Design New Haven

Census 2010: New Haven Shows Fastest Growth Rate Among Largest Connecticut Cities

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Today, the Census Bureau began releasing local-level Connecticut data from the 2010 Census. You may refer to the DataHaven Knowledge Center for a file showing the population growth in Connecticut's counties and largest cities. DataHaven also has a number of resources related to the 2010 Census, including more documents and interactive map-based visualizations, on this page (a newer web browser may be required to see the maps).

New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, including Stamford.

Additional information, and data visualizations, will be posted at DataHaven as they are released by the Census Bureau over the coming hours.

Like the State of Connecticut as a whole, New Haven's growth was partly the result of a large increase in the population of Hispanic/Latino origin - now representing 27% of the city's population, up from 21% in 2000. The New Haven Independent reports on the demographic changes in an article posted here.

Given that a number of other cities in the United States that are heavily dependent on the medical and educational sectors, such as St. Louis and Pittsburgh, have lost nearly 10% or more of their populations over the past 10 years (with Cleveland down 17%), the relative stability of most parts of Connecticut's cities will likely be met with applause.

Public Hearing in Downtown New Haven on Proposed First Niagara/New Alliance Merger, March 9th

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:27:00 +0000

A news release from Ward 9 Alderman Matt Smith:

WARD 9, NEW HAVEN, CT - March 9, 2011 - New Alliance Bank, which grew out of New Haven Savings Bank, is being taken over by the larger First Niagara Bank, headquartered in Buffalo New York.

I will be testifying at a public hearing tomorrow, Wednesday, March 9. The hearing runs from 5-9pm at the Conte-West Hills Magnet School, 511 Chapel Street, New Haven opposing this merger. I oppose this merger for the following reasons:

1. The merger will result in one less New Haven-based bank to help obtain a loan or mortgage to purchase a home.

2. First Niagara has a LOWER government rating than New Alliance for housing loans in low - and - moderate income areas.

3. First Niagara has a LOWER government rating than New Alliance for housing loans to low income borrowers.

4. First Niagara has a LOWER government rating than New Alliance for for business loans less than $100,000

5. At least 250 local jobs will be lost in this take over. Additionally, Peyton Patterson, CEO of New Alliance stands to gain a golden parachute of over $30 million.

6. For over 160 years New Haven Savings Bank/New Alliance has built signigicant assests in our community. The proposed take-over would shift control of this capital outside our community, 400 miles away in Buffalo NY.

7. First Niagara has performed poorly and laid off significant numbers of employees after previous acquisitions in Troy, NY and Harleysville, PA.

8. In 2004, when New Alliance emerged from what was then New Haven Savings Bank, assurances were given to the community concerning their long term commitment to the city. Less than a decade has passed since that promise was made.

9. This merger will set the stage for another, larger, even less vested and responsive financial institution to take over the new bank.

10. Lending decisions will no longer be made here in New Haven, but rather hundreds of miles away.

Under State law, the merger cannot go forward unless the Banking Commissioner determines that it will "produce benefits to the public...[that] clearly outweigh possible adverse effects." The commissioner has agreed to hold hearings so the public can voice their opinions on this critically important issue. This merger will stunt the growth of small businesses, good jobs, and home ownership throughout the city. I am asking you to join me in opposing this merger. If you can not come to testify or show your support, please send me an email so I may bring it with me to the hearing. This is a bad move for our community and our city. I hope to see you there Wednesday night.

Best, Matt

New NRDC / HTA Study Identifies New Haven Among Top 15 U.S. Regions for Transportation Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:33:00 +0000

On February 23rd, 2011, the Smarter Cities project at NRDC released a new transportation study identifying 15 cities with the nation’s leading transportation policies and practices.

The study, created in collaboration with the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), compares and profiles U.S. regions based on public transit availability, use and cost; household automobile ownership and use; and innovative, sustainable transportation programs. Metrics were drawn from sources including the U.S. Census as well as the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index (http://htaindex.org/), which quantifies household transportation costs by location.

NRDC published a profile piece about New Haven, excerpted below:

More commuters walk or bike to work in New Haven, Connecticut, than in anywhere else in New England. One of the first planned cities in the country, New Haven has a walkable downtown dominated by the Yale University campus. Regional bus and rail providers enjoy high ridership, have sought to green their own operations, and have cooperated to move the entire New Haven metropolitan region in a more sustainable direction.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology data highlighted New Haven’s commuter transit ridership, good access to transit, low levels of auto ownership, and good transportation affordability. New Haven ranks in the top 15 in the nation for all of these factors among medium sized metropolitan regions with 250,000 to 1 million people. Regional providers oversee bus and rail services, with bus transit operated by Connecticut Transit and rail by Amtrak, Metro-North Railroad, and Shore Line East. New Haven city planners may not oversee transit services, but the city’s focus on transit-oriented development will keep residents and visitors out of their cars well into the future.

Connecticut Transit, a service of the Connecticut Department of Transportation, allows passengers throughout the State of Connecticut to travel both within and between towns. In 2005 Connecticut pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020,and CT Transit has taken steps to help meet that goal. Of New Haven’s 114 buses, 12 run entirely on clean-burning biodiesel; the 60-foot biodiesel buses can also seat 50 percent more riders than traditional 40-foot buses, upping per-passenger fuel efficiency. In downtown New Haven, Yale University operates its own internal bus and shuttle system. All Yale buses run on a blend of ultra-low-sulfur diesel and 20 percent biodiesel.

The Metro-North Railroad line, part of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, connects New Haven to one of the most comprehensive, well-developed public transportation systems in the country. New Haven lies on Metro-North’s East-of-Hudson line, which logged 2.08 million riders in 2008, and New Haven’s Union train station is one of the busiest AMTRAK stations nationwide.

Street Level

“We have the highest percentage of people who walk to work in New England,” says Christine Tang, director of the New Haven Office of Sustainability, and “the second highest percentage of people who use nonmotorized transportation—which refers to walking and biking combined.”

Almost a third of the city’s population gets to work by foot or bike. Union Station lies minutes away from the New Haven business district, making it easy for commuters to take the bus into town—or just walk. With 24,522 students, faculty, and staff, Yale concentrates a large population of walkers, bikers, and regular transit users around the city’s downtown core; the university is also the city’s largest single employer.

“We don’t have the size or resources to dedicate as much attention to bikes [as major metropolitan areas],” Tang notes. “But we have a very strong policy of favoring bikers,” particularly with legislation that gives them dedicated lanes in certain areas and priority in shared road lanes. City planners are also working to restore the Farmington Canal (PDF), turning an abandoned channel into a bike and pedestrian path stretching from Long Island Sound through the Yale campus and to suburban neighborhoods beyond.

With the 2010 Complete Streets Design Manual (PDF), New Haven framed its plan to keep streets safe, accessible, and business-friendly. In addition to expanding bike lanes and signage, the Complete Streets framework calls for expanding tree belts (all roadside trees and vegetation), setting out street furniture (including bike racks, public benches, waste cans, lighting, bus stops and newsstands), and paying close attention to urban context and aesthetics. The framework explicitly links a vibrant pedestrian culture with a vibrant local economy.

Increasing transit use is going to be a priority for New Haven’s 11-month-old Office of Sustainability. “We’re focusing on providing incentives for residents,” Tang says. “Whether they’re going to be tax-based [or take some other form] is still to be determined.” City planners have proposed bolstering the city’s transportation offerings with a network of modern streetcars, but plans remain in the very early stages.

Transit-Oriented Development

New Haven has a long history of pursuing smart growth policies and transit-oriented development projects. It’s a member of the NY-CT Sustainable Cities Consortium, a collaboration between nine cities and six regional planning organizations “designed to integrate housing, economic development, transportation, and environmental planning,” the consortium’s website says.

Transit-oriented development (TOD) refers to “moderate and high-density housing, along with complementary public uses, jobs, retail and services, that are concentrated in mixed-use developments at strategic points along the regional transit systems” - Peter Calthorpe, one of the first scholars to introduce TOD as we know it today in his 1993 book titled The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream.

Consortium membership has paved the way for New Haven’s plan to invigorate the Union Station area. By expanding parking options and constructing a patchwork of retail, office, and living spaces, the city hopes to draw more foot traffic to a major transit hub. The plan also calls for renovations of the historic station building. The project will be financed with a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant, applied for by the NY-CT Sustainable Cities Consortium on New Haven’s behalf.

Federal funding will also help New Haven convert a portion of the Route 34 highway, which essentially cuts the city in two, into an urban boulevard, opening up new, mixed-use development real estate and connecting the downtown area with cross streets.

A third grant, submitted by New Haven and the nearby town of Meriden, asks HUD to help fund planning and redevelopment along a transit corridor between the two towns. New Haven’s Economic Development department oversees both the Union Station and Meriden grants, and the city views transit-oriented development as key to economic revitalization.

Learn More

Learn about CT Transit and Connecticut’s Climate Commitments.
Check out New Haven’s Office of Sustainability and of Economic Development, and read more about Complete Streets.
Read more about The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its sustainable initiatives.
Learn about the NY-CT Sustainable Cities Consortium.
Read more about Transit-Oriented Development in the city of New Haven, and download the Union Station plan (attached). Check out the proposed Streetcar Line.
Learn more about Yale University’s sustainable efforts, and review the University’s comprehensive Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy.
Learn about Union Station and the rail lines that run through it: Amtrak, Metro-North, and Shore Line East.
Read more about the Route 34 East project and the expansion of the Farmington Canal (PDF).

Update on Elm City Market Progress at 360 State Street

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:13:00 +0000

Original Post 11/23/10: A brief update about the new Elm City Market, a full service grocery store opening this spring at 360 State Street. This is an excerpt of an email distributed to members of the Co-op:

Meeting our target of a spring opening took a major step forward last week as we met with a group of potential general contractors to talk about the interior construction of the store. Our goal is to start the work on the inside of our market in January 2011. We'll be located in the ground floor of the 360 State Street building on the corner of Chapel and State. At around 11,000 square feet of retail space, the co-op will be a full service grocery store. We currently have close to 400 members - and our goal is to grow to 500 members by the end of the year - and to 1,000 members by the time we open our doors!

Thanks to many of our members volunteering their time, we've been actively involved in farmers markets and other community outreach events over the past 2 months, engaging the community at large about our exciting project. We've also recently formed several leadership committees to help tackle the many projects ahead (Financing, Community Outreach, Product Selection, to name a few.) We've met with dozens of local and regional vendors, manufacturers, and distributors over the past 60 days, as we've started to define the thousands of products we'll be carrying. We've spent weeks going over floor plan designs, equipment selection, and interior design elements. We'll also have our final logo design completed by January.

Construction Update

As anyone walking down Chapel Street can witness, construction continues at pace on exterior façade of Elm City Market. All exterior precast elements and window-wall pieces are in place. The full façade of window-wall along Chapel will allow for a great source of natural light and visibility onto the retail floor once open.

The entry vestibules, which will allow access from either end of the block along Chapel Street, State Street, and Pitkin Plaza are presently being installed, and the stair and elevator towers on either end of Chapel Street, allowing access to the parking garage above, are nearing completion.

Inside the Market, all base systems are complete, including the sprinkler system, HVAC system, and plumbing systems, which will allow the interior fit-out contractor to easily connect lines for all equipment needs. All vertical structural members are in place. Insulation is currently being installed at the ceiling and along the exterior columns, as well as sheetrock along the exterior.

Last week, the design team issued a full set of construction documents for the interior fit-out of the space, including all equipment, flooring, finishes, lighting, structural for pouring of the floor slab, and MEP tie-ins. Over the next several weeks, the design team and general manager will work to establish the contract with the interior fit-out contractor, with the expectation of starting all interior finish work right before or after the New Year. We anticipate a smooth transition from all exterior and shell work to interior fit-out work, and you should be seeing lots of activity happening inside the Market interior space in the coming weeks!

Questions?

One of the most frequently asked questions? "Will you have parking?"

The short answer... yes! The long answer... There is a parking garage in the 360 State Street building and customers of the co-op will have parking validated. There will be an elevator from the parking garage into the lobby of the co-op. We will also have 'parking' for those of you arriving on 2 wheels. And those of you arriving on 2 legs (or, for that matter, for any kind of arrival), you'll be able to park yourself for a while in our cozy cafe. It'll be a great place to relax and enjoy a cup of coffee, some delicious food, a visit with friends, or to get some work done as we'll have WiFi access.

Follow additional updates from the Market's Twitter page.

Update 1/24/2011: According to reporting in the Yale Daily News, the market's opening has been delayed for a few more months due to typical startup issues. A June opening date is currently planned. Meanwhile, news reports say that the former Shaw's Supermarket plaza, also in Downtown New Haven (and covered by DNH here as well as by a SeeClickFix issue), may become the future home of a Stop and Shop around the same time. All Shaw's stores in Connecticut closed last year due to a corporate restructuring.

Also, as of January 24th, a new "Member Information Guide" may be downloaded here. The brochure contains a current copy of the food cooperative's bylaws.

Update 2/10/2011: The Elm City Market's February newsletter has been posted. Read it here (PDF File). Here's the construction update:

The construction of Elm City Market continues apace as the project transitions from exterior and shell construction to the interior fit-out. The co-op board has selected a general contractor through a competitive bidding process to complete all of the interior portions of the store and install the equipment. We are proud to bring to our team Chapel Construction, a recognized leader in commercial construction, operating from their hometown of New Haven since 1926, with buildings on almost every city block. Chapel Construction is the perfect fit for the scale, scope, and quality of the market construction;. What’s more, the addition of Chapel to the team continues the co-op’s mission of sourcing locally. Preparation work has begun for the interior fit-out phase including regular meetings with the general contractor and the selection and ordering of all major pieces of equipment. The design team has also been meeting regularly to review plans with all municipal entities required to obtain a permit. Currently the team is working to finalize details such as interior and exterior signage, awning design, finish selections, décor, furnishing, and artwork. A core leadership group committee has been formed to aid in the selection of these details and the design team looks forward to receiving the committee’s input on these very important details, which will shape the aesthetic of the co-op.

$20 Nonstop New Haven <--> Boston (and UCONN!) Bus Fares Now Available: Thanks SeeClickFix!

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:31:00 +0000

Original Post 10/1/09: Transport Azumah has released its preliminary schedule for the new direct bus service here, and it looks like tickets have already gone on sale. The service begins on Friday, November 20th, with a round-trip, 1-2 bus/day Friday through Sunday schedule that we think is likely to be expanded to meet demand. Tickets are generally $20 including all booking fees, but some may be found for as low as $1. The buses connect the Yale Campus and Downtown New Haven to Downtown Boston and vice versa.

For additional background on how the community rallied to bring new bus service to the city, see this post at Cap'n Transit and this post at the SeeClickFix Blog. The latter discusses how to effectively and immediately lobby for transportation improvements through social networking, community organizing, media and legislative strategies. If you can think of other things that can be "fixed," discuss here or simply head over to SeeClickFix and post them.

Click here for the original issue report on SCF, which was reported by Ben Berkowitz and promoted by TGWNN, Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team, Downtown Aldermanic candidate Mike Jones and Dixwell Alderman Greg Morehead, and others. Over 250 people voted to "fix" the issue. The Board of Aldermen passed unanimous legislation as a direct result and, according to officials within the Economic Development Office, the city then lobbied bus operators for a new service.

Unlike Amtrak and many other commercial bus services, these buses will allow bicycles to be taken aboard -- a key consideration for many New Haveners. According to Cap'n Transit:

Azumah writes, "We will be able to take unboxed bicycles as long as they are tagged with the owner's name and contact phone." That is a huge improvement over the current options for travel in this area.

They are also more affordable and faster than any of the current competitors. Click here for DNH's earlier thread on the "Bolt Bus Rally" which discusses the issue in more depth.

Update 10/5/09: Service will also connect from New Haven to Philadelphia. (Note: This service no longer seems to exist).

Update 12/22/09: Transport Azumah service seems to have been canceled, for no apparent reason.

Update 10/4/2010: According to Transport Azumah's post on SeeClickFix, service to Boston has been instituted again, on a trial basis. The bus runs on a Friday through Sunday schedule:

"Service began on the New Haven CT - Boston MA route on Friday, September 24, 2010. TransportAzumah carried 13 passengers this weekend on the service. The website to book seats is http://www.NewHavenToBostonBus.com. The vehicles used will be a bus or van, depending on the number of bookings. There are currently two stops available: New Haven-State Street Station and Elm Street just south of College Street at the bus shelters. The pickup in Boston is across the street from 290 Congress Street. The fare is $25 each way. More service will be added if the initial scheduled trip performs well."

Update 2/7/2011: According to a post on TransportAzumah's Facebook page, New Haven to Boston service resumed in February after a brief lull. A stop has been added at the University of Connecticut, at I-84 Exit 68. From there, UCONN students can easily get to Boston or New Haven. The latest schedule may be found on the NewHaventoBostonBus website.

Downtown New Haven Incubator Spaces Attract More Technology Firms

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:23:00 +0000

Original Post, 1/24/11: According to reporting at the Yale Daily News, New Haven's thriving downtown was a primary reason why the startup social networking company, Shizzlr, decided to move to New Haven:

Up-and-comers Keith Bessette and Nick Jaensch, co-founders of Shizzlr, an online social planning program, have upgraded from a dorm room startup to an office in Science Park at Yale. The site is one of several locations offered to Shizzlr by the CTech Incubator Program, which provides technology entrepreneurs with office spaces as well as resources such as accounting services. Shizzler chose Science Park at Yale over other locations, because New Haven has the most potential given the strong college student presence from Yale, Quinnipiac, Southern and University of New Haven, said Jaensch. “It has a ton of the hangout and activity options for every type of person, the bar and restaurant scene is awesome,” he said.

The Shizzlr site is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that allows users to conduct social planning with their friends. The tool collects and organizes information about social events and activities. It connects with Facebook profiles, but only shares information with a user-targeted group (e.g., people that the user already hangs out with) rather than with every friend on Facebook.

The CT Technology Council and New Haven Register have also highlighted the new company. The Register piece may be viewed here. Thus far, Shizzlr has a thousand or so users, but it has funding for staff and seems to be growing quickly.

Shizzlr is one of a number of new companies that have recently moved to Science Park. The incubator spaces at the development have recently attracted firms such as HDB Newco. HDB Newco "is developing an open source parallel database management system (DBMS) that offers both high performance and scalability to satisfy the growing analytical processing demands of data-driven enterprises. The technology, which is licensed from Yale University, will be used by enterprises to extract critical analytical information from large databases."

Update, 2/1/11: DataHaven's Connecticut Data Blog has an updated post that discusses venture capital-funded startup firms in New Haven plus the state's prospects for continued job growth in the technology sector. An excerpt:

The Hartford Courant recently covered venture capital financing deals for technology companies in Connecticut, as studied by the industry-benchmarking MoneyTree Report. Overall, there were 52 venture capital deals in 2010 in the state, with $187 million invested — a fairly large increase over the 39 deals worth $157 million in 2009. For comparison, Oklahoma, which has a similar population to Connecticut, had less than 1/10th that amount of activity.

Following national trends, the number of financing deals within Connecticut has declined from over 100 during the “tech bubble” of 2000, back to historical levels of around 30-50 per year.

The 9 Fourth Quarter 2010 deals mentioned by the report, which included five in City of New Haven (some atScience Park, pictured here) and one in nearby Guilford, were:

+ $6.1 million, VLS Securities LLC, Canaan: Start-up broker-dealer.

+ $2.5 million, Helix Therapeutics LLC, New Haven: Biopharmaceutical company.

+ $1.3 million, SeeClickFix Inc., New Haven: Developer of online and mobile platforms.

+ $1.2 million, Affinimark Technologies Inc., New Haven: Developer of medical diagnostic products.

+ $453,000, uKnow Corp., Guilford: Advertising optimization.

+ $275,000, Interactive Mobile @dvertising LLC, Norwalk: Advertising.

+ $250,000, Retail Optimization Inc., New Haven: Merchandising software and analytics.

+ $250,000, Twigtek Inc. (YouRenew), New Haven: Website for selling or recycling used electronic equipment.

+ $50,000, Semantifi Inc., Stamford: Software.

Petition to Protect the Ninth Square; Building Rehabilitations Approved

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:43:00 +0000

Original Post 7/19/08: The online version of the petition may be viewed by clicking here. See here for a background post about the buildings, including multiple photographs. A rally at the site was held on Friday, July 18th, at which approximately 50 paper signatures were collected.

Update 7/22/08: An article in today's New Haven Register claims that the current building owner, David Nyberg, has no plans to demolish the buildings, even though the structural engineer who analyzed them recommended tearing down a large rear section:

An engineer who analyzed the condition of historic industrial buildings on Crown Street six months ago recommended a rear portion be demolished, but the owner Monday said he has no intention of taking that action.... Nyberg owns the two structures and a third adjacent building on the Crown Street block that extends from State Street to Orange Street and has site plan approval to build 110-apartments in the three 19th and early-20th century buildings, plus one new building.

“I think there is a better way,” Nyberg said Monday.... “No question about it, we are not taking anything down.” Nyberg Monday said the building facades will be restored to their original condition, and he was more confident than ever that work can restart by Sept. 1.

Update 8/28/08: The petition has been delivered to City Hall with over 600 signatures (online and print).

Update 11/7/08: Two months have gone by and work has not yet started on the buildings. These historic treasures continue to sit vacant and exposed to the elements.

Update 12/8/08: According to the New Haven Register, renovation work on these critically important historic buildings will begin this week.

Update 5/2/09: Business New Haven reports that work on the buildings is continuing, under new ownership:

In late January PMC Property Group began about six months of structural reconstruction work on two historic buildings at 26-28 and 30-36 Crown. New floors, new beams, new columns and new stairways are being installed.PMC owns the buildings, has a permit for interior demolition at 40 Crown Street, and is working on final plans for the properties, according to city building official Andy Rizzo."David Nyberg is no longer associated with this project," Rizzo adds.

Update 12/16/10: The New Haven Independent reports that the city has approved the rehabilitation of these buildings into 65 new apartments. A large amount of work on the exterior and interior has already been completed over the past year. Excerpt:

The Crown Street buildings, which have stood vacant for years, are listed on the Connecticut Historical Commission’s Historic Resources Inventory, which describes one of them as “an important part of what remains of this late 19th-c. block of lower Crown St.” The earliest known tenants, according to the commission, include the Kahn, Wertheimer, and Smith Clothing Store and Tuttle Color Printing, both of which were in the building as of at least 1913.

Part of the building will return to commercial space as part of the revitalization, which is planned by PMC Property Management, a nationwide company based in Philadelphia. Doug Hitchner (at left in photo below), representing PMC, appeared before the BZA on Tuesday with local attorney Marjorie Shansky (at right). Local developer David Nyberg used to be associated with the team and the building, too.

That end of Crown Street has been reborn as a “new urbanist” jewel in recent years. Its landmarks, housed in preserved and retrofitted bulidings, include cafe nine, the Firehouse jazz club and studio and bar, Skappo Italian Wine Bar, Gray Organschi Architecture, and right across Orange Street, Artspace.

.

Renderings and Models of New Yale University Residential Colleges Released

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:33:00 +0000

Original Post, 5/12/09: Paul Needham of the Yale Daily News reports on the design renderings, which were released earlier by Robert A.M. Stern's Boston-based rendering firm, Jeff Stikeman. Click on the image at left to enlarge a view of the proposed north courtyard, which contains a tower that would be easily viewable from the corner of Grove and Prospect, several blocks to the south. Click here to view the YDN's complete slideshow.

Towers for the $600 million project will be added to improve the walkability (and imageability) of the site. Click here for a previous Design New Haven post about the new colleges, and the decision to select RAMSA as the architect.

The YDN article also reveals that several historic buildings currently on the site, including Hammond Hall and the Mudd Library, will be torn down to make room for the new colleges (scroll down for more on that).

Although virtually all other Yale construction projects that hadn't yet broken ground have been put on hold -- even minor renovations -- design work on the colleges is funded by a special donor, and has been continuing at a rapid pace.

Update, 5/20/09: The Yale Alumni Magazine's Carole Bass reports on the new renderings, including interviews with several prominent alumni architects. According to the story, Yale intends to release additional details on the college designs by the end of May. An excerpt from the piece:

It's hard to know how literally to take the drawings, observes Paul Goldberger '72, architecture critic for the New Yorker.... Artists' renderings "are sort of the equivalent of heavily retouched photographs," he cautions. That said, Goldberger continues, "what's very clear is that Stern has decided to go head to head with the master" of Yale Gothic architecture. And "if anybody can pull off James Gamble Rogers in the twenty-first century, it's Bob Stern."

But, Goldberger notes, that raises two additional questions. First, does it make sense to imitate 80-year-old buildings that are themselves imitations of the centuries-old University of Oxford? Goldberger says he's "split right down the middle" on that question. "I have a little bit of worry that the whole thing might be like Yale's greatest hits," he says. "I might have preferred something that would have continued Yale's [more recent] tradition of being more on the cutting edge."

Goldberger's other main concern is practical. Because Gothic architecture depends on fine detailing by both designers and craftsmen, "this is a very bad kind of architecture to do on a tight budget," he says. He's "slightly surprised" that, having decided on a traditional approach, the university didn't go with a cheaper red-brick Georgian style. "On the other hand," Goldberger notes, "I think of Gothic as the heart of Yale. So if you want to tie this area to the heart of campus, it's the right choice."

Update 6/3/09: The Yale Daily News has published a story about Stern's models for the new colleges, which are displayed at Sterling Library on the campus (see YDN photo at left). The story has attracted many commenters on the preliminary designs of Stern's $600 million commission, including a great post by Ken McKenna discussing the history of the so-called "gothic style" completed over many centuries at Notre Dame in Paris.

Another commenter, A&A, makes an argument for the preservation of Hammond Hall and Mudd Library:

Hammond Hall dates back to the turn of the last century and is among the oldest extant buildings commissioned by the Sheffield Institute. Its “head house” in many ways evokes the same Beaux Arts sensibility of materials and proportions that would later be elaborated in McKim, Meade, & White’s campus for Columbia University. While the “shed” at the rear probably does not warrant saving, the head house is in excellent condition and still eminently expresses a hansom brick and limestone composition with a beautifully ornamented copper cornice where hammers and anvils recall the original program for the building. Mudd is the work of a student of Louis Kahn and is quite respectful of that master’s legacy. Its somewhat austere and simple massing is countered by the sensitive detailing of concrete, brick, and glass. Despite its warehouse program it is a very thoughtful intervention in what has heretofore been a desolate corner of the campus.

Yale abounds in delightful assemblages of building fragments: Linsly-Chittenden, Silliman, the Art Gallery, Old Campus, etc.; Hammond and Mudd could also be cleverly incorporated into the master plan for the new colleges. It seems that this large site could easily accommodate two colleges the size of TD and Silliman without sacrificing Hammond and Mudd.

Update 6/10/09: Slides from Robert A.M. Stern's presentations are now available online, obtained by the Yale Daily News. The images include a diagrammatic comparison of the college's new courtyards, materials and public spaces, as well as several new renderings. Questions linger on the relationship of the building to some surrounding buildings and streets, including the appeal of street cross-sections and the type of traffic calming required to make Prospect a much more walkable corridor for residents and students of all ages and abilities.

Update 7/15/09: Preservationists express their discontent with the demolition of existing historic buildings on the site. Carole Bass covers the developing story in the Yale Alumni Magazine:

Noting the environmental cost of demolishing more than 200,000 square feet of usable buildings, New Haven Preservation Trust president Pedro Soto adds: "Yale's trying to burnish its green credentials. For Yale, with its vast resources, to say, 'We just can't figure out anything but demolition' -- it's an interesting thing to hear."

To house some 800 students without clearing the site, "we couldn't have big courtyards" or a broad walkway between the colleges, Stern explains. "We'd have to build big towers, which are what very many universities have as dormitories, but which are nothing like residential colleges."

Meanwhile, a masthead editorial in the New Haven Register argues that the new colleges represent the "best use" of the site:

New buildings will allow more undergraduates to attend; add to city’s growth and coffers. Yale University’s plan to construct two new residential colleges will be good for both the university and New Haven. The 6.5-acre site now has 14 buildings owned by the university....

The largest of the buildings is the Seeley G. Mudd Library, completed in 1982. Designed by Roth and Moore Architects, it received Connecticut and New England design awards as well as the 1983 American Library Association Award. Yale plans to demolish the library and the 13 other buildings to make way for the colleges. Preservationists have objected to the demolitions, which are expected to begin later this year. They have argued for the incorporation of some of the old buildings into the colleges. The university has countered that recycling the buildings would be prohibitively expensive.

Update 8/26/09: An article on the proposed demolition appears in Preservation Magazine online.

Update 8/29/09: Concerns rise as the demolition date quickly approaches. DNH summarizes a number of letters, public testimony and other recent developments at this post.

Update 9/9/10: New renderings have been released by Yale University, showing some minor modifications to the design including a taller tower. The New Journal has published an article detailing concerns about the expansion of the University, which can now move forward following the demolition of these structures.

Update 10/20/10: According to reporting in the New Haven Register, the application process for the new residential colleges has begun:

Architect Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale Architecture School, is designing the two colleges to echo the traditional brick James Gamble Rogers’ buildings on central campus. The City Plan staff is recommending approval of the PDD zone change and giving Yale up to three years to come back with detailed plans for the colleges, which will be located on almost six acres of land. Michael Morand, vice president for New Haven and state affairs at Yale, said they will move forward with detailed planning next year, with construction depending on fund raising efforts. Since they will take about 30 months to build, if work is started in 2013, they could be open by 2015.

Update 12/14/2010: The New Haven Board of Aldermen's legislative body has approved the project as a planned development. The New Haven Independent reports on the new colleges here (excerpt):

In his first day in charge of his new committee, Hill Alderman Jorge Perez presided over the harmonious passage of Yale’s $600 million plan to expand with two new residential colleges. By a unanimous vote, the Legislation Committee of the Board of Aldermen accepted the City Plan Commission’s recommendation for a planned development district (PDD) for the two new proposed colleges and in turn recommended the proposal for consideration by the full board later this month.

If all goes well, they will house about 800 students and after a 30-month construction period open in 2015. A PDD is a zoning designation created by the city to aid development, usually through overriding underlying zoning restrictions. The proposed site is surrounded by other projects, many previously done by Yale as PDDs or its less ambitious cousin the planned development unit, or PDU.

While commissioners at the October City Plan Commission meeting had approved the PDD proposal, some had expressed reservations about how open the newly created east-west “Prospect Way” pedestrian walkway will be to the public and how well the colleges will in general be integrated into the community.

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Hopes and Hurdles for New Haven-Hartford-Springfield Commuter Rail; Project Receives Federal Funding

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:07:00 +0000

Original Post, 12/12/08 by Dmitriy Tarasov, DNH Associate Editor

If you need to go from Downtown New Haven to Hartford or Springfield, MA, and don’t feel like driving, there are currently five, somewhat poorly-timed, daily trains between the two cities. In addition, there is an option that requires changing trains and a train-bus combination with a transfer in Hartford. Yet within the next few years, there is the possibility of a far more convenient option for getting to and from Hartford, Springfield, and other vibrant communities along the corridor. The Connecticut Department of Transportation is looking into a commuter rail line, on which the trains would run once in every thirty or even fifteen minutes.

This past Tuesday Wilbur Smith Associates, which consults ConnDOT on the project, laid out preliminary plans for the line as part of a series of public hearings. Apart from the expanded travel options, the promises contained in the plan are tantalizing. Improved air quality, the ability to travel from New Haven to Springfield in about an hour without using a car, a train connection to Bradley International Airport, passenger service for 15 hours a day at the start-up stage, multi-modal integration with bicycles (current Amtrak trains do not allow them) as well as vastly improved stations (such as New Haven-State Street, in the heart of Downtown New Haven across the street from the 360 State development) are some of the betterments the 62-mile line promises to bring. When complete, there would be a train in each direction every fifteen minutes during the rush hour. The end result: more walkable, TOD-ready, business-friendly, revitalized urban cores along the line between Downtown New Haven and Springfield.

Yet proponents realize that there are still many unresolved issues on which the project can get snagged. As things now stand, the line may not start running until 2015 or, in all likelihood, even later.

To enable an increased number of trains, the line would have to be double-tracked. Wilbur Smith suggests shifting to nighttime four of the five freight trains that currently ply the line. According to Heidi Green, President of 1000 Friends of Connecticut, an advocate for smart growth, the engineering obstacles involved are challenging but “far from insurmountable.” A more difficult question is whether Amtrak, now responsible for scheduling on the route, shares the enthusiasm for the proposed service. In an email to this reporter, Green writes that Amtrak is currently “making [no] promises” toward making implementation easier. The start-up plan will cost $300 million to carry out, and the federal government is a potential source of funding, meaning that the process is not going to be quick.

Yet the biggest potential stumbling block is the state budget. Green writes that the transportation fund is in deficit and the commuter line is not a high priority for the DOT. However, Green points out that the first trains could perhaps start running in 2010 if the project were removed from ConnDOT’s responsibility and assigned to regional authorities, with an environmental review for the line waived through federal legislation.

And then there is the South Central Regional Council of Governments, whose executive director Judy Gott has already made it known that the COG will not tolerate drivers having to wait at at-grade railroad crossings every fifteen minutes. SCRCOG apparently does not mind a 30-minute headway, however.

The New Haven Register piece also quotes Stephen Delpapa, a transportation supervising planner for ConnDOT, as saying that the commuter trains will start running in “optimistically, 2015-2016.”

Robert Cotto, of Urban Compass, points out that that there is already anxiety in Hartford over transportation options and a general lack of coordinated planning in the region. Describing a meeting at which the plans were unveiled, Cotto points to another estimate:

"Joseph Langlais, president of the Parkville Revitalization Association, exemplified the mood of the meeting when he asked, 'When will shovels hit the dirt?'

Cynthia Holden, ConnDOT’s transportation assistant planning director, answered solemnly, 'Ten to 12 years.'"

Even though advocates and Governor Rell have said that the project is unlikely to be eligible for stimulus package funding this year, state transportation advocates are continuing to organize to get the project shovel-ready. For example, a Sierra Club and National Corridors public forum will be held on January 9th in New London, featuring Senator Chris Dodd - who will be particularly influential in the creation of any Obama-administration stimulus package this winter - as a keynote speaker.

Update 7/13/09: Connecticut's New Haven-Springfield line has formally applied for a share of the Federal economic stimulus funding. The Transport Politic has information about potential competitors. Reporting from the Stamford Advocate:

Double-tracking the 62-mile line between New Haven and Springfield to enable high-speed service. Installing the new track is expected to cost more than $300 million. Planning and design work for overall improvements, such as new signals, electrification, rehabilitation or replacement of bridges, and new high-speed rail equipment.

Investments in the New Haven-Springfield high-speed line bring significant travel time benefits to the region and will also support plans for commuter service through the corridor at 30-minute intervals. A formal application will be filed in the fall, according to Connecticut DOT Commissioner Joseph F. Marie.

Update 7/27/09: According to Senator Dodd, Connecticut has a very good chance of receiving a share of ARRA's $8 billion in dedicated high-speed rail funding, despite dozens of applications from states such as Montana and West Virginia.

Update 10/25/10: Connecticut receives another $120 million in Federal railroad funding for the New Haven Hartford line, from the Federal Railroad Administration, adding to a major grant of $40 million for double-tracking that was committed earlier this year under the ARRA program for High Speed Rail. The Yale Daily News reports here and the Hartford Courant covers the piece here.

Biotechnologist Critical After Crossing Downtown "Death Zone" on Route 34 East; CT Complete Streets Bill Gets Vote; Area Development Moves Forward

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:10:00 +0000

Original Post, 5/5/09:

Pedestrians: "This is a Death Zone"

William Kaempffer has a comprehensive article in today's New Haven Register covering another tragic collision yesterday along Route 34, in the heart of the Yale and YNHH Medical District. 56-year-old senior scientist Michael Jaye, who works for one of the neighborhood's numerous biotechnology firms, was hit by a CT Transit bus at College and South Frontage (pictured here), and later died from his injuries. The incident occurred just a block from where Yale medical student Mila Rainof was struck and killed in the spring of 2008, and a few hundred feet from the spot where a Yale public health student was critically injured in 2006.

Kaempffer's article features interviews with pedestrians in the area of the collision. Aaron Cooke, a current public health student, is not the first person to describe it as a "death zone":

A 56-year-old man suffered serious head injuries Monday after being struck by a bus while crossing South Frontage Road, a roadway that pedestrians say is a nightmare to cross.

“All these people are trying to get on the highway... They’re all trying to accelerate to speeds of 65 mph,” said Aaron Cook, a public health student at Yale. "Meanwhile, pedestrians are trying to get to and from the Yale medical district and downtown. Think about it. If you put two and two together,” he said. .... You put those two things together and make it difficult to see when you should and should not be crossing the street.... This is a death zone.”

In addition to the problems of excessive speed, crosswalks in the corridor are currently very poorly marked. They are even nonexistent in some places. With a few exceptions, the situation at these intersections has not markedly improved since 2006. The pedestrian infrastructure along College Street, where yesterday's pedestrian fatality took place, is particularly in need of improvements. In addition, curb returns are extremely wide in several locations (particularly at College and South Frontage - see photo above), forcing pedestrians to literally stand in the middle of the road in order to have enough time to cross. Bicyclists are clearly intimidated by the high speeds and SUVs hurtling through red lights on a regular basis, causing many of them to ride on the sidewalk. The result: numerous injuries every year.

The lack of even the most basic infrastructure along Route 34 also creates a vast chasm through the city, preventing most residents from walking or biking between the Hill neighborhood, the Yale medical campus, and Downtown New Haven. This impacts overall public health and, even without considering the fact that the area is referred to as a "death zone," greatly reduces the overall perception of Downtown New Haven's livability.

Yale Medical School faculty member Mike Nitabach was also quoted in the Register piece:

"You’re in a car and you’re on the highway going 70 miles per hour, and then you suddenly are on a surface street and it’s a whole different mind-set in terms of how you perceive your environment as the operator of a vehicle, and I think that’s part of the reason why Frontage Road is so dangerous for pedestrians,” he said.

Petitions and Promises

Both of the previous high-profile pedestrian collisions sparked major petition drives. The first, a 2006 petition that was circulated within the Yale medical campus, collected over 600 signatures. It called for walk signals at all corners of the Frontage and College intersection, rumble strips on the ramps leading to the intersection (where vehicles fly through red lights and onto the streets at 60 miles per hour), an increase in the height of the railing lining College St, an increase the time alloted for pedestrians to cross the street, and a formal, citywide assessment of intersection safety with a public report.

The second major petition drive was launched by the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition, a grassroots group that formed after Mila Rainof's death. The "Petition for Safe Streets" called for a 90% reduction in traffic injuries and fatalities, and noted that such a goal could only be accomplished if speeds were greatly reduced in areas with high concentrations of pedestrians, such as in Downtown New Haven and around the hospital district. The petition also called for detailed citywide reporting on traffic safety so that neighbors could identify problems, see the specific measures being taken to correct them, and advocate for their own neighborhoods based on the results. The online and paper petition drive collected over 2,000 signatures, and more importantly, the support of nearly 100 state and local elected officials, churches, businesses, advocacy organizations, and neighborhood associations, including all 12 of the city's Community Management Teams.

Unfortunately, years have gone by and virtually none of the specific, concrete provisions demanded by these two petitions have been implemented by the city or by ConnDOT (with a few exceptions below) -- even though the proposed measures are fairly simple, economical, and commonly used in hundreds of other communities around the world. For example, in "Essentials of Global Health," Richard Skolnik discusses how the installation of rumble strips in Ghana in 2000 resulted in an immediate 35% reduction in injuries and 55% reduction in fatalities at treated intersections.

Following the injury of the public health student plus a number of other serious injuries and deaths along the Route 34 corridor, the city and University had in fact promised walk signals and other improvements. A Yale Daily News article from the time reported:

The television channel WTNH reported yesterday that the city’s traffic engineer said walk lights were in the process of being installed on the intersection.... Shah said he also thinks the University has a key role to play in lobbying for improved pedestrian safety.

Like many other city projects designed to improve safety for pedestrians, these signals and associated improvements have been "under review" and delayed for several years. At a meeting with the Yale Medical Campus Traffic Safety Group in May 2008, the City of New Haven indicated that signals would be installed "between July 2008 and October 2009." Is it possible that a better signal, or an LPI, could have saved this pedestrian's life?

Moving Forward: Small Steps Before Big?

DNH regularly walks, bikes and drives the streets around the medical campus, and we believe that urgent actions to improve safety and accessibility in the area are still needed. Residents expressed similar concerns over the Route 34 West plan, presented last month. From a political perspective, if the city is able to demonstrate a concrete commitment to everyday New Haven residents -- the majority of whom in fact do not drive a car to work every day -- then residents will be far more likely to support city development plans like the parking garage-filled Route 34 West MDP. Perhaps measures similar to the ones that New York City took to begin to tame its famous "Boulevard of Death" could be studied as a model for Route 34. See here for some other interesting examples, by the readers of GOOD magazine (one shown below). If the city is to meet the goals established by the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition, anyhow, it must take far more comprehensive measures than painting new zebra style crosswalks.

To give credit to the city, small steps have recently been taken in response to the Safe Streets Petition. A Complete Streets Steering Committee was formed based on the unanimous vote of the city council, and although the committee held its first official meeting only last week -- almost a year after the petition was launched, and more than six months after the city passed its complete streets legislation -- its creation signals a long-term resolve on the part of the city to address these issues (for more on this, scroll down). The city has also been busy moving forward with a plan to make Downtown New Haven more bicycle and pedestrian friendly, and design standards are in the works -- with actual infrastructure, such as bike boxes or sharrows, expected to be on the ground this summer.

In addition, the city launched an educational campaign named "Street Smarts" in the fall, even though it had almost no funding to continue beyond its initial roll out; there has reportedly been a slight uptick in the number of traffic tickets issued by a new New Haven Traffic Enforcement Unit; a few zebra style crosswalks were repainted; and a few concrete bollards have been dropped onto boulevards known for deadly drag racing. But despite calls from the citywide coalition, more concrete measures (such as reduced speed limits and traffic calming) have not yet been seen, and no citywide reporting has been done to allow residents to evaluate the success of such measures within their own neighborhoods.

Board of Aldermen Unanimously Supports State "Complete Streets" Bill

On a more positive note, yesterday evening the New Haven Board of Aldermen expressed unanimous approval for a resolution supporting SB735, the Connecticut "complete streets" bill currently being pushed within the State General Assembly. The bill would require pedestrian and bicycle accommodation on all state roads, like Route 34, and also create a permanent bicycle and pedestrian advisory board within ConnDOT to serve as a permanent body advocating on behalf of bicyclists, pedestrians, and individuals with disabilities.

Following lobbying by the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition (PDF file of the testimony available here), the New Haven Board had passed a similar citywide "complete streets" law in October 2008, by a vote of 30-0.

Supporters of SB735 at the state level are now encouraging other municipalities to pass similar resolutions in support of the bill, and resolutions to do so have been introduced in several other cities including Bridgeport. Based on the support of groups including the Sierra Club, Central Connecticut Bicycle Alliance, Tri-State Transportation Campaign, CT League of Conservation Voters, Transit for Connecticut, 1000 Friends of Connecticut, Greenwich Safe Cycling, Elm City Cycling, Connecticut Commission on Children, CT Fund for the Environment, and the CT Livable Streets Campaign -- and now the City of New Haven -- the Connecticut complete streets bill has gained the support of numerous legislators in Hartford. Today it goes to the CGA's powerful Appropriations Committee for another vote, where rumor has it that it is expected to pass by a wide margin. Visit this page to download a factsheet, which has more details.

Update 7/9/09: The Connecticut "Complete Streets" bill was signed into law by Governor Rell.

Update 10/15/10: According to the New Haven Register, New Haven receives $16 million in TIGER funding from USDOT to do the first phase of the Route 34 boulevardization project, which will create a large new 10-story laboratory building along College Street between North and South Frontage Roads. Click here for more coverage of Route 34. The New Haven Independent has a more detailed report on the TIGER grant here, and the New Haven Register has a Sunday profile on Carter Winstanley, the 41-year old developer of at least six other buildings in Downtown New Haven, in an article here. An excerpt from the Sunday Register feature, with some advice from Winstanley on economic development strategy:

His advice to political leaders is to look to concentrate this research and development in one place. “New Haven has been able to do it on a grand scale,” similar to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“There is a need to have these centers concentrated because biotech fitup is very expensive and there is a high failure rate ... it makes sense to put these into communities like New Haven where you can recycle the labs over and over again,” Winstanley said. He said it is also essential that the talented individuals who are attracted to come work here, have wider options for employment if a given startup fails. “They know there is a real risk associated with it. They want to know if they move their family out and it doesn’t work out, is there another company that they can be associated with?” he said. As for the state as a whole, “How do you create jobs? Look at what you do well and do more of it.”

Update 12/3/2010: New Haven receives another $950,000 from the state, mitigating its expected contribution to the project. The New Haven Register details the reasons why.

Update 12/9/2010: The New Haven Board of Aldermen has accepted the Federal TIGER grant. Construction on the section of Route 34 from College Street to the Air Rights Garage may begin as early as mid-2011. Details in the New Haven Register and New Haven Independent. A memo from the City of New Haven's Department of Finance explains the cost implications of the project on the city's budget, including projected revenue that will pay for the city's expenses in a matter of a few years.

New Haven Apartment, Office Vacancy Rates Among Lowest in Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 01:31:00 +0000

Update, 10/7/10: According to the latest Fall 2010 REIS report, the New Haven area has the lowest apartment vacancy rate in the United States, at 2.3%. This is down significantly from REIS's spring 2009 rate of 4.2%, last reported here. New York City, Long Island and Silicon Valley are the runners-up.

Lower apartment vacancy rates, which are being experienced nationally for the first time since 2007, may be a sign that people who "doubled up" during the recession are beginning to search for their own apartments, that families driven out of their homes due to the historically high level of foreclosures are now renting, and that people are delaying purchase of homes until financing or economic conditions improve. They are also perhaps a symptom of a generational shift away from homeownership as the primary path to family savings.

Prices will generally increase as the vacancy rate decreases, indicating that the New Haven area may need to pay more attention to issues of housing affordability. According to 2009 American Community Survey figures compiled by DataHaven, released last week by the Census Bureau, 40% of Connecticut renters and homeowners now pay more than 30% of their income on housing, up from 29% in 2000. In the City of New Haven, 51% (nearly 23,000 households) pay more than 30% of income on housing, up from 43% in 2000. 29% of owners and renters in the city paid more than 50% of their income on housing in 2009.

Original Post, 4/20/09: According to the Spring 2009 most recent quarterly report by Cushman and Wakefield, cities with the lowest first-quarter 2009 office vacancy rates were New Haven, Connecticut at 9.2%, Washington, D.C. at 9.4%, New York City at 9.6%, Portland and Philly at 10.2%, and Boston at 10.6%. The national central business district average vacancy rate was 12.5%. New Haven's vacancy rate is almost as low as that of Midtown Manhattan, if that section of New York were to be considered a separate stand-alone market.

Factors impacting New Haven's very low vacancy rate include the burgeoning demand for space at Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, as well as a continued influx of small businesses to the Downtown area, such as the Nature Conservancy (relocating from Middletown partly to meet "smart growth" objectives). As recently featured in the New York Times, New Haven is also seeing a large number of new residential and renovation projects within the city's highly-walkable core, as well as new Jamaican vegan restaurant openings. In addition to the 450-unit 360 State tower, a new $40 million, 104-unit tower was proposed last week for the corner of Sylvan and Howard.

One example of new office development is Winstanley Enterprises' proposal for a 250,000SF new biomedical research building attached to the east end of the Air Rights Garage on Route 34. According to a report in today's New Haven Independent, and as detailed several weeks ago here, the land just to the east of the garage has been made available for this to move forward. Winstanley's new building has been in design for over three years and will be attached to the existing 300 George Street development. Winstanley's other office buildings in Downtown New Haven are fully leased to various technology companies and offices affiliated with Yale University, and demand does not seem to be letting up even in the economic downturn. The new facility would complement the nearly $600 million worth of nearly-completed construction at the Yale Cancer Center, which sits just a block away, on the west end of the Garage.

Transport Blog Outlines New Haven Streetcar Proposal

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:48:00 +0000

Original Post, 4/23/09: Nationally-renowned transportation blog The Transport Politic has published a great analysis of New Haven's proposed streetcar line, including the map shown at left (which is by no means a "final" route). Most likely funded through the Federal New and Small Starts program, the line would incorporate the Yale campus, Union Station and a boulevardized Route 34. Blog editor Yonah writes:

While I have confidence that this project would be relatively succesful, having lived in New Haven for four years and understanding traffic patterns well there, one-way operation would be a problem for people attempting to get to the station from downtown, as they’d be forced to go north before heading back south. That’s one easy way to turn off potential riders. Meanwhile, this line is too Yale-centric, a problem for a city that already has some signficant town-gown disparities.

Click here to read The Transport Politic's post and comment.

Update 5/5/09: Yonah blogs about America's streetcar renaissance on today's Infrastructurist.

Update 12/2/09: Yonah writes that New Haven could be a beneficiary of USDOT's plan, announced yesterday, to fund $280 million worth of city center streetcars.

Update 9/8/10: A public meeting to discuss initial plans for the streetcar will be held on September 23. DataHaven has a post with additional resources on the plans and meeting location.

SeeClickFix Tackles Tomlinson Bridge "Disaster"; ConnDOT Vetoes Safety Improvements

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:55:00 +0000

Original Post, 3/19/09: Rather than simply profiling another SeeClickFix "Issue of the Month" this month, DNH has decided to highlight some of the significant coverage received by the Downtown New Haven, Google Maps mashup-based company over the past few days. Using a particularly strong example from the Tomlinson Bridge on Route 1 over New Haven Harbor (pictured at left), we also describe why we think the site will be spreading around the country even more quickly than predicted.

A Tool for Livable Communities: The Coverage

The City Fix, a well-known sustainable transportation blog, has a lengthy post summarizing the company's progress:

Lately, the SeeClickFix guys have garnered national media attention. They were profiled by Voice of America (en Espanol). They scored a $25,000 grant from the We Media Pitch It Awards. And last month, they started incorporating its RSS feeds into an experimental "hyperlocal" news site, sponsored by The New York Times, that covers three small towns in New Jersey. Just last week, SeeClickFix scored a deal with Philly.com, embedding their Philadelphia map into a new “pothole tracker” tool.... According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s technology blog, “They’ve wired up New Haven so well that everyone from city managers to AT&T execs monitor their site and see to it that complaints get addressed.”

Melissa Bailey of the New Haven Independent wrote a profile in yesterday's newspaper, giving detailed examples of how the site is being used in New Haven:

SeeClickFix.com now has over 2,000 users nationwide, said Berkowitz. The project’s success comes thanks to the way it was embraced by the New Haven community, he said. To be effective, the tool relies on commitment from a community of “watchers,” public officials, activists and institutions who take responsibility for maintaining the public space. When someone opens a ticket to document a problem, a report is sent out to relevant watchers based on location and keywords. There are now 454 watchers in New Haven, according to Berkowitz.... After complaints about its shuttles speeding down residential streets, Yale University recently set up a watch area to track those complaints. Given the precise time and location of a speeding shuttle, the university can identify the driver and address the problem.

The site was also highlighted on the Planning Pool, a website devoted to cutting-edge urban planning ideas, including crowdsourcing, and listed on the CEOs for Cities blog; in addition to several cities where it is already being used, a quick search reveals that all around the country, people are posting about the site on their blogs and wondering when it will come to their neighborhood. Downtown New Haveners are very proud of the site, and use throughout New Haven and its suburbs is rapidly growing.

Can SeeClickFix Spread to Large Cities?

Of course, adoption of SeeClickFix depends on involved citizens using the tool, plus government and private entities adopting it as a means of communication with their constituents and customers (typically, having many involved citizens is the first prerequisite). This has worked exceptionally well in New Haven, which has an intimate and legendarily robust civic sector -- after all, the Nine Squares of Downtown New Haven was the first city plan in the United States, Betty Brown wove a detailed story of virtually every building in New Haven in her famous book, the New Haven Independent is currently one of the nation's finest examples of "hyperlocal" online journalism, etc. New Haven's government has also been incredibly responsive: there have been many reported potholes quickly filled, and graffiti complaints have often been addressed within hours of appearing on the website. But will it ever catch on in a larger, more chaotic city like Philadelphia or Chicago?

DNH believes that SeeClickFix will be rapidly adopted by individuals concerned with transportation safety and downtown retail districts, particularly as walking, bicycling and transit use all continue to skyrocket to record levels and beyond. Creating a transportation system that serves these millions of new users requires a much greater attention to detail -- for the simple reason that a small transportation system "gap" such as a crack, missing crosswalk, pothole or gravel in the road is far less likely to damage a truck axle than it is to critically injure a pedestrian, cyclist or bus rider crossing the street.

Design New Haven was the first third-party site to host SeeClickFix, and we believe that transportation and city advocates, such as those hosting some of the roughly 250 other blogs in the transportation and livable communities-focused "Streetsblog Network", may be next. Transportation advocates and downtown boosters generally have amicable existing relationships with local municipalities; once these two user groups begin using the site together -- perhaps in collaboration with public/private entities such as Downtown New Haven's Town Green BID, one of SCF's first public "fixers" -- use can spread more widely throughout a city and even help cement those relationships. In New Haven, for example, See Click Fix was used as a planning tool to help the city identify locations where in-street yield to pedestrian crosswalk signs were needed (and the city has reportedly ordered dozens of such signs since, to be installed this spring).

The Tomlinson Bridge "Engineering Disaster": Fixed?

To give a more detailed example of how this works, and keeping with our SCF "issue of the month" series, New Haven's number one issue at the moment, based on the number of "votes" to have it fixed, is the railroad grade crossing on the U.S. Route 1 Tomlinson Bridge. Opened in 2002, this massive, $120 million bridge represents the only viable pedestrian and bicycle connection from Downtown New Haven to the eastern suburbs of the city, and ConnDOT is currently constructing another, $757 million highway bridge right next to it. Unfortunately, besides the fact that the bridge is not a "complete street" by any remote stretch of the imagination, the railroad grade crossing is at a 30 degree angle to the roadway, and is unsigned for cyclists and improperly paved -- and therefore is extremely dangerous for even the most experienced bicyclists. To view a Google street view of the problem area and the bridge -- which is widely referred to as an "engineering disaster" in terms of overall safety and contribution to community connectivity -- you may click here.

Following posting on SeeClickFix, over 500 people viewed the issue and many comments were posted on the site, all of which can be read on the issue itself, whose link is http://www.seeclickfix.com/issues/1300.html. In addition to the posted comments (which are automatically sent to anyone who signs up for the issue with their email address), dozens of local commuters and cyclists emailed one another regarding the number of people they knew who had been seriously injured at the crossing. Frankly, the catalogue resulting from this exercise was frightening and deeply disturbing.

Based on the discussion on SeeClickFix, numerous individuals ranging from state and city officials to neighborhood activists have now been able to connect and advocate for a quick solution. According to sources, ConnDOT's crack traffic engineering squad is currently conducting an urgent review of the railroad grade crossing issue and plans to have a detailed report ready by April 1st. Hopefully a fix, or at least a temporary one, will happen very soon after that, given the serious injuries taking place on a regular basis. Following this, neighborhood leaders can move on to addressing the more complicated issue of the bridge's overall inadequacy when it comes to multimodal transportation. There's no doubt that many of these users will be back to SCF to report another issue in the very near future.

All in all, due to its potential to empower the community to find solutions for serious safety problems like this one, SeeClickFix gets our award for the best transportation safety innovation of 2008. We predict that within a few months, others watching livable streets issues nationwide will feel the same way.

Update 3/24/09: SeeClickFix has been incorporated into Miami's Urban City Architecture and profiled on Streetsblog San Francisco and Streetsblog New York.

Update 3/31/09: SeeClickFix leads to a successful narcotics sting near Downtown and is compared to Jane Jacobs, while the Tomlinson Bridge story is covered in the New Haven Register Sunday edition (original link here).

Update 7/6/09: The Register has another piece on the Tomlinson Bridge, indicating that more serious "fixes" to the problem are not currently being considered by the DOT, despite the large number of ongoing cyclist crashes at the site. A couple of small metal warning signs will be installed by August, however, which is a good start -- but still grossly inadequate at addressing the situation by any federal or state design standard.

For example, an excerpt from ConnDOT's own manual, posted on SeeClickFix, recommends installation of "flange way fillers." The design manual section refers to "high speed rail lines"; the rail track in question on the Tomlinson bridge was built for future port access and rarely (if ever) used for train traffic -- which, if it did occur, would certainly take place at an extremely low speed.

On low-speed, lightly traveled railroad tracks, commercially available flange way fillers can eliminate the gap next to the rail. The filler normally fills the gap between the inside railbed and the rail. When a train wheel rolls over it, the flange way filler compresses. This solution, however, is not acceptable for high-speed rail lines, as the filler will not compress fast enough and the train may derail. -ConnDOT Bicycle Design Guidelines, Page 42

Research into these "flange way fillers" (shown above) has found that although they are useful in some situations, when it comes to track crossings with extremely acute angles like the one at the Tomlinson Bridge, the fillers could increase the likelihood of cyclists' wheels slipping in a direction parallel to the rail, especially when wet. Although the fillers may be better than nothing if cyclists are appropriately warned of a slipping risk, the only acceptable solution here most likely involves re-engineering the street itself. The street pictured above has a wide shoulder, for example.

An excerpt from Mary O'Leary's piece in the Register:

James Newman, acting engineering administrator at the state Department of Transportation, in an e-mail to an Elm City Cycling member, said “it was not possible to improve the rail crossing geometry given the constraints of the location.”

Michael Piscitelli, New Haven’s transportation czar, said the city is looking at potential engineering changes to see if they come up with a fix for Forbes. “We have to figure out how to do it first, but I think the city would be interested in helping — finding a way to make that safer,” Piscitelli said.

Meanwhile, SeeClickFix continues to rapidly expand around the country, particularly through new collaborations with city government and media sites -- promising news for those concerned with creating more walkable streets and livable communities.

Update 07/13/10: Coverage and protests continue about the issue, which has caused yet more injuries in recent weeks. New Haven Safe Streets has a roundup of recent events.

Community Shares Ideas on Route 34 East Development

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:55:00 +0000

Original Post, 6/27/10: The New Haven Independent (article here) and New Haven Register (article here) each covered last week's community workshop on the future of Route 34's eastern section, also known as the Oak Street Connector. The city has received millions of dollars to study the boulevardization of the connector, a move requested by a broad civic coalition, and hopes to match that with millions more in construction funding. You may view our previous coverage and analysis of the corridor by searching under http://downtownnewhaven.blogspot.com/search/label/Route%2034 until we transition to our new website.

From the Register:

NEW HAVEN — A highway extension originally designed to get traffic out of the city as fast as possible is being re-envisioned as a destination in itself, as a team of urban-centered experts look to reconnect neighborhoods downtown and reclaim some 10 acres. Interested citizens came to the New Haven Library Thursday night to add their views as Chan Krieger Sieniewicz (CKS) architects, Parson Brinkerhoff engineers, Newman Architects and others outlined their goals for the eastern portion of the Route 34 connector.

A concept plan was presented last year, and the new team has been charged with figuring out the traffic components and $36 million in infrastructure changes that will prepare the land for development from the connector exits downtown near the railroad station to the Air Rights Garage.

Alex Krieger, a principal in CKS and chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University, said the proposal is to take advantage of the estimated 12-foot drop in grade for parts of the connector. This would allow two boulevards on either side of the depression to continue to move traffic, with a series of driveways under the reclaimed land that would lead to garages and loop roads for the new development, while allowing direct access to the Air Rights Garage.

About 100 people split up into several groups, each with a city official and a representative of the infrastructure team to explain the process. The team has worked on similar projects across the country, including highway conversion in Cincinnatti and on the Big Dig in Boston.

Pat Kane, a resident of nearby Dwight Street, said the key is mixed development with residential units as an anchor. “You can’t have it emptying out at 5 p.m,” she said.

Michael Piscitelli, who heads the city’s traffic department, agreed and said it is already zoned for this. “We need an all day, every day presence,” he said.

Krieger said a normal city grid system, which New Haven hopes to establish by reconnecting Orange and Temple streets, moves the traffic better and more efficiently than the connector. While the topography at Temple and Orange makes the connection problematic, “the team is bound to figure it out,” Krieger said.

Piscitelli said there are 10 consultant groups working on this, in addition to the state, which is vetting developer Winstanley’s plan to put up the first building adjacent to his medical research labs at 300 George St. That 400,000-square-foot private development is estimated to cost $140 million.

Update 10/15/10: According to the New Haven Register, New Haven receives $16 million in TIGER funding from USDOT to do the first phase of the Route 34 boulevardization project. Click here for more coverage of Route 34.

GNHCLF Breakfast Tackles Policy Efficiencies: April 13

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:38:00 +0000

The next in the Greater New Haven Community Loan Fund's ongoing series of community development breakfasts is a talk with Shelby Mertes, Chief Policy Analyst of Partnership for Strong Communities. The talk will build upon current policy directions in Washington, such as the recent creation of a White House Office of Urban Policy, that seek to break housing, transportation, environmental and land use policies out of their long-standing silos and lay ambitious foundations for more livable, walkable communities.

Efficiency in Public Policy: Better Housing to Improve the Economy, Climate Change, Land Preservation, Transportation, Urban Revitalization, Health, Education, Social Service Delivery and Family Stability
Tuesday, April 13, 8:30am to 10:00am
The Graduate Club, 155 Elm Street, New Haven

Affordable housing policy is undergoing transformation, using new approaches and better understanding interconnections with other policy areas. This can be leveraged to help solve a myriad of policy problems, resulting in better outcomes on many fronts, and better efficiency in the use of scarce public dollars. For more info, visit www.ctpartnershiphousing.com, www.homeconnecticut.org, www.housingpolicy2010.org, www.lyceumcenter.org.

Space is limited. If you plan to attend, please RSVP by April 8 to: Jackie Downing at the Loan Fund, jacqueline (at) gnhclf.org or 203-789-8690, ext. 127.

Press Event to Support Connecticut Ban the Box Legislation: March 23

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:03:00 +0000

Original Post, 3/18/10: Join Mothers for Justice in collaboration with the New Haven Prison Re-entry Roundtable committee in a press event to support Raised Bill No. 5207 at the Connecticut General Assembly: An act concerning Criminal Background Checks for prospective state employers.

Press Conference: Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 2:00pm

New Haven City Hall Steps, 200 Church Street, New Haven, CT 06510

Groups will discuss their support for legislation that gives fair opportunities for individuals seeking employment who have been incarcerated, and who want a chance to seek gainful employment.

"Ban the Box" supports Bill No. 5207 that says a person shall not be disqualified from employment by the state of Connecticut or any of its agencies. People who become employed after being incarcerated increase their contribution to their families, and their communities. Click here for a short video with clips from a recent press conference in Hartford.

The City of New Haven passed its own "ban the box" legislation last year, which the Yale Daily News called "the most substantial New Haven community services reform since the passage of the Elm City Resident Card — a municipal identification card accessible to all residents, including illegal immigrants — in the summer of 2007."

Update 3/24/10: Click on the following links for press coverage at the Yale Daily News, New Haven Register and New Haven Independent.

Connecticut Smart Growth Conference Features Traffic Calming Projects, Livable Communities

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:41:00 +0000

The past two Connecticut smart growth conferences have been excellent, well-attended events with a focus on cutting-edge urban planning methodologies. This year's program features a number of Connecticut projects of national significance, as well as a large group of presenters with ties to Downtown New Haven. See below for a complete list.

The conference coincides with the Livable Communities Act, a bill under consideration in Washington that would support the creation of more sustainable towns and cities.

March 18th, 2010
Third Annual Smart Growth Conference, 2:00 to 8:00 p.m., 950 & 960 Main Street, Hartford, CT

Agenda
1:30 - 2:00 Registration, front foyer of 960 Main St.
2:00 - 2:15 Welcome Sue Merrow, Chair, 1000 Friends of Connecticut, G. Fox Room, 960 Main St.
2:15 - 2:30 Opening Remarks Mayor Eddie A. Perez, G. Fox Room, 960 Main St.
2:30 - 3:30 Development Oriented Transit Rick Gustafson, E.D. Portland Streetcars, Inc., G. Fox Room, 960 Main St.
3:45 - 4:55 Workshop Session One 10th & 11th floor classrooms, Capital Community College, 950 Main St.
5:05 - 6:15 Workshop Session Two 10th & 11th floor classrooms, Capital Community College, 950 Main St.
6:30 - 8:00 Dinner, Keynote Address David Owen, author Green Metropolis, State of the State; Smart Growth in Connecticut Tom Condon, editor of Place commentary of The Hartford Courant, G. Fox Room, 960 Main Street

Pre-register either online at www.1000friends-ct.org. 1000 Friends has a limited capacity and expects to sell out, so pre-registering is strongly encouraged!

Workshops Session One: 3:45 to 4:55 p.m.

1. Clean Water and Smart Growth
Presenters: Charles P. Sheehan, Chief Executive Officer, MDC and Robert E. Moore, Chief Administrative Officer, MDC
The Metropolitan District Commission, created in 1929, is one of the first metropolitan governments in the United States, and one of the most successful. Today it daily demonstrates the economies of scale and cost efficiencies that can be produced by functional collaboration among its member municipalities to provide water and sewer services to central Connecticut. And by embarking on a carefully planned and managed "sewer-separation" project, it is playing a major role in reducing nitrogen content in the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound - preserving these iconic resources for the enjoyment of future generations. All of these projects demonstrate the benefits of deliberately and carefully constructing long-term plans.
The workshop explores how this archetypical metropolitan government operates to achieve smart growth, with the intention of stimulating new ideas of how it can better serve its constituents.

2. Active Transportation: An Essential Ingredient for Smart Growth
Presenters: Ken Livingston, Fitzgerald & Halliday, Jeff Olson, Alta Planning and Kartik Sribarra, Manager of Policy Outreach, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy
Nearly half of all trips in the state are three miles or less, and one quarter are one mile or less, but very few of these are taken on foot or via bicycle. Communities across the country have realized that years of transportation policy focused on the automobile have not curbed ever-increasing congestion and have led to a decline in livability. They are now focusing upon "active transportation", investing in transportation improvements that lead to demonstrable increases in biking and walking AND create more livable communities. This session will provide a tour of what is happening in our state and nationwide to promote active transportation and how these investments work hand in hand with a local commitment to smart growth.

3. The Zoning Tool Box Project
Presenters: Dwight Merriam, Robinson and Cole, Adjunct Faculty at University of Connecticut School of Law
Students at the University of Connecticut School of Law this last Fall developed an annotated zoning ordinance of almost 400 pages as a tool for Connecticut towns to use in bringing their zoning regulations up to contemporary standards. Members of the class will describe their project in a session moderated by their teacher, Dwight Merriam.

4. Through the Lens of Climate Change and Sustainability: Innovative Approaches to Familiar Issues in our Country, State, Regions and Municipalities
Moderator: Representative David McCluskey
Presenters: Lynn Stoddard, Environmental Analyst, Office of Pollution Prevention & Climate Change, CT Department of Environmental Protection, Emily Moos, AICP Senior Community Development Planner, Capitol Region Council of Governments, Lyle Wray, PhD. Executive Director, Capitol Region Council of Governments, and Gary Anderson, AICP Senior Planner, Town of Manchester, CT
What does it take to create a sustainable community and what does that community look like? This session will provide a panel of state, regional and local leaders currently in the process of promoting sustainable communities to talk about their efforts and their visions for the future. Panelists will outline new federal partnerships and opportunities supporting sustainable communities, showcase new efforts at the state level toward reaching climate change goals, highlight the products of regional partnerships toward promoting sustainability and provide a glimpse of what a comprehensive approach to sustainable development could look like on the ground in Connecticut's municipalities.

5. Getting There From Here: The New London Parade Project
Presenters: Bruce Hyde, AICP, Senior Planner, Wilbur Smith Associates, David Stahnke, Division Manager, Wilbur Smith Associates, Sandra Chalk, Executive Director, New London Landmarks, Jim Butler, Executive Director, Southeastern CT Council of Governments, Ned Hammond, Economic Development Coordinator, New London
The City of New London is only 6 square miles and has a population of 26,000 but shares the same kinds of urban issues facing larger cities. An initiative by the city to address downtown traffic concerns led to an additional effort to address a broad range of issues, including those created by Urban Renewal in the 1960' & 70's. The city was able to coordinate traffic improvements with infrastructure improvements that contribute to a more pedestrian friendly, livable downtown environment. These improvements include traffic calming, a total reconstruction of the Parade (plaza) area, re-establishment of pedestrian connections between downtown, the waterfront, parking and the transportation center, improvements to downtown "gateways" and creation of outdoor exhibits celebrating New London's maritime heritage. The workshop will focus on how the effort to calm traffic in downtown New London resulted in major improvements in the urban core of the city. The project is scheduled for completion this spring.

6. From a Culture of Parking to Walking for Culture: Downtown Hartford and the iQuilt Project
Presentation 1: Norman Garrick, Director, UConn Center for Transportation & Urban Planning and Chris McCahill, Doctoral Student, UConn CTUP
Presentation 2: Doug Suisman, Principal, Suisman Urban Design and Tyler Smith, Principal, Smith Edwards Architects
The first presentation will cover the work by Professor Garrick and his graduate students documenting the 200% expansion, between 1960 and 2000, of urban space allocated to parking in downtown Hartford. It will consider the causes and consequences of this growth, and examine the prospects for re-use of this space to improve livability, vitality and sustainability, re-connect downtown to the neighborhoods, increase residential density, and support regional economic strategies. Lessons learned may be widely applicable in other urbanized areas of Connecticut. The second presentation will show the latest version of the iQuilt project for downtown Hartford, which would physically link its wealth of cultural institutions and activities with an enhanced pedestrian network. It envisions significantly improved public spaces, including existing jewels like Bushnell Park and several new public squares and walkways. The plan is intended to increase walking, biking and transit use both by residents and visitors. It is an exercise in re-envisioning the city that may be useful to planners, developers, and strategists in other Connecticut cities.

7. Supporting Smart Growth Projects: The New 1000 Friends Project Scorecard Program
Presenters: Toni Gold, President of Urban Edge Associates and Chair, Project Scorecard Committee and Dara Kovel, Chief Housing Officer, CT Housing Finance Authority
Is smart growth anti-growth? If not, then what projects would smart growth advocates support? A number of real estate project sponsors have asked 1000 Friends of Connecticut to go to bat for their projects in their struggles for permits and approvals. In response, the organization in the last year developed a "smart growth scorecard" to rate projects, and a committee with wide professional expertise to administer the program. Three projects have been scored to date: 360 State Street in New Haven; Storrs Center in Mansfield; and Metro Green in Stamford. The workshop, presented by two of those who developed and now help administer the program, explains the scorecard and the thinking behind it, discusses the specific projects and demonstrates the kind of support that 1000 Friends is able to provide to projects that meet smart growth criteria.

Workshops Session Two: 5:05 to 6:15 p.m.

8. Rethinking Hartford's I-84 Viaduct: Win-Win-Win Solutions for the 21st Century City
Presenters: David Spillane, AICP, RIBA, Principal/Director of Planning and Urban Design, Goody Clancy and David Stahnke, PE, Associate in Charge, Wilbur Smith Associates
Cities across the nation are grappling with aging highway infrastructure that is approaching the end of its life. Hartford's I-84 Viaduct is a nationally prominent example of this phenomenon. As the state's highest volume roadway it provides critical access to Hartford's core and the region's largest employment center . But the deteriorating structure requires almost continuous and expensive repairs that are a drain on state resources. The HUB of Hartford Committee, appointed by the City of Hartford, is working with the Capital Region Council of Governments, the Connecticut Department of Transportation, a consultant team to explore alternatives for replacing the Viaduct. This innovative partnership between city, regional and state partners is seeking creative and cost-effective solutions that integrate community, urban design, economic development and transportation concerns-and maximize public benefits. The session will report on the process that led to the study, the work that is currently underway and emerging directions.

9. Culture & Economy: What Wendell Berry Can Teach us about Smart Growth and Sustainable Communities
Presenters: William Hosley, Principal, Terra Firma Northeast, formerly Executive Director, New Haven Museum & Connecticut Landmarks, Robert Thorson, Professor of Geology, Ecology & Anthropology, University of Connecticut, columnist, The Hartford Courant and Phillip Langdon, Senior Editor of New Urban News, columnist, The Hartford Courant
Wendell Berry is the poet laureate of place whose writings belong at the core of any place-based pedagogy or public policy initiative. Berry observes that "the vitality of a local economy is strikingly related to the vitality of local community. A strong local economy depends on a love of place which depends on the stories we repeat to another." The concept of "Solving for pattern," coined by Berry, is the process of finding solutions that solve multiple problems, while minimizing the creation of new problems. Good solutions often require paradigm shifts. Putting our shared "smart growth" reforms in transportation, housing, education; land use and stewardship of natural and historic resources in the larger context of place-making and community renewal may bring greater unity and coherence to seemingly disparate elements. This presentation and panel discussion will relate smart growth for a healthy economy to Wendell Berry's thoughts and writing about place-making, community and the patterns of behavior that lead to good solutions.

10. Utilizing History and the Arts to Revitalize Downtown Danbury
Presenters: Brad Schide, Circuit Rider Program, Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, Peter G. Bachmann, AIA, Studio Director, JCJ Architecture, Steven A. Wolff, Principal, AMS Planning and Research, Fairfield, CT and Dennis Elpern, Director of Planning, City of Danbury
Every city and town in Connecticut has historic assets in their downtowns, many of them underutilized. Across the nation cities like Danbury are beginning to re-examine their downtown historic cores to see opportunities that produce vibrancy and livable environments. The historic Palace Theater was constructed in 1926, is located in the heart of downtown Danbury and closed in 1995. A grant funded an interdisciplinary team of professionals (the workshop's panelists) to study the restoration and reuse of this once majestic theater. The hands-on study, currently under way, will also look at the arts market to define a specific role/audience in the region and state for the Palace Theater's events. The completed study, expected to take six months, will produce a "roadmap" to bring back the theater to its initial prominence, both from a rehabilitation and building code viewpoint and market analysis viewpoint. Such a study could be a model for other municipalities as they re-examine historic assets in their downtowns.

11. The Sustainable Communities Initiative: How Connecticut can have its cake and eat it, too!
Moderator: David Fink, Policy Director, Partnership for Strong Communities
Presenters: DECD Commissioner Joan McDonald, DOT Dep. Commissioner Jeffrey Parker, DEP Chief of Staff Graham Stevens, and David Kooris, AICP, Vice President, Regional Plan Association
From HOMEConnecticut to brownfields to the state's responsible growth initiative, housing, transit, environment and energy policymakers are coming together to take advantage of the federal government's Sustainable Communities Initiative, a HUD-EPA-DOT collaboration that promises to offer planning and capital funds in coming years to create strategically-located affordable housing near transit in energy-efficient designs so Connecticut can grow, and take care of all its residents, without eating up open space or threatening environmental quality.
This panel will explore the new resources being brought to the table by these agencies and how coordination at the federal level could result in improved regional planning in Connecticut.

12. Using the Plan of Conservation and Development as a Tool to Achieve Smart Growth
Presenters: Robert Orr, FAIA, is an architect and planner from New Haven, CT
Every town in Connecticut is required to create (and update every 10 years) a Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD). The purpose of a POCD is to record the best thinking of the Town as to its future growth and to give direction to both public and private development. The POCD should encompass a long-term vision of the community but also offer guidance for short-term decision- making. In practice, the POCD is an admirable and valuable document, but its legacy is mostly one of collecting dust on a shelf until it's appointed schedule for review and update. It seldom performs as a pro-active shaper of development. One of the major focuses of Smart Growth planning is to change perspective from large-scale auto oriented development to small scale pedestrian oriented development. This workshop will examine the impact of past policies and explore how the POCD might be a more appropriate outlet for such Smart Growth principles, and how the POCD might become a more pro-active player in Smart Growth community development.

13. How Complete Streets Can Transform Our Communities
Presenters: Eric Alexander, Executive Director of Vision Long Island, Nicole Freedman, Boston's Bike Czar and Erin Sturgis-Pascale, Connecticut Livable Streets Campaign
In the late 1800s, Col. Albert Pope of Hartford (and of Columbia Bicycles) and other New England bicyclists formed the League of American Wheelman (now known as the League of American Bicyclists) and rallied around the cry for Better Roads. Today bicyclists are still working for improved conditions on the roads. The Connecticut Complete Streets bill, passed in 2009, requires that all transportation projects address the needs of all road users, including bicyclists and pedestrians. This session will addresses what should expect as our state's streets and roads transition to complete streets.

14. Brownfields Redevlopment: How to Keep the Progress Going, Opportunities for the Future
Moderator: David F. Hurley, PG, LEP - Vice President Fuss & O'Neill, Inc.
Panelists: Mark K. McGovern, Deputy Director, Department of Development Services, City of Hartford; Dale Kroop, Director of Economic and Community Development, Town of Hamden; Mark Pelligrini, Director of Neighborhood Services and Economic Development
The current economic climate poses significant challenges to communities across the country as they try to proactively address brownfield sites. The panel will discuss what strategies and tools they are using to redevelop brownfield sites in today's economy and explore the opportunities they see for the future.

For conference information or questions please call:
Kirsten Griebel
1000 Friends of Connecticut
P.O. Box 1988
Hartford, CT 06144-1988
860 523 0003 office
kgriebel@1000friends-ct.org

Lord Norman Foster Unveils "Svelte" Glass Design for Yale School of Management; Concerns Raised Over Impact on Walkability

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:31:00 +0000

Original Post, 12/11/08: An article in today's Yale Daily News, describing Norman Foster's presentation to Yale this week of plans for the new Yale School of Management campus, contains striking new images from Foster + Partners.

YDN reporter Paul Needham writes that plans for the 246,000 square foot new complex are continuing to move forward at a rapid pace, despite a national economic decline that has caused the delay or cancellation of numerous college and university building projects around the country. The decline in endowment values and projected revenues have reportedly delayed projects even at wealthier institutions, such as Wake Forest, Wesleyan University and Trinity College.

The new Norman Foster design is focused around a central courtyard, making it akin to other buildings on the Yale campus. A rendering of the courtyard area, with its undulating panels of glass, is available in the article. Foster, who is renowned internationally for projects such as the Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong, places an emphasis on transparency and cutting-edge materials:

Speaking to the News, Foster pointed to several aspects of his design that relate singularly to management education. He noted that the building mirrors the school’s emphasis on transparency by making “its internal organization externally explicable,” and he added that he had tried to retain a collegiate feel for the building. “You shouldn’t walk past this building and think it’s a corporate headquarters or an administration building,” Foster said. “It should somehow signal that SOM is an academic institution.”

With its location on Whitney Avenue, a busy arterial leading from Downtown New Haven to points north, and directly across from the Peabody Museum, the new business school will also have important urbanistic relationships to consider. Access to and from the intimate street grids of the Orange/Lincoln neighborhood (on the opposite side from the Whitney elevation) has been a particular concern. Groups of students, faculty and staff met with the architects earlier this year to discuss these issues.

Additional details (including the impressive rendering of the main entrance, at left) are currently available from the Yale SOM website.

Meanwhile, in architecture news from the other side of Downtown New Haven, the Chicago Tribune's architecture blog has named Gwathmey's renovation of the Yale School of Architecture, described as a "Brutalist monster that practically became unlivable after its 1963 opening," as one of the top architectural feats of the year. Blair Kamin writes that the architect has proven that "even the most troubled modern landmarks can be brought back to life." Click here for DNH's previous round-up of reviews of the Rudolph Building.

Update 2/20/09: This project has been put on indefinite hold, due to economic conditions, along with a number of others around the Yale campus.

Update 12/14/09: Apparently, the SOM project is moving forward again. However, recent hearings at the City Plan Commission have spurred a mixed reception. Click here for reporting and more photos of the project, courtesy the New Haven Independent.

Writing in the Hartford Courant this weekend, New Urban News Senior Editor Philip Langdon criticizes the architecture of the new building, particularly its "fishbowl"-like courtyard and its "gargantuan" scale relative to other structures along Whitney Avenue. Here's an excerpt:

For the building's design, the university turned to Norman Foster, a Yale-trained London architect best known for the renovated Reichstag in Berlin and the Swiss Re headquarters in London (nicknamed "the Gherkin" because of its resemblance to a pickle standing upright). Foster's concept for Yale, which was debated in a public hearing in November, would be the latest chapter in the university's gradual remaking of lower Whitney Avenue.

You know something's out of the ordinary when most of a building's classrooms are oval or circular and are referred to as "teaching pods." The proposed SOM contains 16 such pods — double-height rooms with an array of high-tech display panels on their walls (and no windows to the outdoors). It seems the perfect business school for Starfleet cadets.

When students step into the corridors, they would pass by huge walls of wavy glass, which look down onto a central outdoor space containing a lawn, trees and places to sit. Yale describes this as a "courtyard," a descendant of the courtyards for which Yale's colleges and law school are famous. Certainly it is not your grandfather's courtyard. In older Yale buildings, courtyards are enclosed mainly by textured walls of brick and stone. Windows open onto them, but they're detailed discreetly enough that the courtyards offer a sense of repose and semi-seclusion. By contrast, SOM's courtyard would be on view through floor-to-ceiling glass from every direction. It would be a fishbowl....

Norman Foster operates at giant scale, and he dispensed with nearly all of those techniques. SOM's 64-foot-high Whitney Avenue facade stretches on for approximately 360 feet — too long for a pedestrian-scale city. Sixteen super-slim columns support a roof overhang that extends out from the facade for roughly 30 feet. Most of the facade is transparent glass.

Some of the teaching pods protrude from the front wall, their swelling forms covered in cladding in the same blue as a Yale pennant. Two staircases in semicircular walls of glass also project out from the facade, as does a lobby entrance. A glass-walled library is designed to look as if its been hung from the top of the building. Pedestrians are likely to feel puny when passing by this enormous, glassy, seemingly gravity-free interloper.

Concerns have also been raised about the existing, heavily-used pedestrian and bicycle connection between the Lower Orange Street neighborhood (near Pearl Street) and the main campus circulation route along Sachem Street. These types of facilities and shorter-block connections create urban permeability -- one of the most critical measures of a walkable city. According to some sources, the most recent site plans showed a gate along that route, which Yale could close if it deemed the connection unimportant.

Given clearly-articulated demands of neighbors and the fact that Yale SOM students themselves deemed the route a priority, the City should demand the integration of a permanent, 24/7 pedestrian and bicycle route between these two neighborhoods. The route should be designed with the highest standards of traffic safety, including a reconstruction of the intersections at Sachem and Whitney and Orange and Pearl, and a separation of bicycle and pedestrian traffic.

Update 12/17/09: The New Haven Independent provides excellent coverage of last night's City Plan Commission meeting. Commissioners approved the project pending available funding, and a few other restrictions (including an improved pathway). The project now goes to the Board of Aldermen for public hearings.

Update 2/12/10: The Yale Daily News provides excellent reporting on approval of the plan by the New Haven Board of Aldermen's legislative committee -- after four years of negotiations between Yale and neighbors:

"The approval process for the SOM designs has had its share of difficulties. Before the first public hearing, held Jan. 28, Yale asked Foster + Partners, the firm that designed the new campus, to modify the plans for the 230,000-square-foot SOM structure. The new plans included more landscaping and walking space. At Thursday’s meeting, which ran six hours long, aldermen remained attentive to the nearly 20 different testimonies, including one from University Associate Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93 and University Planner Laura Cruickshank. Lemar said Thursday that he is excited to move on with the process. Morand said the approval marks a success after four years of the University cooperating with neighbors and city officials."

Another excellent article on yesterday's hearing appears in the New Haven Independent. Amendments to the plan include a requirement that Yale improve bicycle and pedestrian access around the building, a critical demand of neighbors. Questions about the additional curb cuts the school will create on Whitney Avenue, and reconstruction of the extremely dangerous and inaccessible intersections along it, were not resolved as part of this process.

According to the YDN article, construction on the new campus is expected to begin this summer. Extensive additional coverage of the project, editorials about its design and its approval process can be found within the New Haven Register and New Haven Independent.

January 19: Traffic, Parking and our Green Future

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:31:00 +0000

Please join the Yale Journalism Initiative and Yale Transportation Options for a forum event featuring Tom Vanderbilt, author of the New York Times bestselling book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), and UCLA Professor and Yale Alumnus Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking for a discussion about sustainability through the lens of traffic and parking.

The event will take place from 7:00pm to 8:30pm on Tuesday, January 19th at Sudler Hall—100 Wall Street, New Haven, CT. It is free and open to the public.

The discussion will include such multidisciplinary topics as land use, economics, human behavior, transportation engineering, social change, and the health of the community.

Sculpture, Architecture and Lee Lawrie

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:58:00 +0000

Figurative and ornamental detailing are finding increasing use as a way to relate the scale of new urban buildings to the pedestrian. For example, Kent Bloomer's world-renowned ornamental work will be seen wrapping the $180 million, 31 story 360 State development. Another local example, the Columbus Family Academy (designed by Downtown New Haven architecture firm Svigals + Partners), was recently featured in the New York Times' education section for the way its integrated artwork is used as a teaching tool.

This trend is attracting interest not just from architects, but also from psychologists, scientists who study "mirror neurons" and humanists interested in the human perception of the environment. An excerpt from the New Haven Independent's coverage of a Wine Dine Design event on the topic last year:

Two speakers joined Svigals on the subject — a Svigals mentor from Yale, Kent Bloomer, and local architect and teacher Patrick Pinnell. In returning to representational forms, Pinnell, who has authored a well-respected architectural guide to Yale, said that his friend Svigals’ approach was not retardetaire, but on the cutting edge.

“New neurological research that shows the human brain is hardwired to recognize itself even in forms such as architectural columns. The Doric is Arnold Schwartzenneger, and the narrower composite column is your average teenage ballerina.”

As those familiar with the Yale campus' public art, New York City's Rockefeller Center (shown here) or any number of other American cities will recognize, the integration of sculpture, public art and architecture is a discipline that thrived in American architecture between about 1850 and 1930. One of the foremost architectural sculptors during that time period was Lee Oscar Lawrie. He is probably most recognized for the bronze Atlas sculpture at New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Lawrie, who taught sculpture at Yale from 1908 – 1918, also designed sculptures that grace Yale’s Harkness Tower and other buildings.

Over the past few years, Svigals + Partners and others have been holding a series of local discussions about how figurative art and sculpture are again becoming part of contemporary architecture. While a number of graduate theses and other materials have been written about some of Lawrie's work, the literature is still quite sparse, particularly regarding his projects in New Haven and New York City.

DNH believes that another use of public art and ornamentation may be to differentiate high-quality urban structures from bland, false-fronted, cookie-cutter subdivisions. The former demand far more attention to the pedestrian scale in terms of material, lighting and design quality. If this differentiation helps distinguish historic urban cores from their suburban counterparts, it will be a welcome development in contemporary architecture.

Unfortunately, the exponentially higher cost of creating "urban" buildings -- which, unlike suburban structures, require good design on all four sides, plus site remediation -- may be one of the factors driving development away from our city centers. Improved land use and urban economic policies are needed to address this problem, but well-designed, human-scaled buildings within our cities are also essential.

Local Code: "Distributed Immune Systems" for the 21st Century City

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:58:00 +0000

Coming out of a long tradition of land survey analysis within the field of landscape urbanism, the Local Code project proposes using advances in digital mapping and open data to heal neglected urban parcels within contemporary cities. Although individual "urban scars" can be very small, collectively, they often add up to a space greater than all the parkland in the city combined. What is the potential of all that land?

Local Code, which recently was honored by the prestigious Working Public Architecture 2.0 design competition organized by UCLA's cityLAB, argues that the re-use of these spaces, often located next to poorly-planned interstate highways and in neighborhoods chock-full of health inequities, has broad implications for economic development and public health. This type of planning project seems as relevant to New Haven as to any of the places studied by the project team -- San Francisco being one example:

Tapping into the Department of Public Works catalogue of San Francisco's "unaccepted streets" (those no longer maintained by the city and hence neglected and often impassable), this proposal utilizes various computer models and statistical data to determine and propose new public, park-based uses for these interstitial spaces. Over 1600 of these sites are available, a selection of which are analyzed for the proposal in terms of elevation and topography, microclimate, soil type, hydrology, population density and demographics, economics, crime, and existing networks to determine the most parametrically appropriate transformation of use.

Check out Local Code's excellent animated video -- hosted on the Landscape and Urbanism blog -- for a bit of inspiration. The project is clearly framed and defined, but putting it into place on a citywide scale would most likely require the continued development of electronic community governance tools to allow citizen participation around public space issues -- one of the key recommendations of the Knight Commission -- as well as greater access to such tools. The video hints at this, with its depictions of iPhone displays that could be used to turn brutal industrial backstreets into beautiful, tree-lined chicanes and swales. For another demonstration of this potential, check out the new City-Go-Round site, which shows how open data is improving transportation information.

Given declining city resources for planning and zoning, which entities might be able to bring this type of analysis to smaller cities like New Haven? Could a place-based participation tool like SeeClickFix be improved as a tool for documenting urban issues across a city, and for subsequent public space planning? A number of proposals or "informal design competitions" have popped up on that website -- e.g., a new street between Chapel and George to promote walkability, the redesign of an I-91 underpass, and calls for low-level pedestrian street lighting on State Street -- and may offer a window into future progress.

Update on $300M Downtown New Haven Redevelopment; Long Wharf Theatre Issues RFQ; Project Now On Hold

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:13:00 +0000

Original post, 1/8/09: The New Haven Development Commission will hold a public hearing on the $300 million Gateway Downtown Development Project this Tuesday, January 13, 2009, at 6:00 p.m. on the 2nd Floor of City Hall. City development staff will give an update on the status of the project, which includes the new Gateway Community College and the Coliseum Site areas adjacent to Route 34. According to the City's announcement, posted today, "any persons or organizations who would like to provide input on the project will be given an opportunity to be heard at this meeting."

DNH recalls that the six world-class developers who submitted qualifications to develop the Coliseum Site last year presented excellent ideas on how to develop the Downtown project area, specifically on the need to make it more walkable and bikeable. Similar concerns were voiced by area residents attending an update on the 360 State development this past fall. That project, located two blocks north of the Coliseum Site, is currently in construction.

On a related note, the world-renowned Long Wharf Theatre (which was recently highlighted in the New York Times Travel section, photo above courtesy of the Theatre) recently issued a Request for Qualifications for architectural services for its new theater complex. The new theater, which is active from 8am to midnight nearly every day of the year -- hosting an average of 400 events per year times 230 average attendees per performance -- will add significant pedestrian vitality to the district. In addition to its 70 full-time staff members, Long Wharf Theatre's surveys indicate that 79% of its audience dines out in New Haven at least once per year, an impressive figure considering that a large proportion originates from outside of New Haven County.

The new building will most likely be located on the northwest corner of the Coliseum Site, at the intersection of Orange and George Street. The $40 million complex, funded mostly through state bonds, will consist of 68,500 gross square feet. Long Wharf has already commissioned a number of in-depth studies examining building massing, acoustical characteristics and program, which were included in the RFQ documentation and will help guide architects during the application process.

Architects need to submit qualifications for the project by January 23rd. Downtown New Haven-based firm Pelli Clarke Pelli, designer of several internationally-regarded theater complexes such as the South Coast Repertory Theater, is considered a potential front-runner, but a number of other well-known firms specializing in the performing arts are also likely to apply. Northland Investment Corporation, which has been chosen to develop the Coliseum Site as a whole along with design partner Robert A.M. Stern, submitted a preliminary rendering and site plan of the theater, shown here (scroll down to Team 4). However, choosing the same architect for the theater building as for the site development as a whole, even though the two projects are geared to run simultaneously and open by 2012, is most likely not an option.

Update 1/14/09: Coverage of the public hearing appears in today's New Haven Independent and New Haven Register. The two dozen attendees raised many questions about the project's impact on walkability, transportation access, streetscape design and relationships with surrounding buildings. At the meeting, the City reported that a traffic study for the conversion of Church Street, currently a very wide one-way boulevard with excessive traffic speeds, into a two-way street is mostly complete. This conversion and traffic safety project, which for a very long time has been a key concern of the college, as well as Downtown stakeholders, would most likely happen by the time the new college opens its doors in 2012.

Update 1/20/09: According to anonymous sources, a prestigious group of firms, including many based in or with connections to Downtown New Haven's institutional base, may be likely to apply for design of the new Long Wharf complex, though the final list won't be known until firms actually submit. The list of possible applicants includes "household names" such as Beyer Blinder Belle, Centerbrook, Tom Beeby, Deborah Berke, FXFowle, Gund, H3HC, Holzman Moss, JCJ, KPMB Architects, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Polshek, Pickard Chilton, RAMSA, David Schwarz, SOM, Steven Holl, Studio ABK, VSBA, and many others.

Update 3/18/09: Despite the City of New Haven's intensive commitment to the project and the roster of global architecture firms that ended up applying for the Long Wharf project in January, word came this week that the project has been indefinitely put on hold due to financing issues at the State level. DNH's sources reported that the Theatre met with delegates from the State of Connecticut to discuss the State's ability to fund its portion of the theater project. Although the State delegation assured the Theatre that they remain dedicated to the project, Governor Rell has restricted development funding at this time. The news will no doubt be a disappointment to city development officials, who had been promised state bond funding for the theater relocation for many years, not to mention to the architects who had hoped to compete for the major project. Gateway Community College is not considered a development project, and as of last report, was still moving ahead with full financing (that project is now 100% designed and scheduled to break ground this fall).

On a more positive note, Mary O'Leary of the New Haven Register reports that the 2.7 acre site on Route 34, just east of the Air Rights Garage, has finally been put up for sale by the State of Connecticut. The land had been held by the State "in order to give it leverage in its negotiations with New Haven as it looked for affordable [i.e., subsidized] parking for the Connecticut Mental Health Center." For several years, Winstanley has been seriously looking into plans to expand 300 George Street, one of the region's largest office buildings (and currently completely full with biotech sector clients) over the connector and onto that site. This news will allow them to continue with their plans.

Update 4/2/09: Frank Rizzo of the Hartford Courant reports that the Long Wharf Theater is not that worried about the lack of state bond funding, for now:

Mary L. Pepe, chairwoman of the board of trustees of Long Wharf Theatre, is keeping her cool. She says that recent comments from the governor's budget office regarding the status of the state's $30 million bonding pledge for a new Long Wharf Theatre in downtown New Haven is understandable, given the state of the economy -- and vice versa. One breather: The tick-tock of the clock for the theater to move out of its present loading dock location off I-95 at the New Haven Food Terminal isn't quite so ominous. The Food Terminal, which was up for sale, is now off the market, says Pepe, so it looks like it can stay there beyond its current end of its lease in 2012.

Update 8/25/09: Mary O'Leary of the New Haven Register has an update on the $198 million Gateway Community College project, scheduled to begin construction in October, and 360 State Street, which is adding a second shift.

Update 12/11/09: O'Leary reports that Northland's preferred developer status may expire, as the firm has showed little progress in moving forward on its development plans.

Update 3/9/11: An article in the New Haven Register by Mary O'Leary gives an update on the development project. Long Wharf has, for the foreseeable future, suspended its goal of moving to Downtown New Haven. And the Coliseum Site is no longer under Northland's control, but the city hopes to transfer it to a new developer:

NEW HAVEN — Long Wharf Theatre has renewed its lease with the New Haven Food Terminal Inc. until 2022, dropping its plans — at least for the foreseeable future — to become a hot spot in a new-look downtown. A sour economy and the state’s budget crisis helped scuttle Long Wharf Theatre’s $65 million plan.

Meanwhile, the Economic Development Commission this week is reviewing proposals by two development teams, one of which will be chosen to take Northland’s place as the exclusive developer of the prime development site in the Ninth Square for the next year. In the running are: Live Learn Work Play, a Canadian company that specializes in large-scale urban development, which will work with New Haven’s Herbert S. Newman and Partners and Sora, a real estate team from New Jersey. The second team consists of the New Haven architectural firm of Robert Orr and Associates, who is partnering with Spinnaker Real Estate Partners of Norwalk.

Murphy said whomever is chosen will spend 2011 planning site development, with the city generally requesting a mixture of residential, retail and office space. After that, it would still be some time before commitments are in place, depending on when the market rebounds.

New Urban News: New Research and Resource for Walkable Urbanism

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 02:58:00 +0000

From New Urban News, a publication that provides concise information and research on smart growth, walkable streets and New Urbanism, comes an excellent aggregation of articles on walkability. The editors summarize why walkable urbanism is such an important topic:

Conventional street design focuses primarily on the expeditious and safe movement of automobiles. That single-minded focus is fading. Many transportation planners and engineers recognize the following:
• Mobility is not measured primarily by automobile movement.
• Streets must have character as well as capacity.
• Streets serve a vital social function.
• Streets should be highly interconnected.

If you haven't kept up with New Urban News's recent work -- such as the study we profiled in our "Mind the Gap" post on the need for permeable street networks -- it is definitely worth a look. The publication's senior editor, Philip Langdon, is based in New Haven, Connecticut and actively involved in Downtown New Haven issues.

Second High-End Boutique Hotel in New Haven?

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Original Post, 5/4/09: The New Haven Register confirms today that Hampshire Hotels & Resorts, owner of 205 Church Street, is funding that building's $3 million makeover. With the exception of Wachovia Bank, which occupies the building's stunning 1920s-era lobby, all remaining office tenants have been asked to move. The building's facade, which had deteriorated somewhat, is currently wrapped in an impressive shroud of blue construction mesh, including its faded gold cupola (which is receiving a new coat of gold).

The project was initially reported last month in Business New Haven. Hampshire, owner of high-end properties in New York City, London, South Beach and Hyderabad, India, is also apparently looking at a residential use for the building. A residential use would make sense for the developer, given the very high rents currently found at The Eli, a luxury office conversion just a block down the street.

A new hotel would follow on the footsteps of the highly-acclaimed Study at Yale boutique hotel, completed last year by an offshoot of the Starwood / W Hotels group led by Paul McGowan. At the time, the project was among a flurry of several other proposed hotel expansions in New Haven, several of which have now been completed. The market analysis for the Study at Yale in particular, which may be the best hotel in Connecticut, was largely driven by burgeoning activities at the city's medical campus as well as an increase in academic conferences hosted by Yale University. City tourism and development officials believe that the medical center is expanding rapidly enough to warrant additional top-end hotels.

Update, 5/6/09: The New Haven Independent covers the story, with an interview with Kevin Lillis, Hampshire's VP for real estate development. Lillis discusses some of the architectural problems inherent in a hotel conversion, but indicates that a hotel use is a likely possibility for the structure. Lillis also points out the need for an attached hotel parking garage, which he indicates is in preliminary review. A city-owned "mid block" garage that had initially been planned for the parking lot adjacent to 205 Church was never built due to the high cost of acquiring land, although the city is still planning to construct the garage on a site that the city later purchased just one block down Wall Street. Initally planned for a 2008 completion, the State/Wall garage is now on hold pending market demand.

Update 7/14/09: Eric Gershon of the Hartford Courant discusses New Haven's hotel boom:

Hotel occupancy in New Haven rose 2 percent in 2008, to 62.8 percent, even as local supply grew and occupancy nationwide fell more than 4 percent, to 60.4 percent, according to SmithTravelResearch. In Connecticut, occupancy fell nearly 5 percent last year.

Hampshire thinks there still is unmet demand for upscale lodgings and for meeting space, said Brendan McNamara, a company vice president, but is still researching how best to meet it.

Update 12/11/09: According to reporting in the New Haven Register and New Haven Independent, planning for the 180-room hotel is underway and expected to be presented to the City of New Haven in the near future. According to the Independent's reporting, the city notes that plans contain four restaurants and 20,000 square feet of meeting space, which would complement the 25,000 at the Omni Hotel just across the Green and possibly enable New Haven to host larger conventions.

Millions have been spent on the building renovation so far, with a final pricetag upwards of $50 million, according to Mary O'Leary's Register reporting. O'Leary also covers the historic preservation of the building, which is one of New Haven's early 20th-century glories.

Though $25 million has been spent so far, the financing arrangement going forward apparently continues to be an unanswered question:

Lillis said the $7 million spruce-up, which included repointing the facade, a restored cupola, as well as the marble railing around the decking on the 11th floor, is completed. Inside, all the upper floor tenants are gone, but historic elements, such as the original elevator cabs with classic dials indicating each floor and brass mail chutes, among other items, have been restored. Wachovia Bank has a long-term lease for the ground floor.

“We wanted to bring it back to its 1927 glory,” Lillis said. The renovation has left the 11-story building with “no environmental issues. It’s clean and ready to go.”

Purchase of the Cross & Cross brick building, whose cupola was designed to mimic the churches on the other side of the Green, plus the renovation, has cost Hampshire $25 million so far. Lillis said they are debt-free on the building, but are looking for a partner on the $50 million conversion cost to a hotel.

Science and Potatoes: PepsiCo Opens Ninth Global Research Center in Science Park

noreply@blogger.com (Moderator) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Competition for Rudy's? According to PepsiCo's news release, a new research laboratory in New Haven, focusing on developing healthier food products, will be PepsiCo's ninth global research center. Four centers are located in the United States with others in the United Kingdom, Mexico, China and India along with satellite centers in Thailand, Brazil and Australia.

From Brandweek's coverage:

What will the potato chip of the future look and taste like? PepsiCo aims to find out. The food and beverage giant announced this week that it is opening a new long-term research laboratory next to the Yale campus in New Haven, Conn.

“We felt we needed to expand,” said Gregory Yep, global vice president of research and development, long-term research. “We’ve built this long-term research lab to understand the diet and nutritional needs of consumers around the world.” The lab is PepsiCo’s ninth such global facility.

Pepsi has boosted its outlay for research and development by 40 percent in the past three years. “We’re investing in natural products research . . . different fruits, vegetables and botanicals around the world,” said Yep. “We’re looking at what nature has to give us and improving product lines.”

Using different ingredients and technologies, the plan is to create a pipeline of new healthier products as well as to re-imagine some old ones. “What will products look like in five years? Beverages could look, feel and taste differently. What will the potato chip of the future look like? It’s definitely not fried," Yep said. "Utilizing baking technology, you want it to have the right texture and flavor. How do you do that with [healthier] oils, no sodium or low sodium and low fat? We’re definitely getting there. I’ve tasted prototypes.”

Yep noted that the lab is also looking at different formats in cereal bars, ways for the Quaker line to really take advantage of oats, as well as the areas of protein and fiber. The new lab is also partnering with Yale to fund a graduate fellowship at its School of Medicine that will support nutritional science research.

The laboratory will be located in Science Park, a rapidly expanding complex of former Winchester Arms factories just north of the Yale Campus and its School of Forestry and Environment. In the past year, Yale University has moved hundreds of administrative employees to the facility and several new buildings have been developed. According to a recent article in the Yale Daily News, the renovation of the complex's largest building is set to begin next year.

Update 10/24/10: The renovation of a large tract of Science Park was approved by the City Plan Commission:

The project’s civil engineer Ted DeSantos said the proposed buildings would have a large bike room, showers, and surrounding streets bike-laned where possible, and where not provided with “sharrow” signs.

Higher One’s part of the first phase consists of a $40 million build-out comprising 150,000 square feet. The total square footage to be renovated is 700,000, which includes 200 to 225 apartments, mostly at market rate but with 20 percent affordable; that would happen in a later phase. If plans keep on schedule, the considerable environmental remediation of the old gun production site will commence in November or December, with Higher One hopes to cut the ribbon in 2012.