I'm much more interested in the market aspect of this than the restaurant. For a long time Wooster Street has been missing some kind of Italian specialty food shop, and the neighborhood has long needed some type of convenience store. I hope this ticks off at least one of those boxes, and in general it would be nice to see more retail on that street beyond just more restaurants.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic. New Haven doesn't always present a good face to visitors if you happen to come at it from the wrong angle. Had your wandering been around Whitney Avenue and Audubon Street, say, or further north in the area of the New Haven Museum or the Peabody, you would have had a different impression. You were well away from the posh environs of Prospect Hill or the Yale campus proper. This is where a little advance research would have served you well.

(I have relatives who travel that way: "We'll just show up and take whatever comes our way!" And they end up missing out on stuff they would have enjoyed, or hunting two hours for someplace to eat. Fun fact: I'm diabetic, so you better believe I always know of suitable places to eat before I travel.)

All that said, I'm not sure what response you're expecting coming to the local sub and posting this now? Visitors often post questions here before they visit, and folks here are always up for recommending good places and noting things to avoid. That would have been the thing to post.

And I just now saw this announcement:

https://portal.ct.gov/DOT/CTDOT-Press-Releases/2023/Transit-Royale-Upgrade

CT is now picking up the tab for us to use the paid tier of the Transit app for a year, which makes it even better.

There's a phone app simply called Transit, already mentioned by ankly98, that's designed just to give you bus and train and other mass transit info. I find it a lot more convenient than using a general purpose mapping app when I simply want the damn bus schedule and not the other stuff Apple and Google put in my way to get there. It's free to use though some of the extended features require a paid subscription.

https://transitapp.com

Happily, it does recognize and show you all the invisible "transfers" where buses change route numbers while you're sitting in them, like the 212 to 238.

The fact that you know to ask this suggests you may have already looked at other references to Mandy on this sub. If not, it's worth having a look! I have no first hand experiences with them, and based on what I've seen here I hope to keep it that way. I cherish my ignorance.

One recommendation that comes up here often is a realtor called Seabury Hill. They have a good reputation and get the most desirable listings first so you may have better luck with them, and they can steer you away from some bad landlords. My experience with Seabury Hill was extremely positive.

(Unlike you I had the luxury of being able to take a while to find the right place at the right price. Which was nothing to do with the realtor but with me being fussy.)

The most recent info I've seen is this article from March:

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/jaigantic_update

The lack of news since then doesn't mean anything one way or another, but that article makes it sound as if there are a lot of factors working against it.

Yale doesn't dominate the city nearly as much as you would think. Sure, it's prominent in terms of owning large quantities of real estate...but in terms of culture and psychology and day to day commerce, Yale isn't such a major presence in the city. (Strange but true: I was actually born in New Haven and yet to this day I have never been inside a Yale building.) By contrast, I used to live in Manhattan very close to New York University, and just walking around the neighborhood was an ordeal: packed with students rushing to their next class, local businesses focused on servicing their needs. The difference between there and here couldn't be more stark.

Wait...did this get reported on February 10, then acknowledged on October 19 and only investigated six days after that? If someone reports an illegally parked car and you go looking for it eight months later the chances are decent you're not going to find it.

I stopped using See Click Fix a long time ago because I found the interface too clumsy and frustrating. But I don't remember it being this futile.