New Haven Alders OK city’s $1.3M purchase of 4 Dixwell Avenue sites

NEW HAVEN — The city’s $1.3 million purchase of four rundown Dixwell Avenue properties, including the former site of the Monterey jazz club, is ready to move forward, having won unanimous approval from the Board of Alders.

Elicker administration officials have described the acquisition, a few doors down from the rebuilt Dixwell Community “Q”

House and across the street from the in-thepipeline ConnCAT Place redevelopment of the largely-defunct Dixwell Plaza shopping center, as a key step in the revitalization of Dixwell Avenue.

“This is Dixwell’s last piece of the puzzle,” said Dixwell-area Alder Jeanette Morrison, D-22, who also is chairwoman of the Q House Advisory Committee.

At a Board of Alders meeting this week, Morrison

asked other alders for their support and called the purchase “a step in the right direction of the continuous development of the Dixwell community.”

The city has the opportunity “to build the old Monterey Club” into what it wants to see there, Morrison said. She referred to the proposal by Mayor Justin Elicker’s administration, expressed by Livable City Initiative Executive Director Arlevia Samuels, to develop 265 Dixwell — the old Monterey — and 269 Dixwell only after a “community engagement” public input process to decide what they should become

“It’s been a very, very long time since the community had the opportunity to decide what they want to see” in that area, Morrison said.

The other two of the four properties the city would buy from mega-landlord Ocean Management, 262 Dixwell and 263 Dixwell, which have residential tenants, would be sold to Beulah

Land Development Corp. to be rehabbed and turned into affordable housing.

“This is a step toward affordable housing” and homeownership, Morrison said.

The plan to buy the four properties previously won the approval of the Board of Alders’ Community Development Committee and the Livable City Initiative board of directors.

It’s controversial in part because the proposed price is significantly higher than the $1.175 million appraised value and the $500,000 that Ocean Management paid for the properties before letting the two commercial sites sit vacant for several years.

Mayor Justin Elicker has said that’s not unusual, however, and right now, “nearly every property in New Haven is being sold at above appraised value ... This is just kind of the going rate.”