Other home runs — popular bars and restaurants that cater to the young — include Ordinary, Kelly’s, Cask Republic, Barcelona and BAR. In the upcoming months, the owners of Mecha Noodle Bar will open an unannounced concept restaurant that they hope will be novel, like the restaurant-arcade combination Barcade that will open in New Haven this summer.

In the past decade, this pop-up of unique restaurants has made New Haven a foodie destination, Pearce said. Although famous, places like Louis’ Lunch did not transform New Haven into a food capital of the Northeast, she said. But in recent years, restaurants are full in downtown New Haven every night of the week.

“There’s been an explosion beyond what it was before,” Pearce said. “Before it was just pizza and Italian. Young professionals now will spend a greater percentage of their income on food than people did before.”

As investors succeed in the Elm City, opening restaurants and leisure venues such as Karaoke Heroes, their young professional patrons have built a community around their products.

“In the past, I would have said that I would have moved into the suburbs and bought a house,” Josh Levinson, a 35-year-old software engineer, said. “But the more that I am here, I love it and love being a part of the community.”

Bars and restaurants such as Olea, Zinc and Elm City Social receive paragraphs-long reviews on Yelp by the site’s active contributors. Levinson, who is among those that rave about New Haven’s food scene, also operates a blog “Between Two Rocks” where he publicizes his reviews of bars, restaurants and the best pizza in New Haven.

With these new high-rise apartment buildings, five-star restaurants and swanky bars, New Haven is well on the way to transforming its past reputation.

WHAT IS THE CITY’S NEW REPUTATION?

Mascola, born in 1958, did not leave his native New Haven until he turned 18 and moved to Ohio for college. Upon graduating from Dayton University, Mascola worked on Madison Avenue before returning to the Elm City to found the Mascola Group advertising agency. His firm serves companies far and wide, including many based overseas. But one of his most loyal customers is right across from the Green: City Hall.

For the past four years, Mascola has been helping the New Haven Parking Authority promote the new meter system downtown, which he described as the “welcome mats” to New Haven. He added that well-advertised parking meters should convince visitors that downtown is a place to not only play, but also live and work.

He said his dream project would be to create a marketing plan for the city of New Haven. The city should tout its vibrant arts culture, rental prices, economic growth and other attractions for both the young and elderly across the region.

“New Haven has the product and delivers on the experience for younger people and older people,” Mascola said. “What we’re not really doing is packaging and selling that, even though it’s happening without us putting it into a marketing component and giving it a great position line.”

But what is New Haven’s product?

Fun, cosmopolitan and cultured living for a fraction of the cost of New York City living expenses, Nemerson said.

At the forefront of this new reputation is the city’s recent acclaim as a food destination. Levinson added that the city’s recent expansion of bike lanes and sophisticated new apartment buildings have contributed to the city’s new visage as a destination for young adults looking for a modern lifestyle.

Over the past 10 years, the atmosphere downtown on a Friday night has also changed to mirror the sophistication of Manhattan, manager partner of Elm City Social Ryan Howard said.

“The scene in New Haven is really transcending toward a more refined craft era,” Howard said. “It’s in a less clubby stage with more of your craft cocktail and beer elegance, if you will.”

To Nemerson, New Haven’s reputation is a key factor in the city’s retention of jobs. One of the most important considerations for biotech companies deciding on whether to stay in the city for the long haul is the quality of life that the city would provide for their employees, Nemerson said.

To prevent the city’s leading high-tech companies from leaving, Nemerson said he needed to not only facilitate the growth of a high-tech hub in the city, but also show the company’s employees that they would lead an exciting life in the Elm City. The city demonstrates it is an appealing place to live as well as work, he said, with arts, culture and rental prices that are almost 60 percent lower than those in Cambridge or New York City.

“If you have enough people who say that this is a cool place to hang out and spend time, then the software and biotech jobs will come and say we want to hire you and we want you to stay here and have you be happy,’” Nemerson said.

In addition to the growth of high-tech jobs, city officials also hope to persuade New York commuters to live in the Elm City, where rent is lower and the quality of life is comparable to cities such as Stamford, White Plains and New Rochelle.

Taft reaffirmed that all the private housing and business developments — many of which have been publicly supported by the city — fit into city officials’ plans to “rebrand” New Haven and attract a creative class of young professionals including graduate students, researchers, entrepreneurs and artists.

When asked how he would market the city, New Haven native Mascola responded in glowing terms.

New Haven, Mascola said, deserves a brand that is much more illustrious than the city’s current reputation. The combination of creativity outside of Yale’s walls as well as the presence of the University would create a convincing message that the Elm City is, indeed, an attractive place to live.

“New Haven is a brilliant city,” Mascola said. “It is America’s brilliant city. It shines.”

While downtown New Haven glitters on, the sparkle is less brilliant for New Haven’s poorer population, many of whom can no longer afford to live, eat and play in the downtown area.

WHO ARE MILLENNIALS REPLACING?

Last October, West Haven native Kiana Marie Hernandez ’18 sat down with the News.

She and her mother had just spent a year searching the Elm City for an apartment to call home. As they traveled from apartment to apartment, debates about prices —not amenities or decorating styles —lengthened their search.

Hernandez and her mother are not alone.

With the scheduled demolition of Church Street South — a 300-unit affordable housing complex condemned by the city last fall — at least several hundred families in New Haven must enter a housing market that is both tight and high-priced.

Edward Mattison LAW ’68, a member of the mayor’s City Plan Committee, recounted a visit to a homeless shelter for families. Every single family in the shelter possessed federal housing vouchers to subsidize rent. But none of them had been able to find vacant units of affordable housing to spend their vouchers on.

Mattison and Hernandez are not the only ones who have spoken out about New Haven’s alarming shortage of housing for low-income families. Since the federal Department of Housing and Urban development began to relocate families last fall from the complex, it has discovered that it is particularly difficult to keep these families in New Haven because of the city’s dearth of affordable housing units.

Taft, who completed her doctoral thesis on urban planning, said the question that remains is how New Haven residents who face high poverty levels and a severe shortage of affordable housing units will benefit from the city’s economic growth.

“Can some of the investment going to downtown go to address inequalities in other parts of New Haven?” Taft said. “And is the city getting a good return on investment with the incentives it offers developers downtown, or are those profits mostly going to the developers?”

The mayor, Nemerson said, hopes to ensure that downtown New Haven is an integrated community in terms of income and race. According to Nemerson, the city’s new housing developments benefit all demographics of the city’s population by adding supply to the housing market to lower prices. Former Downtown Alder Abigail Roth ’90 LAW ’94 added that the new housing developments will provide revenue to the city to subsidize affordable housing.

But the plight of the city’s poor can be difficult to remember amidst the luxury amenities of The Novella and the hip, dim lighting in New Haven’s newest bars.

Oliphant said she has noticed that New Haven is highly segregated with strict geographical boundaries of race and class. She added that issues of segregation, though not unique to New Haven, are particularly noticeable because of the city’s small size and wealth contrasts in East Rock, Wooster Square and downtown.

“[In New Haven], I often find myself disheartened by the way people, especially so-called progressive people, talk about low- and middle-income neighborhoods that are populated predominantly by people of color,” Oliphant said. “And while the problems in New Haven may not be entirely unique, I do think there’s tremendous potential in locally powered solutions that could prove unique to the communities they’re intended to serve.”

If Nemerson and Roth are correct and the city’s new gentrification will benefit all, how long will that process last?

ON TO BETTER THINGS?

D’Amico said she will not stay in the Elm City forever.

Many young professionals choose to begin a family in residential neighborhoods such as East Rock and Wooster Square that are still reasonably close to downtown, D’Amico said. But New Haven’s reputation as a city with a high crime rate lingers on in D’Amico’s mind. She said the noise of sirens, gunshots and ambulance trucks prevent her from beginning a family anywhere in the city.

“There’s a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t want my kids to be exposed to at a very young age,” D’Amico said. “There’s a lot of poverty. While this is important for everybody to realize, it’s hard to deal with that kind of thing as a child.”

D’Amico’s reluctance to remaining in the city is exactly what Nemerson and other economic development officials in the city dread. They hope that the young professionals currently flooding into New Haven will either move from downtown to streets in the city with stand-alone houses and grassy front lawns. By remaining in New Haven, this demographic will continue to attract businesses, developers and more like-minded professionals to the Elm City.

In a good omen for city officials, key indicators suggest New Haven’s cohort of millennials will not abandon the city, at least, not any time soon.

Unlike their parents, the Millennial Generation is choosing to begin families later in their lives. Young educated professionals in New Haven will continue pursuing the single-life — with high-rise apartments and regular revelry at Elm City Social — for longer than their parents did. Levinson confirmed that he and many of his friends are enjoying their historically lengthy youth.

“[A lot of people I know in New Haven] don’t have kids or want to buy a house — the path that a traditional lifestyle would lead them to,” Levinson said. “A lot of people are delaying buying a house and having a family. They’re pushing it out further and they are enjoying being young.”

The recent influx of the forever young millennials has also been accompanied by their parents’ move into the city.

Hundreds of empty nesters in nearby suburbs have sold their homes to buy apartments downtown, a trend completely new to the Elm City, Pearce said, adding that apartments on 360 State St. or 100 York St. are particularly popular options.

Pearce added that only in New York City have retired adults moved back downtown after raising children in the suburbs. They did so to avoid having to drive, Pearce said.

She conjectured that in New Haven, the recent boom in construction and desire to be close to children has convinced the elderly to trade their grassy lawns for a downtown loft.

“My father moved from his big house in [Greater] New Haven to Whitney Grove Square,” Pearce said. “That was unusual. Now it is very common for people to do stuff like that. If you just took one building at 100 York you would find it astonishing how many people who live elsewhere in Greater New Haven now live there.”

This and the Millennial Generation’s decision to begin families later in life will combine to make the current demographic wave longer and larger, Nemerson said.

Mascola said that signs from his market research suggest many millennials will remain in the city, whether they decide to move into residential neighborhoods or defy their suburban upbringing by raising children downtown.

Mascola learned from his firm’s marketing campaign for the Union, an apartment building on 205 Church St., that the majority of people moving into the building were young adults with children. They wanted to raise their children in the vibrant arts culture that can only be found downtown, Mascola said.

“The new generation came up and wanted to do a different thing,” Mascola said. “They don’t want to go to a mall in a suburban town. They want to go downtown.”