by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent
One of the lots slated to be built up on Starr St.
The Elicker administration took another step towards bringing 19 new units of housing to a handful of vacant lots on Starr Street Tuesday morning with a groundbreaking ceremony celebrating a $7.6 million affordable-homeownership-development project.
City Deputy Administrator for Housing & Development Arlevia Samuel, Mayor Justin Elicker, Newhallville Alder Brittiany Mabery-Niblack, and State Rep. Steve Winter, among others, gathered at the corner of Starr Street and Winchester Avenue for the occasion.
The city plans to build a mix of single-family homes, two-family homes, and duplexes on vacant lots along Starr Street.
Samuel and city Neighborhood & Commercial Development Manager Mark Wilson said that 15 of these 19 new residential units will provide opportunities for homeownership. The four other units will be rentals.
The exact addresses where these homes will be built are 136, 139, 205, 209, 213, 219, 222, 261, 265, and 274 Starr St. and 632 Winchester Ave. The new homes are slated to be constructed by Ralph Mauro’s local firm Concrete Creations.
These new city-built homes come a half-decade after the city finished building nine new homes along vacant lots nearby on Winchester Avenue and Thompson Street.
City spokesperson Lenny Speiller said that the new homes on Starr Street will be limited to buyers making between 65 and 100 percent of the area median income (AMI).
Of the total $7.6 million development cost, $3 million will be coming from the state Department of Housing (DOH), $2.5 million in city-allocated federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, $1.16 million in sale proceeds from the Thompson/Winchester Homeownership Project, and $940,000 in city capital funding for housing development.
“People take care of what they love,” Mabery-Niblack said at Tuesday’s presser, as she described her own path to buying one of the affordable homes the city built around the corner on Thompson Street five years ago.
While New Haven is in need of all different types of new housing, Samuel said, there’s something special about building new opportunities for homeownership. With homeownership, “you get to say: This is mine,” she said. “Kids get to pick out their room,” and that room remains theirs “permanently.”
During his time at the mic, Elicker reiterated his administration’s goals to build 10,000 new units of housing across the city by 2034. He said that New Haven “brought on 1,500 new units” last year alone. “We are well on our way.”
Samuel and Wilson said that these 19 new housing units should be built in the next 18 months. Samuel said the city will likely hire multiple brokers to find income-qualified prospective buyers for these new houses.