The New Haven coliseum stood downtown for 35 years - a center of events and historic moments in the Elm city.
“Many nighthawks hockey games, a fight card headed by Sugar Ray Leonard, all things of that kind, but unfortunately the coliseum struggled from the very beginning,” State Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney said.
The New Haven Coliseum was demolished in 2007 and it took more than a decade for the area to be redeveloped. An apartment building is under construction on part of the former coliseum site, and city and state leaders announced Wednesday a plan for the last corner of the property: a $200 million bioscience building.
“The companies that are growing here have people that want to live here and want to work here. They don’t necessarily want to go to New York or Cambridge or Boston. They’re New Haven based organizations and they want to stay New Haven based organizations,” said Peter Calkins, vice president of development for Ancora L&G. The company is the developer for the new building.
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Before Ancora can begin construction, the company needs to dig up the coliseum’s 2007 burial site below the paved parking lot.
“The first 12 feet or so are basically coliseum debris that has been mixed with urban fill when the coliseum was demolished,” Calkins said.
The state awarded New Haven nearly a million dollars from the latest round of Brownfield Remediation money: $7 million for 11 projects across the sate on 700 acres of land.
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“For us to be able to clean up vacant, underused properties and turn them into transformational developments for the residents that live here,” Matthew Pugliese, deputy commissioner of CT Department of Economic Community Development, said.
New Haven has become a growing hub for bioscience companies, some born from research at Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale University. Others are relocating to the city to be part of a developing scientific network.
“They have a choice to take that company outside of our city and in some cases that has happened, but more and more we’re seeing more people decide to locate businesses that are spinning out of Yale, that are viable, self-sustaining businesses, to stay in our community,” Mayor Justin Elicker said.
In addition to the 1.5 million-square feet of bioscience space going up around the city, there’s 2,000 housing units in the pipeline and 900 are slated for affordable housing. That growth plan is part of the reason why Elicker believes New Haven has become such a draw.
“I think one thing is the low vacancy rate in Connecticut, and a lot of the suburban communities are not willing to grow and we’re saying ‘let’s bring it on, let’s grow as fast as we can,’” Elicker said.
The city is working on ways to make sure the development can benefit residents. Inside one of the bioscience buildings is a center for local students.
“Inside of that building will be a classroom for New Haven Public Schools. It'll be the state-of-the-art technology labs so that our students in high school programs will have access to the same cutting edge technologies, the same equipment, that's used in some of the very best companies,” Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli said.
There are also plans for a career pathways school so that students can have better access to bioscience and life science industry jobs.
The building permits for the development projects across the city are generating a $14 million revenue stream.
“That's $14 million which we generate from building permits, which we don't necessarily need to, you know, add to the tax burden to homeowners, because we're generating it through other sources,” Piscitelli said.
The eventual real estate tax dollars on the residential and commercial properties will also be a big economic boost to the city.
“Cities around Connecticut are heavily reliant on real estate taxes, and so having these new buildings come online allows a lot more revenue to come into the city to pay for a lot of things that people really care about,” Elicker said. “That’s everything from services for homelessness to fixing our roads and streets and making sure that we have more resources for our kids.”
