Support Withheld For Homeless Housing

The planned conversion of a former Hill homeless shelter into rent-subsidized apartments for housing-insecure young adults earned pushback from neighbors fearing an overly dense ​“rooming house” for needy tenants from throughout the region.

The project in question is called Portsea Place, a planned new eight-unit single room occupancy (SRO) complex at 223 Portsea St. The complex is owned and run by the local homelessness services nonprofit, New Reach Inc.

New Reach CEO Kellyann Day told the Independent that the project is designed for vulnerable young people aged 18 to 24 from throughout the region who have nowhere else to live. She said the building is currently under construction, and should open this spring.

At Wednesday night’s regular monthly Hill South Community Management Team meeting in the cafeteria of Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School on Kimberly Avenue, the roughly 30 neighbors present unanimously voted not to write a letter of support for New Reach’s bid to receive $20,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds from the city for the project.

“New Reach has not had the backing of most of of the residents who live in the Portsea Street area since you made the decision to turn the Portsea Street property into a rooming house, aka, Portsea Place,” Management Team Communications Director Angela Hatley said at the meeting.

This same community did support New Reach when the building was used as a homeless shelter for women and children, she said.

Hatley read from a letter that the team’s CDBG subcommittee had written to New Reach in response to a presentation that the nonprofit’s representatives had given in November about their CDBG application for Portsea Place.

She said that the team decided not to support New Reach’s CDBG Portsea Place application because neighbors do not believe that a ​“rooming house” will fit well within a neighborhood filled primarily by one‑, two‑, and three-family houses.

The team also turned down New Reach’s request for support because the new rent-subsidized apartments will be made available to young people in need from throughout Greater New Haven and beyond, and not just from the city proper, Hatley said.

“Once again we have an entity in our midst that is not only there against the community’s wishes, but doesn’t even necessarily serve Hill South or even New Haven,” she read. ​“Our community has decided that we will no longer be the repository for so called solutions of regional problems.”

In a followup phone interview on Wednesday, Day disputed the management team’s characterization of Portsea Place as a ​“rooming house.”

“It’s not a rooming house. It’s a program with 24/7 monitoring and security for the most vulnerable teens from our neighborhoods,” she said.

The project will contain eight apartments, all SROs, and will be available at subsidized, affordable rents, though she declined to say exactly what the rents will be.

“More than 50 percent of jobs in the State of Connecticut pay less than $20 an hour,” she said. ​“And we have some of the highest housing costs” in the nation.

This project is designed to provide not just affordable housing for youth otherwise living on the streets or in shelters or couchsurfing, but also ​“education and training and vocational experience so that they can join society as a citizen in this area,” she said.

She said the rooms will indeed be open for rent to residents from throughout the region because New Reach, just like any other housing provider, does not discriminate based on where tenants looking to live in New Haven originally come from.

Day said that she as an individual and New Reach as an organization have been active participants in the Hill South Community Management Team for three decades. ​“We’ve been very good neighbors. We listen. We reach out. To the best of our ability, we address neighbors’ concerns.”

The two-and-a-half-story Trowbridge Square building that will be home to Portsea Place formerly housed New Reach’s Careway Shelter, an emergency shelter for homeless women and children that provided 10 apartments, each with a capacity for one adult woman and three or four children.

New Reach received permission from the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals in early 2017 to convert the shelter into eight single-room-occupancy (SRO) apartments for housing insecure young people aged 18 to 24.

The Portsea Place project isn’t the only major change at New Reach in recent years. The local nonprofit closed one of its shelters in 2015 after the city cut some of its funding.

The organization is planning on moving its headquarters from rented space on East Street to property it owns in Erector Square. It’s launching a capital campaign aimed at creating a $5 million endowment to cover infrastructure costs at its existing properties, including two other shelters it runs in the city. And it’s put up for sale a Fitch Street building it owns and has long used to house previously homeless families.

Seeking Columbus Slowdown

Also at Wednesday night’s meeting, Hatley updated neighbors on the Hill South housing subcommittee’s sustained opposition to a prospective 10-unit housing development planned for a vacant lot at 232 – 238 Columbus Ave.

In December, Ralph Mauro of Concrete Creations LLC won a density variance from the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) to allow his company to build 10 apartments on the 14,000 square-foot combined lot. He plans to rent five of those apartments at market rates, and five at deed-restricted affordable prices—sans public subsidy.

Hatley spoke on behalf of the team at the December BZA meeting against the density of the project. Even though the developer won the variance, she said, ​“Being the Hill South CMT, we persist.”

She said she has reached out to the city’s anti-blight and property-development Livable City Initiative (LCI), and has requested a neighborhood meeting with Mauro to try to talk the developer into building six apartments rather than 10 on the lot.

“Ten units is way too dense for that area,” she said. ​“There’s never been 10 units of anything on that little lot.”

The team members present unanimously voted in support of the housing subcommittee writing a letter to LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, voicing their concerns with traffic and density and requesting help with setting up a meeting with the developer.

Mauro could not be reached for a request for comment by the publication time of this article.