Thomas Breen photo
400 Prospect: Psychologists can stay ... for now.
Yale has purchased a two-and-a-half-story Prospect Street house-turned-office building for $2.85 million, further cementing the university’s ownership of much of a Prospect Hill block.
According to the city’s online land records database, on Aug. 2, Yale bought 400 Prospect St. for $2.85 million from Gable LLC, a holding company controlled by Constance D’Atri.
The Queen Anne-style, 1901-built brick building last sold for $235,000 in 1999. The city most recently appraised it for tax purposes as worth $714,300, or roughly a quarter of what Yale wound up paying for the property.
Yale spokesperson Karen Peart said that the building currently consists entirely of professional offices. The embossed metal name plates hanging outside of the building’s front door identify 400 Prospect current commercial tenants as four psychologists, a family therapist, and a massage therapist.
“The property was for sale and is surrounded by existing Yale-owned properties,” Peart wrote in an email comment for this story. “We have no current plans to take the property off the tax rolls and plan to have the current tenants continue to occupy the space. If we were to convert the property to academic use in the future, we would increase our voluntary payments, as outlined in our recent agreement with the City.”
According to the city’s online tax bill database, 400 Prospect’s current annual local property tax liability adds up to around $18,600. The recent agreement Peart referenced in her comment is a deal that the city struck with the university in April 2022 that, in part, created a 12-year sliding scale for local property taxes on properties newly acquired and converted to tax-exempt status by the university.
Yale’s purchase of 400 Prospect St. means that it now owns nearly the entire western side of Prospect Street at the top of the hill between Edwards and Division Streets. Some of the addresses on those few blocks that it already owns include 300, 310, 314, 360, 386, 406, and 460.
Yale will pick away at ownership of this city until there is barely any city left, just a university with a few well-to-do suburbs.