$5M OK’d ​“Just In Time” For Housing

As New Haven debates how to preserve affordable housing, the state came through with money to ensure that a new apartment complex in the Hill will include homes for people earning less than the area median income.

The money comes in the form of a $5 million grant from the Connecticut Department of Housing’s Just in Time fund, designed to enable developers to include lower-income housing in new market-rate complexes.

The state Bond Commission voted to approve the money Wednesday for the first phase of developer Randy Salvatore’s plan eventually to transform 11.4 largely vacant acres of land in the Hill into 140 apartments, 7,000 square feet of stores, 120,000 square feet of research space and 50,000 square feet of offices between Congress Avenue and Church Street South. The city has tried since the mid-1980s to get someone to rebuild that area, which was devastated by mid-20th century urban renewal.

The city had already approved the Salvatore plan. The Harp administration then went to the state seeking the $5 million to bridge a financing gap and enable Salvatore to make 30 percent of the first phase’s apartments ​“affordable.”

The approval of the money means that 33 of the 110 apartments that are planned for phase one will have lower rents, Salvatore said in an interview.

“I would expect we can start excavating in two weeks” and complete the first phase by ​“the end of 2018,” said Salvaote, who built the Novella apartments at Chapel and Howe streets.

The first phase involves building the 110 apartments atop first-floor neighborhood-oriented retail at 22 Gold St., where the Prince School Annex used to stand.

Under guidelines for the Just In Time program, the 33 subsidized units will be rented to households earning no more than 80 percent of area median income, or $70,480 out of an $88,100 benchmark for a family of four. The above chart details the full range of income limits. (Thanks to Independent readers who in comments to past articles on this project have asked for those details.)

Salvatore’s project fits into a broader Hill-to-Downtown Plan the city has drawn up for the area between the train station and Yale’s medical district. At the urging of the neighborhood, the city committed to making 30 percent of new housing complexes subsidized or otherwise lower-rent as opposed to market-rate. Officials are pressing that same goal for the planned rebuilding of the Church Street South housing complex; it is trying for a second time to obtain a federal CHOICE grant for that plan.

“We’re real excited” about the $5 million grant, said Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, who as executive director of city government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) took the lead on seeking the state money. She called it ​“the beginning of the implementation of the Hill-to-Downtown Plan. … We have worked hard in the last year and a half; we are seeing that come to fruition now. “

3 Paths

The quest for the $5 million fit into a larger Harp administration strategy for responding to public demands to enable working-class people to continue renting in a city where builders like Salvatore’s RMS Companies are on a tear constructing market-rate apartments. Mayor Toni Harp has called for a public hearing on how to preserve single-room occupancy facilities and affordable housing in general; alders are considering a proposal to declare a six-month moratorium on converting SROs into market-rate housing. (A planned public hearing on the proposal by an alder committee, planned for Thursday night, has been postponed.)

Cities around the country are wrestling with the same challenge. They tend to choose among three main strategies, as observed by New Haven Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson:

• Constructing government-built public-housing complexes.
• Promoting ​“micro” apartments that squeeze people into, say 300 square feet of living space, in buildings that have larger shared spaces for eating, exercise and hanging out.
• Finding state or federal subsidies for private developers to include affordable housing in otherwise market-rate developments and having higher rates ​“cross-subsidize” lower rents in the same complex.

New Haven has focused on the third option in recent decades. The Ninth Square development of the 1990s and then the construction of the 360 State St. tower are examples. Nemerson called them models for how best to include subsidized housing into market-rate housing: weaving both categories of apartments together — make the demarcations ​“invisible” — so you can’t tell which is which. (The Ninth Square project is now at a crossroads as the original developer, facing big debts, seeks a buyer; read more about that in this article.)

Mayor Harp has expressed reservations about micro-apartments, arguing that New Haven isn’t dense enough to need to warehouse people in tiny spaces.

In pursuing the mixed-income model, New Haven is now competing for subsidies with suburbs pushed by the state to build new affordable housing, Nemerson noted. He credited LCI’s ​“great work” in succeeding in obtaining competitive money for the Salvatore Hill project.

Construction Unsettles High Street

Construction at a separate Salvatore/RMS project in town — on a new ​“boutique” hotel on a former car-rental lot— caused the city to close part of High Street Thursday.

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn sent out the following email at 9:49 a.m. explaining what happened:

“We have determined that the northbound lane of High St between George and Crown must be closed to traffic immediately due to unacceptable settling and shifting of the roadway. This settling appears to be related to the deep excavation for the development at the corner of George and High by RMS.

“[The Department of Public Works (DPW)], Engineering, and Building met on-site this morning to examine the situation immediately after receiving a report from LCI of a deepening crack in the road. DPW will immediately begin installing jersey barriers to protect the area from traffic. [Transit, Traffic and Parking] has contacted affected properties on the block and will assist with signage. Building is requesting a meeting at the site with the developer and their structural engineer ASAP with the relevant City parties. Engineering has contacted [United Illuminating], as they have a distribution duct bank in the affected area.”