Allan Appel Photo
View of the factory from Wallace Street.
The latest plan to move forward with the on-again, off-again resurrection of Hamilton Street’s historic clock factory was tabled at the last minute, but it’s still moving ahead.
The Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) Board of Commissioners had been scheduled at its Tuesday afternoon meeting to vote on a resolution to modify the details of its proposed $4.5 million purchase of the historic but decrepit brick edifice in the wake of a failed previous private development deal.
Even though the resolution was tabled, there’s no need to worry that the deal may be faltering, said HANH Executive Director Karen Dubois-Walton. “We’re still dating seriously.”
After making considerable headway on modernizing the public housing stock it owns, HANH has pivoted in recent years toward new housing production, with deals like this one.
The flagship project of that new direction is HANH’s $21 million purchase of the vacant eight acres across from the train station that used to be home to the now-demolished, privately-owned, government-subsidized 301-unit Church Street South complex. The housing authority plans to transform those properties into a dense new mixed-use development dubbed“Union Square.”
The purchase of the clock shop at 133 Hamilton St. is part of HANH’s strategy to build needed new affordable housing in town.
In August of last year the commissioners authorized the purchase of the long vacant New Haven Clock Company factory in order to convert it into 100 mixed-income yet mostly affordable apartments. Read about that here, and how current owner Oregon-based Reed Community Partners was poised to lose the property to foreclosure due to $235,000 of unpaid taxes.
The purchase was contingent on Reed doing extensive environmental remediation beforehand. In addition to that, the building had been cited by the city for a whole range of dangerous conditions like collapsing walls.
So all that is being looked into with backing and forthing about who is at this stage responsible for what before a formal purchase at an agreed-upon price is consummated, DuBois-Walton reported.
“We’re doing the due diligence,” DuBois-Walton said, likening HANH’s situation to that of a purchaser of a home who makes an offer, signs a letter of intent, then calls in a building inspector to see what’s what before the deal is finalized.
“We’re under contract, but now looking under the hood,” is the way she put it.
That looking includes reviewing owners’ environmental reports as well as potential state and city brownfield remediation funds, said Elm City Communities Vice President Shenae Draughn.
“Some of the remediation can be done only during construction,” added Draughn.
Recent state court filings show that the clock shop building’s current owners tried to get a judge to push the tax foreclosure sale date for the property back to Aug. 6 to give Reed and the housing authority more time to negotiate a final purchase-and-sale agreement. The city objected to that request, arguing that the property currently presents “a health and safety risk to the community and surrounding area” and that the owner “should not be allowed to further delay this [foreclosure] action for a further four-month period.”
The city-hired attorney wrote that that the city would consent to a 30-day extension to the current April 6 foreclosure sale date, but nothing more without an executed purchase-and-sale agreement and without a submission by the current owner to the city of a plan “for stabilization of the building(s) at the property, securing of the site, and protection of the building(s) from weather-related events.”
On March 5, state Superior Court Judge Walter Spader, Jr. sided with the city, agreeing to extend the foreclosure sale date only to May 4.
Thomas Breen contributed to this report.