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“We want to see communities like this rebuilt all around the country to bring together all the pieces that make up great neighborhoods,” U.S Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said.
Donovan visited Washington Village along with Gov. Dannel Malloy, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia, members of Norwalk’s state delegation and representatives from the Norwalk Housing Authority.
The Washington Village redevelopment project is being considered for the federal “Choice Neighborhoods Initiative,” which is designed to create affordable and public housing areas “families choose to live in,” Donovan said. Norwalk hopes to get $30 million in federal funding for Washington Village through the program.
Washington Village was built in 1941, and it is one of the oldest continuously-open housing project in Connecticut. It currently has 136 public housing units. The city’s plan is to tear down the existing buildings and replace them with a larger, mixed-income housing center.
The plans still call for 136 public housing units, plus 67 discounted “workforce housing units” and 70 apartments that will be leased at normal market rates. Local officials hope the new complex will also inspire more commercial development in the immediate area.
“It’s not just housing, it’s a total re-invigoration,” Moccia told Malloy and Donovan.
The new complex will cover not only the space of the current Washington Village, but also city-owned land to the east on Day Street and Hanford Place. Those two buildings, with a total of 81 apartments, are scheduled to be the first of three phases of construction.
The new complex will also be designed to better withstand heavy flooding during major storms, officials say. The living spaces of each building will be about six and a half feet above the line for a “100-year-flood,” or about 18.5 feet total above sea level.
On his tour Donovan planned to visit areas of Connecticut still recovering from Hurricane Sandy. He and Malloy stressed that although the new project would still be in the flood plain, officials think that “building smarter” will help prevent the level of damage seen during the hurricane.
“You’d have to evacuate whole swaths of communities, and quite frankly we don’t have the land to do that,” Malloy said of the possibility of moving developments out of the flood plain. “So you’d either have to empty out a neighborhood, and not build replacement housing, or you have to build smarter replacement housing.”
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