‘A Fundamental Mismatch’: Neighbors Voice Concerns About Proposed Parade Hill Road Development

Neighbors of a proposed 14-unit affordable housing structure on Parade Hill Road during the most recent regular Planning & Zoning Commission meeting raised concerns about the building’s size and appropriateness for the neighborhood, as well as traffic, public safety, flooding, aesthetics, noise and screening.

Addressing P&Z during a public hearing held March 31 at Town Hall and via videoconference, those opposed to the project at 30 Parade Hill Road said they support additional affordable housing in New Canaan, but not such a large building on a .37-acre site that fronts a windy road already overburdened by large commercial and speeding vehicles.

Those speaking out against the 8-30g project—exempt from the town’s active “moratorium” from the state law, due to its size (less than 40 units) and plan to rent all units at affordable rates—told P&Z that there’s case law to allow P&Z to reduce the number of units in the building. They voiced concerns about services available for prospective residents of the development, as well as parking, and criticized a planting plan from the property’s owner—a limited liability company whose principal is Stamford resident Richard Freedman, a trustee of the Garden Homes Fund (philanthropic arm of Garden Homes Management, which owns 9,500 units of rental housing throughout the Northeast)—as insufficient.

Michael Campisi, a next-door neighbor of the site, noted that new renderings brought before P&Z are “missing several important things, and those are the homes around it.”

“The single-family homes around it, who have lived here under a pretense that this is a community of single family homes so when you are placing pictures up there, be a little more accurate,” Campisi said. “And some of what I am saying tonight is reflective of exactly the disregard that has been placed in this design. I’m here because I believe this Commission has a responsibility to this neighborhood, and I believe that this application, as submitted, fails to honor it.”

Campisi said he is most concerned about “the scale of what is being proposed and the screening plan that is meant to mitigate it.”

“On both accounts, this application fails, falls short, and the people who live here deserve much better,” he said. “On scale, what is being proposed here does not fit, not modestly, not with a few conditions or exceptions attached. It does not fit fundamentally. Irrespective of what Mr. Freedman is trying to prove, that a  14-unit complex could exist on a lot that is too small to hold it, and on a road that was never engineered to serve it—the massing, the height, the footprint and the parking lot—they’re all widely out of proportion with the land beneath them and the street in front of them. Delivery trucks, moving vans, construction vehicles. Residents’ traffic multiplied many times over, all funneling onto a narrow road.”

Campisi called the proposed structure—10 two-bedroom and four three-bedroom units in a three-story building that offers 16 parking spaces— “a fundamental mismatch between what is proposed and where it is proposed.”

Referring to the developer, Campisi said, “He can claim that every box has been checked—drainage, footprint, parking, screening, public safety—and maybe exclusive of each other, everything seems within the boundaries of ‘acceptance.’ ” 

Yet its cumulative effect is a “catastrophe waiting to happen,” he said.

“I understand that 8-30g creates a legal framework that developers like Mr. Freedman use to their advantage,” Campisi said. “I understand that this Commish operates under real constraints. But scale and design compatibility are not technicalities to be waived and marginalized, not by the state and certainly not by this Commission. They are the tools this body has at its disposal to protect the integrity of our neighborhoods. I am asking you to use them.”

Under the state law known by its statute number, 8-30g, developers proposing housing complexes where at least 30% of units are designated as “affordable” may skirt local planning decisions by filing an appeal. In 2022, New Canaan received three applications for 8-30g projects. P&Z denied each of them. The developer behind those three proposals appealed each denial under 8-30g, and a state Superior Court judge upheld two of the appeals, at Weed and Elm Streets, and more recently, on Hill Street, while denying one on Main Street. (In what could signal a new agreement for more modest developments, P&Z held a special meeting last week, in executive session—that is, out of the public eye, as allowed by state law—to discuss the first two cases.)

P&Z opened the application March 9, raising several questions about the project and calling for a traffic study. 

During the approximately two hours that P&Z spent on the application during its most recent regular meeting—a meeting that ran for 4.5-plus hours in all—traffic consultant Kermit Hua of Meriden-based KWH Enterprise, LLC presented his findings, including that “there will be no significant traffic impact from these 14 units.”

“This is a site with a limited number of units, and therefore, limited traffic impact,” Hua said. 

He projected five peak-hour trips in the morning and six in the afternoon from the new development, saying that not everyone who travels does so during those two hour-long periods.

Hua said he analyzed sight lines and that the new building will require residents to turn right/south onto Parade Hill Road, mitigating safety concerns. He also said the road has a minimal accident history—two crashes in three years (an offroad collision with a utility pole and a rear-ending near Route 123)—and said plans for 16 parking spots for 14 units “is a little more than one per unit and that is about average for income-restricted apartments.”

“Some will be higher or lower, but since this developer, the applicant, has plans to clearly communicate to potential tenants that you only get one parking space per unit and he will obviously enforce those, you cannot have two cars for one unit,” Hua said. “So in my professional opinion, that would be sufficient with these 16 parking spaces for these 14 units.”

Those living on Parade Hill Road and nearby streets such as Hampton and Siwanoy Lanes took exception to Hua’s characterization. 

Motorists will experience even more limited sight lines in the summer months when roadside trees and vegetation are in full bloom, and those drivers will naturally turn left out of the development when it’s expedient, regardless of a “rule,” creating a real safety hazard, neighbors said. There’s also no overflow parking—for example, if a tenant of the new building has people over for a visit, then in a sidewalk-less neighborhood full of dog-walkers and baby stroller pushers, any street-parking cars would push those pedestrians further into the street. (The applicant’s attorney Amy Souchuns of Hartford-based MacDermid, Reynolds & Glissman, P.C., said creating a sidewalk from the development that runs south toward town would be an acceptable condition of approval.)

One nearby resident, Wendy Dixon Fog, a longtime member of New Canaan Emergency Medical services, said: “With due respect to the guy who did the traffic study, he doesn’t live there. In a matter of 22 minutes going up the street, 14 cars, six landscape trucks, two dump trucks, three vans. Going down the street at the same time were another seven cars and another three trucks.” 

She called Parade Hill Road “a major thoroughfare” and “one of most dangerous streets in New Canaan.”

Dixon Fog also said she’s concerned about responders meeting the needs of people living in a three-story building with no elevator (the first two ground-floor units will be “accessible” for disabled people, according to another presenter, architect Andrew Hennesy from Newburgh, N.Y.-based A. Hennessy Architects P.C.) It’s a “bit of an EMS nightmare,” she said. 

Asked by P&Z Chair Dan Radman to elaborate, Dixon Fog said, “My professional concerns are not just with EMS or fire not having an elevator. When we are taking out patients, especially the elderly or anyone who may be on the larger side, it creates a great strain bringing them down on ‘stair chairs.’ It can not only potentially injure patient, it could potentially injure the EMS. We’ve had accidents before where that has happened.”

Nick DeMarco, who resides very close to the proposed structure, warned P&Z that between the new tenants trying to access their driveway, as well as delivery drivers, traffic easily could back up toward the complicated Route 123 intersection—a possibility unforeseen in Hua’s traffic study because it’s an entirely new problem “that doesn’t exist today.”

“This could create a complete gridlock mess in this location that you guys don’t appreciate,” DeMarco said.

Campisi, among others, also spoke out against the project’s screening plan, calling it “a gesture, not a solution.”

“The trees, you even saw—they are immature,” he said. “A handful of plantings, immature, sparsely placed with no replacement guarantee, no maintenance obligation, no interim protection during construction. That is not screening, that is just pictures on paper. For almost five years my family has waited patiently for the right owner to show grace and a neighborly touch to a dilapidated Cape Cod home. We have stared at dying neglected hemlocks, ravaged by disease, withering along our property line. Existing trees which Mr. Freedman has directed to remain as part of his attempt to provide screening. Maybe thats been updated with arborvitaes as we saw, I don’t know. But it still doesn’t look appropriate. It’s another joke, and it illustrates his contempt for our community. To add insult to injury, he designs a massive, all-consuming parking lot, edging up so far to our property lines that the remaining grounds offer no proper screening—no fence, no barrier, nada. Do you think my family should be subjected to the constant shining of headlights as they pull in and out of this inconceived lot? Of course not. The Commission should demand a legitimate screening plan, mature evergreens north of 30 feet in height, spanning the entire property lines, on the left, right and the back.”

He added: “The character of our streets, the scale of our neighborhoods, the expectation that our homes will not be overshadowed by developments designed to exploit legal loopholes—these things matter. They matter to the families on Parade Hill, they matter to this town. You have the authority tonight to say ‘Not like this.’ We are asking you to use it.”

During the meeting, P&Z also heard from Hennessy, Helen McAlinden (president and CEO of Homes with Hope in Westport, which oversees a 19-unit development from Freedman) and Derek Daunais from D’Andrea Surveying and Engineering. 

Daunais said, “The site design that we’ve developed as currently proposed will provide water quality treatment and manage stormwater runoff such that the development will not cause any adverse impact to adjoining properties, local drainage patterns in the nearby Fivemile River, and it is our professional opinion that the development can be built without adverse impact to public health and safety.”

P&Z continued the application to its April 28 meeting.