Soon hundreds of new apartments will take the place of currently underused city parking lots in downtown New Haven.
Two largely underutilized parking lots, owned by the city, in the area of State Street, will be converted to roughly 450 apartments. A quarter of the apartments will be affordable.
Several decades ago, goals for the neighborhood were very different, State Representative Roland Lemar said.
“The vision of this corridor was how many suburbanites can we move as quickly as possible through our city?” Lemar said. “Instead of us focusing on a few dozen parking spots, now we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of families who can move into our city.”
One two-acre plot, on the corner of Fair and State Streets, will become about 279 apartments, 70 of which will be affordable, according to New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker.
The affordable units will be for residents of a wide income level, from people earning 30% to 80% of the area’s median income (AMI).
“Thirty to fifty percent AMI is hard to do. It takes a lot of work because it is meeting a more deeply affordable need in our city,” Elicker said.
The smaller of the two properties, located on the corner of George and State Streets, will have at least 170 apartments, 51 of which will be affordable. The housing development branch of New Haven’s housing authority, the Glendower Group, will develop the smaller project.
The developments will also include more than 7,000 square feet of retail space.
The city sought proposals for the land in December, but construction won’t begin until late 2025 or early 2026. The projects are part of an overall lower State Street redevelopment project, funded in part from the Department of Community and Economic Development.
Families who live in the affordable units will not pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent, Housing Authority President Karen DuBois-Walton said.
“The other thing that I always keep in front of me when doing any of this and the why for any of this, is that we are at over 40,000 families on our waitlist right now,” DuBois-Walton said. “Those are the families who are waiting for us to build and to turn parking lots into really quality housing.”
