Connecticut could add hundreds of thousands of jobs to its economic base through smart development at its transit hubs, according to a senior state official ”“ and multiple developers said they are encouraged by a new attitude in state agencies viewing them as partners.
“We have one chance to do it right,” said Howard Rifkin, executive director of the Partnership for Strong Communities, which sponsored a June forum on transit-oriented design in Hartford. “When it is done wrong, government and everybody else pays for the mistakes that we make.”
When it comes to transit-oriented development, Connecticut is in the shadow of players like Boston and New York with deeper pockets and pools of talent from which to draw, said Kip Bergstrom, deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, who was one of several speakers at the forum.
Even cities need help from the state to field the resources to match that competition, and Bergstrom expressed hope that a new state law authorizing public-private partnerships will encourage development at rail hubs.
“Just in five cities in Connecticut ”“ in Stamford, Norwalk, Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford ”“ combined there”™s 1,000 acres of readily re-developable land within walking distance of existing train stations,” Bergstrom said. “You could put both 200,000 new residences and 300,000 new jobs on that land. It will not happen without state involvement ”“ the scale of it is beyond those cities. So if we want ”¦ that kind of growth to happen in those kinds of places, we have to make it happen at the state level.”
Municipalities have had enough sour experiences with downtown development to make many skeptical, according to Geoff Sager, president of Metro Realty Group Ltd., which has focused its projects in the Farmington area where it is located.
“I think a lot of the people who live in the various towns do not yet get it,” Sager said. “They denigrate it and kind of scoff at it and I had umpteen people, probably a hundred, who just said, ”˜Oh, no one”™s going to ride the train ”“ that”™s ridiculous.”™”
Still, Connecticut is getting better at working with developers, according to Abe Naparstek, vice president of East Coast development for Cleveland-based Forest City Residential Group, which is building a 130-unit apartment development at a former Ford dealership in Stratford.
“We were able to come in; propose something that everyone thought we were nuts and have tomatoes thrown at us; and we were able to get an approval in three months, and we”™ll be under construction in another three months,” Naparstek said. “So from soup to nuts to getting a site under control and construction will be somewhere in the neighborhood of nine months. It will be a good win ”¦ and it”™s got no public money in the deal.”
Lawrence Kendzior, city manager in Meriden, agreed that great change is under way in how the state approaches things.
“We (recently) got a DOT pilot grant ”“ within 30 days, we had a one-page agreement signed by everybody that needed to sign it, and a couple weeks after that the money was in place,” Kendzior said. “Things are different; that”™s a very different kind of an approach.”
Too many people assume any combination of unused or underused properties and active transit lines will result in a successful project, according to Robert Lane, a senior fellow with the New York City-based Regional Planning Association.
“A lot of the landscape isn”™t going to get there,” Lane said. “We really have to make the most out of those places that might.”
