“New” Housing Pitch Sounds Familiar

Local lawmakers heard a new plan to turn an abandoned middle school into affordable housing — and it sounded a lot like a stalled plan from six years ago.

The property is 560 Newhall St., the location of Hamden’s deserted and decaying Middle School. The developer looking to convert the site to apartments is the nonprofit Mutual Housing Association of South Central Connecticut, also known as NeighborWorks New Horizons.

The town first enslisted Mutual Housing back in 2015 to convert the property. That never happened.

Aaron Hoffmann, Mutual Housing’s director of real estate development, presented a revised proposal to Hamden’s Legislative Council for the project on Monday night. The council next will vote on whether or not to pursue the project, and whether or not to maintain their relationship with Mutual Housing, on Oct. 18.

The developer’s contract with the town was originally set to end on July 22. The council chose to extend that contract until Oct. 22 in a controversial vote that took place just two days before the initial termination date. (Read more about that debate here.)

During that July council meeting, Hoffmann said that the organization’s plan to build affordable housing and a community center stalled for so long because of a prolonged soil examination process on site, which was supposed to only take two to three years. Hoffmann told the Independent that the Connecticut Department of Housing refused to fund Mutual Housing’s project until remediation of the contaminated soil was complete. But the remediation did not conclude until 2020, right before the pandemic hit.

Acting Town Planner and Economic Development Director Erik Johnson suggested in early summer that the council might consider granting Mutual Housing more time to reconsider how the outcome of the remediation could change their original project proposal.

“Fortunately the remediation was completed pretty much as designed,” Hoffman reported two months later. So he and his team saw no reason to drastically alter the organization’s initial idea after all, he said.

The first plan for the site was to build 87 apartments, 80 percent of which would be affordable housing and 20 percent market rate rentals; and to convert the old gym on site into a revamped community center. Hoffman said the only change that Mutual Housing has decided upon this year is to demolish the gym and build a smaller community center in its place.

Hoffman said the idea was to target ​“community members who already live in Hamden and are looking for better housing.” By providing affordable apartments that are larger and higher quality than other housing opportunities in town, he said, Hamden could keep residents who are growing their families or planning to switch apartments from moving out entirely.

He said the concept of a community center was based on the district’s ​“desire to have community space, especially youth programming.” That goal was communicated several years ago during early conversations about how to utilize the property. The reason for constructing a new center, he said, was not because of additional damages to the gymnasium from years of neglect, he said. Rather, he said, in his experience potential partners, like boys & girls clubs, looking to lease such spaces prefer smaller buildings with lower operating costs. Starting from scratch would cut millions off the estimated $6 million it would take to renovate the old gym, he said.

Now that six years have passed, newer council members who did not vote on the plan back in 2015 expressed skepticism about the site design. They also complained about miscommunications and decisions that have delayed development of the empty property.

“I’m not impressed. I’m very concerned,” Councilmember Justin Farmer told the Independent after Hoffman’s report on Monday. Farmer represents District Five, which includes Newhall Street and the many residential neighborhoods surrounding the old middle school.

“We’re basically talking about having the same plan but worse,” Farmer asserted. ​“Nobody in the community wants this project.”

Farmer stated that the plan was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. ​“As a socialist, I’m like, cool, I’m all for [federally subsidized] Section 8 housing,” he said. ​“But why is it that senior housing is better in the Sixth District, while affordable housing is better suited for the southern part of town where crime is high?”

Farmer argued that the site design would cause families from areas like Hamden’s Mix Avenue to move to southern Hamden alongside low-income individuals from outside of town, and facilitate gentrification and ​“astronomical prices” in more central portions of Hamden as populations relocate.

In other words, building affordable housing in Hamden’s most economically devastated region could exacerbate pre-existing socioeconomic disparities in town, especially without additional work to bring other needed resources, like grocery stores and better public transportation, to the area, he argued.

Plus, Farmer said, ​“that whole entire area is a flood zone. How do you wanna add 87 units? You’re just gonna add massive drainage issues.”

Farmer said another problem has been the lack of communication among the developers, the council, and the impacted community itself. ​“You have a project that stalls for six years,” Farmer reasoned. ​“This should’ve been a conversation over all of those six years.”

Hoffman said he did not want to comment on Farmer’s concerns about the project until the two could first talk directly. He added that he could not speak to any public conversations or forums that happened before he was hired by Mutual Housing in March. None of the Mutual Housing employees who worked on the project six years ago are still with the organization, he noted.

After receiving a contract extension in July, Hoffman stated, he ​“spent the months of August and September working on the plan … We wanted to make sure our original assumptions were validated before we reached out to the community.” Now, he said, ​“we’re at the point where we think we could have good dialogue with the community.”

Farmer also criticized Mutual Housing’s decision to shrink the potential community center: ​“You’re spending less money on us, and somehow that’s for the community?”

“This is a generational investment. You’re not just gonna build anything and everything,” he told the Independent. ​“You’re not moving forward with this project without communicating with my community.”