Vets’ Housing Plan Returned To Drafting Table

A local nonprofit is backing up but not out on plans to convert a vacant lot into housing for vets — after the city rejected their idea to let vets back their cars over sidewalks and into an intersection.

City Plan Commissioners voted unanimously during their latest meeting Wednesday night to recommend the Board of Zoning Appeals deny the plan submitted by The National Veterans Council for Legal Redress (NVCLR). The Council is seeking permission to to build four affordable apartments for New Haven veterans atop an empty sliver lot at 252 Davenport Ave.

The Dixwell-based nonprofit seeks to provide support services for anyone who served in the military, particularly for those with less than honorable discharge status.

That’s because the organization had requested zoning relief from the board to permit front yard parking at the site. That would mean that the four cars expected to pull up to the property would have to back out across the street’s public sidewalk directly into the intersection of Davenport and Stevens Street in order to leave their homes. 

Read in more detail about that project here.

Deputy Director of Zoning Nate Hougrand told commissioners Wednesday that city staff, too, has recommended ditching the plan. It is concerned not just about the front yard parking’s interference with the intersection, but also a lack of screening in the form of plants or fencing to conceal the parking pavement from residents, neighbors and the street. 

“It seems clear to me that the applicant should go back to the drawing board,” Commissioner Adam Marchand said. ​“The idea that people would be backing their vehicles out over a sidewalk and into an intersection just seems like an unsafe condition.”

The commission’s vote is meant to inform the Board of Zoning Appeals’ ultimate decision regarding whether or not to allow the parking configuration. The BZA is scheduled to vote on the matter next month, though the applicants may withdraw their proposal prior to that point. 

NVCLR Director of Housing Development Carl Bordeaux said that the nonprofit is already working to reconfigure their site plan in order to avoid a likely rejection by the board.

“I was aware they were going to deny it,” Bordeaux said of the commission, given warnings from land use attorney Ben Trachten during a recent public hearing of the BZA that such a parking plan wouldn’t fly. 

“But they didn’t deny the project itself – they just denied a part of it,” he told the Independent.

Bordeaux’s original pitch to the BZA involved fitting four, 400-square-foot single family homes into the residential Davenport lot while establishing common greenspace for residents by requesting zoning relief not just to allow front yard parking, but to minimize rear yard setbacks and mandated lot areas per home. 

Now, Bordeaux said, he is planning to ​“compromise” on that original vision by locating parking to the rear of the property and building two adjacent two-family homes rather than four single-family houses.

That plan will mean maintaining a long driveway along the side of the property, which will detract from potential greenspace. Bordeaux said that stacking the homes might steal a sense of independence that could otherwise develop through ostensibly detached, single-family homes. 

However, those design changes could also relieve the nonprofit from needing to pursue zoning relief at all.

“Considering the overall objective we have, which is to provide affordable housing for veterans and positively impact housing stock in the area, we decided to use another model,” Bordeaux concluded. 

2 Other Plans Get Thumbs Up

Despite that denial, the commission offered several favorable recommendations for other developments taking place around town. 

In particular, the commission voted unanimously in support of the Broken Umbrella Theatre Company’s plan to build a stage on Blake Street as well as a nursing home company’s intent to move from Fair Haven into the Hill. Read more about those plans here and here, respectively, before the BZA takes final votes on the projects.