“Outdated Zoning” Put Cars Over Housing

The city’s top zoning official singled out the true culprit responsible for the planned conversion of a former four-family house into a surface parking lot: the city’s outdated zoning code.

City Deputy Director of Zoning Jenna Montesano pointed out the housing disincentives still baked into the city’s land use laws Wednesday night during the City Plan Commission’s regular monthly meeting on the ground floor of the municipal office building at 200 Orange St.

She offered those insights as part of a 10-minute discussion about local landlord Mendy Edelkopf’s planned conversion of 1471 – 1475 Chapel St. into 15 surface parking spaces.

Edelkopf has applied to the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) for a special exception to allow for seven of those 15 total spaces to be placed in the designated front yards of the lot at the corner of Chapel Street and Sherman Avenue.

“Normally you see special exceptions to reduce parking,” Montesano said. ​“This is one where they’re actually asking to create parking spaces in a front yard.”

“This is sort of a symptom of our outdated zoning code” that is standing in the way of this lot following the reverse citywide trend of parking lots becoming new housing, she added.

Montesano explained that, for decades, that now-vacant corner lot held a four-family house. The building suffered significant damages from a fire in 2016. Edelkopf knocked down the structure entirely late last year, several months after he bought the parcel for $150,000 from a holding company affiliated with Pike International’s Shmully Hecht.

Montesano said that a surface parking lot was not the landlord’s first pick for what he wanted to build on the 6,775 square foot lot that stands kitty corner to Yale New Haven Hospital’s St. Raphael campus.

“The applicant actually wanted to build another four dwelling-unit building on this corner,” she said. ​“But because our zoning forced it to be nonconforming, the BZA has trouble finding a hardship to grant them the density variance to put four units back on it.”

The site in question stands in a RO (Residence-Office) District. The zoning regulations for that district require that new single-family, two-family, and multi-family residences be built on a minimum lot area of 7,500 square feet, with a minimum average lot width of 60 feet, a maximum building coverage of 25 percent of the lot area, and a minimum 25-foot front yard. Pre-existing, nonconforming buildings in that district are also allowed to convert to a residential use at a rate of 1,000 square feet per dwelling unit.

The four-family house that used to sit on that lot was ​“nonconforming,” meaning that the use did not fit the zoning regulations but was grandfathered in because it predated the city’s adoption of those regulations.

Now that the building is no more, any attempt to construct a new four-family residence in its stead would require a variance from the BZA.

And in Connecticut, BZAs are allowed to grant that level of zoning relief only when an applicant can prove that they have a credible hardship rooted in the land itself — that is, some insurmountable problem presented by some physical attribute of a parcel of land that is standing in the way of an otherwise zoning-compliant use.

“There was someone that was interested in possibly building another four units but it would not have been conforming?” City Plan Commission Vice Chair Leslie Radcliffe asked.

“Correct,” Montesano said.

“And the BZA couldn’t find enough hardship, even though there was something there already?” Radcliffe continued.

Correct again, Montesano replied. She said that developers typically want or need to build more units on a property because of a financial hardship, as a means to offset the high cost of construction. ​“Connecticut law requires that hardship be rooted in the land, not in construction costs,” she said.

So instead of pursuing a new four-unit residential building, Edelkopf has sought instead to build out a use that is much more attainable within the current bounds of the city’s zoning code: a surface parking lot. Montesano said the 15-space lot will provide on-site parking for a 12-unit apartment building that Edelkopf owns next door to the corner lot.

So, she said, this surface parking lot actually makes that apartment complex conform with zoning code — because zoning also requires one parking spot per residential unit in this district.

“I’ll hear a motion,” Chair Ed Mattison said. ​“A reluctant motion, but a motion nonetheless.” He called on his fellow commissioners and city staff to use this housing-to-parking example as a goad to revise some of the outdated zoning laws that promote vacant lots and stymie construction.

With that, the commissioners voted unanimously in support of recommending that the BZA approves Edelkopf’s special exception.