Opinion: The Armory Can & Should Be Saved

An amazing building, with so much potential.... a better shot at saving this landmark, than the foreclosed Clock Factory!

you think back on recent and past articles/comments here, and the answers are obvious. On one side, make transitional apartments for ex-cons, and on the other side, low(no)-income transitional housing for homeless that work. in the middle, use the open space as a community-run community center. there's plenty of transpotation lines on Goffe & Whalley. if the concept works, build 5 or 6 more around the city. If it fails, we can all pipe down about idyllic solutions.

The opportunity for this is amazing, and I had no idea about the Armory until I read this story.

My immediate reaction placed the blame for this situation on the state of Connecticut. The woeful funding of the PILOT program for decades means that New Haven has been carrying part of the load of this building for a long time. The State of Connecticut should foot the bill for this edifice. When Gov. Rell gave it to the City, her gift should have come with sufficient funding to transform it into a usable edifice. Instead, the state got rid of its headache, and transferred it to New Haven like an unfunded mandate, and the community bears the brunt of the issue.

Calling Speaker Matt Ritter and Senators Winfield and Looney - this is the opposite of Batterson Park, and New Haven needs your help! Thanks!

You want to see what will happen? Look at this movie.

Vampires vs. the Bronx
Three gutsy kids from a rapidly gentrifying Bronx neighborhood stumble upon a sinister plot to suck all the life from their beloved community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2yfp6oj2hw

It's my understanding there is a serious mold or asbestos problem with this building. That would be a reason the city has shuttered it, and has not been used for events (Open Studios ...) for the past several years. Would the remediation be cost prohibitive, or could sufficient funding be secured to make it usable again?

This is how New Haven takes care of its property. Let the building rot and then beg for more money to fix. Look at the schools and you will see this plan in action/ Not a smart way to run a city and it predates this current mayor!!

CY2, as Prof. Rubin notes, the state, not the city, owned the Armory for most of its history. Much of its current condition developed while it was a state-owned building.

All of the ideas Prof. Rubin suggests should be explored. But they require substantial on-going operating funding, in addition to the capital funding to renovate the building. There is a crying need for affordable housing. But market rents for new construction are about twice what an almost middle income household (one at 80% of Area Median Income) can afford. The gap is even wider for low income households. Similarly, there is a huge need for affordable, high quality daycare (full disclosure, I volunteer at a daycare center). Providing such daycare will require substantial, on-going subsidies.

The Armory should be rehabilitated and re-used. But we need to have a general idea of how to pay for its on-going as well as capital costs.

The city of New Haven is in desperate need of low income, housing something like Bellavista, but for those with very low income, it should be subsidized by the state. The state was given all kinds of federal money exactly for this purpose. There could also be daycare and a community center within but the main focus needs to be creating housing for low income seniors and families.

The property is about 126,000 sqft. So with zero land cost, if someone does a residential interior retrofit for @$200/sqft and does building shell (roof, brick, windows, waterproofing) an infrastructure (water, sewer, electric, HVAC, parking, stairs, elevators, landscape) for another $100/sqft (probably too little), that's about a $38M budget. I'm not sure how you subdivide or monetize the big central assembly room because its landlocked (no daylight access for apartments or other functions you might insert, so if you pay to renovate that space (arguably the most fascinating part of the complex) and make the remaining 93,000 sqft apartments, you can fit about 93 if they are 1,000 gross sqft/apt. That's about $410,000 per apt which is a bit steep. The tricky part about these old buildings is that the most fascinating parts (the gigantic spaces) don't lend themselves to retrofit and are a big cost burden.

Market rate housing or a new college/university campus (UConn New Haven? The proposed HBCU that The City of New Haven killed 200 years ago?) would be the best use.

We shouldn’t be concentrating more low-income housing in a neighborhood that already has more low-income housing than almost anywhere in the United States.

The enormous state government subsidy that you would need to make low-income housing financially feasible at this site should be used instead in a place like Milford or Spring Glen that has very few subsidized units.

It would be good to have more subsidized low income housing for the working poor, the disabled, the unhoused, and recently released from incarceration, but concentrating mass housing of poor people into already overburdened neighborhoods compounds the struggles of poverty and its negative influences. Scattered site and mixed income housing helps to prevent the concentrating of poverty into “redlined” “projects.”
But if we could create an expansion of ECA and LEAP combined to serve more pre teens, teens and young adults with arts and productive and positive activities, and teach life skills, and offer counseling and mediation and health services, and living wage jobs training certification courses, and open it to everyone regardless of what school they attend or even if they drop out of school, would help reduce poverty, violence, so called “gangs” or neighborhood affiliated groups rivalries, and do more to improve our city for the future than almost anything else proposed for this space. The more you keep teens and young people engaged with supervision in positive and productive activities and gaining skills and knowledge, where they are learning in a fun way, the better.
The state of CT should remediate the lead and asbestos and pay for any repairs, since they let the building go to the city un-remediated, when they knew well enough that the city is perpetually underfunded due to inadequate PILOT funding.

Nothing much came from this optimistic plan touted in 2012 (link below). Hopefully, future plans will be more successful.

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/armory_renovation_plan_okd

Sell the property and earmark the proceeds for permanent affordable housing. Too much remediation needed, and too long a process to achieve it. People need housing now.

Looks like a money pit