nothin Builder: I’m Outta Here | New Haven Independent

Builder: I’m Outta Here

David Yaffe-Bellany Photos

Salvatore prepares to exit.

Holmes: Please stay.

Protesting that New Haven’s political leadership had betrayed” him, a developer looking to build hundreds of new apartments and offices in New Haven stormed out of City Hall Wednesday night — and, he said, out of doing business in the city, period.

The developer, Randy Salvatore, was fuming as he raced from a joint meeting of the Board of Alders’ Community Development and Legislation committees that he had expected to go his way.

The meeting was held to vote on a series of proposals to enable Salvatore to build apartments, stores, offices and research space on 20 acres of largely fallow land in the Hill neighborhood.

Salvatore and political leaders spent months negotiating a compromise plan to allow the project to go through. And both sides thought they had a deal worked out before Wednesday’s meeting.

Then, on Wednesday night, the committees voted to approve almost all the legislative proposals needed to advance the project — except one. The alders voted against changing the zoning on a vacant lot next to the Tower One/Tower East senior complex to enable Salvatore to build not just housing but lab space or other commercial buildings on it as well.

After the vote, at 8:30 p.m., Salvatore stood up and dashed out of the room.

And, he said later, he has walked out of doing business in New Haven for good. He has already built a luxury apartment complex called the Novella at Chapel and York Streets. Besides the Hill project, he had considered converting a Wooster Square factory into apartments and eyed other properties too.

No more.

Moreover, he predicted, Wednesday night’s vote will send a clear signal” to other developers to stay out of New Haven.

He said that even though the vacant lot is only one of more than a dozen land parcels covered by the project, the zoning change was essential to making the whole deal work. So he won’t move forward without it.

I feel betrayed,” he said in an interview.

The deal is dead. I followed the advice of the leadership [of the Board of Alders] — and they misled me. I got calls from every one of them. They begged me to stay in” the deal.

I have no desire to do anything further [in New Haven],” he added. This sends a message to the development community that New Haven is not development friendly.”

The surprise apparent collapse of the deal is a setback not just for the Hill, but for New Haven, said city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson. His team had cultivated Salvatore as a new developer ready to invest millions of dollars in mixed-use developments around town at a time of low interest rates and high investor interest.

We need to figure out what’s going on quickly,” Nemerson said after the vote, or this goose will die and New Haven will have no more — or fewer —golden eggs.”

(Update: On Thursday Salvatore emailed Livable City Initiative Director Serena-Neal Sanjurjo reiterating the he will not attend any more ridiculous” heaerings or consider any more alterations to his plan. He said he would reconsider” his departure from the project only if Wednesday’s vote is undone and the entire proposal is passed into law as it had been presented to the committees. Here is the full text of his note.)

Tower One Switches Sides

Garelli testifying at the hearing.

The alders had put the project on hold months ago and asked Salvatore to work with members of St. Anthony’s Church and a neighborhood group, the Hill to Downtown South Steering Committee, to revise his plans to accommodate their concerns. He did. That’s the version of the project that came before the alders Wednesday night.

But then Mark Garilli, the president and C.E.O. of Tower One/Tower East, spoke up. He had previously supported the plan. Then he testified Wednesday night against the new version, saying that residents are concerned with being surrounded by traffic” that could cut them off from vital emergency services

Salvatore’s plan called for all the land in question — known as Parcel 11,” next to Tower One/Tower East — to be rezoned from a BA to a BD‑3 district, accommodating taller buildings (up to 70 feet) and denser development with a wider mix of uses, like apartments and offices and labs.

New Haven Urban League President Anstress Farwell, who also testified at the hearing, told the Independent that turning Parcel 11 into a BD‑3 district would increase activity in the area, potentially jeopardizing the safety of elderly residents.

These people are literally being put between a rock and a hard place — a highway on one side and very intense activity on the other side,” she said. It would be a possible safety issue, and visually incongruous.”

Alders said Salvatore has misinterpreted what happened Wednesday night and that they do want him to build the project. Their approval of the rest of his plan now advances to the full Board of Alders for a final vote, and the Parcel 11 issue can be negotiated in the meantime.

Legislation Committee Chair Jessica Holmes cast Wednesday’s votes as a sign of support for the project, noting the committee’s progress” in passing most of the proposals.

I hope that he will continue to work with the city,” she told the Independent after the meeting. There’s a lot of effort that went into this. The door is still open.”

Holmes added that she had concerns about rushing” to rezone parcel 11 without knowing more about long-term plans for developing the area, including Church Street South. She said she hadn’t seen the vote not to rezone the parcel as a deal-breaker.

Sometimes the pressure of the process, it doesn’t make it easy to go back and forth. Once you’re in the chamber and it’s time to vote, there isn’t a really good chance to say, for instance in this case, We had not heard anything concrete from the developer regarding plans for that parcel,’” she said. So it didn’t seem like a high-stakes decision to postpone a rezoning of that parcel.”

In testimony prior to the vote, Salvatore said he does not have specific plans for the process and would work with Tower One residents to come up with one if the alders approved the rezoning. 

Underlying the debate was a larger concern among some alders: how changing the zoning on that lot next to Tower One will affect other building plans in the area. The slot sits next to the Church Street South housing complex, which is being demolished with plans for a new 1,000-unit, mixed-use, mixed-income development to take its place. Yale-New Haven Hospital is known to be looking for potential new space for doctor’s offices and other medical facilities. The Yale union-backed Board of Alders majority has taken steps to maintain control over the course of development in the neighborhood to factor in the parking needs of neighbors, traffic concerns, and the future of union jobs at Yale’s medical school and the hospital.

Stop and Start

Paul Bass Photo

Nemerson, (pictured at a prior hearing on the project): This is bad.

Wednesday night’s events represented a setback in an almost three-decade quest to build on a stretch of the Hill that was decimated by urban renewal a half-century ago. Previous developers have failed to obtain the financing to build on what are largely surface lots.

Salvatore came into the picture last year with a plan to build 140 apartments, 7,000 square feet of stores, 120,000 square feet of research space, and 50,000 square feet of offices in the area.

He struck a deal with the city, which called for making 10 percent of that housing affordable.” (The definition of affordable varies with the funding source.) Alders held up the deal and tossed it back to the Hill-to-Downtown Committee to get more neighborhood input. That committee recommended upping the amount of affordable housing to 30 percent.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the Legislation and Community Development Committees voted to approve an amended land-share agreement that incorporated the Hill-to-Downtown recommendations — despite an administrative error that prevented most of the alders from seeing the most up-to-date version of the document.

The proposed project area.

The full Board of Alders is scheduled to vote on the deal on Aug. 1. On Wednesday night, the committee agreed to wait until the later meeting to propose amendments to the deal so that the alders have time to review the document in its entirety.

But the issue that came to dominate the hearing — the zoning of parcel 11 — was not included in the Hill-to-Downtown recommendations for the land-share agreement. It was covered by a separate agenda item concerning the zoning map for Salvatore’s project.

In his testimony, Salvatore said he spoke to Garelli at an earlier stage in the process and got the impression that his proposal satisfied the needs of the Tower One residents.

I’m a little puzzled by some of the comments tonight,” he said. But that’s the democratic process.”

Afterwards, city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson rued the apparent collapse of the deal. He and his staff have worked on it for years, resurrecting a long-dead effort to revive a barren stretch of a potentially reviving neighborhood. His predecessors had tried to get a project going there since the late 1980s.

The outcome frustrated him, given all the work involved in bringing in a new developer, Salvatore, to join the properties’ owner as a partner, and then holding many meetings with alders and neighborhood groups to reach a compromise he thought everyone could support.

After 27 years of waiting to complete this deal, we just spent two and a half years working with the legacy owners of these building rights, all aspects of the community and perhaps our most enthusiastic outside developer to create five potential tech and housing sites that could bring over $250 million of new investment and a home for many hundreds of new high-quality jobs to our city. Then after a huge last-minute disappointment, something unexpected happens to scuttle the deal at the very last minute,” Nemerson said.

He speculated on the larger reasons, ending with a tongue-in-cheek theory: You have to think that maybe someone or some group just doesn’t want really great market-based economic developments to happen in the Hill or maybe the whole city. Perhaps enemy forces from Worcester or Morristown afraid of our growth have infiltrated us.”

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