by Dereen Shirnekhi The New Haven independent
The view of Union Station from Union Square.
The City Plan Commission deferred Thursday on taking a key vote for the “transformational” Union Square development, as the Board of Alders has yet to approve a necessary zoning amendment for the project.
Representatives from the city’s housing authority, meanwhile, warned that even conditional approval from the commission would have provided a “competitive edge” in the pursuit of funding from a selective pot of federal money.
That was the outcome of a special Zoom meeting of the City Plan Commission on Thursday. The only item on the agenda related to the Union Square development project, the housing authority’s plan to build up to 2,490 mixed-income apartments as well as ample retail and park space across from Union Station, at the site of the former Church Street South complex and the current Robert T. Wolfe apartments.
The Union Square project in its entirety is anticipated to cost nearly $1.5 billion.
Thursday’s discussion was specifically about the site plan review, the coastal site plan review, and class C soil erosion and sediment control review related to phase one of the project — the construction of two multi-story, mixed-use buildings with 541 apartments involving the movement of 27,000 cubic yards in the Transit-Oriented Community (TOC) zone.
One problem wound up standing in the way of the commission voting on the project on Thursday: This site isn’t yet considered to actually be part of the city’s TOC zone.
The Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) won unanimous recommended approval from the City Plan Commission at a January special meeting for a zoning ordinance text amendment and zoning ordinance map amendment that would “remap” the 11.4-acre site across from Union Station into the city’s recently created TOC zone. (Currently, the site is located in a specially defined zone called Planned Development District-15.) The rezoning proposal would also update the use table for the TOC zone to allow for residential uses “for the purposes of implementing the Union Square Choice Neighborhoods Transformation Plan.”
That rezoning proposal has yet to receive a vote by the full Board of Alders, which means that the site is not actually located in the TOC zone yet.
“I see this as the next step in a truly generational project,” said City Plan Department Executive Director Laura Brown as she introduced Thursday’s proposal to the commissioners. Still, as the zoning had not been approved, “we do not anticipate a vote tonight.”
Phase 1 includes the construction of most of the two buildings facing Union Station, between Church Street, Union Avenue, and Columbus Avenue, as well as the central square between the two buildings. The construction will include 541 apartments, retail and commercial space, and 195 parking spaces in parking garages.
“We’ve broken two buildings into different stages to align with different funding sources,” explained Paul Santos of Newman Architects.
“I’m really proud to be part of this project,” said Enzo Chiaravalloti, an engineer with Fuss & O’Neill. Chiaravalloti noted that FEMA had moved the site out of the 100-year floodplain, an area with a 1 percent chance of shallow flooding per year, to the 500-year floodplain, a lesser risk of 0.2 percent of annual flooding.
“How did you do that?” Commissioner and Westville Alder Adam Marchand asked.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn elaborated. “FEMA does a 1D analysis, which basically draws a line from the water body up inland and analyzes wave action and other parameters along that line,” he said, though the lines aren’t continuous and FEMA guesses in-between. So the city drew a line around the Union Avenue area and, based on the analysis and the factors specific to the area, refined “the guesses FEMA had done. We instead had a transect that was specific to this area and thus refined where the flooding is in this area specifically.”
“I think it’s reassuring,” Marchand said. “You’ve been down there, you’ve seen the flooding on Union Avenue. Is this going to be underwater?”
“It’s very important to draw a distinction between different types of flooding,” Zinn said. FEMA maps only look at flooding due to coastal storm surge, he said, water coming under the highway, across Long Wharf, and coming up through Union Station and flooding the roadway. “We’ve never seen that.”
The city does see issues with the capacity of storm and combined sewers in the area, which the city is attempting to address, Zinn said.
“But that’s still water,” Marchand said. Was Zinn saying that it was necessary to pursue the existing strategies and not be worried about that for this project?
“Enzo’s team has done a great job of elevating the site above the roadway,” Zinn said. “Given the volumes of water that we’ve seen, it’s extremely unlikely that that water would enter the buildings or cause problems on the site.”
Santos also noted that they had elevated all of the residential entries and residential egresses to one foot above the 500-year floodplain.
Commission Chair Ernest Pagan asked about the 27,000 cubic yards of material being moved during the construction of phase 1.
“The majority of that is just material that will be moved around on-site,” Chiaravalloti said. “The rest of that material added will be the clean materials, the fills, the pavers.”
“How many trucks are we looking at impacting that community?” Pagan asked.
Chiaravalloti estimated about 750 trucks spaced out in the duration of phase 1.
Ed LaChance, vice president of development for HANH’s development arm, the Glendower Group, said, “I just want to state how critical approval of this item is.”
This upcoming Monday, HANH and the city plans to submit an application for $26 million as part of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) FY2025 Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant. Site plan approval ahead of time would give the application a competitive edge.
Jimmy Miller, acting executive vice president for HANH’s umbrella organization Elm City Communities, agreed. “There is only $75 million appropriated” for the federal grant, Miller said. “That means there will be three to five awards nationwide. This will be highly competitive.”
“The more we can substantiate that we are ready to proceed,” Miller said, “the better off our chances of getting this grant will be.”
“We were hoping that our second read” by the Board of Alders “would have occurred already,” LaChance said. There was a scheduling delay with the nomination of new committee chairs. “We have passed [Legislation] Committee with a positive recommendation. We had our first read last night.”
LaChance made a request: “If the only issue is that zoning approval is not yet in place, I’m requesting there may be some way to explore conditional or contingent approval based on the zoning passing at the second read so that we can better compete.”
The meeting was opened for the public to testify. Only Hill Alder Carmen Rodriguez spoke. “Our intentions should be to get more of the residents of Robert T. Wolfe to testify,” Rodriguez said.
In the end, the commissioners unanimously voted to continue the public hearing on the item to their next meeting, set for March 18.
The Board of Alders’ second read of the zoning proposal is March 16. That’s when the alders are expected to take a final vote on the TOC rezoning proposal.
“I would love to support this item but I can’t,” said Marchand on Thursday. “I don’t think it’s proper for this commission to give conditional approval,” which he also believed would set a “bad precedent.” He wouldn’t vote until the zoning had been in place and approved.
Marchand said he was a fan of what he has seen so far of the project. “It has the potential to be transformational,” he said. “If we were voting on it tonight I would be giving it a favorable vote.”
Commissioner Leslie Radcliffe agreed. “It’s a beautiful plan, it’s a beautiful build,” she said. But she also wanted a more substantial public hearing to be held. She wasn’t sure if it was an issue of scheduling, but she expected more Robert T. Wolfe tenants to want to weigh in. “i’m not in favor of voting on this item this evening.”
Pagan agreed, saying there was “no way” to give contingent approval. “The public will have another chance to testify.”