Fighting Lawsuit, Builders Cancel Donation

As a lawsuit drags on over a Kensington Street Park playground, an affordable housing developer has canceled a promise to donate apartments to a neighborhood nonprofit.

That’s the latest chapter in the ongoing tussle over the future of the playground and plans to Boston-based TCB/The Community Builders to build new apartments there.

Because a lawsuit has put broader rebuilding plans on hold, TCB informed neighbors this week, TCB will no longer make a six-unit donation to the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, which had hoped to provide homes there for early childhood educators.

TCB owns a cluster of government-rent-subsidized residential buildings near Kensington Square. It has been aiming to embark on a two-part renovation and expansion plan in the Dwight neighborhood: to renovate 96 of its current rental apartments and to build a new complex of 15 affordable units atop Kensington Playground, a small public park on Kensington Street between Edgewood and Chapel. Those new apartments would be set aside for tenants earning up to 60 percent of the area median income.

TCB’s plans included a set of promises to the Dwight community. The developer said it would beautify Day Street Park and create a smaller additional park on Garden Street. TCB also said it would donate six of its existing apartment units to the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, a community development organization based in the Dwight neighborhood. The tenants from those donated six apartments would move to apartments in the new 15-unit complex, according to the developer’s plans.

The Greater Dwight Development Corporation’s executive director, Linda Townsend Maier, told the Independent that the organization had discussed setting aside those apartments for young adults who grew up in Dwight — perhaps for recipients of the New Haven Promise college scholarship — in an effort to encourage young people to move back to their neighborhood and contribute to community life. 

In 2020, the Board of Alders voted overwhelmingly to sell the playground to TCB for $1, all but setting the construction of the new building in motion. Then, weeks later, a group of neighbors known as the Friends of Kensington Playground filed a lawsuit against the development, seeking to protect the playground. (Read more about the lawsuit here.)

As TCB fights the lawsuit, the company is working with the city to split its plans in two so that it can begin renovating its existing apartments soon.

Upon hearing of these plans, Friends of Kensington Playground advocate Patricia Wallace contacted Mayor Justin Elicker’s office with 18 questions about the project’s splitting and refinancing. A handful of those questions pressed the city on its communication with Dwight residents about the change in plans. ​“Why did the City fail to inform the neighborhood at the most recent DCMT [Dwight Community Management Team] meeting of the proposed change in the TCB deal?” she asked.
 
City attorney Michael Pinto responded, as he did to many of Wallace’s questions, that the new plans are still being formed: “[T]he lawsuit affecting the Kensington Street Parcels required a revised approach and submission of a revised financing plan for the rehabilitation of the 96 units affecting existing residents. At this stage it is premature to present a project that is still being developed.”

On Tuesday evening, TCB Development Project Manager Kristin Anderson attended the Dwight Community Management Team’s October meeting Tuesday night to elaborate on Wallace and Pinto’s exchange.

There, she announced that TCB will no longer be donating the six apartments to the Greater Dwight Development Corporation.

After the meeting, Anderson told the Independent that TCB is now drawing up separate plans to renovate the 96 existing apartments regardless of how the Kensington Playground lawsuit pans out. So the company is not counting on being able to move existing tenants to the newly constructed building.

She was asked whether TCB would be able to retroactively donate the apartment units if the company were to win the lawsuit. ​“We wouldn’t be able to,” she responded. When TCB closes on financing for the rehabilitation projects, it needs to commit to using the funds for a particular plan, she said. ​“That means that all those projects that are part of that [proposed] rehab will continue to be part of the rehab for long term,” regardless of whether TCB is able to build the new 15 units. ​“It would be all tied up.”

If TCB wins the lawsuit, the company still plans to build 15 new units atop Kensington Playground, while keeping all current tenants in their apartments.

“We had hoped that this would work out,” said Greater Dwight Development Corporation’s Townsend Maier. ​“It has not. However, we have other projects in the works. While it would have been very nice to have the building … it’s not that we’re at a loss for anything.”

Instead, Townsend Maier said, the Corporation plans to focus its resources on developing housing units for teachers at its Edgewood Avenue childcare center.