Christopher Peak Photo
Joseph Cohen describes six-story complex to Board of Zoning Appeals.
City Plan Department
294-302 State St.
A New York City developer who already owns several historic New Haven properties is looking to top off his Elm City holdings by erecting a 60-unit apartment complex atop a surface parking lot downtown.
Those plans for a six-story development, a block away from the State Street commuter rail station, were presented to the Board of Zoning Appeals on Tuesday night.
Eyeing a parking lot currently used by the U.S. Army Recruiting Center and the U.S. Postal Service and adjacent to a soon-to-open performance venue, the planned development at 294 – 302 State St. would have 15 studio, 20 one-bedroom, 15 two-bedroom, and 10 three-bedroom units. The ground floor would contain retail space, amenities and parking.
The blueprints are far less ambitious than the 26-story tower that the previous property owner envisioned rising up on the spot. City officials said even the scaled-down development will go a long way to fill in a peripheral section of downtown across from the railroad cut.
Before construction can begin, zoners would have to approve a special exception from the city’s parking requirements. By ordinance, the site should have 35 spaces. The developer is asking to qualify with 19 spaces in an on-site garage. New Haven has been moving in general toward denser development with less parking than in the past.
Given the area’s walkability and the proximity to public transit, planning staff recommended granting the waiver.
The proposal will go to City Plan Commission for an advisory vote before the Board of Zoning Appeals considers a final decision at its next meeting.
The man behind the project is Joseph Cohen of Greenwich, who co-founded East River Partners, a firm that has converted older multi-family apartments into condominiums at 10 locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Most are geared toward “the middle of the spectrum as far as price point,” Cohen said, although the company has undertaken some luxury projects like the conversion of an Upper West Side mansion into a doorman building with units that start at $4.75 million.
Cohen is no stranger to New Haven, where he grew up and graduated from Yale. (As director of the Yale Child Study Center from 1983 to 2001, his dad Donald Cohen fundamentally changed the field of child psychiatry.) During high school, Cohen did a monthlong reporting stint at the old New Haven Advocate.
Cohen and his business partner, Jody Kriss, bought the parking lot and several other Chapel Street buildings as part of an $8.5 million deal in late 2016.
File Photo
Nicotra’s vision for now-scrapped rival tower on State Street.
The previous owner, Chris Nicotra of Olympia Properties, once had big plans for the site that were foiled by the recession. As he watched moving vans pull up at 360 State St., he dreamed of erecting a 26-story tower, but that idea never made it past architectural renderings.
Cohen envisions something more modest that will “fit right in” with East River’s other purchases in New Haven, including $22 million paid for the Cambridge-Oxford Apartments at 32 & 36 – 38 High St., and $3.9 million for the Chapel Street Lofts at 441 Chapel St.
With all the growth in the city center, Cohen said he sees a renaissance downtown.
“There is, for better or worse, a renewal happening in the housing stock in New Haven,” Cohen said. “If you want to talk about the big picture of the ebbs and flows of this city, a lot of it comes down to simple math of how many people are moving in and how are you going to house them. A lot of that movement is in-migration that’s happening in the downtown area that I’m happy to serve.”
Cohen said it was “a little too early” to share renderings or price ranges. He did say the market-rate apartments, which come in a “wide variety” of sizes, will have an “attainable” rent.
Matthew Nemerson, the city’s economic development administrator, said the addition of the State Street apartments will almost round out his efforts to fill up all downtown’s surface parking lots, left over from urban redevelopment.
Once a deal’s finalized for a residential tower akin to 360 State St. in the parking lot between Center and Chapel Streets and between Church and Orange Streets, the only empty space left — a big one— will be the asphalt expanse where the New Haven Coliseum once stood and a promised $400 million mini-city has stalled for years.
After that, it’s anyone’s guess where developers will set their sights.
That is, if they see still New Haven as a good investment.
On the way out of the zoning meeting, Cohen pulled Nemerson aside. What’s up, he asked, with this 11 percent increase in property taxes?