Newhall, Sylvan ​“Convenience” Plans Contested

One planned convenience store won’t be coming to a former Newhallville church any time soon — while another convenience store might be on the way to the ground floor of a Hill house. 

That was the upshot of two contentious Board of Zoning Appeals hearings at which two sets of neighbors pushed back hard on corner stores coming to their blocks.

That meeting took place Tuesday night online via Zoom.

Those two proposed corner store sites are a church building at 261 Newhall St. and the ground floor of a two-family house at 114 Sylvan Ave. 

The respective properties’ owners each went into Tuesday’s BZA meeting seeking a special exception to permit a ​“neighborhood convenience use (grocery and related goods) in a residential zoning district,” per the meeting agenda’s description of each requested zoning relief.

By the end of the night, the owner of the Newhall Street property, the House of Jacob Church Inc., withdrew its convenience store zoning-relief application. 

The owner of the Sylvan Avenue property, Jasim Uddin, persisted, with the zoning board referring his still-active application to the City Plan Commission for further review before taking an expected final vote on the matter next month.

The friction faced by both applicants Tuesday came from neighbors who did not want each site turned into a convenience store. Those critical neighbors argued that such stores are already plentiful in Newhallville and the Hill, that they are magnets for crime, and that they bring unhealthy foods and drinks to communities dealing disproportionately with health conditions such as obesity and high blood pressure.

The proposed Newhall Street church-to-convenience-store conversion would make that site a hot spot for ​“loitering, gun violence and distribution of drug paraphernalia,” Starr Street resident Chanelle Goldson warned in one such example of Tuesday’s neighborhood pushback.

Local attorney Ben Trachten, who represented both applicants Tuesday, pushed back during the meeting by arguing that it would be ​“anti-competitive” to nix a proposed convenience store just because other similar uses already exist in the area. He also said that proposed uses like these are not inherently violent. It all depends on how the owners run the property.

Sylvan Space Survives, For Now

For the Sylvan Avenue property, Trachten said the owner is looking to convert the front of a vacant home into a convenience store. He said that site has functioned on and off as a grocery store going back to 1963.

The store would be just 680 square feet and located primarily in a small attachment at the front of the cucumber-green home while taking up minimum space inside the main house itself.

The idea would be to sell canned goods and snacks to neighbors — while skipping on any alcohol sales.

Competing business owners as well as residents of the area spoke up to contest the potential conversion, arguing that there is already a surplus of convenience stores around Sylvan. They argued that yet another store would at best be useless to the surrounding community and at worst would heighten crime in the area.

Orchard Street resident and Sandra’s Next Generation restaurant owner Miguel Pittman said that a new convenience store ​“at the particular location would be basically overkill.” 

The owner of another existing Sylvan Avenue convenience shop also spoke up, expressing concern that the shop would only have a negative impact on two stores, including his, positioned nearby to the site in question.

“We deal with these complaints over and over again about clustering of uses,” countered Trachten. 

He said that it would be ​“anti-competitive” and ​“protectionist” for the board to reject applications on the basis that there are already too many shops with similar uses in the neighborhood.

He described the streets surrounding Sylvan as part of a food desert — one that is reliant on a lot of small shops with diverse stocks in lieu of a larger grocery. ​“Neighbors have to rely on these smaller food stores for daily provisions,” he stated.

House Remains Of Jacob, Not Of Jerky

Though the Sylvan application moved forward, a second proposal to pursue an almost identical undertaking on Newhall Street was withdrawn by the owner after neighbors came out against the conversion.

The 261 Newhall St. property is currently home to House of Jacob Church. It’s an 18-foot long building that Trachten said has struggled to survive a decline in church-going residents — and whose ownership recently struck a deal with proposed purchaser Nita & Mansi LLC. 

That same holding company also owns a package store on Dixwell Avenue, though the now-discarded Newhall Street project would not have sold alcohol.

Trachten told the Independent on Wednesday that, according to his client, the Newhall Street site is currently derelict and empty, and hasn’t been used as a church in some time. He said the building will require a full interior renovation.

“It’s unrealistic to believe this will ever return as a viable church,” Trachten said of the site on Tuesday. And, he added, the ​“uniquely challenging” dimensions of the building mean that ​“it really has limited uses that could survive in this space.”

The 660-foot layout would have included a kitchen and deli counter to provide hot food and sandwiches in addition to fresh produce and ​“not just canned stuff,” Trachten said.

However, one resident after another still came forward to challenge the notion that a convenience store could benefit their neighborhood.

“A convenience store is not what we need,” Newhallville Devin Avshalom-Smith argued on behalf of community members who sent the local legislator letters describing the Newhall Street application as another crime ​“super hot spot in the making.”

“There are five convenience stores within less than a mile” of that site, he said — adding that such abundance was not indicative of ​“great diversity” in food options but rather a surplus of the same greasy foods with too few healthy ingredients.

“Our community is already dealing with obesity and hypertension,” Starr Street resident Chanelle Goldson said. A convenience store, she said, is ​“not comparable to a Stop & Shop.” And ​“processed fat,” she added, isn’t the only health risk associated with the small street stores.

She said convenience shops — of which there are already several in the immediate surrounding area — are centers for ​“loitering, gun violence and distribution of drug paraphernalia.”

She also pointed to issues with a lack of available parking spots for residents living on that street. Several others noted that individuals tend to double park outside of convenience stores, creating traffic jams on routes taken by families and children traveling to school. 

Jeanette Sykes pointed out that residents of Newhallville and Southern Hamden have recently rallied together to successfully halt a methadone clinic that was slated to come to their neighborhood — and held discussions about what their ideal community would look like. Read here about the various resources that those communities ​“manifested” during a public meeting — including farmer’s markets, grocery stores and community gardens.

Of the prospect of a convenience store, she said, ​“this is definitely not the one that was on their list.”

Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris also pitched in, stating that the prospective convenience store owners failed to effectively reach out to the community and earn support for the project. ​“We’re not opposed to businesses coming in,” she said. ​“But this is what we’re opposed to: Businesses that don’t ask for input or involve the community.”

Trachten and the applicant ultimately decided to withdraw their request for zoning relief, even as Trachten dissented with the public’s critical commentary. 

“Before I formally withdraw the application, I’d like to put a few things on record,” he said. Following the advice of the city, he said the applicant had reached out to Avshalom-Smith the same day they submitted their application. ​“There was an attempt to communicate with the community through this elected official,” he said.

He added: ​“I don’t think you can attribute violence to a particular use.” A convenience store is not inherently prone to crime, he said. Crime is an independent ​“systemic problem that impacts certain areas more than others.” 

The success or failure of a particular store is more so dependent on ​“how they’re operated and who they’re operated by,” he suggested. 

He concluded: ​“This would not be a business that extracts from the neighborhood,” but that would bring fresh food to an under-resourced area. But, ​“in the face of opposition, the applicant has no desire to continue.”