The head of the Housing Authority—an appointed body that oversees the town’s affordable housing complexes at Millport, Canaan Parish and Riverwood—last week voiced concerns regarding the allocation of parking spots for another planned affordable project in New Canaan.
The same ratio of one parking space per unit that has been proposed for a 14-unit structure on Parade Hill Road is what’s already in place at Millport and “there is no question that it’s very tight,” Housing Authority Chair Scott Hobbs told the Board of Selectmen during its regular meeting, held March 17 at Town Hall and via videoconference.
“And so I personally have some worries about the development down at Parade Hill,” he continued. “We found that—and luckily in our area there is a little bit of surplus parking that people could find—but one [space] is very, very, very tough in a suburban community like New Canaan.”
The comments came in response to a question from First Selectman Dionna Carlson regarding the assignment of parking spaces at Millport. She asked whether the leases there specify one car per unit (yes).
An application now before the Planning & Zoning Commission, plans call for 10 two-bedroom units and four three-bedroom units in a three-story building at 30 Parade Hill Road that offers 16 parking spaces. The developer behind the project has said that one parking space per unit has worked at other complexes he has created, and that tenants agree in signing leases to just one vehicle on-site.
Hobbs was before the selectmen to request a $560,000 allocation from the town-held Affordable Housing Trust fund for capital improvement projects at Millport. Specifically, they were $275,000 for a parking lot repaving and re-striping, $110,000 for security cameras and $175,000 for HVAC equipment.
Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of the allocation. At Karl’s prompting, Hobbs explained how the fund is built and maintained.
“Every building permit that goes into town has an affordable housing fee attached to it, and that money goes through this fund in order to help seed opportunities for more affordable housing,” Hobbs said. “And so over the years, we’ve drawn on that in order to do the Millport project, in order to make the Housing Authority’s contribution to the Canaan Parish project, and to help to acquire Riverwood for more affordable housing. The reality is those funds actually went to backfill other other parts of the Housing Authority funds because ironically, you can’t buy more housing using this fund, which is just silly.”
Regarding the capital improvements at Millport, Hobbs said nearly 20-year-old lot there has “serious issues” and that “security monitoring has come a long way.”
“We’ve put in for a new security system over there, from cameras inside of the building, more monitoring and being able to better take care of the property in a much more efficient manner and protect the safety of our residents,” he said. “We likely would’ve had these funds available, but we did contribute most of our available funds for Riverwood, and so that did throw us behind. I think the housing fund has somewhere in the neighborhood of $720,000 in it right now.”