Blighted properties in New Haven will soon be acquired by the city’s newly formed land bank, with the goal of redeveloping these properties to make room for more affordable housing.
It will operate as a nonprofit. Its first task is to acquire several blighted properties from the city.
New Haven is in need of about 30,000 more housing units, land bank executive director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo said. The state needs about 100,000 more affordable housing units, according to the state’s Department of Housing.
“We have a lot of need here,” Neal-Sanjurjo said. “We need to fill them, and we need to get people in homes, so I'm going to do what I can.”
While there may be mixed income developments, the land bank’s primary focus is creating affordable housing.
“We're not going to focus on one neighborhood over the other, but where the product is, the product being un-blighting abandoned units. We're going to bring them back online,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.
Once properties are acquired, the land bank will partner with New Haven’s housing authority, other nonprofits and developers to establish and manage the homes.
The land bank will enable the city to speed up the housing development process, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said.
“Real estate can be a fast paced industry dynamic, and you've got to move quickly in order to acquire properties and government acquisitions sometimes move slower than we like,” Elicker said. “The land bank is a tool that we can use to allow us to facilitate negotiations between landlords and act quickly to acquire strategic properties.”
New Haven joined the ranks of several other large Connecticut cities in employing a land bank to help revitalize underutilized properties, including Hartford and Waterbury.
The idea for a city land bank was first proposed in 2021, following the receipt of American Rescue Plan Act funding, Elicker said. In September, it was approved by the city’s Board of Alders.
The bank received a startup of $5 million in state funding.
“That is a crucial part of the work here, because with that $5 million it allows us to start to acquire strategic properties,” Elicker said.
In recent years, the state’s taken several steps to increase affordable housing options.
About 2,000 housing units have been built in or preserved in New Haven in roughly the last four years. About 1,000 of those units are affordable. An additional 3,500 units are in the works, 40% of which will be affordable and deeply affordable, or for residents making below 30% of the area’s median income (AMI).
Since 2019, more than 12,600 affordable units have been completed across the state, according to the Department of Housing’s Maribel La Luza.
“We are here to accelerate the access to affordable housing, to increase the development of affordable housing, to build more homes that people, Connecticut residents, can afford,” La Luza said. “It's not easy. It's hard. It's expensive. It takes time, but we're here for it.”
