So Long ​“Heights On River.” Hello, Mandy

Why does Oliver care how big the units are? Unless he is going to live in them, he should not, not should anyone else. Minimum unit sizes just drive up housing costs. Overall, a big loss for the city. Absent the obstructionists, this project would be on the Grand List now with its residents supporting local commerce.

Shame on the historic commission, bad New Haven zoning rules and local NIMBY's for costing us this excellent project. We are not better off, in any way, with the existing buildings under Mandy Management. Killing off this project means that other developers with good ideas won't even try.

The requirement for 1,000 sq foot apartments comes out of a racist mid 20th century movement to find something a little less openly racist to replace existing policies like redlining, racially restrictive covenants and open discrimination. The idea is to make it unaffordable for "undesirables" to move into the neighborhoods of better-off white people. NIMBYs are almost explicit about this when they defend the "character" of a neighborhood that can't be allowed to change. Whether it is 2-acre minimum lot sizes in Weston, CT or 1,000 sq foot apartments in New Haven, the idea has always been the same. Exclusion.

Historic commissions, by working so hard to drive up the cost of development, demanding costly materials and repeated redesigns, can have a similar effect in denying housing for humans.

Once again, New Haven stands in its own way. Do these city bodies realize how often they shoot themselves in the foot!? And now the properties are in Mandy's hands... so it's pretty much an all-lose situation. Bravo.

We cannot have new or transient residents in a college town!

The activists blew it again!

The previous design had it's flaws, but now the neighborhood is doomed for the slipshod.
(it doesn't help anybody's property values)

How sad. Another opportunity to grow the Grand List and chip away at city tax increases is squashed.

While I understand the need to have buildings be compatible in style and scale of the neighborhood, and to make sure the materials used are not cheap, shoddy stuff that won't hold up over time, it seems like the current regulations need to be adjusted so they aren't so prohibitive for thoughtful development. New Haven needs to rethink how much they want to discourage developers with vision if the end result is losing those developments to mega landlords like Mandy who will have a stranglehold on the rental market if the city doesn't do something quick to limit the monopoly of properties the mega landlords are obtaining.

Welcome to planet earth user Esbey who discovered "exclusion" in 2020.

Perhaps you could pick a bigger battle to fight in Beverly Hills or in Manhattan where exclusion happens at large scale, transcendent race and is very much out in the open and in your face.

You think Weston CT will build housing for low income whites in their town? Yeah..

Yeah-- how dare the area residents try to have a say about building and consider nasty old history and the silly environment!!!!! Let a real slumlord show ya how it's done!! Can't wait to see it !!!

How do we stop these Monopoly groups from buying up our city?

Higher Taxes for property owners who own more than ten units?

Live-In preference first?

This is getting out of hand.

MANDY / PIKE and the like, please leave a little for the rest of us.

[quote]
Why does Oliver care how big the units are? Unless he is going to live in them, he should not, not should anyone else. Minimum unit sizes just drive up housing costs. Overall, a big loss for the city.
[/quote]

I don't usually agree with "1644," but this is very on point.

I'll also add that in my opinion the number one barrier to brick-and-mortar development in New Haven is the [b] lack of clarity on requirements & process. [/b] I haven't dealt with the Historic Commission specifically, but based on this article it sounds a lot like experiences I've had with other departments.

Problems include:

• The department itself decides the scope of its own oversight (this should be done by a third party)
  
• The department fails to clarify the steps in the approval process (what is the process itself?)
  
• The department fails to specify its requirements (what exactly needs to be achieved to get the green light for this project?)
  
• The department changes its mind or adds requirements partway through (cost estimates are impossible)
  
• The department makes up its own rules, deviating from the applicable laws/codes
  
• The department fails to furnish a reason for denials
  
• The department relies exclusively on oral communications (allowing them to get away with all of the above)
  
  So you get sad situations like this, where well-meaning people get strung along an ever-changing process with no clear requirements or finish line, and after investing a lot of time and resources they eventually have to give up. If they don't, it's a huge gamble because they have no idea what new requirement the city is going to dump on them next.
  
  Here's just one example -- of many -- from an actual conversations I've had:
  
• Building Inspector: "This is a left-hand door. You need a right-hand door here for ADA reasons."
  
• Me: "But you approved the plans, with a left-hand door."
  
• Building Inspector: "Well, you need a right-hand door now." (Cost of a fire door: $900)

I don't know about the future of New Haven. Mandy Mgmt is not only a mega landlord, they have been proven to be a mega slumlord doing a poor job maintaining property while building great wealth with their rental fees.

.....Mandy is a slumlord, as is PIKE and others/ Where is the City to enforce building, health codes??
A building has to be literally ready to fall down before Bldg Code gets to it. The only thing that gets done on time is the tax increases and the mailing of the tax bills. No lag time there!!!

I look forward to the day when Mandy helps NH be the slum is has always really wanted to be-- a kind of manorial village with a rich center (Yale) and the rest is slums for the peasants and serfs to live in. This is what the powers that be want or they would do something about it.

Mayor Elicker,

You inherited a lot of incompetent employees. Some are nice people, some are lazy bureaucrats that stuck around long enough to get promoted to where they are now. Either way -Get rid of them. Many important positions in your administration are filled with people who do not have the ability to do what needs to be done. This article gives some good examples. Please reassess.

Count me in as a fan of the HDC and Commissioners who know how to read and enforce an Ordinance.
Considering the long list of Boards and Commissions, not to mention City agencies, that are mediocre to totally ineffectual, here is one of the premier Commissions, whose members (mostly) have outstanding credentials, who bent over backwards to help Heights Development comply with the requirements of an Historic District - and they repeatedly get slammed on the pages of the NHI.
I've already detailed (more than once), what the neighbors found deficient in both the design and the lack of quality in this shoddy project. The developers abandoned it when they realized it would cost more money to do a quality project than a shabby one.
Those of us who live in the Heights are most familiar with the details. We know how many meetings and conversations we had with the developers and found they wouldn't budge on anything.
But that should not slow down anyone who wants to have an opinion on a concept drawing (as opposed to the actual plan) or its value to anyone beyond the developer's own bank balance.

Patricia, you do highlight one of the great tragedies here, which is that the members of the commission are truly talented and sincere people whose hard work does so much damage to the city. You act like the profits of the developer would be the only benefit of the project, ignoring the actual human beings who would want to live there, to join that community, who are now denied. You ignore the tax money that could have hired teachers, trained workers.

The actual human lives, the actual economic benefit, none of this matters but only the absence of a perceived "shoddiness" that can only be fixed with fake-historical materials and design intended to fool a naive passerby into thinking that a new building is old. Materials over people, fake over real.

And of course in the end we don't even get the fancy fake-historic design, but rather buildings operated by a semi-slumlord. That is the factual effect of all your revered commission members' hard work.

Classic example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Good luck with dealing with and negotiating with Mandy once they decide to do something with property that's just sitting and rotting away.

Someone needs to rein in any power this group has or heavily restructure it. It's destructive for the neighborhood and whole city. We are not some tiny historic town where a handful of people should be deciding major economic decisions.

@Esbey: You need to review the entire story before you make such a sweeping judgment.
Juan Salas and Heights Development wanted to build something cheap and ugly that would be a slum in 5 years.
The neighborhood had a victory. I live here, so I know.
We will not allow a neighborhood with history and amazing architecture to go down without a fight.

Esbey, there are many aspects of land use policy that are racist, going back to redlining and restrictive covenants. But I think the impetus for the 1,000 gross square feet minimum is an outdated understanding of demographics. The minimum makes sense for the two adult, two kids household of the Leave It To Beaver era. But the average household in the area is a bit more than two people (2.4 persons) and nearly 30% of households consist of one person living alone.

What a shame.

I'll never understand the value of a historic district's arbitrary rules to development. What try to freeze development into one particular point in time?

Stephen Harris: I would agree in the case of Wooster Square, which already has examples from Federal to mid-century modern. Why should new construction not be allowed to represent our time?

WakeUpNewHayHay. municipalities only have the powers the state grants them. This is particularly true with regard to taxation, where municipalities must act in "strict conformity" to the tax statutes (see Pepin v. Danbury (171 Conn. 74 (1976)). The tax statutes do not allow a municipality to distinguish between large- and small-scale landlords or between owner-occupied and other apartment buildings. In addition, it would be easy for a large landlord to evade your first proposal by creating separate LLCs for each property it owns (this is already common practice).

I understand why people living in historic districts want new developments to be contextual (I live in national historic district.) But the Historic District Commission routinely engages in pettfoggery, which among other things exacerbates the city's lack of affordable housing.

Patricia, have you considered why local historic districts include only a tiny fraction of the city's 19th and early 20th Century neighborhoods? As you know, the process for creating a local district is (intentionally) complicated. But I would suggest the way the HDC handles proposed building modifications and new developments is a major reason for the lack of interest in creating new local districts.

The HDC is doing the job it is supposed to do.
New Haven is in danger of looking like Stamford, CT - a soulless bunch of corporate headquarters, devoid of any human scale or architectural merit, that empties out at night and leaves a bit of a ghost town behind.
Stamford destroyed its architecture in the name of Urban Renewal.
Now instead of a place where Jackie Robinson chose to live, it a place of overpriced high rise apartments for commuters who don't have the time to invest in local government.

The Historic District Commission is very important and should remain intact. The Friends of Dwight Historic District reached out to the HDC for guidance and help to prevent the destruction of 2 historic homes in Dwight that were very important to New Haven African American history.
The HDC provided a letter confirming the importance of these buildings. I was at the HDC meeting and they made suggestions to help them. I believe the developer just did not have the ability and/or cash to do the project properly. It is important to have an independent group that preservations can go to when the City Of New Haven messes up. What city plan needs is a preservation planner to guide developers, homeowners as to what is appropriate in both local and national historic districts.

Olympia, the issue is not whether the HDC should continue to exist. Ironically, the law (CGS Sec.7-147a et seq.) specifies how commissions and local districts are formed but does not provide for their termination.

You're right that City Plan would benefit from having a staffer with a background in preservation to guide developers and homeowners. But with regard to local districts, the HDC's role is regulatory, not advisory. The HDC does not merely prevent developments that are inconsistent with their neighboring buildings. As Stephen Harris notes, they seek to freeze development at this one particular point in time.

The purpose of a Historic District Commission is to preserve historic buildings, not to create a fake Hollywood movie set for a film about some historic event. Consequently that Commission should have no input whatsoever on new construction. My personal experience over the years has been that they would do well to focus on preservation, which currently is inconsistent. I recall one instance in a historic district near my house where the owner wished to add inappropriate 'winged dormers' to the 'Button House' (originally owned by the person who had been a central player in the "Natural Growthers" oystering controversy in the late 19th century). I wrote an brief essay on why the request should be denied--which it was. I then was blasted by the owner that I had no business raising an objection because I don't pay his taxes. Of course, ANYONE can comment on changes proposed in a local historic district. So the owner simply waited a few years for the Commission's membership to change, resubmitted his request--and it was granted. So now that once historic street-scape is permanently besmirched--with the Historic District Commission's blessings. Additionally, I have observed that enforcement of local historic district regulations--specifically that one may not make alterations visible from the street without approval--is spotty at best. Ideally there should be annual inspections of a district's properties, comparing them to a photo database made at the time of the district's creation, to ensure compliance. Instead, my impression is that the Commission only intervenes if neighbors complain. The Commission is supposed to be following the national Historic Preservation Standards, yet my impression is that they are not even aware of the existence of these Standards: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/historicpreservation/standards.htm