Gilbane Building Co. and MURAL Real Estate Partners won the Lamont administration’s nod to build two 16-story towers including 470 apartments and retail space on state-owned land at New Haven’s Union Station. Image courtesy of Gilbane Development Company and MURAL Real Estate Partners
New Haven has won plaudits from housing advocates for the rapid recent pace of its multifamily development.
The housing boom that’s reshaping the city’s skyline has been dominated by large projects, while smaller developments face lengthy permitting processes including approval of variances.
“There is a mismatch between the way our city is already built and our zoning code,” said Esther Rose-Wilen, New Haven’s assistant director of comprehensive planning. “Right now, a lot of very small simple projects like putting a dormer on your house or an additional housing unit often have to go through the Board of Zoning Appeals.”
That mismatch points to the need for a citywide rezoning for the first time since 1962, according to Vision 2034, the city’s comprehensive plan update for the next decade.
“In recent years, we’ve made quite a few changes to our zoning, but we tend to do it incrementally and not all at once,” said Adam Marchand, a member of the Board of Alders and the Vision 2034 steering committee. “There will be questions asked about our staff capacity and how much we can change all at one go.”
The Vision 2034 report was approved by the City Plan Commission last week, fulfilling the requirement that all Connecticut municipalities update their comprehensive plan every 10 years.
The document is non-binding, and many of its significant recommendations will have to be approved by the Board of Alders, which has power to change the zoning code.
But the previous document helped shape the city’s land-use policies in the past decade, Rose-Wilen said. A majority of the recommendations were adopted or are being studied.
Parking Requirements Pose Obstacles
Since 2020, nearly 4,000 housing units have been developed in New Haven, including 1,890 income-restricted units. Another 1,980 units are under construction, according to the report.
And additional major developments are on the horizon: the Lamont administration in June selected a team of Gilbane Development Company and MURAL Real Estate Partners to develop 470 apartments on state-owned land at Union Station.
The estimated $316 million project, including a pair of 16-story towers and 28,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, is expected to begin construction as soon as 2026.
While mid-rise apartment construction has boomed in recent years, the study found a missed opportunity in smaller infill projects. It identified a potential bottleneck in minimum parking requirements, which add costs to projects and require developers to apply for variances to add housing.
Parking minimums are already waived for projects that meet the inclusionary zoning ordinance, which requires an affordable component in mid- and large-sized projects.
Two areas – the Whalley Avenue Commercial Gateway District and the Long Wharf mixed-use zone – have parking maximum limits. The strategy could be expanded to other areas to reduce heat islands, stormwater runoff and financial barriers to housing development, the report stated.
Additional changes to density, minimum lot size, setbacks, building coverage, building heights and floor area ratios should be considered, the study noted, either on a city-wide basis or in individual neighborhoods.
“The New Haven Zoning Ordinance shapes and controls development across the city and has not been amended since 1962, when car-centric, low-density development was the focus,” the report states. “A comprehensive zoning overhaul is needed, with an emphasis on lowering barriers to the creation of diverse housing options.”
Rezoning should be designed to avoid catalyzing gentrification in neighborhoods with high displacement risk, it added.
The study identified another sticking point for projects in the current zoning code: requirements for retail space on ground floors of residential buildings in the downtown area.
“The commercial market right now is not super strong, but the residential market is,” Marchand said.
Smaller Developers Pursue Inclusionary Zoning
Requirements for developers to include income-restricted units are included in New Haven’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, which was enacted in 2022. For projects with at least 10 housing units, it requires a 15 percent income-restricted component in the downtown for households earning a maximum 50 percent of area median income. Across most of the rest of the city, projects with 75 or more units are required to include a 5-percent affordable component.
The ordinance gave developers density bonuses and eliminated minimum parking requirements, incentives designed to offset the decrease in rental income from the affordable components.
No large-scale projects approved under the policy have broken ground, but Rose-Wilen said many small projects have voluntarily included sufficient income-restricted units to take advantage of density bonuses that make projects financially feasible.
“What surprised us is we have a lot of small projects opting in that would not be required to comply, because they are under 10 units,” she said. “It enables those property owners to get a little bit more density out of their structure and avoid going to the Board of Zoning Appeals.”
