Olive-Court Law Lot Eyed For Apartments

A local developer is looking to turn a former law office building and parking lot in Wooster Square into — you guessed it — more apartments, as part of a project that would put the first dollars into a new citywide affordable housing fund.

The developer, Abraham Meer, discussed the project with neighbors at a community meeting held this past Thursday evening in the Conte West Hills Magnet School library.

The project would convert a brick office building at 98 Olive St. at the corner of Olive and Court streets into apartments and construct a new, more contemporary building on the same corner. The new building would be four stories high but roughly the same height in feet as the existing office. It would the latest in a string of projects bringing hundreds of new market-rate apartments to Wooster Square.

The little office building at 98 Olive intrigued Meer, who has lived in New Haven for 10 years. The building dates to 1900 and once had a role as a synagogue.

“It’s a beautiful office building, a bit out of place in a residential area,” Meer said. ​“I’m constantly trying to bring out the charm in a place. There are a lot of buildings in New Haven that were beautiful but have just been neglected.”

The full project would host 31 studio to two-bedroom apartments ranging from around 500 to 800 square feet in size. Rents have not been finalized but would be slightly below rates at comparable apartment buildings, Meer said.

Multiple components of the project require approvals from city officials. If all of those hearings go in the developer’s favor, construction could start as soon as the fall, Neer said.

The first public hearing is on Tuesday evening with the Board of Alders’ Community Development Committee. Meer has negotiated with the city’s economic development department to purchase a small, city-owned piece of the parking lot at 92 Olive Street for $180,000. A favorable vote from the alder committee, then the full Board of Alders, would finalize this sale.

The project would also require a hearing with the Board of Zoning Appeals to allow residential use of the property and a variance to deal with a zoning technicality related to buffers between residential and business zones.

Architect Wayne Garrick, who grew up in New Haven, is designing the project to be energy-efficient. It would have LED lights and an energy-efficient insulation and heating system. It may even feature Tesla’s new solar panel shingles. (Depending on the price – Garrick said that representatives have not called him back yet.)

Many of the rooms would have sliding glass doors and narrow balconies. Residents would be able to control the temperature of their own rooms from their smartphones.

Meer and Garrick plan to keep 400 to 500 square feet of the current office building as commercial or retail space, like a coffee shop.

Million-Dollar Questions

Meer and architect Wayne Garrick (at left in photo) participated in Thursday evening’s meeting at the invitation of Alder Ellen Cupo (at right). It was a follow-up meeting to Garrick’s presentation at the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team in January, partially to answer remaining community questions.

Garrick said that he has been wanting to have this meeting for a while.

“The best ideas I’ve ever had I’ve stolen from other people,” he said. ​“We have some financial and physical limitations, but whatever is reasonable, we want to try to do.”

Some of the neighbors pay to park on the city-owned lot now. Attendee Katie Buick said she worries what would happen to her spot. Garrick and Meer assured her that concern about current parkers is at the center of their negotiations with the city.

The first floor of Meer and Garrick’s contemporary building would have 20 spaces of covered parking. Their plan maintains outdoor parking spaces at the corner of Olive and Court.

The roughly five to nine neighbors who park at 92 Olive St. now will be allowed to park in the outdoor spaces as long as they live in the area.

A few questions remained that Cupo promised to clear up on Tuesday, including how the cost of parking might change for those neighbors over time and where they would park during construction of the apartments.

A more complicated question lingered for meeting attendees: Why does the city want a monetary contribution from the developers rather than a guarantee that some of the apartments will be affordable?

As part of Meer’s agreement with the city, the city would dedicate $18,000 out of the sale price to the city’s new affordable housing fund, a recommendation of the the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force this January.

The other option was to maintain the rents of three apartments as affordable for 10 years. Attendees asked why the cash would be considered as valuable as the rent decrease.

“We’ve really followed the city’s lead. We’ve been working with them for well over a year,” Garrick said.

Garrick said that the rent subsidy got complicated legally for the city, and this contribution to kickstart their new fund.

Cupo’s husband, Ian Dunn (pictured), said that questions about how to solve affordability for New Haven would end up centering on Meer and Garrick just because they are among the first to contribute to the fund.

“What works best? That’s the million billion dollar question,” Dunn said, who took care of the couple’s four-month-old baby throughout the meeting. .

Wooster Square neighbor and Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell said that the housing fund could potentially help someone avoid an eviction by paying their utility bill or a similar case where a small amount of money would make a big difference. Still, Farwell said that the question of cash versus housing unit is unsettled.

“Is it better to have a bird in hand — an apartment that was very much needed yesterday — or do you start setting up for the future?” she said.

Garrick said that he has been intrigued by this question and thinks that the city’s sale of vacant properties is an answer. While developers are looking for some return on their investment, the cost of land is a big factor in the price of new housing, Garrick said.

“If the city would contemplate selling properties at $1 a property to a person who could design two- to three-family infill housing, the rental rate can be reduced,” he said.

Garrick thinks that developers would be attracted to that deal and would agree to rent the properties at affordable rates. The properties would then contribute to the city’s real estate tax revenue in a way they do not now.

“In my simple mind, it seems fairly straightforward,” he said.

Deputy Economic Development Director Steve Fontana has been working out the details of the land sale with Meer and Garrick.

Sales of city-owned land generate dollars for the city’s general fund. Fontana said that the Board of Alders set a target amount in last year’s budget process for the department to generate through these sales.

“We felt that we needed to focus for the most part on that target. Having said that, we were aware of the need for affordable housing,” Fontana said.

The city settled on diverting 10 percent of the sales price through negotiations with Meer and with one other developer, Paul Denz of the Northside Development Company, on a second nearby project. The city set its terms with Denz first, but both sales are on Tuesday’s meeting agenda.

The commission that will operate the fund has not been formed yet. Fontana called the 10 percent a good faith effort to contribute without sending inordinate resources to the new fund. The cash offers Fontana’s higher-ups — the mayor, alders and the future commission members — a chance to decide on the best tool to help preserve and expand affordable housing.

“We felt that there was greater flexibility if it wasn’t necessarily tied to a certain number of units that were affordable for certain incomes for a certain number of years,” Fontana said.

Meer and Garrick have not heard construction cost estimates from potential contractors, but Meer is beginning to gather the funding to complete the project. Ideally, they said, they would like to be done with construction by the fall of 2021.

The official name of Meer’s development company is Urban Haven Corp. He shares the work in the company with his brother-in-law, wife and other family members as they are available, he said.

Meer said the company’s projects are steadily growing in size. He cited renovations on a brownstone at 411 Olive St. as a recent example.

Meer is part of New Haven’s Orthodox Jewish community, which he said is a big part of his life.

“Between my work, synagogue and family, I’m pretty busy. But as long as you’re enjoying what you’re doing, you’re not working at all,” Meer said.