Thomas Breen Photo
At a housing code inspection (above). Anika Singh Lemar (below): “More housing, everywhere.”
Paul Bass Photo
Anika Singh Lemar sees New Haveners rallying against gentrification — and, in her view, possibly preventing affordable housing from getting built in the process.
Lemar has been on the front lines of the affordable-housing quest. The community and economic development clinic she supervises as a Yale Law School assistant professor worked on a case to force Branford to allow an affordable housing development in its town. The clinic also spent two years helping rewrite Westville Village’s zoning rules to enable not just big-shot developers, but smaller builders construct denser, less car-centric mixed-use projects that can more likely include affordable housing.
Now she’s watching proponents of affordable housing oppose and delay similar long-planned zoning changes in Dixwell’s, Fair Haven’s, and lower Whalley’s commercial districts in the name of preventing gentrification. And she worries that that may have the effect of enabling only big-pocket developers constructing projects with only market-rate housing.
More broadly, she sees a need for New Haven to better define its terms as it wrestles with the specter of “gentrification” — or risk worsening a problem the community aims to tackle.
A similar reassessment has been taking place nationally among affordable housing advocates. In New Haven’s case, Lemar argues that organizing, say, a union of tenants at slumlord-managed properties may be more effective than fighting denser market-driven development on vacant properties.
She offered her perspective during an appearance Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. An edited and condensed version of that conversation follows. (You can also watch it in the video below.)
3 “Gentrifications”
Districts under consideration for commercial rezoning.
WNHH: Are people concerned about gentrification wrong to oppose changes to our [commercial district] zoning?
Anika Single Lemar: I think that it is wrong to think that New Haven’s housing problem — whether defined as a gentrification problem or a housing affordability problem — it is wrong to think the problem is market-rate apartment buildings with swimming pools. It’s wrong to think that redeveloping the old factory building at Whalley and Fitch is gentrification. It’s not. The redevelopment of that building is not going to cause any problem.
Adding 200 new units to a vacant lot in New Haven is good for everyone, including the people who live in Dwight whose housing would have been really desirable to a doctor at the St. Ray’s [hospital] campus, except that the doctor got an apartment at the Novella.
Something like 40 percent of the housing [in New Haven] is subsidized.
Should that be infinite? Or should the suburbs build more? Or do we want affordable housing near services in cities?
If you care about housing affordability, you’ve got to care about housing supply. I just want more housing everywhere. If you had more housing everywhere you would solve a lot of problems.
I feel very strongly that people ought to have more housing choice. There should be affordable housing everywhere.
WNHH: [Critics argued] that if we allow mixed-use, denser projects, that would allow bigger developers to come in, and bigger developer would be less likely to build affordable housing. So that’s stopping [the proposed zoning changes for] Dixwell Avenue — which is really primed for that kind of opportunity to return to a vibrant mixed-use community again. What about that argument they make? Would Anika-type rules on Dixwell Avenue and Grand and Whalley be geared toward gentrification?
So this is a question that begs a question: We have to define gentrification. We have not worked hard enough in New Haven to define what we mean by gentrification.
We’ve been hearing from folks that there are stages to gentrification, that New Haven may be in early-stage gentrification. Late-stage gentrification in that analysis is like Washington, D.C. …
Black people are gone …
Exactly. Tearing down amenities and housing that are attractive to and affordable to low-income people, oftentimes people of color, oftentimes black people, and replacing it with stuff that is not only attractive to wealthy people, but exclusive to wealthy people.
We haven’t really seen that version of gentrification in New Haven. We have been building housing on empty lots. We have not been tearing things down outside of the housing authority’s redevelopment projects, which have been replacing them with projects that are almost 100 percent affordable.
There’s another version of gentrification — “brownstoning” is the colloquial term — where you don’t tear anything down. But you take a house that was previously occupied by low-income people, maybe even multiple low-income families, the Brooklyn brownstone model, and it gets purchased by a more well-off family . Maybe gets de-densified into a single-family house. We’ve seen a little bit of that.
Or a landlord comes in and turns off the heat in the middle of winter or starts construction at 3 in the morning to drive people out …
Sure. That’s more like the first version. It’s almost like a tear-down. We’ve seen a little bit of that. The place where we’ve seen the most of that is Goatville [east of Orange Street]. You have houses on Foster Street for example, that maybe housed three families — somebody bought that and turned it into a two-family or a one-family. We haven’t really seen much of it in Diwxell/Newhallvile, Fair Haven, etc.
Then there is a cultural gentrification. That is much harder to measure. If people are not forced to move but are feeling dislocated in their own neighborhood — the Barbecue Becky phenomenon — that is also a problem. It’s not a housing affordability problem. It’s a cultural shift. Your neighborhood doesn’t feel like your neighborhood anymore.
New Haven has changed. We’re now almost roughly equal African-American, white, and Latino …
That’s right.
The [largest groups of] newcomers are Latino immigrants and some white people, including millennials and some empty-nesters …
What also matters is why people moved. If you have black families that moved into Hamden or North Haven because they see that as a move up, that’s great. That’s not a bad thing. If you have families that are moving because their rent skyrockets or the grandparent who provided child care was forced to move [South] and they’ve lost their social network, that’s a bad thing.
”Fussy” Munson Street
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Performing the pour-over at Fussy.
So are we in early-stage gentrification?
I just think that depends on how you’re defining it. Downtown feels different from how downtown used to feel …
I was walking downtown this morning and noticed that all the people in the windows eating expensive breakfasts were white …
Yes, downtown feels different. My 9‑year-old and I often bike the Canal Trail. He’s 9 and an active child, so he always gets hungry five minutes into the bike ride. We go to Fussy Coffee. It’s hard to sit in the window of Fussy Coffee and see people doing yoga and not think, “That’s gentrification.”
That’s a perfect example. Fussy Coffee is at Science Park, which used to have 18,000 people working around the clock at [rifle] factory jobs. But they don’t anymore. They’re not coming back. Right around the corner there’s an empty factory where somebody’s building over 200 market-rate apartments. Some people say, ‘That’s gentrification.” But down the block you have a vacant lot that Beulah Heights is turning into all affordable housing. Across the street you have Monterey Place, which is stable public housing …
100 percent. It’s not going anywhere.
HUMPHREYS & PARTNERS LP
A rendering of 201 Munson plan.
So you add a mix of people. You still might have what you called “cultural gentrification.” Some people might not like seeing the yoga people. Though black people do yoga too!
The redevelopment of 201 Munson St. is not in and of itself a problem. Is it also a manifestation of cultural gentrification? Maybe. But it’s also going to contribute to the affordability, accessibility and the dynamism of the neighborhood.
Let’s go back to the arguments offered recently against the neighborhood commercial rezoning. I’m wondering if the [opponents] got it backwards and are actually hurting the cause of affordable housing.
Yes. They might be.
They were against allowing builders to go up to seven stories instead of four, because they said big developers are more likely to put in more market-rate housing and not low-income housing … But my understanding is that those big-time developers [unlike small builders] can afford to get variances anyway [under the zoning change]. But if it’s denser, you can afford to put in more affordable housing, because you can make more money on the space by having more people.
Right. There’s a couple of things going on. One thing is that the more housing you have, the less likely you are to see the brownstoning effect.
One version of brownstoning I described was well-off people coming in to a neighborhood and buying housing with low-income people and de-densifying them. I moved to the Greenwich Village after graduating from Yale in 2001. I really wanted to move to the West Village; I was going to NYU Law. It was too expensive, so like many of my friends I ended up on the east side. And part of the Lower East Side gentrification story is people like me, an acknowledged Ivy League yuppie, not being able to move into the West Village or to the Upper East Side because the rules made it too hard to build the there. And we probably would have preferred to live in the West Village. But we couldn’t afford to live in the West Village.
So we went and gentrified some other neighborhood. We didn’t know that’s what we were doing.
So why do you end up with people moving to Goatville when they would prefer to live downtown? Because until recently we didn’t have a lot of housing downtown. If we’re building housing downtown, you’re going to have fewer people moving into Dwight.
The Corsair Effect
Also in Goatville, on the edge, we have a huge example of the upscale housing that came to New Haven: Corsair, which has bizarre two-inch apartments that rent for $3,000 a month.
It is bizarre.
The theory among some is that that helps create affordable housing. It increases supply, so nearby rents won’t go up as much. Have we seen that in reality?
I used to live in that neighborhood. My kids go to school in that neighborhood. My understanding is that the rents have stabilized.
I hypothesize that the Corsair is there because housing prices are going up — not that housing prices are going up because the Corsair is there.
It’s very hard to make with a straight face an argument that the housing prices are going up because the Corsair is there. Maybe: The undeveloped Star Supply space [previously there] was a rodent and rat-infested place. Maybe housing prices are going up because rats and rodents aren’t there anymore. It’s hard to argue that that’s a bad thing.
Tenant Power
Thomas Breen Photo
Abandoned factory where new apartments are planend at Whalley & Fitch.
That’s my other question. Some people say, “Once people start fixing up properties, that makes it cost more.” Because if you spend money fixing up property, the rent goes up.
But we have so much substandard housing in New Haven. Don’t we want that to conform to a higher code?
Or is it still true that in many slum properties, the landlords are getting [federal] Section 8 subsidies, so they’re actually getting the higher rents and they’re just not putting [the money] into the property?
All of the above.
We want people to live in safe, code-compliant housing. We want the tenants themselves to have the power to demand that. It shouldn’t be that if you’re a low-income tenant, you’re reliant on the marketplace to make sure your apartment is code-compliant. You should be able to demand that of your landlord, because that is your right under state statute.
Building political power and economic power among tenants so they can demand that of their landlords is crucial. Really building an effective tenant organizing movement now in New Haven is so important for our renters, who are oftentimes being abused in noncompliant unsafe housing conditions. It’s a huge problem for people who really want to stay in New Haven and the only housing they can afford is owned by slumlords.
With enough code inspectors — given how much Section 8 pays for subsidized apartments, and how much of the low-income rental housing is Section 8 — could we get housing up to code without raising rents? Does Section 8 pay enough to fix properties and still make money
Yes. Section 8 rents are high enough. Section 8 rents are set at the regional level, the county level, rather than the local level. This has been a subject of discussion — whether Section 8 rents should be set higher in suburban towns, at least in places like Connecticut.
That would also promote affordable housing in the suburbs …
Exactly. In New Haven the upshot is because fair-market rents are set the way they are, there is no doubt that Section 8 rents are high enough for landlords to maintain code-compliant housing. And there’s no excuse for them not doing it if they have a tenant with a Section 8 voucher.
So are people who are rightly concerned about gentrification, doing everything they can to stop efforts to address gentrification — by opposing this rezoning, by focusing on limiting the building of housing and putting on conditions? Rather than promoting making it easier for people to build all kinds of housing and shifting the focus to have government have private Section 8 [landlords] bring properties up to code?
And do we want to see Section 8 move to more landlords who are nonprofit?
Yes, I think we can better utilize our local nonprofit developers. We used to have community development corporations in every neighborhood. Newhallville Restoration. Fair Haven had one. I worked at Hill Development as an undergraduate. We lost them all. It’s a national phenomenon, that these smaller community-controlled community development corporations have gone by the wayside. In New Haven there was a lack of capacity and a little bit of corruption that brought many of them down.
The financing for affordable housing has gotten so complicated. Just as zoning is too complicated to let little guys thrive. Affordable housing development has become a big-developer game. That is unfortunate.
Some of the most interesting anti-gentrification work I see across the country comes from nonprofit developers who are able to densify the housing they own and operate and deal with gentrification by building more affordable units in the neighborhood that they control.
We do have Neighborhood Housing Services and LCI [New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative] …
NHS is focused on homeownership. LCI is focusing on homeownership, where you rent out some of the units. It’s a great model.
It is a great model. But we made in a mistake in the 1990s when we thought we could make everyone a homeowner. It actually makes sense across all incomes for a lot of people not to become homeowners.
That’s a limited pot of funds [for homeownership].
The “Community”
When you have a conversation about zoning, what we’re hearing on the commercial corridor stuff is: There needs to be more public participation. There needs to be more public participation. There needs to be more public participation. By the community. By the community. By the community.
But who’s “the community”?
Exactly. If you are at a City Plan Commission hearing people testify on behalf of things, how do you gauge: OK, is this room representative of the world? Land use hearings tend to bring out the angriest people. If you do a poll of town, they’ll say, “We’re OK with this affordable housing coming in.” People who show up at the land use hearings are the people who hate it the most.
I go to a lot of evening meetings. Normally they attract the angriest people.
So what’s the answer?
I think public-policy people, decision-makers, need to be really sensitive to make sure that they’re taking in public participation, but they’re also taking in expertise.
But that sank us in Urban Renewal …
The professional expertise was wrong. You’ve got to try to learn from the past. Substance matters. You’ve got to try to learn what the right lessons are. You probably can’t micromanage things. Delaney’s might have been the place for people to mingle 20 years, but maybe it’s not tomorrow. Just make it possible for somebody to figure it out.
I’ve been thinking about these questions too. I think it’s about access to information and participation. It’s not that you need more people to show up at a meeting, although that’s a good thing. It’s not that you need to take a poll with more numbers in it. It’s important that everybody who wants to know can get really good information about what’s happening in their community and then get multiple chances to weigh in on a decision.
Then afterwards, the decision-makers need to be grownup. They need to have a bunch of meetings. They have to do better than they’ve ever done before to get information out. But then sometimes they have to say: “OK, the three people who showed up angry tonight were just uninformed. They’re just wrong. We’re going to make a decision.”
I agree with what you just said. I would also say the following: People are really good at identifying what is going on in their neighborhoods, what their problems are, what they wish were true.” My housing is dilapidated. My commute is too long …”
So the problems come from the grass roots …
These are things that City Plan needs to know about what people’s lives are like. We have multiple opportunities for people to share that information.
This commercial corridor zoning dates back six years. It’s a six-year process. This is how long this stuff ends up taking. You have to ask those questions. You have to get out into the world.
There’s a feeling among a lot of planners and politicians these days — Minneapolis just did a big rezoning. They said, “We did the public meetings where angry people showed up. It was much more useful for us to get out to public festivals and fairs and get out there door to door and talk to people who aren’t going to get to the meetings.”
What about democratic input? We have 30 alders … They really know their constituents. Why don’t we inject more say for alders? They know better what their constituents think than any poll.
Our Board of Alders is actually our zoning authority. That’s not typical. It injects that. When we were doing Westville [rezoning], it was crucial that [Alders] Richard Furlow and Adam Marchand believed that what we were proposing was in line with what their constituents want.
It goes both ways. My husband [Roland Lemar] was an alderman. One of the first issues that came up when he was an East Rock alderman was whether the housing authority could buy property in East Rock to build scattered-site housing.
The liberals all showed their true colors. They didn’t want it. Sometimes you have to push back on democracy and say no, which is what Roland did. Sometimes you have to push back on democracy and say, “No, this is the right answer.” He had to make the case before the next election that they should vote for him anyway.
Historic Perdition
WNHH Listener Aaron Goode [via Facebook]: How would Anika suggest fixing the Historic District Commission so that neighborhoods like Wooster Square can continue to uphold values of historic preservation without restraining development that is necessary for urban vitality and needlessly frustrating small developers or businesses who are trying to do the right thing?
I think the Historic District Commission is one of the most bogus commissions in New Haven.
I’m with you.
People have an idea of what they believed everything looked a certain way at a certain point in time. They try to stop anybody who has a different idea, like the Chinese-American businessman who was trying to fix up the coffee shop in Wooster Square. That was a scandal.
Fuel Coffee Shop. All these people tried to make a coffee shop work there before but they didn’t succeed. It needed a big window. But these [commissioners] believe none of these buildings had big windows at one point in time that they liked — even though right across the street, at Conte School, an entire block got torn down and a whole new style of architecture was evolving. They made this guy spends thousands of extra dollars and wait [five months] almost before he could have a coffee shop that could do business.
The reason that there isn’t a large piece of plate glass in a building that was built in the late 19th century is because it was technically impossible. They couldn’t do it. They didn’t know how to do that with glass yet. They didn’t know how to structurally hold up the building.
If the technology evolves, obviously the architecture is going to evolve. We have to allow that to happen.
It’s true we tore down too much of our history. We want to preserve it. But this [historic commission] is like what you’re trying to [avoid] with zoning …
It’s worse than zoning. The historic district is worse than zoning. Zoning at least in theory anticipates the possibility of change. When we do zoning really badly, like in our suburbs, we try to freeze places in time. Zoning at least in theory is allowing for change. Historic districts don’t even allow for change.
What about historic district tax credits?
I don’t think anybody argues too much with programs that incentivize preservation. Forcing it down people’s throats … I don’t know.
I live in Wooster Square. We have to have stupid conversations about whether we can put solar panels on our houses.
Thomas Breen Photo
Really? They don’t let you do that? They didn’t have the sun in the 1920s? They think they’re ugly?
We have had conversations with our architect and the solar panel company about whether we’d even be allowed to apply to have solar panels.
They’re not going to like it when global warming wipes out Wooster Square …
That’s true. That’s not going to be so good for us if that happens
.
When the question came up about whether we’d have to apply to the Historic District Commission, we talked to the solar panel company about putting solar panels on the back of our building instead.
Should the next mayor and the Board of Alders pass a law preventing the Historic District Commission from preventing anyone from putting up solar panels or any energy efficiency? We just passed a [resolution] that we want to have a really serious climate change policy in our city. And we have this Historic District Commission that can prevent [switching to] clean energy?
There are a number of states, I think about 20, that in the state law that prohibit local authorities from preventing alternative energy stuff. You can’t use zoning to keep out solar panels. There certainly is precedent for that.
3/5: "building more housing supply may be the only effective way to reduce the pressure that is driving up rents and producing displacement."
http://cityobservatory.org/the-end-of-the-housing-supply-debate-maybe/
Given the housing crisis, why isn't the Board of Alders immediately passing new legislation to eliminate parking requirements, upzone all the main street corridors to a 10-story limit, and fast-track new development?