Yale Div School Eyes East Rock Home

Stephen Brown shows neighbors a map and photographs of 320 Canner St., a two-story, single-family home that Yale is interested in purchasing and converting to academic use.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - 

The Yale Divinity School is interested in purchasing a single-family home near its Prospect Hill campus and converting it into an academic building, thereby removing over $18,500 from the city’s annual property tax rolls.

At Monday night’s regular monthly meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street, Karen King from Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs and Stephen Brown from Yale’s Planning Administration informed neighbors that the university is exploring a potential purchase of the two-story, single-family home at 320 Canner St.

The home, built in 1986, is privately owned and occupied and has an assessed value of $481,810 as of 2016. At the current mill rate of 38.68, annual property taxes on the home would be $18,636.

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City Prepares To Clear Mill River Homeless Camp

Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - 

The city is planning to clear a large Mill River homeless encampment near the Ralph Walker Skating Rink sometime before the beginning of the new year.

Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist Linda Davis delivered that message to the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) on Monday night during the team’s regular monthly meeting at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street.

Davis told the team that the city’s Homeless Outreach Task Force plans to clear out a homeless encampment that has been active for months under the I-91 overpass sometime “before the first snowfall.”

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Plan For Ex-Factory Breaks Condo Barrier

The old Lehman Brothers Inc. printing company, which has been empty for almost 10 years.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - 

With a plan to renovate a shuttered Goatville factory printing plant, a fast-growing New Haven real estate company is betting that New Haven’s housing boom is ready for condominiums, not just high-end rental apartments.

The testing ground for this condo experiment will be the former Lehman Brothers printing plant at Foster and Canner streets, which has been closed and derelict for almost a decade.

During Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street, property manager Mendy Paris, architect Wayne Garrick, and lawyer Kenneth Rozich of the company Ocean Management presented their prospective plan for converting the building into a 30-unit condominium complex. New Haven is awash in new high-end housing construction, but other developers report they have been able to obtain financing only for rentals, not condos. Ocean gets private financing from out-of-state investors and doesn’t need to rely on banks.

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Would You Buy A Parking Space From This Man?

Doug Hausladen.

Thursday, September 28, 2017 - Doug Hausladen came to East Rock looking to make an elusive sale: a flexible parking space designed to bridge the gap between meter-wary merchants who need more on-street parking and neighbors who want to park their cars on the streets where they live.

Hausladen, New Haven’s transit chief, got permission to start selling these parking spaces more than a year ago, when the city amended the code of ordinances to allow for selling business restricted parking spaces on residential side streets.

Since then, Hausladen has pitched different neighborhoods on the idea. So far, no takers.

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Bus Stops Get Fall Reprieve

The crowd at Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - The city’s holding off until the end of the year with a plan to remove six State Street bus stop so neighbors have time to weigh in.

City Transportation, Traffic & Parking Director Doug Hausladen delivered that message to East Rock residents on Monday night during this month’s meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) at the mActivity gym on Nicoll Street.

Forty neighbors filled the room to hear Hausladen out as he apologized for not have engaged earlier in a clear public discussion about the planned removals of three inbound and three outbound Q bus stops on State Street between Bradley and Mechanic Streets. The city’s Traffic Authority recently gave him permission to remove those stops.

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What Will Make Bradley & State Safe?

Intersection of Bradley and State Streets.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - Daphne Geismar has lived on Bradley Street since 2001, and has personally witnessed at least three car crashes at the intersection of Bradley and State.

She has been petitioning the city for over a decade to improve the safety of that intersection.

With a renewed commitment from the city’s transportation department and the support of her South of Humphrey Street (SoHu) neighbors, Geismar may see a safer intersection in the not-too-distant future.

Traffic safety at Bradley and State Streets was one of the focal points of this month’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting, held on Monday night at the mActivity gym on Niccoll Street.

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Neighbors Press For Action On Dumping

Andrea Konetchy with picture of recent tire dump in East Rock Park.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017 - The city can fine you for not shoveling your sidewalk or for dumping bulk trash outside your property. But until now, there has been little it can do to enforce those fines.

That’s about to change, now that the city has finally found a qualified person willing to volunteer time to adjudicate appeals to fines.

Neighborhood groups have been waiting for that change and pushing for help in tackling illegal dumping and other public-space violations.

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East Rock Gets Behind Cedar Hill Campaign

A sign for drivers passing through Cedar Hill. (Lucy Gellman photo)

Tuesday, May 23, 2017 - Thanks to support from the rest of East Rock, isolated Cedar Hill will receive $10,000 toward a grassroots beautification effort designed to build community pride and to connect to surrounding areas of the city currently separated by highway overpasses.

That was the result of a decision of the East Rock Community management team at its monthly meeting Monday night at mActivity gym on Niccoll Street. The team voted to allocate the entirety of its annual Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) funds towards the project in Cedar Hill, a small set of self-contained streets at the northeastern tip of the East Rock community.

For each of the past three years, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, has made available $10,000 in NPIP funds to each of the city’s community management teams to help them address neighborhood quality-of-life concerns.

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Hausladen: Bikes Don’t Kill People ...

East Rockers Monday night suggested potential bike share spots.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - As he presented a plan to bring hundreds of rentable bikes to New Haven’s streets, city transit chief Doug Hausladen invoked statistics about smash-ups on the road to respond Monday night to complaints about dangerous cyclists.

Hausladen showed up to the monthly East Rock Community Management Team to get input from neighbors about a new “bike share” program about to bring 300 instantly borrow-able cycles to the city.

He received lots of ideas and enthusiasm, along with complaints about New Haven’s users of fast-growing transit choice.

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Love Marches On

Wanda Faison and Deacon Vincent Smith on the Love March.

January 15, 2017 - Rodney Mitchell hoisted the American flag at the front of Sunday’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Love March, just as he has for the past decade and a half. His possible successor was right beside him.

Standing alongside him was his son Jayden, who held a simple yellow poster emblazoned with a white peace sign.

Click here to read the full article (http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/mlk_love_march/).

Bike Co-op Adds The Silver Screen

Audience assembles at Bradley Street Bike Co-op (Thomas Breen photo)

September 19, 2016 - Halfway through a presentation on the many ways that the Hill neighborhood has changed over the past 100 years, architect-in-training Jonathan Hopkins paused to ask the question that everyone in the audience had been considering for the past hour and a half.

“Why the city chose the site they ended up choosing for the new John C. Daniels School, I’m not quite sure,” he mused. “Because there were obviously people living there. We just watched a documentary about them.

“On the one hand, I can understand why the city wanted to remove vacant buildings from the neighborhood. But the school project simply didn’t accomplish that.”

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Cops, East Rockers Connect Over Koffee

Sgt. Shafiq Abdussabur and Zora Kim (Thomas Breen photo)

September 18, 2016 - Christine Kim rounded the corner of Humphrey and Orange Streets to find seven cops standing outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

She didn’t know it, but they’d come to talk with her — and other East Rock neighbors.

“Is there an emergency?” Kim asked the first uniformed officer she approached.

“Yes there is,” Sgt. Shafiq Abdussabur replied with a smile. “The emergency is that you have to attend this party right now.”

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