Salvatore Puts Novella Up For Sale

Builder Randy Salvatore has invited potential buyers to make offers on the 136-unit luxury apartment building he erected on a former downtown red light-district corner.

He published a ​“call for offers” Wednesday and is hosting tours over the next two weeks of the 125,350 square-foot building on 1.01 acres at the corner of Chapel and Howe streets. The building features five stories of upscale apartments above a first-story pharmacy and unoccupied storefront.

The $40 million complex — a symbol of the torrid downtown market-rate housing market — opened its doors in October 2015. At the time Mayor Toni Harp declared that it had helped transform the former red-light district into a ​“green light” district. The building has been fully leased, Salvatore said.

So why sell?

The Stamford builder said in an interview Thursday that someone happened to approach him about buying it, so he figured he’d put it on the market to see what price it can fetch.

“If I can get a good offer, I will agree and put the capital into other projects. We’ll know in a month or two if I can get a number I’m comfortable with. If not, I’ll hold it indefinitely,” he said.

He stressed that the sale in no way signals a diminishing in his interest in building in New Haven. He said he hopes to break ground in June on a project aimed at bringing 140 apartments, 7,000 square feet of stores, 120,000 square feet of research space and 50,000 square feet of offices to 11.6 acres of mostly vacant lots between Congress Avenue and Church Street South in the Hill neighborhood. The City Plan Commission last week approved the site plan for that project; Salvatore is waiting for one last approval, of state financial support for making 30 percent of the project’s housing affordable.

City Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson called Salvatore’s decision to sell the Novella ​“great” news. The city benefits from ​“guys like Randy Salvatore” taking risks and attracting capital to develop buildings, he said; usually developers then sell projects to companies that specialize in managing buildings.

Nemerson compared a developer like Salvatore to ​“a sea captain of the 1790s” who decides to set sail from Water Street. ​“You go down to Argentina. You head to China. You come back three years later with a fortune. Or your ship sinks. But you then sell everything that you’ve brought back from China and from Argentina when you get back to Water Street. You don’t then go into to the porcelain business or the sealskin business. That’s not your business. Randy Salvatore is not really a building manager. He’s a building developer. We want him to be taking risk and to bring in highly leveraged dollars to transform parking lots into new things.”