Thomas Breen photos
At 201 Munson's ceremonial groundbreaking.
Local contractor and Newhallville native Rodney Williams.
A dozen New York City-based developers, investors, and local city officials dug in and tossed ceremonial shovels full of dirt — as a team of hard-hatted construction workers behind them continued transforming a 13-acre former contaminated industrial site into 398 new places to live.
That was the scene Wednesday morning at the official groundbreaking for 201 Munson St.
The event marked the ceremonial start for a years-old development project at the old Olin Chemical Company site that in recent months has become a bustling hub of environmental remediation and early-stage construction.
In the next 18 months, the New York City-based construction firm Hudson Meridian plans to have built a new six-story, 377-unit apartment complex, 21 new townhouses along Munson Street, 474 surface and garage parking spaces, and a green expanse of lawn sloping up in the direction of Shelton Avenue.
The work on display Wednesday of the construction of the Munson Street townhouses, the building out of the apartment complex’s concrete foundation, and the prepping to cap the last of the site’s lead-contaminated soil all served as a backdrop for a celebration of a project that has been long delayed finally nearing fruition.
Paredim Partners' David Parisier and Hudson Meridian's Bill Cote.
“In March 2020, we were ready to close a loan and the bank put it on hold for Covid,” Hudson Meridian Principal Bill Cote said. “There wasn’t a lot of lending going on for a couple years.” He thanked the project’s lead financers, ACORE Capital and Sculptor Real Estate, which provided the developer with a $78 million loan in May, for “believing in this project in New Haven.”
Cote also singled out for praise local construction contractor and Newhallville native Rodney Williams for helping make this project a reality.
“We’ve owned the property for over four years. We were introduced by the previous owners to a gentleman by the name of Rodney Williams,” Cote said. “Rodney helped our development team navigate New Haven and work with the community. … Rodney, thank you for everything you’ve done.”
Mayor Elicker.
Mayor Justin Elicker marveled at how “remarkable” it is that a site that has been “underutilized” for so long is now finally on the brink of providing 398 more apartments.
“We talk a lot about affordable housing and how affordable housing is so important,” Elicker said. “While technically there are no affordable units as a part of this project, I think that having many, many more units in the marketplace naturally will help alleviate some of the pressure of the prices around housing.” (After the press conference, Cote confirmed for the Independent that, while the developer is not legally required to set aside any of the 398 future apartments at below-market rents, his team has committed to making 10 percent of the new housing units affordable to renters making up to 80 percent of the area median income [AMI].)
Ex-Alder, current climate czar, Steve Winter.
Steve Winter, who now works as the city’s climate and sustainability director but who up until Friday was the alder for the ward that includes 201 Munson, described the “tremendous amount of remediation that had to be done with this project.”
“I hope that this and the other developments in the greater Winchester-Science Park area can really knit together the various neighborhoods around Science Park,” he added. And, he said, he’s excited “to see this huge, 13-acre underutilized tract being put to much better use.”
Rodney Williams.
After the press conference had ended and the dirt had been ceremonially shoveled, local construction contractor Rodney Williams pulled this reporter aside to emphasize just how big of a deal this project is for the city — and just how much of a reminder it is that New Haven needs to invest in a skilled workforce.
He lamented that the city’s current laws around developers hiring local, minority- and women-owned businesses only go so far if New Haven doesn’t double down on making sure city residents have the skills and experience to work on huge projects like 201 Munson.
“The lack of skilled workers in this city is a problem,” he said.
Good jobs that New Haveners are ready to fill will allow city residents to live where they want to live, he said. “We’re creating affordable housing,” he said, “but we’re not training” people to be able to afford to live where they want. Williams told the Independent that his firm recently had four New Haveners working security on the 201 Munson St. site, and he’s in negotiations around doing some of the drywall work for the townhomes.
Steve Calicchio, who is Hudson Meridian’s project executive for 201 Munson, said that there are currently around 80 construction workers working at the development site. At the height of construction in the months ahead, he said, there should be between 200 and 300 construction workers on site at any given time.
Aaron Goode.
Aaron Goode, who founded a group called the New Haven Friends of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail, also provided the Independent on Wednesday with comments he had prepared to give as one of the scheduled speakers on the press conference lineup.
“Residents of 201 Munson will be able to literally roll out of bed, hop on a bike, get on the trail and be at Yale or downtown New Haven in less than 5 minutes; or in the other direction, ride 80 miles all the way to Massachusetts without ever having to go on a roadway or navigate a single block of traffic,” he wrote about the canal trail that runs directly adjacent to the construction site. “We think that is a pretty special amenity to offer residents that is unique to this particular place. It’s exactly the kind of amenity that millennials and many other people are looking for as they seek out opportunities for urban living.
“Revitalizing a brownfield site, hiring local workers, leveraging the trail as an asset, with projects like this the future is bright,” Goode continued. “The Farmington Canal Trail is already the crown jewel of the bicycle pedestrian network in Connecticut, it is already one of the greatest rail trails in the country, but with new businesses, new development springing up around the trail practically every day, with new neighbors and new users drawn from right here on Munson Street in historic Newhallville, we know the best is yet to come. Thank you for being here, thank you to everyone who has worked on this project and helped to fulfill our long term vision of the trail as an instrument of growth and opportunity.”
After Wednesday’s press conference, Rodney Williams shared with the Independent several photos of a local crew working on clearing the 201 Munson St. site of overgrowth and debris in 2018. Below are some of those photos.
NHI readers have been subjected to a very long conversation between ThreeFifths and me. The short version is that he sees gentrification happening/about to happen everywhere in town, while I have seen it as quite limited in scope to date.
But this project is different, both in its scale and with likely interactions with nearby developments. New Haven needs more housing, both market rate and subsidized. But this project, particularly in combination with the next phase of Winchester Lofts and the Canal Street development and the two newish Yale colleges, is likely to change Newhallville’s demographics.