Paul Bass Photo
Coliseum site; developer Fowler (inset).
Conference center? No longer key to the project.
That’s the upshot of the latest discussions in the fledgling effort to build a mini-city of apartments and offices and stores on the old New Haven Coliseum site.
Spinnaker Real Estate Partners — the latest developer chosen to try to move forward with construction on the 5.5‑acre current surface lot bounded by Orange, George and State streets and MLK Boulevard — commissioned a market study to examine the advisability of building a four-star hotel with a conference center as part of the project. The previous governor, Dannel P. Malloy, had made that a condition for releasing $21.5 million in state road-improvement money tied to the project.
The study showed that the market demand for a conference center may not be strong enough to enable the developer to raise financing.
So “it doesn’t look like, if they do a hotel at all, it will be a big hotel that can offer space for meetings,” Mayor Toni Harp said during her latest appearance on WNHH FM’s “Mayor Monday” program.
She said the project will probably include a smaller “boutique” hotel like those popping up around town at locations like the Blake and the Duncan.
Spinnaker updated Harp administration officials in a conference call Monday.
“We didn’t make any determination one way or the other,” Spinnaker CEO Clay Fowler told the Independent. Rather, he said, he was presenting “the data” about market conditions.
Crew at work on Spinnaker’s Audubon Square project.
City development chief Michael Piscitelli said that he believes downtown still needs a conference center, even if one might require some form of public subsidy to make the economics work for a builder. “We see enough indication that there is demand,” he said. He noted that New Haven currently doesn’t have a space with enough rooms to host conventions or sizable conferences, so the city loses the business to Hartford or the casinos or locations out of state.
Piscitelli said that if a decision is made to subsidize a conference center, it’s unclear whether the city would seek to do that at the Coliseum site or elsewhere.
The market for hotel rooms remains strong, according to city officials — with people often needing to rent rooms in towns like Milford or West Haven or other area towns when they have business in New Haven.
“One of the reasons we lost Alexion was because we didn’t have enough hotel space for an international company to be located here. I think we’re going to see more of the smaller hotels being built,” Harp said. She said, for instance, that the developers of the Route 34 West project across from Career High “are close” to striking a deal with a hotel builder, and “they’re aware” of the request that new hotels include unionized workforces.
The city originally agreed to sell the Coliseum land to Montreal-based LiveWorkLearnPlay and approved an ambitious $400 million-plus new urbanist mixed-use building plan. Five years later, the developer wasn’t getting any closer to commencing instruction. Spinnaker, which has begun building more than a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of projects in town, stepped in as the lead developer to try to jump-start a revised version of the plan.
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