When Fred Morrison looked at the open space at the Army’s seven-acre site, he envisioned a new complex of supportive and affordable housing.
Morrison (in photo, in wide-brimmed hat) is the new director of the New Haven 10-year Plan To End Homelessness. He was among a group of homeless advocates who showed up Tuesday afternoon to tour the George D. Libby Army Reserve Center at 200 Wintergreen Ave., which the federal government is abandoning.
The police chief showed up for the tour, too, with an eye toward moving the department’s academy and firing range there.
The armory was one of the bases that the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) decided to shut down in 2005. The Army Reserve plans to leave the site in the next couple years, leaving the 7.15-acre property available for another use.
In bidding out the property, federal guidelines provide a significant advantage to homeless providers. Under the Base Closure Community Redevelopment and Homeless Assistance Act of 1984, the surplussed land must be offered for free to anyone who has a viable plan to house the homeless there.
The site has a clean bill of health as far as environmental contamination goes, said Gary Puryear (at right in photo at top of this story), base transition coordinator for the Army, and leader of Tuesday’s tour. If future owners discover any Army-related pollution, the Army has vowed to come back and clean it up, he said.
The new owner must pledge to not to flip the property or use it for any purpose other than what the federal government authorizes.
Puryear said before taking the property for free, a homeless provider has to show it has the funding to support a new development at the site. Doing so would mean knocking down or rehabbing the army’s 1950s concrete bunkers.
As they toured the building Tuesday, homeless advocates agreed that would prove a tall feat.
Meanwhile, Police Chief James Lewis (pictured) was sizing up the armory. The NHPD is eyeing the site as a prime spot to move its police academy and firing range.
“Clearly, the buildings would be a terrific training facility,” said Lewis. The garage is bigger and there’s plenty of classroom space compared to the city’s cramped quarters on Sherman Parkway. To make the plan happen, the city would need to provide regional training at the site, he said.
And it would need to construct a new shooting range. The current one is housed in small, narrow room in the basement (pictured). Clutching rolled-up plans in a leather glove, Lewis gestured to an outdoor embankment, where he thought he might be able to build lanes for an outdoor shooting range.
The city is also pursuing funding to create an indoor shooting range on the site.
Either move would please Beaver Hill neighbors like Nan Bartow, who toured the property on Tuesday, too. Bartow is among an active group of neighbors who have been fighting for years to get the city’s outdoor shooting range out of their neighborhood. They complain of the constant sound of gunfire, and of lead from bullets leaching into the Beaver Pond Park. (Click here for a back story.)
“We’ve been working on this for years,” said Bartow as she followed a military guide through the site. “This certainly gives us hope.”
Which vision, shooting range or supportive housing, will prevail?
The fate of the property will be decided in part by a special Local Redevelopment Authority headed by city Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts.
Smuts advocates moving the firing range to the site, but he said that, bound by strict federal guidelines, he will be open to hearing any proposal that comes before the LRA. To provide more separation between the city’s agenda and the LRA, he said he has split the work of creating the city’s application, and of staffing the LRA, between two different staff members.
The guidelines encourage the land to be used to alleviate homelessness, but don’t require it.
If the LRA decides the land should go to a non-homeless use, it must show that the needs of the homeless are adequately provided for (“yeah right!” said one homeless advocate), or that the site isn’t suitable for homeless providers to use.
Former Alderman Ed Mattison, a fiduciary of the 10-year plan and a longtime advocate for the homeless, admitted the site isn’t optimal. Its location, tucked away near West Rock Park, is “an out of sight, out of mind kind of site,” he said. It’s on a bus line, but too isolated for a shelter, he said.
But if the property were developed as a mixed-use site, with market-rate, affordable and supportive housing, for example, it could make sense.
“Then it would be more like a community and less like a ghetto,” said Mattison. “We don’t want to have a ghetto.”
Mattison said most of the homeless providers at the site agreed that a mixed-use complex, with supportive housing, would be a good idea. Supportive housing is a key component in the 10-year plan, which seeks to move chronic homeless people into permanent homes.
The big question was, Mattison said, where would the money come from?
The state pulled out funding for 145-units of “shovel-ready” supportive housing.
“Now that the governor has kicked us in the teeth,” he said, homeless advocates aren’t holding their breath for state funding.
Mattison said the groups are looking to partner with a developer to make the project happen.
Smuts said the city is looking for partners, too: Perhaps even a homeless provider, if the proposal makes sense.
The city may be able to get the property for free: If the LRA wants to use the site for a public interest use that’s not related to homelessness, it can do so if it gets sponsored by a federal department.
Whatever happens, the new project wouldn’t rise for until at least a couple of years. Interested providers must submit a notice of interest to Smuts by March 27. The LRA will then take 270 days to pick a new owner and create a redevelopment plan. Around February 2010, the plan would be submitted to the federal housing and defense departments. Final approval wouldn’t come back until September 2010 or so, officials calculated.
Even then, warned Smuts, the Army may not be ready to leave: The Army Reserve is waiting to consolidate at a new base that’s being built in Middletown, but will likely end up in litigation.
Mattison admitted the site was well-suited for the firing range and police academy, and not so great for housing. But he said he hoped the city use the chance to help its homeless population, whose needs are becoming even more urgent amid an economic crisis.
“This gift from the federal government is supposed to help the homeless. We have some leverage here,” he said. “This is an opportunity to deal somewhat with the problems of homelessness, and that’s what we want to do.”
This site should DEFINITLEY be used to house the homeless as the population is growing and current shelters are in dire straits.