by Thomas Breen
With the city’s zoning director and four downtown-area alders arrayed around him, Mayor Justin Elicker signed into law a zoning update designed to encourage the development of more housing in the city’s center.
Elicker put pen to paper on the second floor of City Hall Tuesday morning during a celebratory signing ceremony for the Downtown for All zoning overlay, which the Board of Alders unanimously approved on Dec. 1.
The zoning overhaul was spearheaded by Downtown/East Rock Alder Eli Sabin (Ward 7), and was championed by fellow downtown-area alders Kiana Flores (Ward 1), Frank Douglass (Ward 2), Angel Hubbard (Ward 3), and Carmen Rodriguez (Ward 6), as well as by the Elicker administration’s City Plan Department.
Broadly, the overlay district loosens restrictions on the size, density, configurations, and locations of new residential developments downtown. Now that it’s been signed into law, Downtown for All allows for the development of:
• Taller residential buildings, thanks to the doubling of the maximum floor-area ratio from 6.0 to 12.0;
• Denser housing, thanks to a lowering of the minimum gross floor area ratio per unit to 400 square feet, down from 1,000 square feet (or 600 square feet for qualifying inclusionary zoning developments);
• Single-room occupancy units, now that developers can apply for a special permit to create rooming houses and dormitory-style apartments.
Click here to read the Downtown for All law in full.
“There’s so much demand for housing, and not enough supply, so prices go up,” Elicker said on Tuesday. This new law is designed to use zoning — “one of the biggest levers we can use” to influence the housing market — in order to encourage the development of lots more places to live.
Connecticut needs more than 100,000 new housing units, Elicker said, and New Haven has a goal of creating 10,000 more over the next ten years. “We are building building building,” Elicker said, referencing the city’s 550 housing permits issued so far this year. This bill is designed to promote more of exactly that.
City Deputt Director of Zoning Abdul-Razak Zachariah added that this zoning update — including provisions designed to make it easier to build housing in industrial districts covered by the overlay district — should reduce delays and decrease costs for the construction of new housing. He said those costs are all too often passed along to tenants in the form of higher rents.
“We did it!” Sabin said before giving the mayor, zoning director, and his aldermanic colleagues high-fives. “Hard work pays off. Teamwork pays off.”
Sabin argued that building more mixed-income and affordable housing downtown should help with just about every facet of life in the city’s center: More construction will mean more jobs for New Haveners. More housing near jobs will mean less car traffic and fewer greenhouse-gas emissions by people who can walk to work. More eyes on the street will make for a safer city.
Elicker and Douglass gave special shout-outs to Sabin for his work across years in building support for this legislation and getting it across the finish line.
What About IZ?
City zoning director Abdul-Razak Zachariah.
Zachariah spoke on Tuesday about how so much of the city’s zoning code was written in 1962, and how the zoning code has not kept up with New Haven’s changing housing needs.
But what about a much more recently adopted local zoning overhaul: 2022’s Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) ordinance? How does Downtown for All interact with and build off of IZ.
Zachariah said on Tuesday that Downtown for All is designed to work with IZ where those two districts overlap.
After years of public debate and review and tinkering, the Board of Alders adopted an amended IZ law in January 2022. The ordinance requires developers of certain market-rate apartment buildings to set aside a percentage of units at deed-restricted affordable rents. Downtown, that means that new buildings with at least 10 apartments have to set aside 5 percent of units for renters with Section 8 subsidies and another 10 percent of units for renters making no more than 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI).
IZ also includes a host of incentives — including a 25 percent FAR bonus and no parking minimums — to make it more appealing for developers to comply with its affordability provisions. On Tuesday, Zachariah said that IZ’s FAR bonus plus Downtown for All’s FAR boost should allow for developers to build even taller than they otherwise would be able to.
But, these nearly four years later, is IZ working to actually create new affordable housing?
As of late October, the answer was no — or, at least, not yet.
City spokesperson Lenny Speiller told the Independent on Oct. 27 that, as of that date, no IZ affordable apartments were yet open and occupied.
There are currently 24 different IZ-eligible developments in the works. If and when they are finished, they will contain a total of 696 new apartments, 104 of which will be set aside at affordable rents. (The largest IZ-eligible development in process is the 462-unit project slated to be built atop vacant land at 185-253 State St; 69 of those apartments will ultimately be set aside at below-market rents.)
During an interview with the Independent in late October, Elicker spoke about how IZ appears to be more appealing so far for smaller renovations and developments. (On Tuesday, Elicker and Zachariah repeated that point, with Zachariah noting that smaller developers appear interested in taking advantage of the parking and density bonuses included in IZ).
But, Elicker continued in late October, “we’re concerned overall about the lack of development, particularly for larger building projects … It’s not helpful to have an Inclusionary Zoning ordinance that’s really strong and nothing gets built, because then you have no IZ affordable units being built.”
Elicker said at the time that the city is “evaluating whether we should change some of the components of the Inclusionary Zoning ordinance” in order to make sure that development happens.
He also pointed out that there is “still a huge amount of development happening” across the city. That includes affordable housing projects supported by local and state subsidies. “The natural IZ-created units,” however, where no extra government subsidies are required, are “clearly not going as well as we’d like.”
Alder Sabin (right): “We did it!”