Oakview Road Site—

Developer Seeks 80-Unit Multifamily Complex

By Andrew Gorosko

A major land developer wants to build an approximately 80-unit multifamily, age-restricted housing complex on a 58-acre site off Oakview Road, near Newtown High School.

Representatives of Toll Brothers, Inc, of Huntingdon Valley, Penn., were scheduled to attend a February 12 meeting of Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) to ask to connect the envisioned complex to the municipal sewer system. The WPCA session was scheduled to take place after the deadline for this edition of The Newtown Bee.

Whether the WPCA would grant Toll Brothers approval for such a sewer system connection is unclear, considering the town’s limited sewage treatment capacity at the joint town-state sewage treatment plant on Commerce Road.

In the past, the WPCA has approved some, but not all, requests for sewer connections for multifamily development.

Public sewers and public water lines that serve Newtown High School are located beneath Oakview Road, along the frontage of the development site. Toll Bothers would need to convince the WPCA to expand the dimensions of the town’s sewer district for the complex to gain sewer service. 

In connection with the development proposal, the Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) has scheduled a March 4 public hearing on Toll Brothers’ request to convert the zoning designation for the 58-acre property from the current R-2 (Residential) to EH-10 (Elderly Housing). EH-10 zoning is intended for high-density, multifamily complexes that are restricted to people over age 55. Complexes such as Walnut Tree Village, Liberty at Newtown, and The Homesteads at Newtown have EH-10 zoning.

The site that Toll Bothers wants to develop lies between Oakview Road and the Pootatuck River. The property is near the northerly end of Oakview Road, near Oakview Road’s intersection with Berkshire Road. The site is adjacent to the eastbound lanes of Interstate 84. The property is bordered on the south by land owned by the Potatuck Club, and is bordered on the west by agricultural land at Fairfield Hills, the municipal sewage treatment plant, and the easterly end of Commerce Road.

Toll Brothers holds a purchase option on the acreage from Watkins Brothers Development Corp, and others, attorney Robert Hall states in a January 14 letter to the P&Z.

A traffic study performed for the developer found that the proposed complex would not cause traffic congestion on Oakview Road, nor create a traffic hazard there, according to Mr Hall. Toll Bothers is willing to widen and improve some narrow sections of Oakview Road in connection with the project, according to Mr Hall.

The proposed complex of two-bedroom dwellings would be constructed on a hill composed of sand and gravel. That hill overlooks lowlands along the Pootatuck River.

Because the development site is located within the town’s Aquifer Protection District (APD), zoning regulations would require any multifamily development to have public sewer service.

In his letter to the P&Z, Mr Hall writes, “The justification for this [requested] change of zone is the tax benefit which Newtown would receive from a high-class, age-restricted development and the demand for that type of housing in Newtown.”

Toll Brothers wants to build a complex similar to its Regency Meadows at Trumbull, a age-restricted multifamily complex that is now under construction on Route 25 in the Tashua section of Trumbull, just north of Route 25’s intersection Route 111, according to Mr Hall.

That complex consists of multiple buildings that contain three or four dwellings each, but which have the outward appearance of large single-family houses. The starting price for units at the Trumbull complex is about $450,000.

Toll Brothers has developed several residential subdivisions of single-family houses in Newtown, including Greenleaf Farms off Poverty Hollow Road, Newtown Chase off Blackman Road, and Newtown Hunt off Hawleyville Road.