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STAMFORD – A land-use consultant is laying the groundwork for redeveloping a large Springdale office park into multifamily housing.
Rick Redniss of Redniss & Mead has submitted an application that would change zoning regulations to allow a few hundred apartments to be built in River Bend Center, a 36-acre, mostly vacant office park off Hope Street.
Residents just hearing about the application said it’s a bad idea for one of the most congested streets in Stamford.
“I’m dumbfounded – first that this has been proposed and, second, that it might be approved,” said Laurie Doig, a member of the Glenbrook Neighborhood Association. “I can’t imagine more traffic on Hope Street.”
Doig and other residents said the narrow road – the main artery through Springdale and Glenbrook – is lined with shopping centers, strip malls, schools, small businesses, condominiums and multifamily houses, and clogged by truck deliveries and railroad crossing gates that hold up traffic throughout the day.
But that was not the finding of a report Redniss submitted along with the application to rezone River Bend Center.
The report, compiled by Kimley-Horn, a nationwide planning and engineering firm, concluded that the office park can accommodate 376 to 470 apartments, and a residential development of either size would generate less traffic than the 12 River Bend office buildings if they were all occupied.
The report states that the number of car trips was derived from data gathered by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. According to Kimley-Horn’s methodology, the fully occupied office buildings would generate an estimated 10,026 trips per day.
A development of 376 apartments would generate far fewer trips – 6,375 a day, according to the estimate. A bigger development of 470 apartments would generate 6,951 daily trips, the report states.
A low-show meeting
Steve Garst, a founder of the Stamford Neighborhoods Coalition, said the report ignores a big factor.
It assumes Hope Street can accommodate 6,000 or 7,000 car trips a day because it handled 10,000 trips before River Bend began losing tenants, Garst said. But the report fails to consider the thousands of housing units that have been built in Stamford since River Bend dropped to its 35 percent occupancy rate.
“And more units are coming – I know of at least 30 buildings that have been approved but haven’t been built yet,” Garst said. “We don’t even know what else is planned.”
This week alone, land-use boards are set to consider two Hope Street projects. The Zoning Board had on its Monday agenda a nine-unit complex at 908 Hope St., near Northill Street. The Planning Board had on its Tuesday agenda an application to build 27 townhouses at 91 Hope St., near Howes Avenue.
City Rep. Bobby Pavia, who represents the neighborhood, said Redniss may be gauging potential opposition to high-density housing in largely single-family Springdale. Redniss held an informational meeting for residents on April 2, Pavia said.
His counterpart in the district, city Rep. Mary Fedeli, posted it on a Facebook Springdale neighborhood page. Fedeli wrote that letters went out to 175 River Bend-area property owners inviting them to the meeting, but only two showed up. People who went were “told that there are no specific plans for redevelopment and the property is not for sale,” Fedeli wrote.
Pavia said Monday it’s hard to tell what’s going on.
“If there is a plan to build 470 units, it hasn’t been shared with me. I was directly told there was no plan and no developers are involved,” Pavia said. “If that isn’t true, as one of two district reps, I’m not sure I have been kept in the loop. At some point the people of Springdale are going to want transparency.”
Fedeli posted that another meeting has been scheduled for 6:30 p.m. April 24 in Building 3 at River Bend Center on Riverbend Drive off Hope Street.
Redniss did not respond to a request for comment.
The need to ‘reposition’
According to an analysis Redniss submitted with his zoning change proposal, he is seeking to revise parts of River Bend’s “high-technology district” zoning regulation to allow residential development.
If the Zoning Board grants the special permit, River Bend office buildings “may be reused or redeveloped for multifamily residential use, provided that a minimum of 30 percent of the total floor area is used for non-residential uses.”
Non-residential uses may include colleges and universities, research laboratories, servicing and assembly of light electronic equipment, and child day care.
Under the proposal, buildings could not exceed four stories.
Redniss submitted an analysis with the application saying the zoning change would “reposition” River Bend “in a manner that will protect the tax base while simultaneously addressing the housing crisis.”
Office vacancy in Stamford has exceeded 30 percent for years, and with “the rise of video conferencing and increased comfort with remote work options,” it’s unlikely to improve, the analysis reads.
Residential development, on the other hand, must be encouraged, Redniss wrote.
“Allowing housing supply to grow to match demand is the foundation of creating affordability in a housing market,” he wrote.
But residents have said development in Stamford – more than 12,000 units in the last dozen years, mostly high-priced studios and one-bedroom luxury rentals – has pushed housing affordability farther out of reach, and increased traffic and neighborhood congestion.
The River Bend proposal is more of the same, Garst said.
Compounding ‘density issues’
“I live and work in Springdale, so I’m up and down Hope Street six times a day,” Garst said. “Sometimes traffic doesn’t move. When the railroad safety devices go down in River Bend, cars back up. There aren’t many turning lanes on Hope Street.”
The city’s Land Use Bureau chief has spoken several times about “density issues in Springdale and Glenbrook,” Garst said.
But the Kimley-Horn report concluded that a housing redevelopment “is anticipated to have no adverse/perceivable impact on the traffic operations of the surrounding roadway network.”
It states that the car-trip estimates are based on Institute of Transportation Engineers data for housing developments that are near railroad hubs. River Bend is beside Metro-North’s Springdale station. The assumption is that people who live near train stations are less likely to have cars.
That’s not real life, Doig said.
“You can’t take the train to the supermarket,” she said.
A study commissioned by the Transportation, Traffic & Parking Bureau, released in January, did not conclude that proximity to a train station reduces car ownership. Moreover, it found that 74 percent of people who work in Stamford drive to their jobs, 7 percent take the train, and 4 percent walk.
“Traffic on Hope Street is terrible at all hours of the day,” Pavia said.
He and another city representative from the area, Sean Boeger, said they hear it from constituents regularly.
“There’s no way that adding residences will not contribute to the traffic that is increasing and increasing on Hope Street,” Boeger said. “If the residents of Springdale, Glenbrook and Belltown care about this, they need to wake up and pay attention to what’s going on. They’re complaining to us on the Board of Representatives, but we have no authority over this. The Zoning Board has the authority.”