Thomas MacMillan Photo
Britton’s new commute: 5 minutes by bike from East Rock.
No more fighting highway traffic in bad weather. No more working in a sidewalk-less sea of strip malls. No more fretting about suburban crime or contributing to climate change.
A company called “Sunlight Solar” has said good-bye to all that — by moving from Milford into New Haven.
Sunlight Solar, a solar panel company with offices in New England and the Pacific Northwest, has over the past week opened up shop at 90 Hamilton St. after more than eight years off the Post Road in Milford. The company’s new digs are next to an I‑91 on-ramp and the Vandome night club.
The move means the company’s employees — most of whom live in New Haven — can commute to work on foot or by bike, reducing pollution and fossil fuel usage, just as the solar panels they install on homes and small businesses do.
What’s more, the company now has a fenced-in parking lot for its vans and Priuses and easy access to the highway. Plus, it is now just short walk from restaurants and coffee shops in Wooster Square.
Sunlight Solar’s trajectory from the suburbs to the city fulfills a city-planning goal nearly five decades old, said Tony Bialecki, deputy economic development director for the city. In the 1960s, as I‑91 divided Wooster Square, planners designed Hamilton Street to compete with the suburbs as a site for commercial ventures, he said. It was meant to be part of an “industrial ring” around the city’s “core,” he said.
Sunlight Solar’s move is part of a larger, nationwide trend of people choosing to live and work in cities, Bialecki said. He hopes to see more evidence of that trend as the city works to redevelop the River Street area as commercial and industrial center.
“I’ve been looking for a place for two years,” said Dan Britton, the director of operations at Sunlight Solar. He needed good access to the highway; Sunlight Solar works all across the state. And he wanted a place with a fenced-in parking lot, because Sunlight Solar vans were broken into in Milford.
He found everything he was looking for in New Haven, Britton said. “Now we can walk over to Wooster Square.” Milford, on the other hand, was like L.A.: “To go anywhere, you have to drive.”
“We think of ourselves as a sustainable company,” said Rachel Oxman, the head of sales and marketing.
That green ethos was hard to sustain while working in Milford. Not that the employees didn’t try. One worker, project manager Annalisa Paltauf, doesn’t own a car. She commuted by bike year-round from Westville, cycling seven miles each way everyday on the Post Road.
“She’s fit,” Britton said. Several other employees biked, too, including Britton. He said it would take him 30 to 40 minutes to get from East Rock to Milford by bike. But he would drive if the weather was bad, and then sit in traffic at the end of the day as cars backed up on the highway.
In Milford, there was “no community,” Britton said. “Here, we can have relationships with other businesses.”
Despite the fact that they worked in Milford, most of Sunlight Solar’s employees live in New Haven. Oxman said she moved down from Hartford after taking the job a Sunlight Solar four years ago. “It didn’t even cross my mind to get an apartment in Milford,” she said. “New Haven is such a neat city to live in.” She now lives around the corner in Wooster Square, and walks to work.
Most of Sunlight Solar’s employees are between 25 and 35 years old, Britton said. New Haven is the best place to live in Connecticut for people that age.
Britton said solar energy is a difficult industry for long-term economic prediction. The industry “lives and dies by incentives in the state.” State programs offer subsidies for solar panel installation, and legislative changes can create a “boom and bust” rollercoaster. That said, “the market looks pretty good for the next 10 years,” Britton said.
Britton said the building Sunlight Solar is renting on Hamilton Street doesn’t yet have panels on the roof. But the landlord has submitted application for state incentives.