Copyright Hartford Courant
The developer who won approval last year to put up a three-story building in East Hartford with 36 apartments and a pair of commercial spaces is scaling back its plan. Unlike recent changes in much larger development plans in South Windsor, Portland and elsewhere, Nam Hue 251 now intends to build more commercial space and fewer apartments than initially planned. The company’s new plan for the property near the Pratt & Whitney headquarters calls for slightly more first-floor commercial space but 16 fewer apartments, and may be another indication of the quickly shifting markets for housing and business space in central Connecticut. Part of the new proposal is to cut the height from three stories to two. The plan is to build on a vacant lot at 351 Silver Lane, roughly across from the Dunkin’ Donuts just west of Roberts Street. Town Planner Carlene Shaw recently told the Planning and Zoning Commission that after the company got a site plan approval to build 35 apartments last summer, it added a 36th unit to the plan but never began construction. “The developer after some long thought-out discussions with financial entities and partners, they determined for this project to move forward they’d need to reduce the scope from three stories to two stories. That’s the fundamental change,” engineer Luke Mauro, senior project manager with Solli Engineering, told commissioners. Solli is a consultant to Nhan Nguyen’s Nam Hue 251, and presented the plan on behalf of the company. The original proposal was for 26 one-bedroom apartments and 10 two-bedroom units, with about 3,400 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor. The new version has two studio apartments, 12 one-bedroom units and six two-bedroom models. But the first-floor commercial space is enlarged to about 4,600 square feet, roughly a third bigger than initially expected. That’s the reverse of what’s been happened with large-scale mixed-used proposals in Connecticut over the past couple of years. Those often have tens of thousands of square feet of anticipated retail when they start out, but developers in recent years have been telling towns that the market for new bricks-and-mortar retail outlets continues to lag. In those cases, the developers typically ask to swap out some of the planned retail space for more housing. Several Connecticut communities have struggled with that trend because they seek modern stores, restaurants, bars, recreation businesses and similar attractions to boost their tax base and attract visitors. Conversely, affluent suburbs are usually cautious about more housing — particularly two- bedroom units and bigger — because of the potential for families with more children adding to school enrollments, thus driving up the local education budget. Last year, the developer of hundreds of apartments at Brainerd Place in Portland told local officials that the market didn’t justify as much new commercial space as he’d planned; instead, he wanted the go-ahead to build additional apartments. Also last year, a different developer told South Windsor that acreage long planned for new retail space simply couldn’t be built out that way. Instead, housing would need to be the central component, the company said. East Hartford planners ultimately approved the revisions to the Silver Lane project, which includes a cutback in parking and an expansion of green space and landscaping on the site.
