Residents Help Kick Off Construction At Hartford's Bowles Park Housing Complex
Rose Price’s face lit up Monday as she watched a shovelful of dirt fall in front of her.
The tumbling soil was dropped during the ceremonial groundbreaking on Willow Creek, the mixed-income residential community being built on the bones of Chester A. Bowles Park in the city’s Blue Hills neighborhood.
Price, 72, had waited 30 years to scoop that dirt — three decades of organizing meetings, testifying in front of legislators and arguing for attention in the North End.
“I fought so hard with the tenants and the [Hartford] Housing Authority to get this project built,” Price, the former president of Bowles’ resident association, said Monday. “It’s important, because people in these communities now have decent places to live — not downtown, not in West Hartford, but here. You can be poor, but you still deserve a decent place to live.”
After years of stymied progress and unfulfilled promises for funding, the transformation of Bowles Park into Willow Creek began in 2014, when a development partnership for the project was formed.
But the work itself began late last year, after the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development helped relocate Price and 69 of her neighbors still living in the community’s crumbling, ’50s-era buildings.
The project is split into two phases, the first of which will see 62 mixed-income rentals and a “community room” for residents. Construction began last month, and is expected to take about a year and a half.
This first phase will cost about $40 million, and financing will be a combination of private and public funding — about a third coming from public funds. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE
Hartford Hotel Owners Scramble To Raise Funds To Cover Higher Costs Of Apartment Project
Work has all but stopped on converting the top floors of the downtown Radisson hotel into apartments, as the owners scramble to raise nearly $2 million to cover higher-than-expected costs for the project.
The hotel’s owner, Inner Circle US, is keeping a “skeleton crew” on the project, which is now in limbo until the financing is secured, Michael W. Freimuth, executive director of the Capital Region Development Authority, confirmed Friday.
The additional financing had been expected by the beginning of October, but it has not yet come through, Freimuth said.
“It’s not high anxiety, but obviously we’re concerned,” Freimuth said. The authority is financing the conversion of the top nine floors of the Morgan Street hotel into 96 rentals with a $6.5 million loan. But the authority — a crucial funding force behind the creation of hundreds of new apartments downtown — has made it clear it would not approve more financing for the project.
The conversion was attractive because the Radisson — and its predecessor hotel flags — suffered from being isolated from the rest of downtown, with low occupancy. The project will reduce the number of guests rooms from 388 to 188.
Apartments were seen as a viable option for the top floors, partly for views of the new Dunkin’ Donuts minor league ballpark.
When Inner Circle broke ground on the project in the summer of 2016, it expected the first rentals to be ready in the spring of this year. If the additional financing is secured, occupancy may not be possible until spring, 2018, Freimuth said.
Freimuth said costs were pushed up by higher than expected expenses to update “mechanical” systems, such as electricity, heating and air conditioning. In addition, the owners decided to include washers and dryers in each unit — a distinguishing amenity — rather than creating one common laundry on each floor, forcing design changes, he said. CLICK TITLE TO CONTINUE