Neena Satija Photo
Christine Hoff, one of the students who designed the new “minimalist” house.
Just hours after architecture students gathered for a swanky reception to celebrate a cutting-edge “minimalist” house they built on Orchard Street, bullets sprayed out the window of a passing car into the home next door.
The juxtaposition of events highlighted the challenge of reviving historic but crime-plagued neighborhoods — in this case on Orchard Street, where Neighborhood Housing Services is trying to sell a new home in a tough area next to a rundown three-family home with a history of problems.
The shooting took place around 9 p.m. Monday, according to Lt. Ray Hassett, the top cop in the Dwight/Kensington neighborhood. He said police got reports that someone in a passing car fired six bullets at 452 Orchard St.
That house is right next door to the latest home built by students at the Yale School of Architecture.
The house at 452 Orchard “has historically had problems,” Hassett said.
When officers inspected the bullet-ridden house Monday night, “it was hard to tell what was old damage and what was new damage, actually,” Hassett said.
At the corner of Elm and Orchard Monday night, a crowd of 15 kids and adults stood on the sidewalk about an hour after the reported shooting. A police car blocked the entrance to Orchard Street as another one circled the block.
The house sits adjacent to a brand-new home at 456 Orchard St., which first-year Yale architecture students competed to design last year. The whole architecture school Class of 2013 spent the summer building it as part of a yearly endeavor called the Vlock Building Project.
Three hours before the shooting next door, bartenders in the backyard of 456 Orchard served wine and soft drinks behind tables, and servers went up and down the stairs offering hors d’oeuvres to visitors as they toured the house.
Since the project’s inception in 1967, the homes have met a mixed reaction in the neighborhoods in which students build them. The projects have received acclaim for their inventive designs and for enabling working families to help stabilize neighborhoods. But sometimes the move-ins have proved difficult. In 1993, Latino owners moving into a Yale Building Project house on Newhall Street, in a largely African-American neighborhood, found their home vandalized shortly after moving in. An Indian family that bought the 2006 home on Henry Street, also in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, told the Independent that shortly after moving in this summer, they suffered a series of nighttime attacks. Read more about the program here.
The Orchard Street spot was chosen by Neighborhood Housing Services, the not-for-profit agency that is partnering with Yale on the project. NHS Director Jim Paley said NHS chose 456 Orchard because it already owned the tax liens for the property and was doing some work on nearby houses. The agency likes to build new homes in concentrated areas to increase the chances of success in revitalizing the surroundings.
After Monday’s shooting, Paley said he hopes the city and police will get to the bottom of what’s happening at 450 Orchard before he sells the neighboring property.
“We don’t want to put a new homebuyer in any kind of physical danger because of what’s going on next door,” said Paley.
The property will go to a tenant earning at or below 80 percent of the area median income. For a family of four that would be $64,200.
The last few Yale Building Project houses were in the Hill neighborhood. Orchard Street represents new territory for the project.
“It’s great to move into a new community” this time, said Christine Hoff, a member of the winning team who designed the house.
“There have been so many families who have come in and said, ‘How much is it? We want to buy it,’” she said.
“The yard is an extension of the living room space,” said Hoff.
From the outside, the house at 456 Orchard looks pretty small. But it’s actually quite spacious, with three floors as well as a basement. Hoff said her team tried to be as efficient with space as possible. They called themselves “Team Mnml” — even abbreviating the word “minimal” to drive home the point.
Another example of the house’s “minimal” characteristics is its skewed roof, said Hoff. Instead of having a traditional “pitched” roof, the students allowed for some attic space as well as some higher ceilings for rooms on the top floor.
The house stands in stark contrast to its neighbor, a dilapidated red wooden three-family building with a backyard full of trash. Land records show the home is owned by Janet Dawson. Last June, the New Haven Advocate reported that Dawson was among several landlords facing over 100 foreclosure lawsuits after having bought up cheap properties during the foreclosure crisis.
Dawson’s holdings were overseen by Apple Management until the company dissolved in 2009. The name is still fresh in city officials’ minds as a problem landlord. Dawson could not be reached for this story.
One of the tenants of 452 Orchard stood outside her house Tuesday afternoon as kids flowed in and out of the front door. She doesn’t know who shot at her house Monday night, or why, she said, but she’s worried about her safety.
In recent months, “somebody got shot right there,” said the tenant, pointing a few feet away, who only identified herself as Jennifer. “And right there, and right there.”
After spotting the rundown house at Monday’s ceremony, Mayor John DeStefano made a note to follow up.
DeStefano said he peeked next door and found it to be “badly maintained.” He saw debris and abandoned cars in the rear yard — far in excess of what’s normally found in city neighborhoods, he said. After talking to the people who live there, he made a note in his Blackberry to have the Livable City Initiative, the city’s anti-blight agency, follow up with code enforcement.
“We are cautiously optimistic that the city will be acting swiftly to remove this problem in this house right next door to our house,” said Paley.
Great work by these students! I'm really excited to see this type of contribution to the city.
As a city, we need to support their work, by helping to provide stable jobs for the people who live in this neighborhood, and by providing an effective community police force that engages and works with the neighbors.
We need to drastically overhaul our zoning codes, re-focus economic development on a block-by-block renewal program that encourages small businesses to come back to these neighborhoods, and completely re-design the streets so that they are safe, sane, and walker-centric.
We need to stop blowing our budget on large, flash-in-the-pan projects that increase suburban moves, and tackle the basic building blocks of our city.
How lucky we are to have the help of Yale and other partners in doing this. Let us do our part now.