Thirteen years after the HealthBridge nursing home in Wethersfield shut down, a developer is proposing to demolish the vacant building and put up 160 apartments.
The neary 11-acre property has been fenced off and deteriorating for years, and town officials are excited at the prospect of replacing an eyesore with an active use.
“This is great for the town, and Wethersfield needs the housing,” Mayor Ken Lesser said Monday.
Developer Joseph Calafiore is proposing to construct three mid-rise buildings with predominantly market-rate units, with a mix of studios and one- and two-bedroom units. Calafiore’s consultants contend it would mean a net fiscal improvement for town, but did not project specific figures.
Calafiore’s 341 Jordan Lane Development LLC will seek a zone change from the Planning and Zoning Commission; if it succeeds, it will later put forward a more detailed site plan application. The zone change hearing is Tuesday at 7 p.m. at town hall.
The project begins with razing the roughly 100,000-square-foot, single-floor building that’s been on the property since 1965, when it opened as the Jordan Lane Convalescent Hospital. The operation went through a number of names and corporate affiliations over the next 40 years, and at one point had more than 300 beds and served as a significant employer.
By 2010, it housed fewer than 180 patients and was posting losses of more than $1 million a year. It shut down in 2012, and the building has been problematic since, according to a 2023 lawsuit by 341 Jordan Lane Development LLC that sought to oust the nursing home’s final corporate owner, Wethersfield THCI Holding Co.
Trespassers had gotten inside, water had puddled in the basement and exterior stairwells, the eaves were rotting, and “the building has numerous broken windows and doors, some of which are boarded up,” Calafiore’s business asserted in the suit.
Last year a judge directed Wethersfield THCI to remove any remaining effects from the building and ordered 341 Jordan Lane Development to the company $160,000. Months after the suit was settled, the new housing complex application was submitted at town hall.
The plan is for two four-story buildings along Folly Brook and a three-story building closer to Jordan Lane. In all, there would be 98 two-bedroom apartments with either 1,128 or 1,138 square feet; 48 one-bedroom units of 743 square feet, and 14 studios with either 619 or 683 square feet.
The company said it would reserve about half of the property as open space, and would have walking trails and other amenities.
Calafiore’s company would set aside eight apartments — or 5% of the total — as “affordable” for the next 40 years.
In an analysis, Town Planner David Elder noted the project reuses property that’s already been cleared for dense multi-family development, and that it is near transit routes. But he wrote that the company should provide more details about how it concluded the project would be a net financial gain for Wethersfield.
Elder also emphasized that a 5% set aside for affordable housing is short of what Connecticut wants each community to achieve townwide.
“The town has made great strides and spent considerable effort to comply with the state’s 10% affordable housing requirement,” Elder wrote. “The application’s proposal for less than 10% of the units being affordable means the town will need to compensate for these additional units elsewhere, and puts the town in greater jeopardy for an 8-30g application.”