New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘A bottom-up attempt at community planning’
Group of experts say the city’s future should include small-scale development
NEW HAVEN — Downtown development doesn’t all have to be subsidized, mid-rise buildings, full of expensive apartments with a few “affordable” apartments mixed in, a group that knows their way around the city and urban planning argue.
“Human scale” development — akin to Court Street — can work, be profitable and keep money in the local community, argues a group that wants to convince the city to try that approach on a one-acre, city-owned parking lot opposite the FBI building at 10 Wall St. in the heart of downtown. The idea is to put housing and “micromanufacturing” on the site,
But in order to do that, they city would have to change some of its existing “exclusionary zoning” regulations, they say.
Those involved — internationally-respected
architect Robert Orr; Joel Schiavone, who led a largely boarded-up downtown New Haven back into the light in the 1980s; activist and onetime city director of traffic and parking Paul Wessel; planner and educator Emly McDiarmid; entrepreneur Mark Van Allen, and developer Eric Polinsky — want the city to listen.
And so far, officials have been willing to listen — with no commitments as of yet.
“New Haven has always been a great place for design excellence and we are grateful for the expertise and visionaries we have here,” said Mayor Justin Elicker. “I’m taking a close look at their suggestions.”
Lean Urbanism
The idea is simple and complicated: in urban development, small really can be better.
“It’s a misnomer that you get more money per acre for big buildings than for small ones,” said Orr, a Yale-educated architect who in a 50-year career has designed buildings all over the city and the United States — and as far away as Costa Rica.
Pound for pound, the low-rise stretch of Court Street in Wooster Square “pays more taxes per acre than other residential properties ... just about anywhere in the city,” including homes on tony St. Ronan Street, said Orr, who argued that small-scale development could help ease New Haven’s budget woes in an article he wrote in May 2020 for the CT Mirror.
Lean Urbanism
“I’ve been pushing this idea for a long time,” he said. “There’s a group of us nationally that’s been debating this ‘Lean Urbanism’ for about nine years.”
Ideas like what they’d like to see happen at 10 Wall St., between Orange and State streets, have been done elsewhere, including Boston’s North End and Beacon Hill, Orr said. “The trouble is, it’s unusual, and banks and lenders” tend to be “used to doing big stuff.”
But New Haven, “like a lot of cities, is having a lot of trouble balancing the budget, and it’s because so little of the land is taxable property,” Orr said. For the 2020 grand list, tax-exempt property in the city represents $8.5 billion, according to Acting Assessor Alex Pullen .
Projects such as 10 Wall St. could help change that, Orr suggested.
Lean Urbanism is “smallscale, incremental community-building that requires fewer resources to incubate and mature,” according to the Project for Lean Urbanism website.
“Lean Urbanism is a movement of builders, planners, architects, developers, engineers, activists, nonprofits, municipalities, and entrepreneurs, working to lower the barriers to community-building, to make it easier to start businesses, and to provide more attainable housing and development,” it says.
A development like the one the local group envisions for 10 Wall St., could offer 172 units of housing and two small-scale “micro-manufacturing” spaces on a 1.07-acre site crossed by three 8-foot-wide “skinny streets” — and for similar projects in the future — might involve a number of different developers to essentially build a new neighborhood from the ground up within downtown, Orr said.
But to bring this particular idea to life, “we’re looking for one big developer to do this as a demo,” he said.
He didn’t name names, but said, “We’ve got some people lined up.”
The current effort to explore the idea for 10 Wall St. came from Wessel, whose wife, Sandra Malmquist, is director of the nearby Connecticut Children’s Museum and Creating Kids day care at Orange and Wall streets. He brought it to Orr, who had already been talking to Schiavone about another issue.
Aside from the 10 Wall St. issue, “I’ve been talking for a couple of years about these guys who come in from out of town,” get big tax breaks, put up big buildings and then turn around and sell them, said Schiavone.
Bottom up
The idea here to take a look at 10 Wall St. didn’t pop out of nowhere.
Wessel thought of it after a developer won approval in December 2019 to build a seven-story, 102-unit apartment building at 269-283 Orange St. which would require moving the historic, 1758-vintage Pinto-Whitney house, listed on the National Historic Register, to within five feet of the adjacent Children’s Building.
See a video of the site here. While researching various ideas, “I discovered this project that (Yale architecture professor) Alan Plattus and a bunch of grad students had done” in 2019 “that looked at the (10 Wall St.) block with human scale buildings,” Wessel said.
In the case of the approved Orange Street building, “they had done 90 percent of the work on it before we became aware of it,” he said. As the gears in his mind continued to turn, he began to wonder what might be possible if thought was given at the very start of a project to more human scale development.
“I want to put to test the ideas that Robert has talked about with his ‘lean development’ for awhile,” Wessel said.
City Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli, whom Wessel knows, “mentioned at one point that they were planning to put (the Wall Street parcel) out to bid, and after bouncing some ideas around, “I went to Mike Piscitelli and said, ‘This is what we’re thinking about. I would like to have a discussion about this with the city ... when you put it out to bid, and see if there’s a way to do it,’” Wessel said.
Piscitelli suggested that the group first present the idea to the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team, Wessel said.
Aaron Goode, chairman of the management team’s Development Committee, said the management team doesn’t endorse or oppose specific proposals, “but has always enthusiastically supported a more proactive and holistic approach to planning and zoning, as opposed to one that is just reactive to individual site development proposals as they come across the transom, which is what we usually get at the management team...
“One thing we liked about the report by Orr/Schiavone et al. and their concept for 10 Wall Street is that it’s genuinely a bottom-up attempt at community planning, a vision for the built environment driven not by politicians, bureaucrats or developers,” Goode said in an email. “Not that there is anything wrong with developers or city government — they play an important role — but we have always thought the built environment is too important to be left to the experts and the profit-makers.”
Generally speaking, “we need more independent voices on planning, zoning and development — there are lots of these voices in places like New York or Boston but in a small city like New Haven, these independent voices are often lacking,” Goode said.
Crossroads
“As a general point, the downtown is a great space for creative thinking about high density and exceptional design and we truly appreciate Paul’s efforts to advance concepts for this important site,” said Piscitelli. That said, “10 Wall Street is not on our priority list for development right now.”
The city’s current focus is on supporting affordable housing and if the 10 Wall St. block “went out to bid, the highest and best use would be a market rate housing project.” he said.
But the dialogue with the community is an important one right now and New Haven “is built on a number of different urban forms,” and has rooms for “both larger, higher-rise projects” and smaller-scale developments, Piscitelli said.
Schiavone told Elicker in the March 11 cover letter to a booklet the group put together, entited, “New Haven at a Crossroads,” that “as the COVID monster diminishes, I am hoping you’ll soon have time to turn your attention to the development philosophy of the City of New Haven.
“The enclosed document, prepared by myself and four other New Haveners, outlines how we can eliminate enormous tax reduction subsidies for developers (and or absorbing increased municipal expenditures for every new building, such as first responder calls, public works, city administration, infrastructure, schools, etc.) allowing us to use these increased tax revenues to create locally owned affordable neighborhoods where costs and revenues balance and city life thrives.
“To accomplish this, a primary goal would be to eliminate exclusionary zoning and modernize New Haven’s zoning to the SmartCode,” Schiavone wrote. “This will allow the city to reduce the complexities and size required by our current exclusionary zoning for development projects and to pursue fine-grained neighborhood development, intertwined with surrounding contexts, changing New Haven fabric to New Haven fabric by New Haveners.”
By eliminating the need for elaborate tax reduction subsidies needed to make large development profitable, “we can deputize home-grown local developers, builders, investors to construct more enduring neighborhoods that will enable affordable rent and ownership, equal profit to smaller developers, and full taxation,”
He called that “a win for the city and a win for our citizens.”
Wessel wants to approach some of the developers in the city who might be interested in this sort of development, and said that if the idea
“does seem to make sense, if it passes a test for reasonableness among the developers who do this sort of work in the city, I want to go back to the city.”