The mid-town Hartford offices of one of Connecticut’s leading promoters of affordable housing was the scene last week for a novel “speed-dating” event that linked housing developers and related professionals and municipalities.
The Partnership for Strong Communities last Monday held its first match-making expo, in which more than three dozen city and town officials got 90 seconds or so to promote their housing wish-lists and blueprints to some two dozen entrepreneurs, lenders, lawyers and others with backgrounds in developing multi-family and mixed-use projects.
Several participants say the two-hour event was worth it and already look forward to the next one.
“It was an experiment for us …,” said David Fink, the partnership’s policy director.
Fink said he devised the “speed-dating” concept as a way to link two groups who don’t usually connect unless one of them has a specific project to pitch. The partnership is working on plans for another event this fall, he said.
On top of that, Fink said, more communities are under pressure to widen the availability of housing tagged as “affordable,” which increasingly applies to young millennials who often find themselves priced out of housing to rent or buy.
But many Connecticut communities, particularly smaller ones, lack contacts and experience with developers who know where and how to build what towns are lacking, Fink said. Conversely, developers are busy people, too, and don’t always know which communities and sites within them are ripe for redevelopment.
“What we’re trying to teach the towns to do is be proactive,” said Fink, a former Hartford Courant reporter/editor. “In the past, housing creation has been reactive.”
Portland First Selectwoman Susan Bransfield represented her riverfront town at the packed session at The Lyceum, 225 Sullivan St. Also in attendance was an informational panel of representatives or heads from the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, the state Department of Housing, and the federal Housing and Urban Development, among others.
Bransfield, who braved a “red-eye” flight from the West Coast earlier that day to attend, said she connected with seven developers and an agent of Guilford Bank. She pitched them on the redevelopment potential of the stalled former Elmcrest Hospital site along Route 66, the town’s commercial corridor.
“We’ll see if there are developers out there who are interested,” she said.
— GREGORY SEAY
