Commission opens hearings for apartment building proposal

0
136
An artist’s rendering of a proposed 51-unit, roughly 50,000-square-foot apartment building planned for 628 New Haven Road in Naugatuck next to the Salem Square Shopping Center. –LUKE MARSHALL

NAUGATUCK — The developers behind a proposed four-story apartment building on New Haven Road have specific tenants in mind.

“It is an apartment building that is really designed and marketed toward millennial individuals. Millennial individuals are those types who won’t bring families with them. So, we don’t anticipate a large influx of students into classrooms,” attorney George Boath told the Zoning Commission last week.

Boath represents Jerry Nocerino, owner of the Ansonia-based All-Star Property Management, who is seeking special permits to build the apartment building at 628 New Haven Road and to do excavation on the site.

The commission opened public hearings, which were continued to its Nov. 14 meeting, on the special permits last week.

The plan calls for a 51-unit, roughly 50,000-square-foot apartment building. According to the plan, there would be 27 single-bedroom apartments, 16 studio apartments and eight two-bedroom apartments.

Joseph Mingolello, an architect with the Shelton-based Mingolello & Hayes Architects, said the two bedroom units are about 840 square feet, the one bedroom units are about 750 square feet and the studio units are about 460 square feet.

Boath said the apartments would all be market-rate apartments.

Mingolello said the apartments would be manufactured offsite and shipped to the site. The building would be built as a modular construction, he said. The plan calls for a combination of stone and vinyl clapboard for the outside of the building, he said.

According to Jim Swift, a professional engineer and licensed landscape architect working on the project, approximately 19,000 cubic yards of earth material needs to be removed from the site.

Depending on the weather, the excavation is expected to take 90 to 120 days, he said.

The property is part of the New Haven Road Design District, which calls for any new apartment building to have commercial space on the first floor. In May 2017, the commission approved Nocerino’s request to change the regulations to read an apartment building must have commercial space on the first floor or at least 10,000 square feet of retail space on the same property.

The property is also the site of the Salem Square Shopping Center, a 19,636-square-foot shopping center with stores on the first and second floors. The overall size of the lot is just under 3 acres. The apartment building is slated to be built to the north of the shopping center.

In addition to the special permits, Nocerino is requesting seven waivers under the design district, including increasing the allowable number of stories for a building from three to four; increasing the maximum allowed height of a building from 40 feet to 44 feet; and decreasing the required number of parking spaces per dwelling from three to 1.4.

Boath said the plan calls for 64 parking spaces around the building and to use eight additional spots from the parking at Salem Square. He said the apartment building won’t need that many parking spaces because it will be marketed to Millennials, who he felt tend to use public transportation more.

The project is still waiting approval from the borough’s Water Pollution Control Board and the Connecticut Department of Transportation.