🔒Time is ticking on affordable housing plan for historic New Haven clock factory

Time appears to be running out on an ambitious plan to transform the long-derelict clock factory building on New Haven’s Hamilton Street into affordable housing.

In 2018, an Oregon-based company purchased the property at 133 Hamilton St., for $1.4 million with a plan to clean it up and create 130 affordable apartments, gallery space and a restaurant or coffee shop.

The city and state embraced the project, providing a combined $5.2 million package in tax abatements and a loan and use of a federal grant to remediate radium and other on-site contaminants.

But four years later, Reed Community Partners has yet to begin construction and owes the city about $175,000 in back taxes dating back to 2019. That led the city to foreclose in April. Reed failed until recently to hire a lawyer to defend itself, almost leading the court to hand the property over to the city by default, court records show.

Reed Community Partners’ lawyer in the case, Jay Richard Lawlor of Hartford-based Hoopes Morganthaler Rausch & Scaramozza, did not return a message seeking comment.

In addition, the city in May cited the Reed Community Partners entity that owns the structure — Taom Heritage New Haven LLC — for multiple code and blight violations, including graffiti, broken and missing windows, being open to trespass, piles of debris, overgrown areas and possible hazardous waste storage. The property is also attracting illegal dumping, the citation said.

“It is determined that the existing conditions pose a danger to the community,” the citation said.

A recent walk around the property confirmed its dilapidated state.

Reed Community Partners, whose LinkedIn page describes it as “a fully-integrated Portland, Ore. developer of high-quality affordable multifamily housing,” did not return a voicemail left at its headquarters.

Josh Bevins, who had helped spearhead the project over the years, left the company in April, according to his LinkedIn profile.

New Haven Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli said in a statement that the city followed “standard protocol on tax delinquencies” in moving to foreclose, adding it’s “premature to speculate on the outcome.” The city, he said, is determined to collect all the taxes and penalties.

“While the city values Taom as a development partner, we simply cannot move forward until there is a satisfactory resolution to blight and public safety matters as well as taxes rightfully owed to the city,” Piscitelli said in the statement.

Piscitelli said the city had in the past reimbursed Taom $570,000 from a federal grant for remediation work.

The state Department of Economic and Community, meanwhile, provided the firm with $3.8 million of the $4 million brownfield remediation loan, spokesman Jim Watson said. He had no further information on the loan.

The New Haven Clock Co. factory, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, is a relic of New Haven’s manufacturing golden age. The 150,000-square-foot complex, which operated from the 1850s until 1956, was once among the busiest timepiece factories in the world.

In the 1980s, the rambling red brick structure was home to a colony of artists who hoped to turn it into an arts center. Its last tenant was an exotic dance club called Scores.

Reed fought successfully to evict the club in 2019.