Homeless Youth Quest Prevails

A temporary housing facility for homeless youth won approval — and dodged a potentially contentious future public hearing — in its bid to build a 12 to 20-bed rooming house atop a single-story social services building on Grand Avenue.

The operative phrase is ​“rooming house.” Not ​“shelter.”

That wording made a world of difference as the City Plan Commission granted site approval approval Wednesday night to Youth Continuum, a decades-old local homeless youth support agency that is working with the housing nonprofit Y2Y to build a second-story addition atop its 924 Grand Ave. headquarters. Dozens of local affordable housing activists and Wooster Square neighbors turned out to support the project for the commission’s regular monthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

Y2Y, which already runs a similar residential program in Cambridge, Mass., is now clear to bring its support services for co-ed,18-to-24-year-old homeless youth to the Youth Continuum site. The commission granted the site plan approval with four affirmative votes and one abstention, from Commissioner Ernest Pagan.

The project can now move forward.

Wednesday’s vote represented the culmination of two years of near herculean community outreach by Y2Y Co-Founder Sam Greenberg. He, his attorney Marjorie Shansky, and Youth Continuum CEO Paul Kosowsky presented the body with 121 letters of support and a four-inch binder’s worth of documentation of the 217 meetings Greenberg and his team have held with 155 different Wooster Square, Downtown, and Fair Haven stakeholders about the homeless youth residential program.

The vote also represented a victory for Y2Y over a vocal contingent of opposition to the project, which surfaced most publicly at a contentious neighborhood meeting in May 2018 at which critics decried the addition of a new social services agency to a stretch of Grand Avenue that already has a men’s homeless shelter, a youth homelessness support agency, and a state parole services building.

Greenberg said he is very proud of how ​“open, honest, transparent, and above and beyond” the public engagement process for this project has been since he first started canvassing for Y2Y in New Haven in July 2017.

Although 20 Y2Y critics, including City Clerk Michael Smart and Wooster Square Alder Brenda Harris, submitted letters to the City Plan Commission calling for a public hearing on the proposal, the commissioners ultimately decided against prolonging the site plan vote.

They said they were convinced by Greenberg and Shansky’s framing of the proposal as in compliance with existing zoning law, and therefore eligible for a site plan review of the proposed project’s layout, parking, lighting, and other such technical matters.

In particular, commissioners and city staff said they agreed with Y2Y’s framing of the homeless youth housing project as a ​“rooming house” rather than as a ​“homeless shelter.” Rooming houses are allowed as of right in the site’s light industrial (IL) zone, while homeless shelters require a variance application and a public hearing before the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA).

“Rooming house” is a more appropriate legal definition for Y2Y’s project, Greenberg and Shansky said, because the residential program will house a limited population, will require reservations in advance, and will accommodate stays of up to 90 days at a time. Residents will not have to line up on the sidewalk outside the building every afternoon in the hope of securing a bed for the night, as is the case at most homeless shelters.

“For young people experiencing homelessness,” Greenberg said, ​“they don’t stay in shelters.” They are much more likely to stay in safe, stable, clean, youth-focused residences with on-site social services like the counseling and job support that Youth Continuum already provides at 924 Grand.

The layout of the proposed second-floor residential addition, Greenberg said, will resemble a college dormitory with its kitchen and dining area and lounge and bunk bed sleeping ​“pods” separated by some kind of open-air partitions.

Deputy Zoning Director Jenna Montesano, explaining the City Plan staff’s recommendation of approval for the project, agreed that ​“rooming house” is more accurate than ​“homeless shelter” to describe the proposed project.

“The rooming house definition was the best fit,” she said. Even though a layperson’s general impression of what a rooming house is may not conform with the youth homelessness program under consideration, she said, the technical, legal definition per city zoning ordinance does indeed jibe with what Y2Y wants to do. ​“You have to fit it into a definition somewhere.”

“If we had a public hearing” on this matter, City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison said, ​“it would be extremely difficult for people to stick to the topic.” The commission can only review technical compliance with appropriate zoning code, he said, and not the merits of housing homeless youth in this particular building on Grand Avenue.

All but one of the opposition letters that the body received failed to state any reasons for requesting a public hearing on the proposal, he said. And the only one that did stressed the author’s opposition to the building’s use, and not to the technical aspects of the proposal.

Since the commission found that the project meets the definition of a ​“rooming house,” he said, and since rooming houses are allowed by right in the district, a fight over use would be inappropriate during a City Plan Commission public hearing. ​“We don’t have that power,” he said.

After the commissioners decided they would hear the site plan review application, local architects Turner Brooks and Duo Dickinson walked the body through the proposed rehab and second-story addition to 924 Grand Ave. with a series of 3D models and digital renderings.

Brooks described the renovated 924 Grand as ​“a gentle, humble urban building” that presents a more robust facade on Grand Avenue and slopes down in the back to be more in line with the residential character of St. John Street behind it.

The building’s basement will be an expanded storage space, he said. The first floor will retain Youth Continuum’s current headquarters and service offerings. And the new second floor, to be accessible by both a stairwell and an elevator, will house the new Y2Y dining area and kitchen and dining area and sleeping area.

The warmth and familiarity of the design, Dickinson said, will ​“give people a sense of pride and human dignity.” The main sleeping area includes lofts, he said, to allow for an extra sense of privacy and self-segregation even while maintaining the program’s need to have a relatively open plan for the safety and security of its tenants.

“I highly recommend to move this item,” Commissioner Radcliffe said in support of the site plan.

Mattison agreed, offering one more time before the board’s vote a defense of his decision to forego a public hearing.

“This applicant clearly in my opinion meets the requirements of the New Haven Zoning Code,” he said. ​“I think it would be illegitimate for us to hear from people who don’t want it and from people who do” simply based on the use, which is allowed as of right in this zone.

After the vote, the room burst into applause. Greenberg said he doesn’t yet have a definite schedule in place for when Y2Y hopes to begin construction and have the rooming house open. He and his team have spent so much time focused on community outreach and site plan preparation, he said. He promised to keep the neighborhood informed about next steps.