Best Laid Plans And The Real Estate Market

There are plans currently before the town’s Water Pollution Control Authority and Planning and Zoning Commission that demonstrate how the town’s best laid plans for its own growth and development can suddenly be swept up into the vortex of Newtown’s real estate market.

The plans are for an 80-unit, multi-family, age-restricted housing complex on 58 acres on Oakview Road, tucked in between the Pootatuck River and I-84. It is adjacent to open lands at Fairfield Hills owned by the Department of Agriculture and to the Pootatuck Club, a private rod and gun club. At first look, everything is wrong with it. It is in a two-acre residential zone, not an EH-10 zone as is required for such complexes. It sits in the environmentally sensitive aquifer protection district but is not in the sewer district, which would offer some protection to the aquifer. It is an intense use of the land in an area already choked with traffic congestion. Yet in the chess game between the town’s interests and the interests of real estate developers, if we look two or three moves ahead, there may be reasons why this unlikely development just may win town backing.

As age restricted housing, the 80-unit complex yields a surplus in cost-of-services-to-tax-revenue calculations — a plus for the town. Twenty homes full of school children educated at a cost of $9,000 per student per year in a subdivision in the existing two-acre zone will provide a net loss for the town year after year after year.

While septic wastes from 80-units could be a disaster for the sensitive Pootatuck aquifer, both water lines and sewer lines run past the site on their way to the high school. And unlike the town’s sewer line in Hawleyville, which was created to spur economic development, the main purpose of sewer line in Sandy Hook is environmental protection. The aquifer would probably be more secure with an 80-unit housing complex on a sewer line than with 20 residences with their own septic systems.

In the end, this housing development will probably stand or fall on the traffic issue. Oakview Road feeds both Berkshire Road and Wasserman Way, which in turn supply the series of intersections at Route 34, Toddy Hill, Wasserman Way, and Exit 11 with the town’s biggest traffic snarl every weekday morning. Pouring more traffic into that mess may be more than P&Z can allow in good conscience. The addition of traffic lanes and other road improvements in the area by the site’s developers may help their cause. We shall see.

Whatever happens, this housing development has already demonstrated how land use planning can quickly be turned on its head by unanticipated developments. From here on out, we can count on housing developers to use every argument they can think of to change the rules for their best advantage. The town owes every property owner a fair hearing, but the town should proceed carefully and only change the rules for its own best advantage.