“Don’t Dig” Strategy Paid Off

A decision not to reconfigure a three-street intersection saved five years and $50-$80 million — and led to a signing Wednesday of a deal to resurrect a vanished stretch of the Hill.

A similar decision has proved elusive in the Ninth Square, potentially delaying for years the resurrection of the old New Haven Coliseum property.

Call it the ​“Think Twice Before You Dig” approach to urban redevelopment.

The benefits of that approach were on display Wednesday afternoon atop the concrete steps to the entrance of the old Welch Annex School at 49 Prince St. Mayor Toni Harp and developer Randy Salvatore signed a stack of documents (a ​“Development and Land Disposition Agreement”) there to finalize the city approval of the sale for $1.2 million to Salvatore of 11.5 acres of land where he plans to build $100 million worth of new apartments, stores and offices or labs.

People lived on that land until the mid-20th century, when New Haven leveled it as part of urban renewal. Most of that land is now surface parking lots. The land also includes two empty school buildings. Salvatore’s company plans to remodel one, the Welch Annex, into new apartments and tear down the other, the former Prince School Annex, around the corner at 22 Gold St., to make way for a new 100,000 to 110,000-square foot apartment building with first-floor storefronts. Those two buildings are the first phase of the project. Salvatore has agreed to rent 70 percent of the apartments at market rates while reserving 30 percent for affordable housing, the terms of which will depend on what state or federal subsidies support it. (Earlier Independent coverage inaccurately identified a third building, across from Welch on Prince Street, as the doomed building. In fact it is currently a privately owned doctors’ office building that will remain intact.)

The mini-neighborhood, which now resembles an abandoned movie set, will once again become ​“a walkable, inviting place for longtime residents and new residents,” Salvatore declared.

Harp called the signing ​“a remarkable step forward toward continued growth and prosperity” in New Haven. The deal, the product of dozens of meetings and several near-collapses, marks a development success the Harp administration can claim as its own (like the College Street Music Hall), rather than the shepherding to fruition of plans begun before it took office in 2014.

Success eluded three separate administrations over 25 years. The breakthrough came when the Harp administration took a second look at the spot where Lafayette Street and Washington and Congress avenues come to an angular intersection.

A Second Look

Cliff Winkel said Wednesday that he had been trying to get City Hall to take that second look for decades.

Winkel has owned the development rights to all those 11.5 fallow acres since the late 1980s. That’s when the DiLieto administration gave rights to Winkel and then-partner John Schnip to buy the land and build on it. It never happened. Schnip left town. Winkel held onto the property. The subsequent Daniels and DeStefano administrations couldn’t budge the project along.

One stumbling block, Winkel said, was that Lafayette-Congress-Washington intersection. Plans called for the city to dig up and relocate the utility ducts there — the underground passages for phone and cable lines. That way the city could reconfigure that corner into a predictable grid. City planners considered that essential to help drivers and others navigate the area.

Winkel said he always disagreed. ​“Nobody believed me until the Harp administration. It costs $50 million [to do the utility work]. You never get it back. It wasn’t worth it.”

Matthew Nemerson said he visited the intersection in December 2013, the month before he took office as Harp’s development administrator. He said he came up with an estimate at closer to $80 million. ​“All the fiber [optic cables] for the university and the medical center” are buried there, he said.

There’s no guarantee the city would be able to get that kind of money from the federal or state governments, he said. The mere act of trying would delay any effort to jumpstart a development project there for five years.

Besides, Nemerson reasoned, what was wrong with non-rectangular street grids? Who said cities had to have perfect rectangles at every corner? Sometimes unusual historical patterns make cities more interesting.

Nemerson said he met with Yale officials to ask whether they needed to have the streetscape made into ​“rectangles” for the nearby doctors building and College Plaza buildings, and how much it was worth to them. The answer: No need to dig up the street.

Next Nemerson visited Winkel, who he has known for decades. He urged Winkel to pursue an amended deal with the city to build on the land, with updated concerns addressed and without all that utility work. Salvatore had just come to town starting to buy properties to build new housing. He had the wherewithal to build the Hill project. The two teamed up and set out to make it happen.

Salvatore Wednesday agreed that the don’t‑dig decision was crucial. Even New York has seen much development take place in recent years on less predictable streetscapes.

LiveWorkLearnDelay

Nemerson would like to see a similar decision get started the long-delayed plan by Montreal-based LiveWorkLearnPlay to build a $400 million new-urbanist mini-city at the Coliseum site, with 1,000 mixed-income apartments, 30 – 40 new businesses, a four-and-a-half-star hotel with 160 – 90 rooms, 30,000 square feet of stores, and a public square.

So far that decision is proving elusive.

The need for such a decision arose because it turned out to be much more complicated and expensive to move underground utilities at the site, specifically at Orange Street near MLK Boulevard, than the DeStefano administration contemplated when signing the LWLP deal.

The city negotiated wth United Illuminating for years about how to conduct the work and how much it would cost. Nemerson said the two sides had reached ​“95 percent” agreement. Then a Spain-based conglomerate bought UI. And the position changed, Nemerson said.

Now the two sides have agreed to disagree, he said. They agree that it will cost $15 million to $17 million to do the work. They disagree about who is legally bound to pay for it: UI or the city. That matter will be brought before regulatory authorities to decide. Nemerson said UI is willing to go ahead and do the work if New Haven can prove it has the money to pay for the work if it loses the case. It doesn’t currently have that money available. (UI could not be reached for a comment before this story was published.)

Under the best scenario, that would enable to utility work to be completed by the summer of 2019. Meaning LiveWorkLearnPlay couldn’t begin building the project before that. That’s way too long to wait, Nemerson said — because the city needs a new hotel sooner than that.

“They’re now a huge multinational corporation” at UI, Nemerson said. ​“Other than one or two people who are still there, they’re all new. This is just another project for them.”

At this point, again, the simpler solution would be to redesign the project slightly to avoid having to do the utility work at all, Nemerson argued.

That would require moving the hotel only about 80 feet up the block on Orange Street, he estimated (and less so on the end of the block, on State Street). The city has been meeting with LWLP the past two months to urge the company to do the redesign. Those talks continue.

While the city feels time pressure, LWLP doesn’t need to. It turns out that the deal struck by the DeStefano administration to sell the land to Reim’s LWLP gave the company 14 years to build the project. (LWLP principal Max Reim did not return a call for comment for this story before publication.)

Nemerson said if LWLP can’t make the change, the city might have to seek another developer for the land. But he said the administration remains hopeful LWLP will build it because of the company’s combination of retail, hotel and housing development.