by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent
When New Haven enters the spotlight this weekend as a national “build build build” model, one local veteran urban theorist won’t be giving visitors the official tour.
So she took the Independent on the tour she would have offered visitors — and the nuanced “go slower” take she would have offered on the latest hot idea in how to remake cities.
Anstress Farwell — a decades-long student of New Haven urban planning and a fixture of community meetings about the city’s built environment — isn’t against the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement.
Rather, she thinks it’s fun and provocative. She would have liked to attend the YIMBYtown conference when it comes to town this weekend, but missed out on registering in time before it was all booked up.
Nevertheless, she does find the YIMBY ideology insufficient when considering what makes for an affordable, livable, opportunity-rich city. And she thinks that persistently high rents and vacancies downtown, even amidst New Haven’s decade-long housing boom, represent a call to slow down — rather than speed up — plans for residential redevelopment.
“Value signaling is fine,” Farwell said on a recent downtown walking tour with the Independent in the runup to YIMBYtown, “but you can’t build public policy on it.”
The conference itself runs from Sunday to Tuesday, and will be held at the Omni Hotel.
Organized by DesegregateCT and billed as “pro-homes, pro-riders, pro-pizza,” this year’s YIMBYtown will hold panel after tour after panel on everything from climate change and insurance markets to “Montana’s Pro-Homes Revolution” to the best way to “win hearts and minds for parking reforms.”
Featured speakers include North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong, storied environmentalist Bill McKibben, and elected officials and pro-homes advocates from Boston to Austin.
“This convening will feature grassroots advocates and organizers, academics, public officials, and other thought leaders who are at the forefront of pro-homes advocacy across the country (and world),” YIMBYtown’s website proclaims. “Join with hundreds of other individuals advocating for more affordable and abundant housing in their communities for networking and shared learning.”
On Thursday, this reporter spent an hour with Farwell — a deep thinker on New Haven housing who moved to the city in 1976 to student urban planning in Yale’s department of the history of art, and never left, and now leads a nonprofit called the New Haven Urban Design League.
Farwell isn’t on the YIMBYtown lineup, and her advocacy often clashes with the YIMBY mantra. This reporter wanted to hear her thoughts on what lessons she thinks New Haveners should take away from the past decade-plus of new apartments bursting forth on mostly vacant lots in and around downtown.
A good place to start, Farwell said, is at the corner of Chapel Street and Orange Street.
That’s where a Chicago-based developer called CA Ventures recently finished building The Archive, which includes 166 new apartments spread out across two new buildings at 808 and 848 Chapel. The development site used to be home to a Kresge department store, which burned down in 2007.
According to that apartment complex’s website, The Archive currently has available a 388-square-foot studio apartment for $2,390 per month. The website also indicates that there are nearly 20 studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and three-bedrooms now available for rent.
These price and vacancy levels aren’t unique to The Archive, Farwell said. According to the website apartments.com, there are more than 700 apartments in the downtown area currently available to rent.
“Look at how much we’ve built. Look at how much is vacant,” Farwell said. “Build-build-build doesn’t solve the housing crisis.” If housing affordability were strictly a matter of supply and demand, then rental prices should be lower in New Haven after all of this new construction. “But the prices are not coming down.” And there are still empty apartments available to rent.
So what’s going on?
Farwell has a few ideas.
First, she thinks that you can’t address housing affordability without improving incomes and jobs. “If incomes kept pace with the cost of living,” more people would be able to afford to live and thrive in the city.
Second, she’s wary of corporate landlords that participate in a “national system of price fixing” through services like RealPage, which allow them to “hold to the highest market rate.”
Third, these developer-landlords are able to carry so many vacancies in part because they have just enough high-priced rentals filled. They can then get tax write offs for empty units and their lack of associated income. And they save money — on repairs, maintenance, and management — for apartments left unoccupied. She stressed that these developments are all too often financed with the help of REITs, or real estate investment trusts, and need to get enough income to pay taxes, cover expenses, and pay back debt; everything else is profit.
Fourth, she warned that these projects are all too often envisioned and built for a very specific audience: namely Yale students and staff and hospital workers. A driving consideration appears to be: “What can travel nurses pay and what can students borrow? We know the [housing boom in recent years] has been focused on serving one population: single people, Yale graduates, postdocs.” They are not designed for, and do not help, the people struggling the most in New Haven’s housing market: working families with multiple children.
Fifth, these podium-style buildings follow a paper-thin aesthetic that, save for a few small design differences, impose a blocky sameness on the blocks they pop up on.
Aren’t these residential developments better than nothing? Would she rather see the 808 and 848 Chapel lots remain, well, empty lots?
That’s not the right question to ask, Farwell countered. Because there could have been a better option than what wound up getting built. New Haven could have done — and still should undertake — a comprehensive rewrite of its zoning code based on community input and careful consideration as to what types of new development should take place where, she argued.
YIMBYism, she said, can feel too motivated by desperation, by acting like we are in crisis mode all the time and need to rush rush rush to get anything built as fast as possible. Without enough attention paid to zoning and design and the state of existing neighborhoods and the future that New Haveners would like to see, this mentality cedes too much control to out-of-town corporations that build the same buildings over and over again, while keeping rents too high and catering to too small a slice of the community.
Why, Farwell asked, do New Haven’s newest downtown developments feel like they’re intended to be dormitories for college students? It doesn’t have to be that way.
Farwell recognized that city government has limited say over what gets built on privately owned land. The city’s influence there all too often starts and stops with zoning.
Publicly owned land is something else altogether, she argued, and that’s where the best opportunities lie for impactful public input on urban redevelopment.
She walked over to State and Fair streets as a prime example of what’s going right and wrong with residential redevelopment atop publicly owned land.
The city recently closed two lanes of northbound traffic running from Fair up to Chapel on State as part of a broader project to undo mid-century Urban Renewal’s focus on shuttling cars into and out of the city center as quickly as possible.
Reclaiming roadway on State Street for residential development is exactly the right thing to do, Farwell said. That was a smart decision by the city and by the state to fund, and will lead to a more vibrant downtown.
But, she cautioned, the first development the city has teed up for this publicly owned stretch of State Street has many of the drawbacks of the private-land developments recently built downtown and in Wooster Square.
Even though these buildings will contain a percentage of apartments reserved at below-market rents, Farwell said they are on track to resemble The Archive and Olive & Wooster and Audubon Square and other market-rate private developments in design and impact.
Instead of teeing up large buildings owned by a corporate landlord catering mostly to Yale students and grads and hospital workers, Farwell called for city government to “re-plate” the newly reclaimed land along State Street and find smaller builders, and even supporting community land trusts, that could allow for different types of people a chance to “own a piece of the city.”
“People came to New Haven because it was a place of opportunity,” Farwell said about what made the city so appealing to migrants from across the country and the world over the course of the 20th century. Residential redevelopments can be a tool for making New Haven a place of opportunity again, as opposed to a place for corporate landlords to get rich.
How do we get there?
With careful planning, Farwell said, that engages community members and takes stock of New Haven’s past in light of what the city wants to see in its future.
And that takes time. And can’t necessarily be done in a rush. Good public process, she argued, leads to better outcomes for everyone.
“I like things to be carefully thought out and methodical,” Farwell said. YIMBYism is all well and good. But overall, “ideologies don’t interest me.”
Looking east on Chapel from Orange, towards more podium-style buildings in Wooster Square.
City-owned land on State Street ripe for redevelopment: This shouldn’t be just another dorm.
Beacon’s new development on State near Chapel. This one Farwell likes! A more considerate and neighborhood-appropriate design, plus a unit mix and level of affordability more open to families.
360 State: While not categorically opposed to high-rises, Farwell noted that not everyone wants to live in a building so tall, and not every development has to be a tower.