At 2 p.m. on Mon., May 27, 2013, the Au Bon Pain located at 1 Broadway shut its doors. The closing was sudden. The cafe’s workers were given only four days notice. And less dramatically, the unexpecting student body that had been happily patronizing ABP since it opened in 1994 was blindsided. The popular cafe did not close because it was having financial trouble. Rather, Yale University Properties simply decided that it wanted a different retailer in that property and chose not to renew the lease.
For the next year and a half, that prime retail property remained boarded up, its windows shielded by advertisements for the previously unheard of but now ever-present “Shops at Yale.” Rumors abounded around campus about what would be filling the vacant spot, the most persistent of which said that the incoming store would be a Brooks Brothers.
On Jul. 31, 2014, Yale announced that a luxury department store called Emporium DNA 2050 would be opening in the coveted spot at the tip of the Broadway Triangle. The store opened for business mid fall. Emporium DNA is a chain owned by IK Retail Group, an American retail management and development corporation, but the store itself offers mainly European designer brands. The store’s high-end merchandise is openly advertised through Emporium’s glass façade—designer purses draped across mannequins clad in dresses that cling to the hard, faceless figures like Saran wrap. At roughly the same time, right next door, Italian cosmetics store Kiko Milano appeared. Its window reveals tables of colorful lipsticks and blushes that, too, look better fitted for European nightclubs than New Haven street corners—or even Toads.
The student body’s reception of the stores has been lukewarm at best and vitriolic at worst. The arrival of these stores represents a larger trend in upscale, chain-oriented development of commercial properties owned by Yale, and recent changes have highlighted that the University’s downtown development interests might not align with needs of the student body or the city at large.
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Today, Yale University Properties—the real estate arm of Yale Corporation—manages a commercial real estate portfolio that includes over 85 retail tenants and 500 residential properties, ranging from American Apparel to the Harrison Court apartment complex. But if you looked at a map of the city dating before 1996, Yale’s reach would have been limited to academic property.
The University acquired most of the downtown property it now owns in what New Haven City Planner Karyn Gilvarg called an “accident of the economy” in 1996. Following the collapse of the housing market, local property manager Joel Schiavone saw most of his holdings foreclose. The city wanted the real estate portfolio to remain as a single package with a single owner to maintain a certain degree of regulation over which retailers were filling the storefronts, and Yale stepped forward as one of the only entities capable of keeping the set of properties intact. Yale created University Properties to manage its newfound commercial real estate portfolio.
This series of unforeseen events presented the University with the opportunity to branch out in an entirely new direction—urban retail development and commercial property management. But the institution saw the possibility of gaining more than simply financial returns on a good investment. The urban crime waves of the eighties and nineties in New Haven were affecting the University’s ability to attract both students and faculty, who were increasingly drawn to safer and generally wealthier cities such as Cambridge and Princeton.
“In the mid 1990s when people felt uncomfortable south of Chapel Street and north of York Street, it created a very bad environment for marketing Yale,” said Matthew Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development director. “The word was, ‘Yale is a great school; New Haven’s not a great town.’ Yale realized that in the internet and post-baby boomer age, it was in their interest to have a wonderful New Haven beyond and all around the campus, and a healthy New Haven everywhere throughout the town, too. The idea of spending millions of dollars to buy non-academic buildings had really never been something that legally or operationally Yale had thought about doing before, and then they took the plunge and that changed everything about downtown.”
UP aggressively retails its downtown properties. Highly regimented and regulated, Yale’s formula for creating a cohesive shopping district is strict, and its near-absolute control over the area gives it the freedom to mold it as they see fit. As with ABP, if the University no longer wants a particular retailer, they can simply choose not to renew the lease.
Bruce Alexander, vice president and director of New Haven and state affairs and campus development, came to Yale in 1996 from the Rouse Company, a national shopping mall developer. His formula for developing Yale’s commercial holdings as a single entity mirrors the strict regulation of mall retailing.
Alexander declined to comment for this article.
“What you see is uniformed hours of operation, shared promotion, shared street furniture and decorations,” former Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano said of UP’s retail development strategy. “You clearly get the sense of a mall. Yale has strict formulas of what kinds of stores are there.”
In other words, UP holds a tight grip on which stores are coming in and how they create a broader economic market—or, rather, a large shopping center. With too many restaurants, the shopping traffic would be concentrated only at night when diners would frequent restaurants for dinner. Yale’s self-contained microeconomy does not thrive on competition, eliminating the need for duplicate stores. (Some observers might argue that J. Crew and Gant don’t serve entirely disparate demographics.) Rather, UP places a clothing store next to a cosmetic store because, like at a mall, a single shopper might be inclined to go first to one and then to the other, maximizing the shopping experience—and also profits.
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It is important to distinguish between Yale University Properties and Yale’s academic holdings. The two are independently managed, and serve their own purposes. The academic portfolio, obviously, houses the educational and research goals of the University. The commercial holdings, meanwhile, grapple with less refined issues—namely what public do these shops cater to, and what is that public looking for.
Yale views its property management project as a benevolent force in the New Haven community; UP is a part of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, whose establishment, according to its website, “institutionalized the University’s commitment to the city of New Haven. We are committed to enhancing the quality of life in New Haven through the development of high quality retail and office environments and the revitalization of surrounding neighborhoods.” New Haven Deputy Economic Development Director Steven Fontana agreed that the University and the city have a “symbiotic relationship” when it comes to downtown development. Yale does the legwork creating this kind of cohesive shopping center, bringing revenue into New Haven and attracting people from outside the city to spend money.
But despite its inclusion in what sounds like a city-oriented project, UP is nonetheless a corporate entity, entirely independent from Yale’s academic holdings. The properties included in Yale’s campus proper would probably amount to a multi-billion dollar portfolio, but it is a somewhat futile exercise to attempt to put a price tag on Harkness Tower; moreover, it’s not as if Yale has plans to ever sell Sterling Memorial Library or Pierson College.
On the other hand, Yale’s interest in commercial properties, as with all corporate entities, stems from the University’s desire to remodel the area around campus to better suit its own needs—to attract prospective applicants and to build profits. And while the University maintains that the revitalization is a force for good, it is clear that these commercial moves have also exacerbated community divides.
Michael Schaffer, a commercial property manager for the local real estate company C.A. White, sees Yale’s retail development as beneficial to his business. “Honestly they’ve been helpful; they’ve stabilized the retail in this community. Obviously, everyone has a different perspective. My perspective is that the stronger, the better the quality of retailers there, whether it’s serving the undergraduate community or not, they’re providing a good base that attracts more people in from the suburbs to shop in the city—people that have money that are willing to spend money here.”
The example most often cited as a success story about Yale’s retail development is the Apple Store on Broadway, which has broad appeal, ranging from the Yale student to the New Haven resident to the Connecticut suburban family. City Planner Gilvarg acknowledged UP’s role in bringing business to New Haven but questioned whether it helped New Haven more broadly. “The Apple Store might not have come to New Haven without the pushing and prodding of Yale,” she said. “That’s an anchor for New Haven; it brings people here, but then the question is how to get them off Broadway to the rest of the city.” That is, Yale-owned properties are drawing customers, but are they shopping outside UP’s reaches and benefiting the broader New Haven economy?
Another problem is that the Apple Store’s broad appeal is not mirrored in much of the rest of Yale’s retail district. “In general it’s attractively imaged—it gives an inviting, appealing look to people who might not know New Haven very well,” Gilvarg said. “But on the other hand it doesn’t provide a lot of the basic essentials for the people living here. A lot of women like to say that there is nowhere to buy underwear in downtown New Haven.” The concern beyond the inaccessibility of certain necessary products is that the creation of discrete shopping districts is emphasizing the distinction between Yale’s sectors of the city and the rest of New Haven.
James Doss-Gollin, SM ’15, grew up in East Rock. He noted that these distinctions do not present a novel issue for the city, but expressed regret that Yale is not doing more to overturn 300 years of class divisions in New Haven. “They’re not creating separation, but they’re missing an opportunity to integrate the city,” he said. “The city’s been divided for a long time. It’s been town and gown, that’s not new. But they have a really special opportunity now because the University is investing so much money in developing the retail sector. They have an opportunity to make things that both students and the community at large could share.”
DeStefano, on the other hand, maintained that the development of specific retail appeal in specific areas can be healthy for urban growth. “There are distinctions that appear class-based, but I remember how many empty storefronts there were 20 years ago—there were a lot. Now, storefronts are filled, which is a good thing. Do I think there are shopping districts that appeal to different people? Yeah, but when haven’t there been?” He added that the development of distinct retail pockets is a natural occurrence in any city. “To me, it’s no more different than going to lower Manhattan where there are certain neighborhoods that have certain characteristics in the retail. You could say that we have class-based segregation of retail, but really retail serves different markets. Clearly, Upper Chapel and Broadway serve one market, but you don’t have to go far to find something completely different—it’s all pretty close to each other.”
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From March through October of 2014, the landscape of Upper Chapel was disconcerting. Starbucks sat just footsteps away from a squeaky clean Pinkberry. And next door, Panera’s wax-cushioned booths were packed with undergrads filling up on clam chowder bread bowls. A corporate triumvirate had commanded the northern half of the block. Meanwhile, Claire’s—a vegetarian, neighborhood spot—stood its ground just down the block, although ideologically, it was miles away.
Ann Diamond, a community activist and former employee of Yale, said that the changes over the years have made it too difficult for New Haven’s small businesses to thrive in the areas surrounding campus. “I used to go downtown nearly every day and either shop or have lunch or walk around,” she told me. “I never go downtown anymore. There’s nothing for me there. All the small restaurants we used to go to have been pushed out by Yale. There were lots of little shops. Now there’s no reason to go there—you can get the same experience shopping online.”
In addition to potentially hindering the success of local business owners, the absence of affordable local stores is pushing New Haven residents’ consumption out of the city, to big box chains in the suburbs. “Some of my friends have cars, so now we can compete in a way we couldn’t before, it’s not just what we could get to by bus,” Doss-Gollin said. “We like to be downtown, we like New Haven, we all grew up here, but do you want to spend an extra 70 percent to have the same food in New Haven that you could have somewhere else? There’s still stuff here, but mostly it’s pushed us to cheaper chains in East Haven or West Haven.”
The buzzword here is, obviously, gentrification. Beginning as early as the sixties, middle and uppermiddle class families started moving out of the city into the surrounding suburbs, where there was less crime and better public schools. Development of the city over the last couple of decades or so is now causing an inversion of that process—middle and upper-middle class suburban families are moving back to the city, where housing stock has soared, crime has decreased, and schools have improved, causing prices to skyrocket and consequently pushing lower class families out to the suburbs.
“In our business, the role and impact of what is called gentrification is a huge, huge issue,” Nemerson said. “I think that one of the things that people often are really responding to is, when you have a neighborhood that actually works well but suddenly goes to a different price point and loses its ethnic character, that’s a real problem.”
This rising price point is certainly evident in downtown New Haven today. More than pulling people in for a weekend shopping spree, the upscale, luxury chains are now pulling these families to New Haven permanently. This is exactly what Yale is looking for—the comfortable middle class appeal of Princeton and Cambridge. Or, in other words, Yale begins to shed a storied stereotype—all Yalies are forced to endure living in New Haven for four years in exchange for a Yale education. Free of that assumption, the University would expect to attract an even higher caliber of students and faculty. From the perspective of the average New Haven resident, on the other hand, these changes can be catastrophic.
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“I think Emporium DNA is universally disliked by the Yale College student body, regardless of one’s income level,” Andrea Villena, TC ’15, said. “But even if you can afford to shop there, there’s a good chance you won’t want to—I think there’s a lot of stigma surrounding this store and walking out of there with one of those absurdly fluorescent orange bags would make a lot of people uncomfortable.” Doss-Gollin agreed: “I certainly didn’t think that those were the kinds of stores that students were going for. It seems like these stores are something that most students aren’t accessing and most people in the community aren’t accessing.” The underlying questions that arise from these issues are who exactly UP is currently tailoring these retailers to and whether they should be appealing to a broader audience.
Student discontentment was perhaps made most public when the Yale Record staged a mock demonstration on the corner of Broadway and York Street asking UP to put in a second Kiko Milano. Carrying satirical signs that read “Kiko Mila-Yes!” and “I’m a father, a veteran, and a proud working mother, and I support 2 Kiko Milanos,” the publication’s contributors sought to express the general confusion among the student body about why Yale chose to bring in these particular high-end retailers.
Alexandra Barlowe, BR ’17, saw the new openings as fairly consistent with Yale’s past role in the community. “I wasn’t surprised by Yale deciding to open up more expensive shops around campus,” she said. “But I do think it is sending a pretty clear and unfortunate message that Yale intends to continue distinguishing itself and its wealth from the rest of New Haven, rather than attempt to integrate itself more into the surrounding community.”
In a UP press release from Thurs., Jul. 31 announcing the opening of these two stores, Associate Vice President for New Haven Affairs and University Properties Lauren Zucker explained Yale’s interest in these retailers: “Feedback from our customer surveys has indicated a strong desire for an affordable cosmetics offering as well as additional exciting brands in New Haven, and those requests are being met. Although these are international companies, these retailers will create local jobs in New Haven and will draw consumers to New Haven to support all of our downtown local merchants.”
According to Nemerson, UP’s rubric for retail success doesn’t necessarily take into account the needs or desires of any single demographic. “Yale Properties holds themselves to the standards of a mall or well organized planned community. If they can assemble successful retailers who pay high rents and can make money, then things must be working pretty well,” Nemerson said. “So they’re maybe not always asking the question, what exactly does a sophomore in TD want to buy when she’s on her way to get a beer or a bite at some place on Chapel Street? Their question is, can we create a strong enough destination to charge 35 dollars a square foot, and still have a business do well—whether it’s Urban Outfitters or Atticus. Success is the best sign of success in a retail environment, and over the 15 years they’ve been at it, the national perception of New Haven as a destination has changed to a remarkable extent.”
While Nemerson emphasized UP’s ultimate goal of making a profit, Karen King added that UP also needs the businesses themselves to be successful. King, community affairs associate for Yale’s office of New Haven and state affairs, said that there is one major consideration in choosing specific retailers that forces UP to cater to non-student demographics: the length of the academic year. “As students are only here about eight months of the year, it is critical to find tenants who serve our immediate local population but also draw shoppers from a wide radius around New Haven,” she said. “Past history would show that the mix on Broadway, for example, cannot be just student friendly or the merchants do not survive.”
Deputy Economic Development Director Fontana agreed that business owners have expressed concern about the effect of the shorter academic year. “A number of retailers and restaurants have said to us that business is very cyclical or erratic depending on whether Yale students are here. They say, we die in the summer when the Yale students go home, so can you find a way to help us become more sustainable—we don’t need to make tons of money while the Yale students are gone, but we need to survive.”
He added that the city is starting to undertake projects of its own intended to help solve this problem of year-round sustainability. “What we’re trying to do at the macro level is to build up a downtown community neighborhood,” he said. “We’ve been avidly pursuing housing development projects all around the downtown. If we can build up a neighborhood of two or three or four thousand people who live in the downtown area separate and apart from the Yale students, we can support a lot of these businesses all year round.”
To an undergraduate student who is only spending four years in New Haven, changes can seem drastic, with all indications pointing toward Yale’s rapid encroachment into the rest of the city. But to someone like John DeStefano, who has been in New Haven all of his life, the changes appear more gradual—and perhaps more welcome. “They don’t own all the property. It might seem like they do. They own four blocks up around Broadway and they own four blocks up around Upper Chapel,” DeStefano remarked. “They don’t control Mid Chapel; they don’t control Lower Chapel; they don’t control the commercial strips; they don’t control Whalley Avenue. If you look at the concentration of properties, it’s in places where the campus is on both sides. I don’t have the sense that Yale is controlling retail in New Haven, because they don’t own most of the storefronts. They own concentrated areas.”
As a corporation, Yale’s interest is to build profits from its investments; as an academic institution, its interest is to develop a host city that is appealing to prospective applicants. Anything beyond its own institutional goals broaches the issue of moral responsibility to the city of New Haven.
Gilvarg suggested that one thing UP could do to help the city beyond its own interests would be to advise on retailing in other parts of New Haven: “One thing that doesn’t happen as often as it ought to is conversations between Yale and the retail community at large. Some potential renters might not be appealing for Yale Properties, but could work elsewhere in the city. Yale could be very helpful in pitching retailers.”
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Gilvarg’s suggestion is a simple one, but right now UP seems more interested in opening stores like Emporium DNA and Kiko Milano than addressing broader city planning issues.
Emporium DNA sits at the tip of the Broadway Triangle, its floor-to-ceiling windows stretching out to reveal immaculate shelves of accessories and neat rows of clothing. Its position on the corner of Broadway and York Street places it at the entrance to Yale’s mini shopping strip—it is intended to be welcoming, inviting. But for many, the bright storefront has the opposite effect; it appears daunting and exclusive. The expensive products sit in full view, but just out of reach.
As the latest addition to UP’s downtown retail portfolio, the luxury department store appears to be what Yale envisions as the future of downtown New Haven. But the student pushback on Yale’s recent acquisition raises the question, if not for the students, then for whom? And with that, we return to the reentry of the middle class to downtown New Haven after several decades of hiatus from the city. With a middle class appeal gaining momentum, Yale University Properties seems to be effectively creating a neighborhood less different from those surrounding Yale’s largest collegiate competitors.
So no, perhaps Yale University Properties is not catering to the students currently walking Chapel and High Streets. Rather, its eyes focus forward, as those of a University corporation must, to the students who will soon be bustling in and out of WLH, students who will perhaps wait to buy their Barbours in New Haven rather than packing them.