112 More Apartments OK’d For Hill

Building more housing like this is the only way to fix the city's affordable housing crisis. Now 150 people will be able to rent these, instead of renting the existing housing in New Haven which pushes even more long-time New Haven residents out to cheaper places like Waterbury, Hamden, and Meriden.

We should encourage the development company to raise the rents even further, or provide more subsidies. That way they can make an larger profit and use those earnings to build even more housing in the city and surrounding area.

Anonymous, a different take. The city's affordable housing crisis will not be fixed without building more housing like this. As you have said, if there is a shortage of market-rate housing, well-off people will seek apartments in lower-rent neighborhoods, pushing up rents there.

But this is not the same thing as saying that market rate housing, by itself, will fix the crisis. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, the New Haven rental market is "balanced", there is not a shortage of physical units. But a large proportion of the population cannot afford their rents. Adding hundreds of apartments per year will not significantly reduce rents. If this were the case, rents would be going down. They're not. As you yourself have reported, a couple of hundred apartments have been each year in recent years, and rents continue to go up. Adding thousands of units per year (as you have urged) would reduce rents. But there is nowhere near this amount of market demand, and developers won't build projects unless they think they can fill them and make money.

anonymous Dec 16, 2021 10:27 am
We should encourage the development company to raise the rents even further, or provide more subsidies. That way they can make an larger profit and use those earnings to build even more housing in the city and surrounding area.

“In the twenty-first century, the visions of J.C. Nichols and Walt Disney have come full circle and joined. “Neighborhoods” are increasingly “developments,” corporate theme parks. But corporations aren’t interested in the messy ebb and flow of humanity. They want stability and predictable rates of return. And although racial discrimination is no longer a stated policy for real estate brokers and developers, racial and social homogeneity are still firmly embedded in America’s collective idea of stability; that’s what our new landlords are thinking even if they are not saying it.
Tanner Colby,

You see.Rising rents and gentrification go hand and hand.True. Gentrification alone does not necessarily cause displacement, but it creates the conditions for it by Largely increasing the cost of living, You see gentrification creates a downward pressure on low-income residents. Without anywhere to gain an economic edge, low-income residents are eventually forced to seek housing elsewhere and are displaced from their neighborhoods,In fact they are moving to Danbury Waterbury and Ansonia for apartments.Alexa Vaughn wrote a article about how market forces are to blame for the displacement of low income residents, And that revitalization springs from wealthy newcomers.She said.Neighborhood revitalization only works if it benefits the current residents of the area in question.

Part One.

Part Two
Gentrification gives the appearance of “solving the problem” of urban poverty and neglected city infrastructure. Renovated storefronts and apartment buildings attract new tenants, new businesses, and new clients. From an external perspective, this rebirth is a much needed change for economically depressed neighborhoods.

However, people living in these neighborhoods are faced with a much darker reality as their rents begin to rise and they are forced to choose between forfeiting even more of their income to pay rent or giving up their homes altogether.

New apartment complexes are not the only culprits; light rail and transit oriented development have also played a hand in displacing local residents who can no longer afford to live in the area. As prices rise, hard-working tenants are pushed further from their jobs and back into cars (undermining the environmental goals of TOD.) Families are pushed further from their social support networks. Tenants without vehicles are pushed further from public transit.Growth, investment, and revitalization are not inherently bad. They can be very good. However if policy-makers don’t adopt measures to protect residents, these come to undermine structures that support healthy communities and economies and create greater barriers to economic stability for individuals and families. If we don’t create policies to protect tenants and ensure truly equitable growth, this problem will only continue to create greater inequality and economic instability.

"Adding hundreds of apartments per year will not significantly reduce rents. If this were the case, rents would be going down."

I don't think this makes sense, unless you know how much rents would have increased if we hadn't built those hundreds of new apartments. San Francisco is building significantly fewer apartments (per new job) than New Haven is, and rents in that area have increased up to $10,000 per month or more in many cases. New Haven rents have gone up, but they would have gone up even more rapidly if we hadn't built any new housing over the past decade. Also, people would be paying more in fuel costs to commute here, which is also something that is happening in SF. That means more money going to oil companies instead of to support jobs in local small businesses.

"there is not a shortage of physical units"

I highly doubt this. It may be more true at a regional level, since the New Haven region includes places like Waterbury and Meriden. But downtown New Haven doesn't seem to have a surplus of units, given that newly-constructed apartment buildings fill up before they are even completed.

"But a large proportion of the population cannot afford their rents."

This has always been true. However, it is also true that an even larger proportion of the population cannot afford their rents if the rents go up because not enough new market-rate housing is built. In order to afford rents as they increase, people will double or triple up on apartments (I know of situations where entire families live in one room in New Haven) -- so most people will still be housed in some way, but they'll be paying so much towards housing there will be little left over for other needs.

"Developers won't build projects unless they think they can fill them and make money."

This is why we also need to reduce costs (including red tape, gov't reviews, etc.), greatly increase subsidies for private developers, and eliminate parking requirements, as many other cities have done.

Another stick built paper mache cheap house with plastic bathtubs and vinyl siding—renting one bedrooms for $2100 a month! It'll be sagging and out of plumb in 30 years. But then I suppose that's the point. Mr. Salvatore will be happy at his bank.

Anonymous, Kevin McCarthy and THREEFIFTHS- good points made, but I think THREEFIFTHS is more on the money for lower income workers being pushed out, rather than rents getting lowered by more units being built. The people who used to live in Downtown, Dwight, and East Rock who could afford market rate rents will now move to the new builds, but the rising costs of taxes, maintenance, labor, materials, utilities, insurance and upkeep of 100+ year old multi family buildings means that local small landlords won’t be able to afford to lower rents, but they also won’t be able to find as many tenants as in the past could afford those rents. They will be forced to sell their properties to mega landlords, investors and speculators and corporations, who will then do lipstick on a pig renovations or remodels or tear them down and build cheap materials construction ugly new builds and more units and smaller units to maximize their profits, and then because they will have a monopoly on the market, they will fix the market rates. Also their credit checks and three months security deposits will force out the poor and minority and lower middle class renters. Those renters will have to either squeeze more tenants illegally and unsafely into units intended for far fewer people, or they will have to move to Waterbury or the Valley, or Middletown or New London or other further out commutes to find units they can afford. This will increase traffic and pollution and make it harder to find workers to fill lower paid service and retail and restaurant jobs. We have to build decent, safe, affordable housing for the retired, disabled, working poor, young people just starting out in life with college loan debt, and young working middle class families. The inclusionary subsidized percentage of AMI rent rates units are a very minor help with adding affordable units, but they do help somewhat with income diversity in the neighborhoods they are in, and they are better than nothing.

I agree with Kevin McCarthy most of the time, but there is no way that the broader downtown rental market is "in balance." I have talked to multiple people who have not been able to find a place to rent downtown. The new buildings are full up, as are the nicer old noes. One frustrated friend instead bought a house near State Street that was being rented out and will kick out the tenants to live there. I have no doubt but that our (modest) apartment building boom is helping to absorb increased demand that would otherwise spread into nearby neighborhoods, driving up prices there (even more).

But I do agree that this building boom won't "fix" the affordable housing crises, which is caused by families having incomes that are too low to afford a decent place to live. Fixing that requires either massive subsidized housing program (which isn't happening) or else a local economy that provides good jobs.

Anonymous, New Haven needs more market rate and subsidized housing. And I agree with the points in your last paragraph. But the housing market is in fact regional. People, particularly renters, move from the city to the suburbs all the time. And I suspect that most of the tenants of this development will come from out of town, many from NH’s suburbs.

The demand for market rate housing in the city is far less than the tens of thousands of units you have called for in your previous posts. New Haven is not San Francisco, where development proposals are routinely denied. I can’t think of single substantial proposal that has been denied during the first Elicker term. If market demand were on the scale you contemplate, there would be pending proposals for thousands of units. There aren’t.

We will never know how much rents would have gone up had the recent developments had not been built. But the fact that rents went up substantially during a development boom argues that they will not go down substantially if development continues at a similar pace. And there is no reason to believe that the pace of development will increase dramatically, particularly if the inclusionary zoning ordinance is adopted.

Sven, my stick-built house is 178 years old. It is in good condition. My neighbors’ house is only slightly younger, and has had vinyl siding for at least the 30+ years I’ve lived here. The podium technology has been around for decades. Any building technology will last if it is properly maintained. If it is not maintained, it won’t last.

Heather, I said that the current pace of development will not substantially reduce rents. And I very much doubt that the pace of development will increase enough to do so. But I do agree with many of your other points.

Thanks to Thomas Breen for providing that very helpful layout of where in relation to the other Salvatore properties and streets this new proposed building will go.

Kevin, my house is 161 years old and also in good condition. That is because it is owner occupied and cared for with proper maintenance. In fact the vast majority of 1-3 family houses in New Haven are so called “stick built”, and many date back to the 19th century when houses were built with old growth timber.

Today’s building materials are not the same. The 2” x 4” “sticks” used today are cut from large celled softwood grown on corporate plantations. These fast maturing trees of larger celled composition yield a much softer and weaker wood. Trimmed to approximately 1.5” x 3.5”, they are also considerably smaller than the actual 2”x 4” old growth timbers of the past. Yet despite this superior older wood, I would be willing to bet that your house is not quite level and not quite plumb. You can imagine what a 112 unit building built of inferior softwood will look like in 30 years.

This “stick built” or “podium built” or “5 over one” construction style was first used in Los Angeles in 1996 to put up affordable housing quickly and cheaply. It is universally criticized for high fire risk as well as eyesore blandness. You will not see this type of construction rise more than six stories since any more weight would cause the building to collapse.

Many communities do not allow this type of construction. Among them, Waltham Mass, Edgewater NJ, and in New York City and much of Chicago, these buildings are built only with special exception to building codes because they are dangerously fire prone. Many other urban centers are considering similar legislation if not enacted already.

A list of recent fires in wood framed apartment buildings can be found here.
https://buildwithstrength.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/America-is-burning-small.pdf

I didn't realize that comments are length restricted. This is the rest of my comment:

The only upside to this type of construction is speed and economy— 30% to 40 % cheaper than concrete, steel and brick. Thus its popularity with modern developers who like Mr. Salvatore, usually turn around and sell their buildings for handsome profits before any problems arise.

And let’s not even talk about the irony of affordable housing origins vs. a $2100 1 bedroom apartment.

In my humble opinion, this type of construction is the most terrible development in modern architecture that I’ve seen in my lifetime. We are falling headlong into a cultural and visual numbness from which we may never recover.

Concerning vinyl siding, it is well known that this material gives off toxic fumes under high temperatures. It hides moisture problems that can lead to mold growth. It is not sustainable, it does not allow the house to “breathe”, and its appearance is unpleasant.

For further study:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-america-s-new-apartment-buildings-all-look-the-same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

http://archplanbaltimore.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-one-plus-five-is-shaping-american_27.html

Sven; Given that the buildings are devoid of any architectural merit, I am happy that they may fall down after 30 years. In any case, they will be fully amortized after 27.5 years. BTW, my house is about 120, old growth fir, and severely out of plumb. Houses. like people, bend with time. Visit York to see some wonderfully twisted buildings still standing after several centuries.

Sven, Not everyone can afford to live in a 200-year-old old-growth-timber house in the middle of the city.

If you have existing/rental property, I can see why you might be opposed to the construction of less expensive housing. This new housing is the only thing that allows workers to find a place to live without displacing current residents or overcrowding into existing units. Without this new housing being built in New Haven, rents would rise to San Francisco levels of $10,000 per month or more, and the generations that own those 200-year-old homes would be even wealthier. That more than anything else explains why some homeowners are vocally opposed to it, even though every modern building being built right now is well within building code and far safer than any of the existing wood-frame houses are (have you seen how many fires have hit older buildings in New Haven lately)?

Every time a nurse, teacher, doctor, civil engineer, or other worker in the New Haven area retires, a new worker needs to move here to take the job they retired from. But the retirees usually "age in place" - moving to Florida is the exception. That's why we need so many more housing units just to maintain our existing economy. We can either encourage private developers to build as many new homes as possible, using whatever means necessary, or we can have a situation where rents spiral even farther out of control and people get pushed out.

Esbey, to clarify, the Fed report deals with the New Haven market as a whole, not just downtown. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people want to live in or near downtown than the current supply of housing. Presumably the developers know the market. But for all of the new developments in and near downtown, this is a fraction of the market for the city as a whole. And the city constitutes about 15% of the metro area.

On the other hand, I agree that the affordability problem is primarily a shortage of income, rather than a shortage of housing units. A person working full time at a job paying $15/hour can afford a rent of a bit more than $800/month. Such apartments are rare anywhere in the New Haven market. Young single people with such incomes can find roommates and affordable housing. But this is not an option for single parents. And middle aged and older singles are probably not seen as the most desirable roommates.

Sven, the podium technology was commonly used in Chicago (my hometown) starting in the 1960s. The buildings are primarily in upper middle class neighborhoods on the city’s North Side. (They’re particularly common in Lincoln Park and Lakeview.) And unlike my house, the upper floors of these buildings were constructed with the lower-grade timber you describe. The buildings are still around and occupied, more than a half century after they went up.

anonymous:


There’s plenty of people that can afford to live in a 200 year old 1200 square foot house in the Dwight section of New Haven. We’re not talking East Rock or Westville.

How you can possibly think that a $2100 one bedroom apartment could be “less expensive housing”? And that is probably without heat. I do actually have apartments to rent: How’s $1350 for a two bedroom —with heat. Really, I don’t understand where your assumptions come from. I’m afraid your thinking is flawed. I’m certainly not worried about the new “stick builts” attracting renters away from my units, rather I’ll be expecting a flood of new applicants.

Concerning building codes and fires, your comments are simply not true. I urge you to access the links in the last comments I made.

Yes, of course we need new housing, but how are $2800 rents helping new families that come to New Haven? Your economics are upside down.

Kevin:

When you reference “podium” construction in Chicago, which actually began in the 1930s to replace the older “balloon” style construction, which was in use when Chicago burned down in 1871, you’re mainly talking about 2 and 3 family homes, not a seven story 112 unit apartment building. Also, much if not most of Lincoln Park is composed of brick and mortar row houses. In fact, wooden buildings are under very strict building and fire code guidelines in Chicago. The memory of 1871 persists.

Sven, I’m a fourth generation Chicagoan. The technology is called four plus one. It was used exclusively for multi-family housing. Four residential floors were built above a parking level. These floors would routinely have stick-built wood framing with a stucco or brick veneer.

The architectural style you’re describing is also common in Chicago. I had an aunt and uncle who lived in a house like you describe in St. Ben’s/North Center. But it is a different type of housing.

Sven, BTW, your link about wood-framed fires on Dec 17th does not support your contention that these new buildings are fire traps. The fires listed are almost all either uncompleted buildings, meaning no occupants and no operational sprinklers, or old, likely ballon-framed buildings, three family wood framed building so plentiful in northeastern cities. Yes, wood burns, but the question here is do the sprinklers and other fire containment measures allow occupants time to evacuate. The date, it appears they do.

1644 — Yes, of the 100 or so fires listed, some of them were in unoccupied buildings under construction, but most were not. At least 62 fires occurred in occupied buildings. Thousands of people were displaced any many died.
Kevin — The “Stick Built” or “Podium Built” or “Five Over One” or "Stick Frame Over Podium" or "One Plus Five" or "Two Plus Five", or "Texas Donut", construction styles are either identical, or slight variations of each other.