10% Afforable Housing Mandate Debated

The city’s planned zoning overhaul for Whalley, Grand, and Dixwell Avenues hit a gentrification speed bump from activists concerned about protections for low-income residents.

That debate around the future of the city’s downtown-adjacent ​“commercial corridors” took place Wednesday night during a workshop held at the beginning of the City Plan Commission’s six-hour meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

No one spoke in opposition to the construction of more housing and a more walkable streetscape along these avenues. But city staff, commissioners, neighborhood leaders, and affordable housing advocates debated how best to get there.

In particular, they considered how best to ensure that newly built housing doesn’t force out of neighborhood residents who can’t afford downtown-level market-rate rents.

The City Plan Department’s proposed Commercial Gateway District draft zoning regulations, department director Aïcha Woods explained, contain a 10 percent ​“inclusionary zoning” mandate. (Read this CityLab article for a comprehensive primer on the increasingly popular zoning policy, as well as a case study on how it’s worked, and not worked, in Washington D.C.)

That proposed rule would require all new residential or mixed-use developments with nine or more units in the rezoned districts to set aside at least 10 percent of their apartments at ​“affordable” rents — with ​“affordable” pegged to 60 percent or less of the area median income (AMI), or around $55,140 for a family of four.

Click here to read the new draft zoning regulations in full and here to read the city’s proposed changes to the use table. The proposed new zones would cover Dixwell Avenue from Tower Parkway to Munson Street, Whalley Avenue from Howe Street to Pendleton Street, and Grand Avenue from Olive Street to Hamilton Street.

Woods said the 10 percent affordability number emerged from over a year of public meetings, intensive internal research, and careful review of the Affordable Housing Task Force​‘s findings and recommendations.

Initially, she said, the department’s rezoning efforts were focused primarily on floor ratio adjustments, environmentally friendly building incentives, and switching parking minimums for parking maximums to best foster vibrant avenues built at the scale of people, not cars. But a heated public meeting with housing activists at the downtown library in April helped shift the department’s focus more towards the necessity of writing affordability into the regs.

“Financial Feasibility Concern”

“I think it’s tremendously valuable to raise these issues,” said City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison, who served on the Affordable Housing Task Force. Up until now, he said, residents concerned with using public policy to help shape the city’s apartment construction boom to include low-income renters have had few public venues to work through those ideas.

He said he does have a ​“financial feasibility concern,” however, about the risk that an inclusionary zoning mandate would deter investors from building housing in New Haven altogether, therefore resulting in no new housing, market-rate or otherwise.

“The academic studies show that changing zoning rarely by itself is able to change what happens on the ground,” he said. ​“It just isn’t powerful enough.”

That’s why what the city is proposing with these new zoning regulations is just a pilot, Woods said. It’s designed to provide an immediate test of all of the proposed revisions, including the 10 percent affordable requirements, to see if they spur equitable development along Whalley, Grand, and Dixwell.

Couldn’t the pilot wait until after the city hires a consultant to complete a formal inclusionary zoning study that recommends which percentage mandates would be most effective in this city, as recommended by the task force? alternate commissioner Elias Estabrook asked.

“There has been so much demand for doing something on these corridors,” Woods said. ​“I would hate to put it off.” She said she plans on hosting another public meeting on the matter sometime in July before submitting the proposed updates to the City Plan Commission for a formal recommendation vote, and then passing them along to the Board of Alders for more review and potential adoption.

“We might not get it perfectly right” the first time around, Deputy Zoning Director Jenna Montesano said. But ​“I think we have to do something now” based on the flood of new developments and the urgency for some affordable housing protections expressed by the community.

“We Feel Very Much Included”

Robin Golden, a consultant with New Haven Legal Assistance Association, agreed.

“We do not have time to wait for any kind of study,” she said. Some kind of inclusionary zoning needs to go in place now, and, if 10 percent is what the department recommends to start with, then 10 percent is what the city should try out.

Nadine Horton, the chair of the Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills Community Management Team, said that her community has hit road block after road block in trying to attract developers and new housing investment because of Whalley Avenue’s 1960s-era zoning, that privileges car dealerships and parking lots and singles-story, standalone buildings like fast food chains over multi-family housing.

“We can’t entice certain developers because of the zoning,” she said. She commended Woods for coming out to the management team and into the community to worshop the proposed zoning changes over the past few months. ​“We feel very much included in the process,” she said.

“People’s Lives Are At Stake”

Kerry Ellington, a community organizer with New Haven legal aid, had a different take on the proposed zoning overhauled and the process that has led up to it.

She said she has seen her apartment building at Chapel and Orchard Street ​“gentrified before my eyes” during her decade living in the Dwight neighborhood, where rents have gone up to accommodate students and hospital workers and other professionals wanting to live just outside of Downtown.

“Gentrification is a real issue that’s not being assessed and not being addressed in our city,” she said. She criticized the city’s economic development strategy as being focused on bringing in new investment at all costs.

“It can’t hurt to develop a genuine, multi-month process” that would include people like her and her neighbors in this zoning redo, she said. ​“Coming from my community, we’ve been left out of this process.” The department needs to do a better job educating residents who might not come to management team meetings about what zoning is, how it affects their lives, and how it might be used to protect the interests of working class people and not just developers.

“We need a space in the community to hash that out,” she said. ​“This is because people’s lives are at stake.”

Ming-Yee Lin, a staff attorney with legal aid, seconded Ellington’s push to prolong the process and delay the pilot commercial corridor adoption.

“We have to remember these are real communities,” she said about Dixwell, Whalley, and Grand Avenues. While a host of new market-rate apartments might fill middle and upper-income housing needs, they might also displace the city’s poorest from neighborhoods they’ve lived for generations. ​“People are feeling anxiety” about this construction boom, she said, and the zoning overhaul should be particularly sensitive to those concerns.

You say this is a pilot, Dixwell Community Management Team member Crystal Gooding said to Woods. ​“What if it fails? Then you have three corridors where this fails?”

“We don’t have a secret process we’re going to roll out at the end,” Mattison said. This proposal is just the first full draft of a document that will continue to evolve as members of the public, commissioners, alders, and other stakeholders contribute feedback.

Woods and Montesano encouraged all interested residents to submit feedback on the rezoning project here. While she did not commit to any particular new public meeting, Woods thanked the speakers for their feedback and promised to include it in the final proposal presented to the commission and the alders.

“This is an astounding turnout,” Mattison said at the end of the commercial corridor workshop. Reflecting the inclusionary zoning debate, he recalled the most important piece of advice he received from a former chair of the City Plan Commission as Mattison rose to become the head of the board.

“You just have to be careful,” Mattison said, ​“that you don’t make a tremendous mistake.”