Around Town

‘We Feel Really Good’: Officials Cut Ribbon on Rebuilt ‘Canaan Parish’ Housing Complex [PHOTOS]

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Officials on Tuesday held a ceremony to mark the opening of the rebuilt housing complex at Route 123 and Lakeview Avenue, part of a larger project that also will see a new structure on the site. Residents of the 60 units at the rebuilt complex started moving into the new building Monday, following issuance of a temporary Certificate of Occupancy, according to New Canaan Housing Authority Chair Scott Hobbs. “We feel really good about the outcome,” Hobbs said Tuesday prior to a formal ribbon-cutting at the new building. Despite COVID- and budget-related holdups, “we are relatively on schedule from where we started,” Hobbs said. “We are extremely happy about the finished product and believe that we have created an exceptional structure for our client/tenant occupants,” he said.

Government

Selectmen OK Easement for Pedestrian Path through ‘The Vue’ Condo-and-Apartment Complex

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Town officials on Tuesday authorized the first selectman to sign off on an easement through The Vue apartment-and-condo complex on Park Street, formerly known as Merritt Village, that will allow pedestrians to traverse the property between Mead and Maple Streets. Conceived by the creators of The Vue, the pedestrian path through the center of the newly re-developed property is designed to serve train commuters, among others, who’d become accustomed to walking through the former Merritt Apartments buildings by cutting off of South Avenue to Mead and then Maple to Park Street. Creating the easement to formalize the proposed path became one of the Planning & Zoning Commission’s conditions when the appointed body approved the project in November 2016 after months of hearings. 

The Board of Selectmen after 29 minutes of discussion that had little to do with the easement itself voted 3-0 in favor of authorizing First Selectman Kevin Moynihan to approve the easement before it’s recorded in municipal land records. It will be in effect in perpetuity, Town Planner Lynn Brooks Avni said during the selectmen meeting, held via videoconference. P&Z had approved the final wording of the easement at a meeting last October.

Arnold Karp

Rebuilt House on God’s Acre Sells for $3.4 Million

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A prominent home on God’s Acre—neglected for years while tied up in foreclosure, then rebuilt in a closely followed effort featured by TV’s “This Old House”—has been sold, documents show. Located next to St. Michael’s Lutheran Church, the home at 4 Main St. was purchased for $3.4 million, according to a property transfer recorded March 20 in the Town Clerk’s office. The sale bookends a fraught and complicated period for the historic property, a ca.

Arnold Karp

Rebuilding of ‘Canaan Parish’ Housing Complex To Start Midsummer  

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Those overseeing a major rebuilding project on Route 123 in New Canaan say they’re preparing to file for a federal loan in hopes of starting construction in June or July. The estimated $45 million Canaan Parish project “is moving along nicely” and a Federal Housing Authority loan commitment could be in hand within about two to three months, according to Scott Hobbs, chairman of the New Canaan Housing Authority. The volunteer agency is partnering with New Canaan Neighborhoods Inc. to rebuild Canaan Parish, a 60-unit Section 8 housing complex at New Norwalk Road and Lakeview Avenue, in a single five-story structure and to construct a new, 40-unit structure of the same height. Both buildings would count toward the state’s affordable housing requirement. 

Unanimously approved in August 2018 by the Planning & Zoning Commission, the project involves “taking an older, out-of-date structure that we are going to demolish and building a much more state-of-the-art, better energy efficiency [residence] with the green space that we now know people need, in a combination of different-sized units,” said Arnold Karp, a local builder who serves on the New Canaan Neighborhoods project committee. “So we are really taking something that had outlived its useful life and updating that,” Karp said.

Arnold Karp

Merritt Village: Two of Four Buildings Now Framed Out, Ready by Year’s End

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Two of the four residential buildings at the widely anticipated Merritt Village development on the edge of downtown New Canaan are now framed out, and should be ready for move-in by the end of this year, the project’s developers say. A total of 59 apartments will be available between the two buildings now nearing completion, and 40 condominiums will be available on the other two nearer to Park Street, according to Arnold Karp and Paul Stone of New Canaan-based Karp Associates Inc. The condo buildings will be ready by the spring 2021, they said. “We are on time, we are on budget and the buildings are as attractive as I thought they were going to be, with all the extra time and effort that we spent on design, materials and quality of workmanship,” Karp said Monday morning, standing with Stone in an area amid the buildings that is to become a wide green of open space that wends through Merritt Village, flanked by terraces with benches and fire pits for residents. 

“I think when you ask neighbors, I think the general view from the town is that they have digested the project,” Karp said. “They see that it’s not looming over anybody, that it’s well-planned-out and well constructed. We are not going to make everybody happy, but I would say that overall we have gotten only favorable comments, especially in the last several months.”

Located south of Maple Street and east of Park Street, the landmark project received final approval from the Planning & Zoning Commission in November 2016 after several months of emotionally charged public hearings.