Shovels were flying downtown Monday as New Haven defied a housing-driven recession by breaking ground on the state’s largest-ever apartment building.
The shovels were tools both real and symbolic.
Down in a huge hole below Chapel Street workers shoveled the foundation for a 30-odd-story (depending on who’s counting) residential and commercial tower at the Shartenberg site.
Did we say “Shartenberg”? Oops. That’s what people by habit still call the long-vacant stretch of Chapel Street between State and Orange that once housed the old Shartenberg department store, a symbol of New Haven’s halcyon pre-urban renewal retail past.
Now New Haven is being trained to call the lot “360 State.” That’s the name of the $180 million complex of 500 apartments and ground-level stores going up there.
And that was the name repeated throughout an official groundbreaking ceremony Monday morning, as officials donned hard hats and thrust shovels into a symbolic mound of dirt overlooking the foundation pit at street level. Pictured at top: city Economic Development Administrator Kelly Murphy, who negotiated the deal for the project, and developer Bruce Becker.
The symbolic shovelers heralded a future vision for downtown. It’s a downtown populated by medical and university-connected renters who rely on their feet and mass transit rather than cars, buy organic groceries downstairs from their $1,000-to-$5,000-a-month apartments, and help save the planet by living in a green building.
The sunlight-bathed ceremony also offered a ray of hope for a city in the midst of wrenching economic news, from restaurant and store closings to layoffs at longtime large-scale employers. Starting on the block where 360 State is rising, surviving small-business owners are watching shrinking receipts with trepidation.
Developer Becker (pictured, of the firm Becker + Becker) announced that preliminary work is going faster than expected. He predicted that 360 State will open to the public in the summer of 2010, rather than the originally scheduled fall date. Planners claim 360 State will create 1,200 construction jobs, 492 permanent jobs, and hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenues for the city.
Becker said he’s not daunted by the recession. Even when seeking to rent apartments ranging from $1,200 to $1,500 a month for studios to $4,000 to $5,000 a month for three-bedrooms with “huge terraces facing the Green.”
“People are paying that in today’s market,” Becker said. “There’s no vacancy at all for the better buildings here downtown,” such as the Eli on Church Street.
And tomorrow’s market looks brighter, both Becker and Mayor John DeStefano argued: Yale-New Haven is building its 490,000 square-foot cancer center six blocks away. Nearby ancillary office and retail projects on Park Street and on “Lot E“ total another 600,000 square feet. Yale University is growing, too, with new social sciences and forestry school buildings under construction. Two new residential colleges and a biology building are next on tap.
That’s why, Becker and DeStefano said, New Haven can put shovels in the ground at 360 State when a deep freeze has stymied development elsewhere in the country.
Becker said he also benefits from the nature of his project’s main financing. He’s not borrowing the money. Most of his financing comes from an equity fund, the Multi-Employer Property Trust, reliant on union pension money. The Multi-Employer Property Trust is comfortable with long-term investments in projects that create union jobs (and thus send more money back into the pension funds).
It also supports the environmental thrust behind 360 State. The project is a pilot for the LEED Program for Neighborhood Development. It will cut energy use by an estimated 35 percent through efficiency measures and rely on “photovoltaic arrays, recycled and local materials and a fuel cell,” according to a release. “It will be the first LEED Silver residential project in Connecticut.”
A crowd of movers and shakers attended the event, including the Office of Economic Development’s Chrissy Bonanno and housing authority chief Karen DuBois-Walton (pictured). Who else showed up? Click here for Tom Ficklin’s photo album to see.
Cool. Now how about a grocery within walking distance of Downtown?