Long Road for Newhall Project Coming to End

The Newhall Community Development Program will end in the coming months.

The program began in 2010 to make structurally related repairs to homes for owners who participated in the Newhall remediation program, which was completed in the fall of 2012.

But the project dates back more than a decade, when the town had planned to renovate and expand the former Hamden Middle School. The discovery of contamination in the soil put the brakes on those plans and began the remediation of not only that property but of the entire neighborhood.

Click here for a timeline of the complete Newhall Remediation Project.

The goal of the program was to make houses safer throughout the neighborhood and houses impacted by being located on unstable fill material. 

“We are very pleased that we are able to help over 80 home owners to date with repairs that will help maintain  housing values and  improve the quality of life of residents”, said Dale Kroop Executive Director of the Hamden Economic Development Corporation (HEDC), who sponsored the program.  HEDC hired TriCon Construction Services in the Heller and Johnson engineering company as professionals to provide structural engineering and construction management expertise.

To date there has been improvements to more than 80 homes, including installation of more than 500 window replacements and 30 new roofs. The project also included improvements to basement foundations and floors, repairs to cracks in walls and ceilings and other related structural problems.

HEDC was able to acquire 13 houses, many of which were demolished. Previous owners were also relocated with project funds. From now on any new applications not in the pipeline will be placed on a wait list until funds run out. 

Finally, nearly $2 million in contracts were awarded to small local and mostly minority owned businesses and a job training program was developed to train unemployed residents in the field of Deconstruction. This training resulted in the eventual employment of several people.

In January, state and local officials hailed the coming end of the project.

For more information about the Hamden Economic Development Corporation, please contact Dale Kroop at dkroop@hamden.com