New Haven Independent

Posted by: Norton Street | November 5, 2009 3:24 PM

The successful neighborhoods in the city are the kind that grew incrementally over time through a natural process of public demand followed by private supply. One problem with massive federally subsidized housing developments is that they are placed randomly because the large amount of funds allows it financially. However, just because a project is federally funded does not mean it cannot accurately replicate something that occurred naturally over time. Unfortunately, this project repeats many of the mistakes of earlier posts WW2 developments in that it takes large isolated piece of land and artificially populate it with boxes and stores. Neighborhoods and more importantly, communities, are not made up merely of the things that occur in them like housing, retail, offices, parks, etc, but the connections between the things in the community and to other communities; that a large part in what determines the success of the neighborhood.
It is imperative that connections be made to Hamden, because not only are the folks on the New Haven side isolated, so are the people on the Hamden side. Expanded bus service is always good, but more important than that is walkability. Every house in the country needs to be within walking distance to life's essentials. It is nearly as important to be within walking distance of work. The streets that lead up to West Rock are not enough of a connection to New Haven, more than roads are needed to make an adequate connection. There has to be a reason to be on the street for a reason other than getting from point A to point B. Ideally, Wintergreen and Springside could be turned into Main Streets with mixed use buildings and tiny residential side streets that could function as a proper gateway up to West Rock. If it is preferred to keep that area natural and uninterrupted by development then do not develop the Brookside/Rockview site either.

Also, "more space" is not always a good thing. In fact, I would suggest it is usually a bad thing. A bedroom only needs room for a bed and a desk. The communal rooms of the house should have adequate space to fit the entire family, and so should outdoor enclosed space. The trend in American housing has been to shrink the semi-private outdoor space that faces the street and enlarge the private indoor space. This does awful things to the public realm and the neighborhood and should be immediately stopped. If more than one child is expected to sleep in a room, more room is appropriate but beds should still be bunked, children should be encouraged to be outside, where they learn much more than they would staying in a large bedroom watching tv.
There should also be a reason for people who don't live in the community to go up there. Possibly something connected to West Rock park, or a public building or an outdoor concept space could be part of the development that attracts outsiders for other reasons beside drugs.

Posted by: andrew garrow | November 5, 2009 10:02 PM

Norton Street, what side of the fence did you grow up on? what makes you think you know one GD thing about this issue?
Will the Hamden side get the next installment of this story? Not likely.
I grew up in the pine rock section of Hamden, without the fence the people who lived in those houses would have lost all value in their properties - value set by the market, nothing to do with the ideals and attitudes of the folks who actually lived in the area of question.
The City chose to put these lost folks on the frontier of the city. There is no logical reason to put these projects out there. there were no existing grocery stores, main streets, bus routes or any reason in hell other than the city of new haven put them as far away from the center as possible. just like we do our prisions (enfield and somers have the states toughest prisons and are on the extreme borders w/ mass.)
Don't blame Hamden for thise one. New Haven's past created an impossible situation, lets remember that.

Posted by: terrapin | November 6, 2009 8:48 AM

Hamden could have helped lessen the isolation of the Rockview Circle neighborhood by having the road connect through to Woodin Street. Instead it chose to go out of its way to send the message that residents of New Haven are not welcome when it reinforced the fence along Woodin Street, making it taller and removing the pedestrian pass throughs. Any negative impact of the project's proximity to the Hamden side of the neighborhood would still be there; fencing it off just sent the message that Hamden perceives itself to be another whitebread suburb and that Hamden just views New Haven as a place to push its lower income residents into.

I live in southern Hamden, off Dixwell Avenue. Our end of town works a lot better the way it is (small shops/restaurants/retail); having the towns mesh together along the border than it ever would if we took the Woodin Street model and tried to wall off the city.

Posted by: bob solomon | November 6, 2009 4:05 PM

Some of the discussion is based on the notion that the City or the Housing Authority developed West Rock as a whole, but that's not what happened. There are four sites, and they developed in different ways:
1. Rockview was federally funded, and opened in 1952, so it was, from the beginning, owned by the Housing Authority as low-income housing. The location was based on the availability of free land - the City owned the site because it had been used in earlier days as New Haven's alms house, after the previous alms house site became incorporated into Edgewood Park. At the time Rockview opened, the feds stated that the road would be cut through to Woodin Avenue when mandated by increased vehicular traffic. However, there was a private exchange of letters with Hamden, stating that the road would not be cut through if Hamden objected. The fences came later.
2. Brookside, which was 50% larger than Rockview, was built with State funding as moderate income housing. The Housing Authority was not involved in its building or management, until it failed and, after foreclosure, was transferred to the Housing Authority.
3. Westville Manor was built as a replacement for Oriental Masonic Gardens, which was privately built, owned, and managed. The Housing Authority received OMG (first time I ever noticed the initials) after foreclosure, and then Westville Manor after construction. For a great description of OMG, check out Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House."
4. Ribicoff - the cottages came later, and were unoccupied into the 1980's, with all kinds of structural problems from the beginning.

Posted by: Norton Street | November 6, 2009 5:56 PM

Bob Solomon,
Thanks for the info. I did not realize Brookside was originally privately owned. And pretty much all public housing projects in this country that were built prior to about 1960 had some middle class residents at some point of all different ethnicity.

Andrew Garrow,
I have posted many times on various articles about the awful placement of the West Rock housing projects. However, I understand the reasons for doing so. New Haven demolished extensive stretches of dense urban environment for the construction of enormous scale buildings and roadways. Something like 20,000 residents were displaced during the urban renewal process. A trend had also emerged in America or taken large pieces of land that had been previously unbuilt such as farmland, forests fields, etc and developing sprawling housing pods. West Rock public housing is an example of this and so it the Pine Rock Neighborhood of Hamden. The thinking was that it was better to be out of the congestion of the city even if it meant being isolated from it.
"without the fence the people who lived in those houses would have lost all value in their properties"
The houses in the Pine Rock section already have no value. Pine Rock is a disorganized, cheap piece of crap. Nothing in the neighborhood has any worth at all. The houses were quickly and cheaply made, the roads are windy and disorienting, the sidewalks are non-existent, the services, retail, and civic spaces are no where to be found and any worth that the area supposedly has is artificial and imagined. If the housing situation in the US over the last couple years has told us anything, it is that the way we have been giving value to homes for the last 50 years is wrong and made up. The developers of the area purposefully made windy and curvy roads so that no good buildings had to be designed or constructed. Curvy roads is a trick people use to not have to make focal points in a neighborhood. Look at a corner house in New Haven. The corner house has the important job of grounding the block because it has two facades. Corner houses in Pine Rock are no different than middle of the road houses because Pine Rock sells a product to a consumer, it doesn't provide a public realm worthy of use. The place consists of private box next to private box repeated to death with nothing special, diverse or interesting.
The roads have to be connected so folks can get to Dixwell Avenue, not so they can connect to Pine Rock. I would never want to put a child through the awful experience of passing through a visually depressing, architecturally worthless and socially retarded place like Pine Rock except to allow them to get to Dixwell Ave. The neighborhood east of Pine Rock is a much more suitable dwelling place for humans; it is within walking distance to services, retail and transit. The streets are much more regular, understandable and pleasant.
Middle class people lived in public housing all the up until the 1960s. White families, hispanic families and black families all lived in Elm Haven, Quinnipiac Terrace, Farnam Court, all projects. It was affordable housing with more space than a lot of the old housing in the city. Families used it as a stepping stone to save up before buying a house. The problems came with the deindustrialization, decentralization, and the suburbanization of the country. Blacks migrating to the north in search of jobs found nothing because the factories were either moving to the suburbs or across the ocean. This began the current situation in public housing. The white families that were able to move out to the suburbs did so quickly, and the black families that had the money to move out were not sold homes in suburbia due to flat out racism. Places like Pine Rock make this country worse every day that it still exists.
Isolation, separation and disconnection are not a part of America, and anything that promotes that should be destroyed. That means both West Rock and Pine Rock, because they are way more similar than you think. But that's not going to happen, so in order to make both places better, they have to work together.
But really its not even worth discussing with you because you know nothing about public housing, nothing about the history of suburbia in America and are completely ignorant to anything relating to useful information. MANY OF THE HOUSES IN PINE ROCK WERE BUILT AFTER THE HOUSING PROJECTS!

Posted by: Ed DeJoliet | November 7, 2009 7:00 PM

It is wonderful that Esther is finally going to get the place she should have. Unfortunately, sometimes things happen more slowly than they ought.

Our sincere congratulations.

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Posted by: andrew garrow | November 8, 2009 5:16 PM

Norton Street. I guess that was a pretty backhanded way of saying you have no idea what it was like to grow up on EITHER side of that stupid fence. So many words, so little to say.

Posted by: Norton Street | November 8, 2009 9:44 PM

A good friend of mine lived with his brother and mother in Westville Manor up until just a few years ago. We went to the same school and over the years he told me many things about growing up in that particular area of the city, and it wasn't until recently that I was able to piece together what he had told me with larger issues that have been occurring since before either of us were born. We were also on the same bus for a few years and I told see him getting apprehensive as we got closer to his stop everyday; I would ask him every once in a while if he was alright and he would just say he didn't want to go home. He was able to get out through basketball; he now plays for a division 1 school.
So no I did not grow up there and I don't know what it is like to grow up there, but I get the general idea because of the experience my friend had in West Rock and because the conditions in Pine Rock are nearly identical to any other post WW2 suburban sprawl development.
There are no merits in defending a fence put in place to prevent poor blacks living in projects from lowering the price of a middle class single family home subdivision housing pod. And if that is not what you were implying and rather you feel that mulitfamily attached housing decreases the value of single family detached housing then not only is this backwards, regressive and shameful; it is flat out incorrect. I can list example after example until my keyboard breaks of places in this country where different housing types are integrated in a way that not only doesn't make the neighborhood unsuccessful but it drastically increases its worth. I will instead use just one example: my street. There is a mix of owner occupied 2 family houses, multifamily houses, rental houses, small apartment buildings, large apartment buildings, large single family houses and small single family houses all in varying styles, uses of material, price, and size. All these different elements are brought together by the uniformity of how the buildings interact with the street, the sidewalk, the front yard, the neighboring houses, the adjacent houses, cars and people. On my street, people are put first, and so the large front porches on nearly every building serve as a great permeable membrane where neighbors socialize informally at unplanned times, which greatly increases the connectivity of the street. Cars are put in the backs of houses on driveways or garages or side alleys in order to get them out of the way so people can enjoy their street. The cars that are parked on the road serve as a buffer to pedestrians that do not want to have to deal with noisy traffic. Streets trees also help shade the sidewalk, the street, and houses; they also create a pleasant vaulted sightline down the straight street. The corner houses often play with massing, detail and materiality in order to anchor the block and create good first impressions for people entering the street. All these different housing types are also organized in sensible ways. Now there are some problems; segregation does still exist, but on this street, housing can change, it can be subdivided to increase the rental units, it can be gutted and turned into less units, it can become something new to reflect the present. That type of flexibility is what helps make great neighborhoods.
What the new development for West Rock represents, is a chance to change the area. It is a perfect opportunity to create a small retail center in the new development. This could help increase the usefulness in Pine Rock, because if there were groceries, a hardware store, a pharmacy, etc within walking distance, the neighborhood would be more suitable for elderly and children. This would then help integrate the areas, rather than continue segregating them.

existing site:
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs066.snc3/13340_1168821775810_1085910074_30434841_2219240_n.jpg

idea for possible solution:
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs066.snc3/13340_1168821895813_1085910074_30434843_7854958_n.jpg

comparable view for proposed corner of Wilmot and Rock View Streets:
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs066.snc3/13340_1168832696083_1085910074_30434862_83220_n.jpg

comparable view for proposed Brookside Ave (south of Wayfarer):
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs066.snc3/13340_1168833056092_1085910074_30434863_3533251_n.jpg

comparable view of proposed Wilmot Street (near Willow):
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs046.snc3/13340_1168833616106_1085910074_30434871_5135692_n.jpg

comparable view of proposed Willow Place:
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs066.snc3/13340_1168834096118_1085910074_30434875_1708495_n.jpg

comparable view of proposed Fawn Hill Place or Thorpe Street:
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs066.snc3/13340_1168835616156_1085910074_30434881_8303451_n.jpg

Posted by: dmeth | December 7, 2009 9:37 AM

Does anyone remember that one of the reasons for the big fense is the fact that there were numerous break-ins and at least one-break-in and rape? The fense was put up to protect the Hamden residents on the south end. How come that is never mentioned?