Coliseum site is the future of the city

Strategically, the Coliseum site in

New Haven may be the most important land in the city. With concurrent efforts to erase the gash of Route 34, cutting the city in half, the Coliseum site carries the potential to ignite whole new neighborhoods infilling to downtown, to the train station, to the Hill and hospital/ research campus, and to Wooster Square. It’s the hub of a potentially dynamic wheel. The future New Haven.

Currently, affordable housing controversy bogs down the application for development. Pitted on one side is the waterfall of high-end apartment buildings rising around the city, which testify to the city’s popularity. Pitted on the other side is the tremendous lack of housing for those who can’t afford it. The developer stands in the middle holding a pro forma spreadsheet that must pencil out in order for investors to back the project. So far, the numbers don’t add up. The conundrum forces the city to consider what some might call drastic measures in forfeiting tax revenue and other measures in order to gain the housing they seek for the city’s lowest-income households.

Whereas this is a vital concern, one needs to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater (the scourge of pushing people into homelessness). We must never abandon the quest to create housing for all, but the “baby” is a leftout group in this quest, in fact an entire left-out generation. To some, they may seem unlikely.

Anne Helen Petersen clears up the “unlikely” in her book, “Can’t Even: How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Petersen takes pains to settle the longstanding myth that millennials are the “entitled” generation. Nothing can be further from the truth.

In point of fact, millennials (of all races, creeds and colors) are the first generation whose childhoods were relegated to resume building rather than unstructured play, to confusing competition with their peers rather than happy bonding, to insurmountable student debt, and to instability. None of us see that their lives are an eternal crapshoot, that they’re no different than the city’s lowest-income, but from a different perspective. They get no respect.

They bounce around between multiple jobs that never last more than a year or two. Multiple jobs never pay enough for food, housing and debt payments. A vicious cycle. No wonder they live in their parents’ basements.

Petersen paints a picture of her generation as a group of people running their fastest on an exhausting marathon and every time they get to within sight of the finish line, it mysteriously moves seven miles further ahead.

They are burned out and angry. Angry at the generations who preceded them with lives of relative stability. Life-long jobs. Home ownership. Comfortable retirements.

These people need to be included in the Coliseum neighborhood development. Affordable rents, jobs in creative enterprise, and the ability to have time to bond with new friends.

They need a real neighborhood. And a real life.

Already finding footing in the surrounding area are the first signs of a tech district, micro-manufacturing. Innovation and micro-manufacturing are the type of jobs that could provide stability to motivated underserved millennials.

Rather than tall, expensive apartment buildings cut off from the public by doormen, the underserved, including millennials, need affordable walk-up buildings in dense formations that define a public realm where bonding with a diversity of new friends can form, and innovative ideas can take seed.

Benefits for developers and their investors are that such buildings prove to be considerably less expensive to build, even though they increase the dwelling units per acre and tax revenues to the city over tall, spread-apart developments with high rents. This is referred to as Lean Development.

Using Lean Development, the 4.65acre Coliseum site can hold 1,000 dwelling units (all affordable) in 100 small buildings, 1,900 residents, 14 shops and eateries, and five micro-manufacturing facilities. They all would be three to five stories on three skinny streets with parking for more than 600 cars, depending on water table level.

This is the type of neighborhood project that will attract all segments of society, but especially those in the millennial generation, crying out for stability and the chance to perform. It’s about time we tap into their incredible resources and wasted talents. Making downtown a better place to live for all is the most sustainable endeavor imaginable at this uncertain point in history.

Robert Orr is is a national award-winning architect, urban planner, and one of the originators of New Urbanism. Mark Van Allen has been involved in entrepreneurship, real estate and technology transfer efforts throughout Connecticut including financial and operating positions in investor-owned partnerships and companies in the U.S. and China..