Paul Bass Photo
Firefighter Dan Kislukonin in August at the scene of the second of two fires in two months at the abandoned clock factory.
Paul Bass File Photos
The housing authority’s planned redevelopment of a dilapidated clock factory on Hamilton Street will have to wait six months — again — in the wake of a court order issued Friday.
Taom Heritage New Haven LLC, a subsidiary of the Oregon-based Reed Community Partners, which bought the building in 2018, successfully requested a postponement of the building’s foreclosure auction date from Feb. 1 to June 28.
The Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) had completed a Purchase and Sale Agreement with Taom Heritage in June 2024. That agreement, which came a year after the city foreclosed on the property for back taxes to the tune of $240,000 in May 2023, was conditional on Reed performing environmental remediation on the site. HANH characterizes the site as an “opportunity to create much-needed affordable housing in a mixed-income, mixed-use way in the city of New Haven.”
If the current owners do not complete the remediation, the housing authority’s purchase will fall through and the building will again be up for sale at a foreclosure auction. The necessary remediation is outlined in Exhibit D of the purchase and sale agreement. It includes cleanup of mercury, radium, PCBs, and raccoon waste, along with physically securing the deteriorating building. The new sale date is June 28, 2025.
Shenae Draughn, HANH’s newly minted president, told the Independent the authority is “confident” the extra time will allow the current owners to get new appraisals for cleanup costs and meet the currently delineated milestones in the purchase and sale agreement.
“We’ve been working with the current owner around deliverables,” said Draughn. “They too want to sell the property to us.”
“Contractually,” in order to sell, she added, “they’re obligated” to clean up the site.