Ribbon Cut On Cofield Estates

Inner City News

10 months ago

by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent

… as celebrated with an official ribbon cutting.

Six decades after Urban Renewal’s bulldozers plowed through the Oak Street neighborhood — and nearly three decades after the late Rev. Curtis Cofield II began fighting to build back housing there — city officials, nonprofit developers, and West River neighbors cut the ribbon Monday on 56 new affordable apartments.

“Sixty years ago, they said this would never be replaced,” longtime community leader Jerry Poole said about the residences that were destroyed to make way for a mini-highway. “I use one word to describe how I feel about [the new housing here today]. Magnificent. Magnificent! That’s how I’m feeling.”

Poole was one of more than a dozen speakers to take the mic Monday morning at an hour-plus press conference celebrating the completion of construction of the Curtis Cofield II Estates.

That complex of 11 townhouse-style buildings containing 56 new all-electric apartments sits atop a 4.3‑acre site bounded by Legion Avenue, Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and Tyler Street.

The apartments were built by the New York City-based NHP Foundation and the locally-based West River Self Help Investment Plan (WRSHIP). According to NHP Foundation Project Manager Micah Hunter, the first residents moved in in April, and the apartment complex is currently half filled.

Forty-four of the apartments are set aside for renters making no more than 60 percent of the area median income (AMI), which currently translates to $55,740 for a family of two. Fourteen of those below-market-rent apartments are also “supportive housing,” managed in partnership with Columbus House for formerly homeless tenants. The remaining 12 apartments are reserved for renters making no more than 100 percent AMI.

In addition to housing, the new complex includes a playground, a community center, a gazebo, and a commercial space. A press release sent out in advance of Monday’s ribbon cutting states that the development cost $20.2 million — a mix of private, city, state, and federal dollars. The apartments were designed by the local firm Kenneth Boroson Architects.

“A year ago we were here breaking ground,” said Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers, who served as the emcee for Monday’s event. “That’s a good thing … All the hard work paid off.”

Speaker after speaker followed Walker-Myers in fleshing out how much hard work so many people put in across so many years to make this project a reality.

Poole, the project’s unofficial historian, reached back to the early 1960s, to a time when the Oak Street neighborhood was “a very vibrant area” — a mixed-income, racially and ethnically diverse hub of working class New Haven. From 1966 to 1970, he noted, the state seized dozen dozens of acres of land in the area and demolished the neighborhood to make way for a mini-highway. The state officially gave up on that road project in 2000.

In 2001, Cofield — a Black community leader and pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church — became the first president of the WRSHIP, the local nonprofit that would lead the way in envisioning and codeveloping the 56-apartment housing complex that, decades later, wound up getting built. He died in 2008.

Anthony Dawson, a West River native and former alder and police commission chair who currently serves as president of WRSHP, described Monday’s ribbon cutting as “a dream come true.”

This complex is a “testament to determination,” U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro said, as she recounted her own family’s experience battling Urban Renewal in Wooster Square. She praised “the strength of [Cofield’s] legacy and the people he inspired” to follow through on this project.

Walker-Myers singled out for praise Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, the current head of the New Haven Land Bank and the former head of the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) under then-Mayor Toni Harp, for shepherding this project through some critical years.

“This is a big day,” Neal-Sanjurjo said, as she looked out the dozens of people who turned out to celebrate Monday’s ribbon cutting alongside her. “This is an amazing day.”