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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New Program Couldn’t Keep Him Alive

Liaison Jesus Garzon Ospina describes death of first LEAD participant.

Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2018 - 

Two New Haven police officers found Mark Cochran, 55 — the first person targeted for help in an experimental program to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail — slumped over and intoxicated behind Trinity Church on the Green.

It was a Thursday in mid-December. The police called an ambulance, and, when it arrived, Cochran picked himself up and walked over to the car of his own strength.

As the ambulance ferried him to Yale-New Haven Hospital, Cochran, who had struggled for years with homelessness and substance abuse, coded. Medical personnel on board were not able to resuscitate him.

Cochran was pronounced dead at the hospital soon after the ambulance arrived.

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Not-For-Profit Seeks Support To Keep Rebuilding In Hill

Hill North Management Team Chair Lena Largie (right) and Hill Alder Ron Hurt.

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018 - 

A city not-for-profit that has spent nearly 40 years rehabilitating historic houses and supporting stable homeownership in the city’s poorest communities is looking for another round of federal grant money to help it continue its housing renovation and education work in the Hill, Newhallville and Dwight neighborhoods.

Bridgette Russell and Elias Estabrook of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) made that pitch during the Hill North Community Management Team’s regular monthly meeting in the cafeteria at Hill Regional Career High School on Legion Avenue.

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Former Refugee Takes LEAD Downtown

Jesus Garzon Ospina

Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - 

A Gateway Community College student who first came to New Haven over 15 years ago as a refugee fleeing violence in Colombia has been tapped to help low-level, non-violent drug offenders on the New Haven Green avoid arrest and receive stable housing, employment and medical rehabilitation.

At Tuesday night’s regular monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) on the second floor of City Hall, the 20-year-old political science student at Gateway Community College, Jesus Garzon Ospina, introduced himself as the neighborhood’s new community liaison for the city’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program.

LEAD is an experimental pre-arrest diversion initiative that the city launched at the end of November in the Hill and Downtown neighborhoods. The program, which was founded in Seattle and has been adopted in Albany, Baltimore, and Bangor, Maine, seeks to provide case management and rehabilitative social services instead of arrests and incarceration for low-level offenders engaged in drug abuse, prostitution and other non-violent street crimes.

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Mid-Year Car Tax Increase Coming

Alders prez Walker-Myers breaks news to neighbors Tuesday night.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - 

New Haveners will receive a slightly higher mid-year car tax bill in January 2018 as the city looks to stay within budget without cutting social services, in the face of reduced state aid.

Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers revealed that news to neighbors at Tuesday night’s Dwight Community Management Team meeting, which was held at its regular monthly location in the gymnasium of Amistad Academy on Edgewood Avenue.

Walker-Myers told the two dozen attendees that the city will send out semi-annual car tax bills in January 2018 that will reflect a mid-year increase in the local motor vehicle mill rate from 32 to 37 mills. That means that residents will pay $37, rather than $32, for every $1,000 worth of assessed value for their cars.

That’s a mid-year adjustment for the fiscal year that began July 1. Taxpayers have already paid a car tax bill for the first half of the fiscal year based on the 32 mill rate.

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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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LEAD Launches

Lt. O’Neill at Tuesday night’s meeting.

Friday, Nov. 24, 2017 - 

The city’s new prospective start date for a pilot program that diverts prostitutes and low-level drug offenders from the criminal justice system and towards social services is this coming Wednesday, Nov. 29.

At Tuesday night’s Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) meeting on the second floor of City Hall, Lt. Mark O’Neill, who is the district commander for the neighborhood, updated residents on the latest schedule for the city’s new Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program.

The city is preparing to begin a two-year, federally-funded pilot next week in the Hill and Downtown neighborhoods.

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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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Ping Pong Bests Piano, Bikes

The five finalists.

Friday, October 20, 2017 - Wooster Square will soon be home to two public ping pong tables after neighbors voted in a spirited election to spend part of their annual citizen-controlled allotment of the city budget on tabletop tennis.

Such was the result of the most recent Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT) meeting, which was held on the second floor of City Hall.

The meeting featured a “ranked choice”-style election — not over personalities seeking public office, but rather over how a community should allot public money. Advocates for public bikes and a kiosk and a piano competed with the ping pong proponent for the public’s support.

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Woman Takes LEAD On Familiar Turf

LEAD’s Minardi and Murphy at Hill North meeting.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - Rasheen Murphy grew up in the Hill in the early 1990s. She saw friends and family struggle with drug addiction and fall victim to violent crime and incarceration. She had her first child at age 15, while still a student at Wilbur Cross High School.

Twenty years later, Murphy still lives in the Hill and is about to start working with the city and the police department to help keep low-level, non-violent criminals in her neighborhood out of jail and away from some of the challenges that she and her peers faced while growing up on those same city blocks.

On Tuesday night at the Hill North Community Management Team’s monthly meeting at Career High School, Murphy introduced herself as the neighborhood’s community liaison for the city’s new grant-funded Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which is slated to begin in the Hill North, Hill South, and downtown neighborhoods in November.

Dwight Signs Off On Eminent Domain

Chair Florita Gillespie: Tonight we’re voting for this.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017 - The city’s Redevelopment Agency won hard-earned community support on Tuesday night for its bid to use eminent domain to hold slumlords accountable in the Dwight neighborhood.

City officials offered one final concession to the neighborhood: The city won’t follow through with seizing a specific rundown property If the community vetoes the idea.

Such was the outcome of the latest meeting of the Dwight Community Management Team (DCMT) on Tuesday night, when over 30 neighbors gathered in the cafeteria of the Amistad Academy Middle School on Edgewood Avenue to discuss new developments in the neighborhood. On the table was whether to approve a Chapel/Dwight/Whalley Redevelopment and Renewal Plan proposed by the city’s Redevelopment Agency. The agency has tried for months to win the team’s approval, stop one in a multi-step process of making the plan a realty.

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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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Duncan Rebuilders Vow To Preserve History

The Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team.

Thursday, September 21, 2017 - The new owners of the the 123-year-old Hotel Duncan promised to preserve many of its historic architectural elements, from its manual-operated elevator to its neon-lit marquee, as it converts the building into an upscale establishment.

On the inside, they aim to reimagine the design of the rooms and lobbies to reflect New Haven history and culture and to create a communal space that is welcoming to both visiting hotel guests and members of the community.

Such was the pitch that Graduate Hotels president Tim Franzen made to the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team on Tuesday night during its monthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

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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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“Participatory Budgeting” Takes On Olive Street Speeding

Friday, May 19, 2017  - Olive Street will be the beneficiary of a new mobile, radar speed sign next year as the result of an annual exercise in “participatory budgeting”: a democratic decision-making process that empowers a neighborhood to decide how to spend a small share of the city budget.

During its monthly meeting at City Hall this week, the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCT) voted to dedicate $5,000 of its annual $10,000 in “Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP)” allotment towards traffic calming on Olive Street.

For the past three years, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, has distributed $10,000 in NPIP money to each community management team in New Haven to spend as it chooses. The program allows community members themselves to debate and decide on which quality-of-life issues they would like to address in any given year.

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Zoning Overhaul Hearings Postponed; Criticism Aired

Wednesday, May 17, 2017  - Two hearings scheduled for a plan to dramatically change how New Haven makes major zoning decisions have been postponed, and the proposal ran into some initial public criticism Tuesday night.

The Legislation Committee’s proposed amendment to the zoning ordinance governing “Community Impacts” came under sharp criticism from members of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSMT) on Tuesday night during their monthly meeting at City Hall.

The plan would create a new “high impact” category of zoning approval that would require Yale University to go through a new layer of review — and detail a wide-ranging list of “community impacts” — before it builds anything in New Haven. (Read a previous full article about the proposal, and arguments for and against it, by clicking here.)

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Plans Revived For Wooster Sq. Apartments

Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - A historic industrial building in the Wooster Square neighborhood that has sat vacant for years may soon be home to nearly two dozen new apartments and a street-level café or microbrewery.

Real estate developer Peter Chapman presented this vision for a building he owns at 433 Chapel St. during the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management team’s monthly meeting at City Hall on Tuesday night.

Chapman first bought the building at the corner of Hamilton Street — just on the other side of where I-91 bisected the historic neighborhood into residential and industrial zones back during urban renewal — from the city in 2002 with the intention of converting the six-story brick warehouse into 14 apartments and a street-level commercial space. After years of delayed development and political troubles stymied his first attempts to rehab, and then to sell, the building, Chapman told the management team on Tuesday night, he is now on firm financial footing. He said he has a plan for the building that fits well within the city’s zoning requirements; and that he, just like everyone in the neighborhood, is eager to see it once again occupied.

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