Wall Street (Building) Revolution Advocated

How can New Haven’s downtown look more like Wooster Square and less like Stamford?

The answer could start with a one-acre parking lot at the corner of Wall and State streets.

So argued Joel Schiavone — aka ​“Mr. Downtown,” who developed the Chapel/College Street district — and former city transportation director Paul Wessel to center-city neighbors.

The subject at hand: the city-owned surface parking lot at 10 Wall St.

“We’re at a crossroads. Our options are to become like Stamford with high-rises, offices, malls and everything we don’t like about most cities,” Schiavone said. ​“Or we have the New Haven option. It’s a remarkable city and one of the few walkable, livable cities in the northeast apart from Portland and Boston.”

The parking lot at 10 Wall is city-owned, so the city can still restrict who buys it and what they can do with the land.

Schiavone joined Wessel on Tuesday evening to pitch ​“the New Haven option” to the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team at its monthly virtual meeting.

The city has tried to sell 10 Wall St. before to close budget gaps and did not receive high enough bids to tempt a sale. Wessel noted that the city is planning to put it out to bid again next year.

When Wessel talked to city officials about the property, they suggested he go to the management team.

“We often engage with a development after the fact, after a developer owns the property. This is an opportunity to talk about how we would like to see it develop, given that it is in the city’s hands,” Wessel said.

Wessel first got interested in 10 Wall St. as the spouse of CT Children’s Building Director Sandy Malmquist. The childcare center sits between 10 Wall St. and a series of Orange Street lots set to become a seven-story apartment building.

In the process of pushing back against that development, Wessel found a study by the Yale Urban Design Workshop that sketched out what the area would look if high-rise or mid-rise buildings filled the current parking lots.

Wessel talked to architect Robert Orr about what a ​“lean development” approach to the property would look like. The idea was that dividing up land into small parcels generates more tax revenue, makes housing more affordable and keeps profits local.

Orr calculated that 10 Wall St. could become 20 lots, which could each fit eight to 10 studio or one-bedroom apartments, plus shops, manufacturing or start-up space. The total project would cost the developer $17.7 million, if one person did the whole project instead of the plot-by-plot approach Orr is advocating. It would generate around $533,850 in taxes for the city every year. Click here to see the calculations.

At the same time, Schiavone was working on a 104-page report with Orr, Emly McDiarmid, Mark Van Allen and Eric Polinsky encouraging New Haven to abandon zoning codes that promote big, blocky buildings (like the new ​“Audubon Square” complex a block north of the surface lot). These buildings do not produce affordable apartments without major subsidies, Schiavone argued, and they were intended to keep downtowns white.

Download the report here and view it online here.

“I would like to suggest we take Wall Street as a first step. Then we take all the precepts and apply them throughout the city and get city employees trained in this kind of thing. Then we can move forward with a request for proposals for all the downtown lots, including the Coliseum site, with these precepts in mind,” Schiavone said.

Schiavone saw the potential for a vibrant population center in New Haven’s downtown in the 1980s and helped develop it into that vision. He has recently re-emerged as one of many neighbors critical of the ​“mini-city” planned for the former Coliseum site.

DWSCMT President Caroline Smith, who is handing off the presidency at next month’s election, drew the meeting to a close after Wessel and Schiavone’s presentation. She suggested that the two talk more with the management team’s development subcommittee. 

Updated on Friday, Feb. 19 at 11:30 a.m. to reflect Orr’s most recent calculations for 10 Wall St. costs and taxes. A previous version of this article quoted preliminary numbers that the DWSCMT received by accident.