Crowded Hill Neighbors Blast Zone Changes

Zoning updates are clearly important, but the real issue for people in the Hill and Dixwell is the decreasing home ownership. What single or multiple family homes are homed by residents, are at risk for being sold to developers who will tear them down and build large scale developments - for tenants.
There is a silent crisis going on.

If you look at the real estate listings with multi family 75-100 year old wooden buildings on lots under 4,000 sq ft in The Hill, Dixwell and Fair Haven, or the ones in Bridgeport or Waterbury, I can understand why you wouldn't want to recreate those buildings, but if you look at the little houses under 1,100 sq ft on small lots under 4,000 sq ft in parts of Hamden (for example: Spring Glen,) or in the other suburbs or the traditional row houses in many cities in CT and in the East Rock/Downtown area you can see it can be done in such a way that doesn't detract from the neighborhood.
If the construction standards required of small lots with close proximity to neighboring buildings had very high fireproofing and safety standards, that should help. Many of the small single family homes on small lots have cute little yards, courtyards, some have driveways and 1 car garages. Some of the legal 2 family houses have fully plumbed 3rd floor units with front and rear stairwells that with the proper fire safety construction measures would make an easy conversion to a 3 family. There are homes with finish-able basements that with the proper fire and safety measures would make a good apartment. There are lots of "garden" (below street) apartments in Chicago and NYC. There are homes with large garages or former horse & carriage barns that would make good accessible apartments if fire and safety measures are taken. Often in cities parking is limited, but that can be addressed by parking garages and accessible and safe public transportation options that have convenient scheduling and routes that access neighborhoods, employers and entertainment, and good walkability/safe bicycle routes, and ride services that are readily available and reasonably priced. As Global Warming increases, Baby Boomers age out of driving, and many Gen Z and Millennials prefer not to own vehicles, the need for great green public mass transit options will increase.

If a property owner wants to put in an Accessory Dwelling Unit in a largely residential area, that's a property rights issue in my mind. With regard to parking on-street, in the public right-of-way, that has to be better managed by the municipality - are enough streets in the Hill part of a Residential Parking Zone? For those streets that are, is that working out or can those residential-parking-permit-zones be better managed?

If you look on the far left hand side of the last photo in the article of Arthur Street, you can see a basement apartment (painted red). Originally, that property would have been built as a single family house. At some point, the owner created the apartment in the basement. This was a fairly common thing that property owners did in this neighborhood.

Under the existing zoning regulations in New Haven, homeowners are able to create basement apartments similar to this today. The biggest problem is that most people are uninterested in creating apartments like this. And the few people who are interested in doing it, don't realize that they can do it and don't know how to do it. This is the urgent problem that needs to be addressed.

Zoning reform should come after the issue of lack of interest and lack of knowledge among City homeowners and residents have been addressed. If zoning reform is prioritized, then only the people who are already interested in and knowledgeable of real estate investing and development will benefit from the changes. This risks empowering the speculative real estate investors active in New Haven rather than empowering the City's existing homeowners and residents.

Free parking on city streets is a big problem, not least when it is used to prevent construction of new homes for humans. Free parking is not a right.

As a practical matter, the proposal would have little impact on the Hill and other dense neighborhoods (including my part of East Rock). The Phase 1 slide notes that "non-conforming changes to elements still require BZA relief." In English, this means the rules regarding how close a building can come to the lot line, how much of the lot can be covered with buildings, etc. still apply. The property owner would still need to get a variance to get an exception to the rules, for example to build dormers to turn an attic into an apartment. This normally means hiring a lawyer. And the legal standard for getting a variance is hardship. The fact that adding an ADU would financially help the owner is not sufficient.

Nonetheless, I think the city should broadly permit ADUs. They are a substantially cheaper way of creating affordable housing than having the Housing Authority build them. And approximately one quarter of homes in New Haven have a single occupant. Many of these owners are seniors who are "house rich but cash poor". Permitting ADUs can be a way of permitting allowing these owners to continue living in their homes.

Did no one ever think that making more units equals more cars? What do planners really consider when they do these things? Mayor DeStefano de-densified; now they densify... there is never a plan that is planned carefully or carried out thoroughly. The result is the mess you see today.

Who wants crowds of people stuffed into the city??

Sort of a side-note, but if a person can use space on the street to store a car at no charge, why can't a person use that space to store their garbage cans for free? Is there a special right attached to owning a car that gives a person the right to free use of shared space?

This article is helpful. I reached out to my alderwoman about safety concerns regarding parking on my street. I've seen fire trucks and school busses get stuck trying to leave the end of Judith Terrance In NH, I was advised to start a petition to request parking changes. Not only is my time limited but in my opinion, that's only going to cause me issues with my neighbors and possibly no end solution if the ones with 6 cars on the street are opposed to this concern. I have a driveway. My personal parking is not the issue. There's a handicap neighbor who's had complications recently and watching the first responders get stuck because of the tightness and overcrowding is very sad. I think the city should focus on these matters. Update zoning regulations.

@William Kurtz
There are significant taxes paid on a motor vehicle such as property taxes to the jurisdiction in which it is kept and registration taxes to the state. I am not arguing that this gives you a right to free parking (although it could be argued that this is just another form of usage of the roads) but it makes your comparison to trash cans rather silly.

@ CityYankee, de-densifying tends to shrink the Grand List of a city - probably a wrong direction mistake of those past administration(s).

@William Kurtz, as a general rule you can't store a car on the street. Many streets, even without meters, have limits on how long you can park. And if you park anywhere for more than 72 hours you risk getting a ticket.

CityYankee, where do you live, Bethany? People who choose to live in cities realize that "crowds of people" live there. In the case of New Haven, there were actually far more people living here in the past. In 1950, the population was 164,000, compared to 130,000 today.

The discussion between @William Kurtz and @DerbyRam54 articulates something that most people don't consciously consider: free on-street parking is taxpayer subsidization for the storage of private vehicles. As a taxpayer, I just don't want my tax dollars being used to provide storage for personal vehicles, which are major drivers of climate change and cause countless unnecessary deaths (cars are, particularly, among the highest causes of death for children and young adults).

Let's densify housing, drive up demand for actually climate- and human-friendly transportation, and use the taxpayer dollars to support building fast, safe, convenient, affordable mass transportation & pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.

Dear Kevin, yes there were more people here in the 50's but there were not as many cars. Also, people were not as crazy and entitled as they seem to be now. Dedensification was supposed to address the fact that we seem to be getting less and less able to live together peacefully in close quarters. It seemed like a good idea in theory to make some more space so we don't feel all hemmed in. But people have so much now and they want ever more accommodations so they can live as they please, no matter what the existing conditions of an area are. Who knew that less people means less tax revenue? Apparently , planners of the Model Cities and DeStefano years did not know this!

It is we that have changed and the model of the city where we are has not changed; only deteriorated.

Aicha Woods: "I think exclusionary zoning has specifically been used to continue racial segregation". Correct--by suburbia. As a result, cities ALREADY have large concentrations of racial minorities and this particularly has been the case since the post-WWII "white flight" to suburbia. Therefore it's totally irrelevant to bring this up when discussion our city's zoning.

I tried posting a comment on this article when it first came out but it clearly got rejected. Im asking everybody to consider the language differences when comparing the idea of zoning changes here and zoning changes in Woodbridge. Double standard.

@Klerovich: I would imagine that constructing a full accounting of whether parking or roads in general are subsidised would become quite complex. Car owners are certainly not getting the space for free when you consider all the taxes levied on vehicles, nor is parking the same as "storage".

It may also be hard for you to accept but there are social benefits to road-based transport. Perhaps you could try doing without anything that reached you by road and see how things go.

The point that appears to escape the anti-car lobby in New Haven is that for a lot of people, whether they live in the suburbs and dare to drive into New Haven or live in New Haven and need their car to get to a job in the suburbs, the car is a necessity and a vision of universally available public transport is a nonsense given the patterns of land use in Connecticut.

Insisting that on-street parking not be available, as you appear to do, is simply a class-based attack on working people who cannot afford houses with driveways and garages and need a vehicle to get to work.

The "why not garbage toters?" was a semi-rhetorical question, intended to illustrate the very point that Klerovich made later, but since people saw fit to respond:

@DerbyRam54: Car taxes and registration fees are irrelevant to the discussion about free parking. If they granted one a special privilege to use street space for parking, there should be a mechanism in place to provide that. As it is, street parking is limited and controlled in much of New Haven while in towns and cities where the mill rate is lower, free street parking is abundant. And parking is absolutely 'storage.'

As to your assertion that, "the car is a necessity and a vision of universally available public transport is a nonsense given the patterns of land use in Connecticut," remember that the 'patterns of land use in Connecticut' are governed by the very zoning codes under discussion. It's question-begging (in the most precise sense) to argue that zoning laws can't change because zoning laws make it difficult for them to change.

@Kevin McCarthy: " as a general rule you can't store a car on the street. Many streets, even without meters, have limits on how long you can park. And if you <bold>park anywhere for more than 72 hours you risk getting a ticket</bold>."

In theory, sure. In practice, not so much. And again, parking <i>is</i> storage. Even for up to 72 hours.

@DerbyRam54 The reason people need cars in this city is that the public transportation is deeply flawed. Buses don't run on time, it's very time-consuming to get from one side of the city to another, and the schedules do not accommodate many riders' needs.

If the city were to actually invest in high-quality public transportation (as I said, "fast, safe, convenient, affordable"), most residents would not need a car. This is true of most European and Asian cities -- heck, it's true even of NYC.

Likewise "patterns of land use" in no way require that we use cars. Our car-based infrastructure is what forces people to need cars.

The fact is, car-based transportation leaves out the poorest of the poor -- those who cannot afford to buy or maintain a car -- or who, due to disability, are unable to drive one.

Insisting that car-based transportation is universally "necessary" is simply a failure of the imagination.

@William Kurtz: explain how parking a car is not a use of the road, and quite why the taxes paid on ownership and use of a vehicle somehow become irrelevant in this instance. Clearly there needs to be limits on the availability of on-street parking due to the resulting congestion, but your assertion that there should apparently be no on-street parking other than metered parking is probably not going to be well received by many working citizens who cannot afford a house with a driveway and who would resent what amounts to a further tax on them.

Land use patterns are absolutely part of the problem. Industry and job opportunities for many workers have become dispersed throughout the suburbs as the old industries in New Haven have disappeared. Viewing transport requirements solely in terms of the city is quite myopic (but quite typical of Connecticut with its lack of regional government) and both you and Klerovich seem to ignore the impact that this dispersal has had on the ability of the bus to provide service for city workers to access employment outside the city. Car ownership and car pooling become essential if workers are to get to where jobs are, necessitating a place to keep the car overnight. Ignore that, and you either force people to leave the city or you reduce employment opportunities for working class residents.

Again, @DerbyRam54, this is a failure of the imagination. Quality public transportation gets people the places they need to go, including outside the city if that's where they need to be. Public transportation in, say, Moscow or Paris (or smaller cities in Russia or France, or again really any European country) doesn't just stop at the city boundaries; it extends to the suburbs and the countryside.

But expanding transit in the city would be a great start to reduce car dependency for people who live and work inside the city (which is still very many of us). That would reduce competition for parking among those who work beyond the city. Car sharing, as you mentioned, is also a great way to reduce the demand for taxpayer-subsidized car storage!

Someone suggested we bring back the trolley cars tracks that are under the roads and mirror the bus routes.
Boston still uses trolley cars and they are less polluting than engines.

@Klerovich: I quite agree with you that transportation planners in this part of the world lack imagination and that the level of service we have is woefully inadequate, but comparisons with major world cities is a bit of a stretch.
Before technological advances rendered travel more or less redundant for most of what I do I spent periods of time on projects overseas. In Tokyo use of a car would have been insane and the dense city and suburban rail network made commuting from a downtown hotel to our suburban office quite easy. But the population density of the greater Tokyo area is several levels of magnitude greater than New Haven.
A couple of hours driving around the industrial parts of the greater New Haven suburbs will illustrate the sprawl of places of work alongside suburban housing. Linking that with public transport would be expensive and probably not cost-effective.
Much more could be done to reduce car traffic within and into New Haven as an end-destination, but a big part of the solution lies out in the suburbs where more needs to be done to cover the first mile.
When I first came to the US I lived in Westport and commuted to Manhattan. Parking at the railway station in Westport was inadequate and the town had developed a three-tier system of getting you from your house to the station and back again. MaxiBus was actually a medium sized schoolbus type vehicle that ran on a scheduled service where demand was high. MiniBus was the same thing but using a 12 passenger van on more lightly used routes. MaxiTaxi was a 12 passenger van that had to be booked in advance as a rideshare service for parts of town where neither of the other two services were appropriate. The whole thing worked very well, especially when you consider that the routing of MaxiTaxi had to be worked out manually in the days before small computing power was available. That was, I thought, an imaginative solution that could be emulated elsewhere.

@Patricia Kane: I think it was Heather C who posited reincarnating the streetcar system of yesteryear as a solution to transport problems.
First, it is perhaps worth noting that the only reason New Haven streetcar service lasted into the late 1940s was the bankruptcy of the New Haven Railroad in 1935 and their consequent inability to support their subsidiary Connecticut Company, who were running a significant operating deficit ($1.8 million in 1934). The reorganization plan for ConnCo involved conserving cash and reducing expenses, which meant converting to buses. The buses were not as efficient as streetcars but did not involve maintaining track, overhead power lines, and electrical substations. Conversion could proceed no faster than the courts would permit, and so streetcars were still running in New Haven when the US entered WW2, putting an end to conversion for the duration.
Whatever infrastructure may remain under the tarmac is of course now just scrap metal that is too expensive to recover. Construction costs for light rail in any of its formats is probably not worthwhile for a city of New Haven's size, and trying to operate streetcars without some form of reserved right of way (which could include streets reserved for public transport vehicles only) is more or less a waste of time. Given the length of time it takes to get a bike lane marked out I think it's safe to say we won't see streetcars in New Haven (although you can go and see some of them in East Haven/Branford, Windsor Locks and I believe at Lake Compounce.

DerbyRam54- thanks for remembering my comment on streetcars! My great grandfather took a streetcar from his home on the Cheshire-Hamden line to his job and back again at Yale everyday in the 1900's. My point was not to unearth the rail lines for the streetcars, but to encourage the thought of electric powered modern streetcars, buses and shuttles that would take people in and out of the suburbs for work, play and school. Many of our major employers have moved to the suburbs, many of the workers who they employ live in the cities. Having lived in Chicago and having relatives that lived there and having stayed with friends in NYC and visited Boston, you can't help but be jealous of the variety of transit options they have, and wish that the state of CT would invest in our public transportation to make it easier to use, cheaper, and more convenient to get to and from the airports, the train stations, the major employers, the schools, shopping areas, and to entertainment/activity venues like restaurants.bars, theaters, clubs, parks, beaches, movies, museums. Many companies when considering a move to CT or who left CT stated that the lack of good mass transit options and the ease of transportation for their employees was a major factor in deciding where to locate to. Nobody likes sitting in traffic in their vehicle or dealing with jerks behind the wheels of other vehicles. If CT invested in making sure you could take a electric bus, shuttle, streetcar to wherever most people needed to get to and from at all hours of the day and night safely, cheaply, and on convenient schedules with useful routes and with great transportation shelters and stations, we could reduce pollution, make transportation more equitable, and probably reduce traffic jams and accidents. We are going to be forced by Global Warming to give up the love of the gas and diesel private vehicle, we might as well embrace the future and make CT a great transportation state to live in and work and play in.

New Haven residents have a lot more to worry about than parking. While ADUs are more or less a non-issue (for one, they are very difficult to finance), changes to the lot sizes and setbacks are a big deal.

This is a developer- and lobbyist-backed initiative that has been cleverly packaged as progressive policy. Changes to the setbacks in the name of affordable housing are a trojan horse intended to set the stage for very large, very expensive single-family homes on prime city lots.

It may not be apparent right away, but soon enough, neighborhoods that previously housed those of low- and moderate-income will be home to affluent professionals who want to be in a more urban environment. These changes will eventually put gentrification on steroids.