37 million in federal block grant money towards making the Newhallville economic development project a reality.

At the July 20 meeting of the Ward 20 Democratic Ward Committee in the cafeteria of Lincoln Bassett School, Mayor Justin Elicker broke the news that — after years of effort, fundraising, and planning — the city is no longer looking to build out the laundry cooperate at 188 Bassett St.

“I think that the vision is strong,” he said. ​“But we’ve looked into the building, and the cost of doing that at that site is very high. We think that it might be more appropriate to actually build a new building for the laundry co-op. So we are exploring that as a potential option, not at 188 Bassett.”

During a Zoomed interview with the Independent, city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli, Acting LCI Executive Director Arlevia Samuel, and Neal-Sanjurjo confirmed that plans to build out a worker-owned laundry at the former state social services building are now dead.

“The cost of the renovation work” proved too high, Piscitelli said. ​“Given that this was set up as a commercial office building, making it a contemporary industrial use” — including tearing out the second-story floor and moving in the necessary equipment for a commercial laundry — would be too expensive.

Neal-Sanjurjo estimated that building the worker-owned laundry at 188 Bassett St. would cost $9 million. Constructing an entirely new building for the project, meanwhile, would cost ​“under $2 million.”

“The city remains extremely and deeply committed to launching the commercial laundry project,” Piscitelli said. ​“This is a significant opportunity to create intergenerational wealth, address a need in our community to re-localize important supply streams with major employers and businesses, and [it has] practical and symbolic importance for future, inclusive economic growth.”

Continuing to try to place the project at the former state building, he said, is ​“impractical.”

“The cost is so significant, and there are more appropriate sites that would be more cost effective,” said Samuel.

Does the city intend to keep this worker-owned laundry project in Newhallville, even as it plans to construct a new building from the bottom up?

“We’re trying our best to make sure it stays in Newhallville,” Samuel said.

“The walk-to-work aspect is going to be very important for us,” added Piscitelli.

And has any of that $1.37 million in federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money been spent on the project to date? Is that now down the tubes, given that the city is looking elsewhere to construct the laundry?

No, Samuel replied. That money has not yet been spent, and it’s tied specifically to the worker-owned laundry project. So the city can and will spend it only when the project moves further ahead.

What Happens Next?

So. What happens to this big, still-empty, city-owned building on Bassett Street now that it’s not going to house a worker-owned laundry?

During the Ward 20 Democratic Ward Committee meeting, Mayor Elicker said that city officials had toured the site with the Board of Education to see ​“if the Board of Education might move there, because they’re looking for a new home.”

Piscitelli said the city is still trying to figure out what exactly comes next at 188 Bassett.

“We have some breathing room now to figure out the highest and best use” for the property, he said. ​“Had it been left on the open market, it almost certainly would have been scooped up” by a private buyer. Since the city has control of it, the public will have much more of a say as to what comes next.

“Keeping the building in a state of good repair and stewarding it until we figure out that reuse is a significant thing that on the ground is taking place every day,” he added.

At the July ward committee meeting, Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris called for the city to set up a new committee that includes Newhallville community leaders to help determine what the future of the Bassett Street building should be. Several Harris Tucker School students presented Mayor Elicker with a petition to that effect. The mayor said he’d happily agree to setting up such a committee and working closely with neighbors on future plans for the site.

The planning process for what comes next here, Harris said, must be ​“equitable.”

Starr Street resident and Newhallville alder candidate Devin Avshalom-Smith said in a recent interview that, whatever happens next at the former DSS building, the city and the neighborhood need to make sure ​“we have a reasonable and responsible anchor business, and we need to make sure the property is used for business acceleration and community-based missions.”

Piscitelli told the Independent that the city is currently figuring out ​“how best to engage the community” on 188 Bassett’s future. The city will have more to say publicly on this building, and on the worker-owned laundry site’s potential new home, he said, sometime this fall.