Allan Appel Photo
Greenwich Avenue near Second Street, a line of homes owned by Mandy Management, one of the major buyers of properties in New Haven.
Developers and real estate management companies are buying up at a frenetic pace the dwindling number of privately owned homes that give the neighborhood its character.
Nonprofits too are increasing the number of units they own in the area.
Meanwhile the city is poised to make a push to create more affordable housing, with a new proposal to create an affordable housing commission.
In the face of all these changes, some of the last Hill South homeowners have banded together to resist new real estate pressures and to have more of a say in how their neighborhood changes.
Hatley with LCI Specialist Artie Natalino, Jr., at community management meeting.
Those concerns emerged in a quiet but passionate presentation at the most recent monthly Hill South Community Management Team (CMT) meeting held earlier this month at the cafeteria of the Betsy Ross School on Kimberly Avenue.
That presentation was made by 30-year Greenwich Avenue resident Angela Hatley. She had been instrumental at the previous management team meeting in forming a committee to monitor the real estate “pushes” in the neighborhood, including those by private developers, nonprofits, and the city.
Hatley said the creation of the CMT’s subcommittee is not a direct result of the evolving of a new affordable housing commission, or in response to the 18-month long deliberations of the aldermanic Affordable Housing Taskforce, out of which the commission is developing.
“I didn’t even know about the task force,” said Hatley, but now she does. She said she’s leery of some of the recommendations and their implications for the Hill South neighborhood.
What prompted the formation of her task force, she said, was the never-ending campaign of leaflets left on doorknobs and porches, along with phone calls, from real estate companies wanting to buy up individual owners’ homes.
That sense of pressure from the private real estate world is now combined with what is clearly a municipal priority, embodied in the affordable housing task force recommendations, and the evolving new commission.
Greenwich Avenue looking west toward Kimberly, near Galvin Park
Hatley cited, among the 44 recommendations of the task force to preserve and grow affordable housing in the city, a proposal to make it easier for an individual home to add a mother-in-law apartment.
Hatley said she has nothing in principle against mother-in-law apartments. However, “if your neighborhood is as dense as ours, parking then becomes an issue.”
Hatley said that she and her committee “discussed the detrimental impact of some of these changes.” She said the blocks of the Hill South area have absorbed the lion’s share of former residents of the now demolished Church Street South projects, for instance.
Hatley was at pains to point out that “traditionally this neighborhood has been open to have everything,” including nonprofits like New Reach and Columbus House, among others, that have bought up homes for the needs of their clients.
“That is our pride, but also our problem,” Hatley averred.
She cited, for example, New Reach, which is devoted to helping to solve homelessness through supportive housing like its buildings on Portsea Street. The transitional housing there to shelter “women and children is fine,” Hatley said.
Not so fine in her view are new plans in the offing to convert and enlarge the capacity of the property to meet the needs of a new demographic, young adults 18 to 24 years of age.
“And it’s not necessarily New Haven people,” Hatley said.
Longtime Hill South resident Dora Brown, in the red cap, with crowd listening to Hatley’s presentation.
A positive example of a how a nonprofit presents, listens, and partners with the community is a recent negotiation with Columbus House, Hatley said.
In that effort, the Yale School of Architecture built a house on Plymouth Street in collaboration with Columbus House but in ongoing consultation with the Hill South neighbors.
“We worked together as a team. All we ask is we be taken as a partner,” she said.
Hatley said her anecdotal research tells her monies are in the pipeline to combat homelessness — and to make housing affordable — especially for a new demographic, young adults. She said she worries about supervision and the mix of young people, and how potential noisemaking and late hours will affect elderly homeowners.
Larger home for lease on Howard near Sea Street, in the City Point neighborhood.
She said she worries that homeowners who are holding on will feel driven out and sell their property.
“We need the community to back us when the city tells us what’s happening,” she said.
Homeowners — many elderly or without cars — don’t easily make it to City Plan Commission or other downtown evening meetings when these issues first emerge in site plan or zoning conversations, Hatley noted.
Hatley said her model is the Downtown/Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT). “They don’t allow anything unless they approve. They [the city] run roughshod over us.”
“We own property. They are our anchors. We’re not going anywhere. We need the neighborhood to back us when it comes time for City Plan,” which was why the Hill South CMT housing committee was established, Hatley said.
“We need to be Wooster Square People.”
The committee’s next steps, Hatley said, will be to invite some of the principals who put together the task force recommendations to come to speak to the entire Hill South management team.
No date has yet been set for that gathering.