Norwalk and Westport Chambers offer update on their local real estate markets

The Greater Norwalk Chamber and the Westport-Weston Chamber of Commerce recently joined together to host the annual Real Estate Outlook at the M&T Bank Magnificent Room at the SoNo Collection in downtown Norwalk. The panel featured a wide-ranging discussion of trends and currents in the real estate market across Norwalk and the surrounding area.

Eric Bernheim served as the host and moderator of the event for the eighth time. Bernheim is a managing partner at FLB Law and head of the firm’s Real Estate & Land Use Practice. He noted that his practice has played key roles in both Norwalk and Westport, including the YMCA development in downtown Westport and the SoNo Collection itself.

“In my land use practice, I’m seeing a lot of different issues, but two really kind of stand out in all of the projects we are involved in,”Bernheim told the audience of local business leaders and municipal officials. “One is affordable housing, the other is parking. Gov. Ned Lamont has recently said we’re heading towards another housing crisis, or a different kind of housing crisis. We are very short on housing supply. I’ve seen numbers that say we’re 400,000 units of housing short in Connecticut, and 89,000 units short for affordable and moderate-income workforce housing. Yet last year alone Connecticut built more residential units than at any time in its history.”Norwalk apartments have a 5% vacancy rate, according to Bernheim, meaning that they are filled almost as soon as they are built.

“Another issue that we’re seeing is parking,”Bernheim added, calling parking minimums one of the greatest barriers to adapting buildings to new uses and a continuing problem for zoning departments. Bernheim cited the opening line of a CNN story to drive home the scale of parking as a topic: “Approximately 2 billion parking spots cover the country, enough to pave over the entire state of Connecticut.””In my opinion the best person or people to decide how much parking needs to go with the development is the developer,”Bernhein said, using the SoNo Collection as an example since it far exceeds the parking minimums set out by the city. “They’re actually over-parked at this site because that’s what their tenants wanted.”Dan Suozzi, a co-founder and partner at ROAN Development Ventures, described how his own project, the Hamlet at Saugatuck, approached issues of parking through community engagement.

“We’ve spent years listening to members of the community and trying to incorporate as much as we possibly could to make not just a successful development but also a place for the public to enjoy,”Suozzi said, describing the project’s emphasis on open spaces and access as reimagining that section of Saugatuck. “So really providing something for the community and transforming an area that is currently just 4,000 parking spaces.”David Genovese, the CEO of Baywater Properties, praised the campaign put forward by ROAN partners to during their push for rezoning, which featured local business owners in the area near the proposed development discussing how they expect it to impact their shops and restaurants. Genovese himself oversaw the creation of the Corbin District in Darien, which he described as the result of realizing an important truth about the way real estate in Fairfield County operates.

“In the early 2000s, they realized that these towns are competing for residents and for businesses just as we are competing for anything in business,”Genovese said. “There was sort of a mindset shift. I was there when it happened.”Genovese bemoaned the struggle to develop in many towns but praised Norwalk for not imposing barriers.

“I thought I was going to get into real estate investment and development to get to work designing great buildings and investing them and managing,”he said. “I never realized I would spend half of my time talking about parking.”Adam Cognetta, the managing director of the Capital Equities Group which owns some of Norwalk’s most prominent office space at 50 Washington St., and Jessica Vonashek, the chief of economic and community development for the city, provided the Norwalk-specific perspective for the discussion.

Vonashek highlighted the city’s complete overhaul of zoning regulations, the first in 40 years.

“We’re happy to be having them rewritten,”she said. “The proposed zoning regs are using a very user-friendly template. The structure is different. I think everybody in the room would agree that the trick to being able to develop is knowing how much time and how much money is going to go into permitting and licensing. This zoning is really geared toward creating a prompt and predictable zoning pattern for the city.”Cognetta pointed out that the Webster Lot development, a major project which will place hundreds of housing units and thousands of square feet of office and retail on the site of what is presently the parking lot next door to their property at 50 Washington St., is one area where creative parking solutions have required working with tenants.

“For us it’s been a matter of working within the existing constraints and the land we have and the company that manages that lot for us to accommodate our tenants,”Cognetta said. “They’re figuring out if we downsize space can they get away with three spaces of parking per thousand feet when you have 7,000 feet or can you get away with less?”Cognetta added that a temporary tech solution with a fixed number of tagged license plates permitted into the lot has proved to be a workable solution, but the panelists largely agreed that having a site-appropriate amount of parking rather than a one-size-fits-all formula or solution would likely go a long way towards alleviating development costs and providing some amount of relief from the housing crunch. Less of an emphasis was placed on high tech solutions than a fundamental rethink of parking’s role in the construction landscape.