Farnam Redevelopment Breaks Ground

Brenda Harris is so eager to move from the Farnam Courts Townhouses, she decided to help matters along by shoveling a little dirt on the site of her next home.

Wednesday morning Harris — longtime head of tenants’ residence council at the development on the long-troubled and aging Grand Avenue public-house development — joined officials, architects, builders, and funders at a festive groundbreaking on the eastern edge of town for for the first phase of the redevelopment of a Farnam Courts rebuilding plan.

The ground she helped break is over on Eastview Terrace, an existing Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) development with 240 families.

If as planned work is done by next November, Harris will be among 25 new families moving into 25 new homes there, one of two off-site locations for families being cleared out, for now, of Farnam Courts.

HANH is preparing the two off-site batches of new homes so Farnam families can move out of their existing apartments at the Grand Avenue development, which the authority will then raze and rebuild in phases as a denser, greener, mixed-use complex.

About 32 more families will move from Farnam over to a second ​“off site” location in Fair Haven. That land is currently being prepared by the tearing down of the old Cott bottling plant on Chatham Street from Ferry to Rowe(pictured).

Then work will proceed on the Farnam site itself, done in quadrants while remaining families move from one portion of the complex to another.

The total project is to cost $100 million, $30 million of which goes toward the two off-site locations.

The complex array of funding sources includes state and federal grants, bank loans, tax credits, $6.5 million from HANH’s own exchequer, along with $8 million from the city’s capital funds to pay for new infrastructure at the Eastview Terrace site.

HANH Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton (at right in photo) described the sprawling project, which spans three alder districts, as ​“the beginning of a new era of affordable housing in Fair Haven.”

Harris and other Farnam tenants have been involved in the design of the project. She said she loves what she has seen thus far: ​“I can’t wait. The sooner the better.”

The 25 units at Eastview Terrace will be designed by architect Ken Boroson and look pretty much the same as the modest two-family townhouses that currently dot the sloping hillsides at the base of Bella Vista.

Boroson built the Eastview Terrace townhouses currently at the location and other projects in Fair Haven including the Clinton Avenue School addition and restoration.

The 30 units at the old Cott bottling plant site are to be designed by Fair Haven-based architect Regina Winter and will feature retail and office space on the ground floor, with family-style residences above.

Meanwhile, over at the Farnam site itself on Grand Avenue (pictured), plans call for mixed use on the street levels, with taller, denser buildings on the avenue, backing into a greener space in the center and smaller-scale buildings receding around a grid of walkways designed for community interaction and easier policing.

Click here for a fuller picture of the development’s plans, which have evolved over the last three years.

In total, according to documents distributed by HANH, when all the phases of Farnam are complete, the three locations of the Fair Haven redevelopment will create 59,000 square feet of commercial space, as well as a new park and community center, the latter two to be features of the Farnam main site.