Thomas Breen photos
City-owned lot on West Division. Below: Hopfner.
The Yale School of Architecture and Columbus House plan to transform a city-owned vacant lot and an adjacent trash-filled parcel in Newhallville into a new owner-occupied house and two new units of affordable housing, six years after students fled the neighborhood.
Architecture school faculty member Adam Hopfner and Columbus House board member Ben Ledbetter made that pitch at the regular monthly meeting of the Newhallville Community Management Team in the cafeteria of Lincoln-Bassett School.
Hopfner is the faculty supervisor for the Yale School of Architecture’s Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, an annual student-design competition that has resulted in the construction of a new house built in New Haven for each of the past 52 years.
Management team meeting at Lincoln Bassett.
The Vlock building program recently launched a five-year partnership with Columbus House, a local homeless shelter and housing support nonprofit. The first three homes homes built through that partnership have all been in the Hill, at 54 Adeline St., 41 Button St., and, most recently, 168 Plymouth St.
At the management team meeting, held this past Tuesday night, Hopfner and Ledbetter said that next year they plan to bring the Vlock program to Newhallville: In particular, to a city-owned lot at 324 West Division St. and a consistently trashed parcel of land just right behind it.
“People will just throw stuff over the big cinderblock wall,” Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Winter said about the current lot. “Want to get rid of a couch? Throw it over the wall. Want to get rid of a table? Throw it over the wall.”
Ledbetter and Alder Steve Winter.
He said he reached out to Hopfner and Columbus House about bringing the Vlock project to the neighborhood after having many conversations with neighbors about how best to solve the problem of the illicit dumping ground.
“I think the solution to the problem is replacing [the blighted lot] with a home.”
Hopfner said that the partner organizations plan to build a single-family home on the 324 West Division St. lot and a two-family rental property on the adjacent lot. The single-family home will be restricted to affordable owner-occupants, he said, while the two-family behind it will be restricted to affordable rentals.
Management team chair Harris.
How exactly will these properties be used? Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris asked. And whom will they be made available to?
“My understanding is that the two units will be for permanent rental units,” Hopfner said. “This is not a boarding house, this is not a rooming house. It is permanent affordable rental housing.”
The Yale architecture team has been to Newhallville before — then fled. In 2013 it started building a house on Lilac Street. Then an 83-year-old professor got mugged on the site. The team pulled up stakes and built the house in the Hill instead. But others rallied to build the home, through Neighborhood Housing Services.
Excellent choice for project location, it reinforces previous work by Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven (4 gut rehabs) on that block, and eliminates a problem that has degraded that neighborhood for decades.