Worker-Owned Laundry Lands $1.37M From Alders

Alders voted to allocate nearly $1.37 million in federal funds towards an estimated $8 million new worker-owned laundry project in Newhallville, as part of a broader vote for funding community development initiatives.

Local legislators took that vote Monday night during the latest regular bimonthly meeting of the full Board of Alders.

The meeting took place online via the Zoom teleconferencing app, as City Hall remains indefinitely closed to the public because of the state of emergency around the Covid-19 pandemic.

The vote represented the culmination of the alders’ annual decision-making process on how to allocate federal funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), Home Investment Partnership (HOME), Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA) and Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) programs. Click here and here for articles about previous committee hearings on this year’s funding distribution.

Westville Alder and Community Development Committee Co-Chair Daryl Brackeen, Jr. said during Monday night’s meeting that the city received $8.2 million in such funding this fiscal year, representing an increase of half a million dollars over last year. ​“That’s great news, because the amount is usually reduced or level-funded at best,” he said.

Included in this year’s CDBG funding vote is $1,368,723 for the the city’s planned development of a worker-owned laundry at the long-vacant former state welfare building at 188 Bassett St.

The city purchased the 46,119 square-foot building for $900,000 last fall under former Mayor Toni Harp, who spearheaded the Newhallville jobs project with Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo.

The project as conceived would have a nonprofit, and then workers themselves, run a commercial laundry out of the Bassett Street building. The laundry would ideally serve some of the largest employers in the area, like Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale University. The idea came from a similar operation in Cleveland, Ohio, run by the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative, which the city is partnering with to get the local project off the ground.

Reached by phone Monday night, Neal-Sanjurjo said that the $1.37 million allocation from the Board of Alders provides a critical boost for a project that should cost roughly $8 million to build out in full.

“We’re hoping that the approved funding through CDBG,” she said, ​“will be leveraged with other funding” to allow for a complete retrofitting of the building, which has lain dormant since the state Department of Social Services left in 2013.

“We’re going to move forward,” she promised. ​“What we have to do is be diligent and just figure out where the rest of the funding” will come from.

Neal-Sanjurjo said that the project is behind schedule thanks to the novel coronavirus outbreak and the associated broad-scale shuttering of the state’s, and the country’s, economy.

She said the deepening economic crisis and mass unemployment associated with Covid-19 only underscore the importance of a project like the worker-owned laundry, which she said should bring around 120 jobs to the neighborhood.

Other city government and nonprofit initiatives funded through the CDBG allocation include:

• $1,146,810 for city housing code enforcement. Neal-Sanjurjo said that this federal funding should allow for two new city housing code inspectors, bumping the department’s total number of such inspectors to 13. The city’s consolidated plan that funded positions will ​“provide inspection, investigations and surveys of housing units for code violations and the condemnation of those dwellings found unfit for human occupancy. The primary focus is in deteriorated areas combining code enforcement, together with public or private improvements, housing rehabilitation or enhanced services to arrest further decline of the areas.”

• $50,000 to Beulah Land Development Corporation for the gut rehabilitation of a single-family home at 124 Carmel St., and $20,000 more for new construction projects of a single-family home at 232 Munson St. and a two-family home at 245 Munson St.

• $42,540 to New Haven Reads to help cover part of the salary costs for two site directors for the child literacy tutoring program.

• $110,720 for the Columbus House 75-bed seasonal men’s homeless shelter at 586 Ella T. Grasso Blvd.

Click here to read the city’s full five-year consolidated plan, which includes a line-by-line breakdown for the allocation of this year’s CDBG funds.

$3.5M More En Route

Brackeen (pictured) added that HUD has awarded the city $3.5 million in supplemental CDBG funding during the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the $2.2 trillion federal CARES Act.

He said that $2.2 million of that money is reserved for software and hardware costs for city departments and community agencies, and the remaining $1.3 million for grants for the homeless, housing insecure, and people with AIDS.

He said the city is still awaiting instruction from HUD as to what process it must go through to distribute that money. He said it will likely be similar to the committee-led public hearing process associated with the regular annual CDBG funding distribution.