nothin Builder Revives Coliseum Deal | New Haven Independent

Builder Revives Coliseum Deal

Paul Bass Photos

Developer Fowler at City Hall; Coliseum lot (below).

It’s official: LiveWorkLearnPlay is gone. Spinnaker is in. And the long-delayed plan to build a new urbanist mini-city on the grave of the New Haven Coliseum has new life.

City officials broke that news Thursday afternoon along with leaders of the project’s new development team at a briefing in City Hall.

The project in question is a $400 million mix of apartments, open space, and stores (but not necessarily a hotel anymore) on the 5.5‑acre surface lot where the Coliseum once stood at Orange, George, and State streets and MLK Boulevard.

The city signed a deal in 2013 with a Montreal outfit called LiveWorkLearnPlay (LWLP) to take over that land and build the project. But the project never happened. Depending on whom you ask, the developers couldn’t raise the money, or unexpected design problems intervened.

After failing to negotiate new terms with LWLP, the Harp administration asked Fairfield County-based Spinnaker Real Estate Partners to come rescue and revive the project. Spinnaker has been the go-to builder in New Haven’s current development boom: It has just started leasing the first of hundreds of new apartments in a project off Orange and Audubon Streets, and has approvals to begin building a Hilton Garden Inn at Orange and Elm and hundreds more apartments in Wooster Square.

Mayor Harp at Thursday’s briefing.

At Thursday’s briefing, Spinnaker CEO Clay Fowler announced that his firm and a partner company, the Fieber Group, have reached terms with the city to take over the project and proceed with an updated version of the plan. The developers signed a modified development and land disposition agreement with the city based on the original deal.

As for LWLP? They are effectively out,” Fowler reported.

Fowler said his team plans to break ground on the first of two phases of the project in Spring of 2021 and complete that phase in Spring 2023. According to the current plan, the first phase will include 16,000 square feet of retail/restaurant space (including co-working space aimed at companies that can grow onsite), 25,000 square feet of open space, and 200 rental apartments, 80 percent of them market rate (from the high teens” to high 20s” or upper range of $2,000 a month).

The developers have renewed the agreement’s guarantee of making the other 20 percent of the apartments affordable.” That means reserving them for tenants with earnings ranging from 50 to 120 percent of the area median income, according to Steve Fontana, city government’s point person on the project. (Sixty percent of the annual area median income comes out to about around $55,140 for a family of four.)

City of New Haven

The housing authority has committed around $1 million to help subsidize the affordable housing component, officials said, but that would not cover the vast majority of help needed to make it work, Fowler said. The city has agreed to help the developers obtain tax credits or other assistance. Ultimately, Fowler said, It largely falls on us to solve it.” And, he vowed, we will do it.”

[Update: Housing authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton said the agency has not made a commitment. We have not had any conversations with them,” she said.]

Before breaking ground, the developers and the city promise extensive public consultation, beginning with fall meetings with the Downtown and Hill South community management teams and discussions with the City Plan Commission. Therefore, Fowler said, he does not have many specifics yet on exactly what the project will look like. He said he wants to hear the public input.” But he also said the public input would not have final say over the design.

He’d like at some point to include a 10 to 20-story high rise in the plan, he said. But for now he can say only to expect lower-rise five to six-story apartment buildings.

And while he’d love to minimize parking as much as possible, he noted that New Haven hasn’t advanced as much as other places in giving people alternatives to cars. I do wish New Haven was a bit more advanced in some public transit modes,” he said.

Fowler said plans are too preliminary for an estimate of the project’s total cost. LWLP had put the number at $400 million. A release issued by the city stated the developers will invest $122 million.

Hotel?

Piscitelli: Still hoping to land a conference center somewhere in town.

The biggest change in Coliseum Project 2.0 (it doesn’t have an official name yet) comes in the hotel — or the absence of one.

The original plan called for a four-and-a-half-star hotel to anchor the development. The city and LWLP fought over where the hotel would go. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy made the release of $21.5 million in crucial state road re-building aid dependent on the signing of a deal with a hotel operator.

Now the state has agreed to release the money anyway, without a hotel deal. And Fowler said that after conducting a market study, the team concluded it could not afford to guarantee including a hotel in the plan.

New Haven still needs more hotel rooms and a conference center, said Acting Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli. He noted that New Haven loses convention and conference business to other cities. When conferences do occur here, visitors often need to rent rooms in the suburbs.

But since the signing of the Coliseum deal in 2013, plans have been approved for numerous boutique hotels elsewhere in New Haven, from the Blake on High Street and a new version of the Duncan to Spinnaker’s Hilton Garden Inn.

The market still exists for a conference center, Piscitelli and Fowler agreed. But it’s not clear that a large conference center would generate enough money for the developers to finance it, Fowler said. In the current government climate, such a project would have a hard time receiving a public subsidy. And with new rooms coming online downtown, I don’t think anyone needs another hotel without a conference center,” Fowler said.

So Fowler committed only to studying further whether to include a hotel in the project’s second phase.

Otherwise, the planned second phase calls for 30,000 square feet of retail, 30,000 square feet of public open space, 500 apartments, and 80,000 square feet of other commercial uses.” Fowler also said he’s talking with propspective tenants for office space for both phases.

A New Day

Spinnaker’s New Haven projects, if completed, will have brought between a quarter and half-billion dollars of investment to town.

Mayor Toni Harp thanked Fowler at Thursday’s briefing for his company’s confidence in the city. Fowler said New Haven is sharing in a broader demographic return to cities” that includes young and older adults alike.

This is a worldwide phenomenon,” he said. We all want to walk down the street and get a cup of coffee … We all want to have collisions with each other.”

At the same time, a combination of factors has led developers and their financial backers alike to focus on rental apartments to the exclusion of condos in cities like New Haven, he said. The federal tax code does not treat earnings from the sale of condos as capital gains, Fowler noted, so developers need to make more of a profit to cover the tax burden. And people are seeking more mobility than in the past when they move to a city, so they seek to rent rather than own.

Parking central: The current Coliseum site.

The video below includes portions of Thursday’s briefing:

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