Final Plans Released for Yale's New $600 Million Residential Colleges

A PDF with RAMSA's detailed drawings and images is now available from Yale's New Residential Colleges website. Click here to download the file (please contact us if the link is broken).

An excerpted view of Prospect Street, the campus's main artery, is shown here. Yale's plans for this street appear to include some significant traffic calming measures. As New Haven Safe Streets has detailed to some extent, major concerns have been raised about the appropriateness of surrounding streets and sidewalks to handle even more pedestrian and bicycle traffic. The new Yale business school campus, under construction two blocks away, will also add traffic. A specific example of a street concern located directly in front of the new colleges is the issue, "Icy, poorly engineered Trumbull Street Bridge / Prospect Intersection will lead to numerous injuries and deaths." The types of improvements shown in RAMSA's drawings for Prospect Street, combined with improved access to the Farmington Canal Greenway (which runs from Northampton, Massachusetts, southbound all the way to this site and then creates a below-grade trench that crosses much of downtown New Haven and eventually leads to the waterfront) are a good first step at improving the livability and walkability of this area.

In addition to physical street improvements, future construction on the blocks surrounding the new residential colleges will hopefully provide additional mixed-use buildings that encourage pedestrian traffic at all hours. There are quite a few sites in the immediate area which Yale is reserving for other types of developments, including a large parcel at the corner of Prospect and Sachem where a historic home was demolished.

The College designs have already been approved by the City of New Haven. Once built, they will create millions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue to the city, as well as hundreds of new jobs. Click here for some background on the residential college system.

For extensive background on the development of this plan, and previous controversies related to it, please see Design New Haven's detailed blog posts here, here, and here.