Salvatore Puts Novella Up For Sale

Now that there is the Chapel Street Pharmacy on the first floor, this crappy eyesore is finally bandaged up enough to try and sell to stupid investors.

If I developed an apartment building, I would at least make sure that the first floor retail space was both open past 6pm, and maybe sold some things that tenants would like to buy -- like band-aids, salve, adult-diapers.....

I have no idea how this even happened. Randall Salvatore. You are a self-serving carpetbagger who needs to be banned from future employment in New Haven.

Get rid of this speculator. He is the death of all of us.

Good luck with that.......a good location for affordable or even subsidized housing....on main street with mass transit and bike lanes nearby not to mention 2 large hospitals.

I don't understand the hatred of this building. Was the blighted parking lot and empty houses so historical and lovely that we wanted to keep them forever? Is it such a bad thing to have high income tenants paying taxes and spending money in New Haven? Is this apartment building really in any danger of ruining the character of New Haven? What, exactly, is the problem here? Just that it isn't pretty enough for Bill and Wendy? Or that it wasn't built as affordable housing by a cash-strapped city in a state with a $450 million deficit?

This ties right into my comment in ref to the WHALLEY POTENTIAL PROJECT OF REPLACING DELANEYS...Here is a business man who came in got tax credits, variances, etc,,sold us a beach front residence in the dessert(sarcasms) and now is looking to get a few dollars and bail. When are teh every day homeowners going to get give backs take rebates etc. When is the city going to say hey will will give you free roofs or five year tax credits for making sure your home is presentable and taxable...the answer is NEVER!yet every shiny shoe vagabond with a good story comes along and we give them free money. We let them build with discounted tax promises etc and as soon as it is no longer a maximized profit they leave and we as homeowners scramble with part time jobs ,cut backs on family activities etc because we know that since they are NOT paying their fair share of taxes we will be mandated to pay more! enough...Axion made promises of grandeur for all the tax relief they got , they promised jobs etc and look they have already layed off and promising more....when are we going to remember history and stop fall for Trojan horses.

Because most of us have lived in New Haven long enough to have seen the city fall for this type of snake oil salesman before. New Haven never fully recovered from the "Condo Boom" of the late 80's and early 90's, and when the crash game, it came HARD (PHRASING, BOOM!!). Banks went belly up, and many of those condos went unsold, and literally ROTTED off their foundations. Go down to Quinnipiac Avenue and you'll see the slabs of concrete. That's all that left from those units. Now they're repeating all the same mistakes.

It's McMansions 101. You buy land cheap, build cheap to raise the value of the property, and then you take the money and run before the imminent collapse of the real estate market. A collapse that guys like Randy Salvatore contribute to, by constructing a building that looks like either a Soviet era Cold War Kruschkyovka, or as it were designed using Legos, but somehow still manage to make money off of. Even if wealthy tenants who can pay those high rents move in, they won't be able to spend enough money for the rest of us to benefit from their largess to trickle down to the rest of us. There needs to be development, however it needs to be from the middle out. Not from the top down.

B2R,

I have mixed feelings about the design of the Novella.

Like a lot of these podium-style buildings (1-2 story concrete or steel base with 4-5 stories of wood light frame construction above), the Novella was built with relatively inexpensive building materials. For a building that advertises itself as a luxury apartment building, the design leaves much to be desired. Part of the issue is the cost of construction, which drives down the amount developers can spend on materials. For this reason, I generally approve of the hardi board siding. While it was certainly done for cost reasons, there's something about it that works for me. The building has a similar massing as nearby brick apartment buildings and the former YMCA building across the street, but the board siding relates to the Dwight Street neighborhood around the corner, which largely consists of wood-frame clapboard sided houses.

Having the hardi board go all the way down to the sidewalk, however, was done in poor taste and more careful thought should have been put into the design of the "base" of the building. While the ground level retail is nice, the parking along the sidewalk of Chapel Street is not desirable. Again though, underground parking would have been prohibitively expensive, so I give that a pass.

The worst part of the Novella for me is the Chapel Street setback, or lack thereof. While the smaller, older houses of the Dwight Street neighborhood sometimes have no setback along Chapel Street, a building with the bulk of the Novella needs a more substantial setback - see the width of the Howe Street sidewalk as compared to the Chapel Street one. It's not good for pedestrians and its not good for the street trees, which were butchered.

If the Chapel Street setback was more generous and the "base" was designed better, I would like this building a lot more. On the whole, though, I mostly agree with your other points. Just thought I'd add my two cents.

@BetweenTwoRocks

I believe the points that Bill and Wendy were along the lines of:

1) The retail space of the Novella has sat empty for a very long time. Now that something has finally opened up (the pharmacy), it would only seem to make sense for it to offer convenient hours. Otherwise, it seems like a waste.

2) As the building site is on a main street with good access to public transportation and close to amenities (hospitals, city hall), would it not have been better used for affordable housing? The city has seen a recent boom in luxury units being built, but can the same be said for affordable units? Many city residents, who could benefit from the infrastructure and transportation access of downtown are priced out of these buildings. Instead, complexes such as Westville Manor and Brookside Estates are closer to the suburbs, creating a greater distance between a population who is more likely to rely on public transportation and the places they need to/can go. The "high income tenants paying taxes and spending money in New Haven" have plenty of options when it comes to housing in New Haven. Those who cannot afford a $1950/month rent for a 620 sqft 1 bedroom in the Novella (actual price from checking their website just now) are essentially given the message that "downtown is only for the rich". For the record, I pay less than that for more square footage in East Rock. But even my rent is out of reach for many. It would just be nice to see more options for those who are less fortunate, but no less deserving.

Ever think that the reason developers or management companies have trouble courting retail stores into these properties is that the people who live upstairs are buying stuff from Amazon.com?

JC Freemont,

If I lived at The Novella, it would be nice to be able to go downstairs and buy a soda, some chips, and maybe some useful household item that I just inconveniently ran out of, rather than this very 'narrowly-focussed' medically-oriented front of a store that is the Chapel St Pharmacy.

There is no reason to go in, and I have never seen a customer in there....in that regard, it reminds me of the now defunct Olive Oil store....

To everyone who says this would be a great location for affordable housing: who, in your imagination, was going to pay for that? The Donald J. Trump Charitable Foundation? The idea that the city could have had affordable housing here and chose not to is an "I want a pony" fantasy. It's like saying your parents made a bad decision to vacation in Disneyland because it would have been more fun to vacation on Mars.

Similarly, do you think the developer turned down a better store because he is stupid? Are you offering to run the store you want to see? There is a real problem here, which is that everyone wants to see first-floor retail on all of the new apartment buildings, but retail demand doesn't grow that fast. 100 new apartments don't actually require a additional store, not given the amount of retail already downtown. The store is odd because it turns out that the only person who wanted to open a store here has an odd idea (who knows maybe it will somehow work and/or when it doesn't it will probably start selling the milk and potato chips that folks want to see.) We are going to have to admit that some new buildings won't support first-floor retail. Rather, the new residents should be helping to support existing retail space.

This building is much, much, much better than a surface parking lot, which was the only alternative on the table. It was built without subsidies and adds to the city's tax base. This is a pretty good outcome.

@ B_T_R------I believe the state deficit is closer to a billion. And you're right, the building isn't pretty enough but I probably will outlive it.

@ Esbey-----Please google Housing First approach for homeless people. Wouldn't it be better if Trump was charitable....to anyone ???? There are plenty of good empty buildings in town that could be bought by the rich (Yale or the city) and given to Liberty Community Services, the city's strongest non-profit so far, to run on tax-free property. The buildings would be near medical and social services and mass transit and have 24/7 concierge/reception protection. All would be non-smoking (fire hazard). AS jobs are rare rents would be paid by SSI, etc. although many homeless, addicts or otherwise, do become taxpayers in the long run. Housing First saves lives and money in more than a few other cities (US). This isn't a dream....it's reality. Although I do like ponies...and pitbulls.

Esbey,

It has been my theory that the promised 'First Floor Retail' is a little more than bunk.
All we have seen so far has been the moving of cups (Chapel Pharmacy at Novella, J Press at College/Crown).

It reminds my of the early naughts, when 'affordable artist lofts' were the catch-phrase of developers....