NORWALK, Conn. – Expect demolition on Wall Street soon, according to Ken Olson of POKO Partners.
Both Mayor Harry Rilling and state Sen. Bob Duff (D-25) concur: Physical action on the long-delayed Wall Street Place development will occur within a few months.
Rilling said in his State of the City address last week that Wall Street Place would get moving within six months to a year.
“I’m more bullish.” Duff said. “I give it three or four months. I just think that he’s going to be getting ready to go soon, that a lot of the pieces of the puzzle are coming together and that things have lined up in a way that I think it will present itself to get going sooner. Now maybe the mayor has information I don’t have, but I’d like to be optimistic and say that it’s going to start sooner than that.”
“I think they’re both right,” Olson said. “We’re still waiting for designation of low income housing tax credits, which we expect to have hopefully within the weeks but either way we expect to begin demolition no later than the middle of the second quarter. We’ll start pulling demo permits before that and commence demolition. There’s a fairly lengthy financing process that needs to go on regardless of whether or not I get the low-income housing tax credits, so that could slow us down a little bit, but that’s the expectation. I think the mayor was giving me a lot of room, which I appreciate, but we’re expecting to commence demolition certainly within the second quarter. Demolition and foundations are almost a nine-month process, so vertical sometime after that.”
That’s problematic, Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Tim Sheehan said. The deadline laid out in the Land Disposition Agreement will fall well ahead of the time the project could possibly get built, which means the RDA would have to grant an extension.
“We’re all hopeful that the applications (for funding) are successful and that the financing will finally be in place to commence construction. If that’s the case, I think that the appetite to look at a possible extension relative to the performance measures under the Land Disposition Agreement will have a greater opportunity to be considered.”
Wall Street Place is planned as a combination of affordable and market-rate housing. Olson is waiting for word from the state on a Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) 9 percent tax credits application and a Competitive Housing Assistance for MultiFamily (CHAMP) funding application through the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development.
The CHAMP component, also known as Flexible Housing Program (FLEX) funding, was always intended to be the last piece, Olsen said.
“The struggle that we had was in the market; at the time, it was very very hard to get the market rate financing,” he said. “The affordable is the easier part to get financed. We have actually all of the financing necessary to do the market-rate piece. We don’t have yet the low income tax credits. So that is what we are waiting for. We expect those to be made in the next three, 12 weeks, plus or minus. Assuming we get one, that would be fantastic, but even if we don’t we’re going to start demolition soon and I expect to move the project forward,” he said.
There are people who say that Olson’s plan to put expensive automated parking under his development held the project up, as the exorbitant price tag made financing the project more difficult.
“I think one of the issues that is a difficulty for the project is the garage, from a financing standpoint,” Sheehan said. “… When you look at the cost of the garage construction, that is a killer. It’s a big piece of the puzzle.”
Olson stood behind the parking plan.
“We’re building a very high-quality product.,” he said. “That makes the project a little more expensive. We have some really cool things as part of the project that nobody else has. So the automated parking facility is one. We are expecting to use small plant co-generation. The design of the project is a much different type of project than other people build typically in these communities, so it’s going to be made of steel instead of wood frame. It’s just a very, very different kind of building.”
Duff said Wall Street Place is built on the idea that people want to live in central cities, in places that are convenient to live in.
With an election coming this fall, he stressed how much money has come to that part of Norwalk, including $1.5 million to the Globe Theater on Wall Street.
“Wall Street has received $6.5 million from the state of Connecticut in addition to the $5 million that the Waypointe development has received as well, down the road (on West Avenue), he said. “So this area is extremely important to the legislative delegation, to Gov. Malloy and the lieutenant governor. We know that having a vibrant theater in this area, where there is going to be a lot of housing, is going to be extremely important to attract people to live here. We think this area is not going to be like SoNo, where it’s a destination, but this area is going to be more where it feeds on itself, where people live here and shop here and work here and play here, and everything is really here for them. So it’s going to have a different feel than, say, SoNo will. I think that’s great. So it’s just a matter of really getting those shovels in the ground, getting it moving along and watching this area come back to it’s glory that it had really before the 1955 flood.”
There’s still the hurdle of an extension from the RDA and continuing extensions from the Zoning Commission.
“The ask is going to be more favorably considered if he can demonstrate that he has the requisite funding in place,” Sheehan said. “If there are gaps, that’s going to be problematic.”
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