48-unit "Workforce Housing" project built over the Cos Cob railroad station parking lot? (UPDATED)
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Thursday’s Selectmen agenda includes a first read for a request for referral for municipal improvement status for a possible Strickland Road Housing development.
The applicant is Sam Romeo, Chair of Greenwich Communities (formerly known as Greenwich Housing Authority).
The proposed location is a town owned commuter parking lot by the Cos Cob train station.
It is abutted by train tracks on one side, I95 on one side, and existing housing authority units on a third side.
… The agenda materials (see page 84) are limited to 3D renderings and an aerial photo of the possible development site, a commuter parking lot on Strickland Road, so we reached out to Mr. Romeo for some details.
Mr. Romeo said what is requested specifically is Air rights for MI over the parking lot.
He seeks to build 48 workforce housing units in what is a transit district given the train station is next door and walking distance to the Cos Cob business district, Cos Cob School and Cos Cob Park.
He said ideally the development could serve town employees including nurses, teachers, police and firefighters, and that all the apartments are proposed to be 2 bedroom units.
“It would be 100% affordable,” Romeo said. “To count all against 8-30g.”
… Romeo said the housing authority would seek funding from the state and have to compete with other projects from other municipalities, but he was optimistic.
I like and admire Sam Romeo, and under his leadership (and perhaps his predecessors — i wasn’t following the agency until a few years ago) the Housing Authority has done far more to provide and maintain moderate-income housing in Greenwich than any state or federal agency has. Or, for that matter, commercial developers like Pecora, who toss a few poverty units into their own projects so they can use state law 8-30g to override local zoning regulations and construct hundred-unit apartment buildings.
The details of this proposed project aren’t even close to be fleshed out, but in concept, it doesn’t strike me as a bad one.
Readers are free to disagree, of course.
Greenwich Free Press attended yesterday’s meeting and a report on what was said can be found here. A few more details were supplied by the proponents, and there seems to have been no vocal opposition, but I’m sure that will change as the project wends its way through the approval process.
One can be against subsidized housing in principle, and I’m a semi-soft free marketer myself, but the reality is that the state has more power than Greenwich, and there’s going to be some it no matter how much we might resist. In his comments yesterday, Camillo supported the plan “because it will get the state off our back”. He’s too optimistic about that, I think, but it might be useful in the inevitable law suits coming our way in the next couple of years.
