by Laura Glesby
The Board of Alders voted Monday night to authorize applications for nearly $10 million in environmental cleanup funding from the state to pave the way for nearly 700 new apartments in Newhallville and the Ninth Square.
At their final full board meeting of the year, alders unanimously voted to authorize the city to receive that funding, if awarded, in the form of two brownfield grants from the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development.
According to Economic Development Officer Helen Rosenberg, the city is “expecting to hear something any day” from the state about whether the brownfield grants have been awarded.
In Newhallville, city is requesting $6 million to remediate 71 and 89-91 Shelton Ave. Developers Vesta Corporation and Vallone Ventures intend to build 240 housing units at those parcels — all of which are slated to be affordable to households earning below 60 percent of the area median income (AMI), or $68,220 for a family of four.
Both 71 Shelton and 89-91 Shelton have undergone a degree of environmental cleanup already.
In 2021, General Electric completed a long process of removing radioactive contaminants from 71 Shelton, a vacant lot that once housed a nuclear factory.
Meanwhile, the existing industrial building at 89-91 Shelton has been remediated to a “commercial” level, but will need to be cleaned up further before it can be legally renovated into housing.
As Rosenberg informed alders at the Community Development Committee’s November meeting, the anticipated remediation efforts at those two addresses will remove lead-based paint, asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), among other contaminants.
Newhallville Alders Kim Edwards and Troy Streater, who sit on the Community Development Committee, said in November that they plan to ensure thorough communication with residents about each step of the remediation process.
“We have residents right near the project,” who may be concerned about dust from the remediation, said Streater, whose ward encompasses the properties in question.
He recalled how a previous proposal for 89-91 Shelton had called for self-storage units, rather than housing. “I’m happy to hear that [housing is now planned] for it,” he said, “I know that’s what the area needs and I will be in support of that.”
Hill/Downtown Alder Carmen Rodriguez: New development is “bringing our communities together.”
In addition to the $6 million for the Shelton Avenue development, the city is requesting $3,602,765 from the state to fund the environmental cleanup of 183 and 253 State St., a vacant lot where Gilbane Development Company and Xenolith Partners CT plan to build about 450 new apartments.
Per a development and land disposition agreement with the city approved by the alders in September, the developers are planning for 118 of those apartments to be affordable to tenants making up to 80 percent of the AMI (or $99,040 for a family of four).
That site needs to be remediated of “common infill materials” such as arsenic, lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and oils, according to Rosenberg.
Both the Shelton Avenue and State Street developments are part of a broader rise in development that has already begun to reshape their respective neighborhoods.
The Shelton Avenue project neighbors hundreds of new and soon-to-be-constructed apartments on Munson Street, Canal Street, Dixwell Avenue, and the former homes of the historic Winchester Repeating Arms factory.
And the State Street project — located diagonally across from the recently constructed “Square 10” luxury building — is slated to join hundreds of more apartments linking Downtown and the Hill, including anticipated developments across the street on State and George, beside Union Station, and where the old Church Street South complex once stood.
Hill/Downtown Alder Carmen Rodriguez, who chairs the Community Development Committee and whose ward includes all of those Downtown-Hill developments, reflected Monday on the new growth in her ward.
She framed each proposed environmental cleanup as an effort to pave the way not only for new housing, but for more “walkable” and “connected” neighborhoods as residential life replaces abandoned or industrial lots.
“I am so excited to see that we’re bringing our communities together,” she said.