Carlos Mouta has spent decades investing and developing in Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood, seeing value in its vacant factories and aging housing stock long before others.
Today, Mouta continues to build momentum for the struggling neighborhood. He’s made great gains gathering support for a plan to transform a massive decaying former Whitney Manufacturing factory on Hamilton Avenue into 235 apartments and 45,000 square feet of commercial space.
The state Bond Commission, in April, agreed to provide an $8.5 million loan to support the $91.7 million project, which has strong backing from the Capital Region Development Authority.
Mouta is most often introduced as the developer of the popular Parkville Market, a former lumberyard on Park Street that he transformed into a popular indoor food hall bazaar. The $5 million project wrapped in 2020, and has been met with wide acclaim ever since. Mouta is currently working on an expansion of the market.
His Parkville portfolio of revitalized and repurposed properties also includes Pope Commons, 360 Main, the Hartford Design Center and the Design Center Lofts.
Mouta spent most of his childhood in the city of Beira in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. When the country declared independence in 1975, his Portuguese parents immigrated to the U.S., ending up in Hartford. Mouta graduated from Central Connecticut State University to study business and marketing, and then took a job at the Hartford Courant in the newspaper’s circulation department.
His first forays into real estate were buying up distressed properties in the wake of the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s and early 90s.