Spinnaker Partners On Fair St. Apts.

One of the city’s busiest builders has teamed up with a Wooster Square luxury apartment developer to bring 185 new rentals to Fair Street — now that the duo have acquired two service garages and a surface parking lot for $3.45 million.

According to a deed filed on the city’s land records database on Wednesday, 20 Fair RE Owner LLC has purchased 20 and 34 Fair St. from Fair Properties LLC for $3.45 million. 

Those commercial properties are located on a newly housing-rich stretch off of Olive Street on the border of Wooster Square and downtown. The properties were last appraised by the city’s tax assessor as worth a combined $1,336,000.

The seller of those properties is a holding company controlled by Jude and Lucy Ahern. The new owner is a holding company controlled by Clay Fowler of the Norwalk-based Spinnaker Real Estate Partners.

Fowler and Darren Seid of the New York City-based development firm Epimoni told the Independent on Friday that their companies have partnered up to acquire 20 and 34 Fair St. with the goal of bringing to life a new-housing plan that Seid’s company won site plan approval for back in October 2021.

That plan would see a new seven-story, 185-unit apartment complex constructed on the recently acquired 1.21-acre parcel on Fair Street. The development would consist of new studio, one‑, two‑, three‑, and four-bedroom apartments, and would include nearly 1,100 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. The plan would also see the developers reopen to public access a long-shuttered stretch of Fair Street between Union and Olive Streets, in the form of a pedestrian-only​“greenway” complete with trees, planters, trash cans, and places to sit.

Besides some ​“tinkering” with the project’s design, Seid and Fowler said they plan on building what was approved by the City Plan Commission two and a half years ago.

“We have a lot of faith in New Haven,” said Fowler, whose company has already constructed hundreds of new apartments at the Audubon Square complex and is in the midst of developing still 200 more at the former Coliseum site. ​“The city continues to grow. It’s been a favorable development climate within the city administration. We’re very committed to the town.”

Fowler described the planned new Fair Street apartments as ​“almost an extension” of the ex-Coliseum site development, which sits less than a quarter-mile away. ​“We think it’s a key part of town,” he said about the Fair Street project. The new housing and reopened public street for pedestrians ​“will help knit the Wooster Square area to downtown.” Fowler said construction should begin by the fall or winter of this year.

Seid, meanwhile, told the Independent that he decided to partner with Fowler’s company to build this new Fair Street development because Spinnaker is ​“a first-class organization” that continues to build and build, in New Haven and elsewhere.

About Fowler, Seid said with reverence: ​“His business acumen, his experience in this type of development, his track record, his balance sheet, the type of debt conditions he can demand from the marketplace because of his extensive track record and decades of experience and decades of relationships, it became a no-brainer. They were very quickly at the top of the list for a partner.”

Given that hundreds of new apartments have recently been and are still being built in this part of the city, can this stretch of Wooster Square-downtown really accommodate much more new rental housing?

Yes and yes, Seid said. He said that the 299-unit Olive & Wooster complex that his company developed at 87 Union St. has been ​“sitting at around 96 percent of units leased for a long time. There’s clearly more appetite in New Haven” for more apartments.

Who exactly is living in all of these new high-end rentals?

Seid said that many of the tenants for these properties, including the existing Olive & Wooster and, likely, the planned new Fair Street development, are members of the expanding Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital communities. That includes the various biomedical companies booming in town, many of which have been founded by Yale staff, students, and alums. 

There’s the nearly $1 billion expansion to Yale New Haven Hospital’s St. Raphael’s campus, Seid said. The almost-complete 101 College lab-office tower. A planned new biosciences building at the ex-Coliseum site. All of these projects help bring people to or keep people in New Haven. That combined with the city’s ​“cost of living, culture, arts, diversity” all contribute to the city’s growing population, and demand for new housing.