A developer has won a key zoning change for its plan to convert the sprawling, vacant Connecticut MassMutual campus into a mix of apartments and townhouse condos, creating more than 450 new homes.
Given the region’s housing shortage and the lack of any other prospects for redeveloping the massive office complex, Enfield officials unanimously approved 100 Bright Meadows Associates’ request to declare the 65-acre property — currently in a business zone — as a special development district.
The possibility of converting dead space into something active appealed to all planning and zoning commissioners, who unanimously approved the request.
Enfield benefitted for decades from two of the hottest real estate sectors of the ’80s: large-scale retail and office campuses. But two of its biggest commercial landowners have suffered as those businesses fell out of favor.
National trends away from brick-and-mortar shopping have largely killed the Enfield Square Mall, and Covid’s devastating toll on in-person office work meant the MassMutual complex stayed empty for years with no sign of a buyer.
The town is now banking on out-of-town developers to replace both with large-scale housing. Nebraska-based Woodsonia Real Estate is proposing the Enfield Marketplace on the site of the mall, while 100 Bright Meadows Associates, an arm of Branford developer Michael Massimino’s MB Financial, bought the MassMutual site for about $4 million in May and is moving forward with a project it calls The North Point Collection.
“If you build this, that’s what we created the special delevopment district for. This is a great thing for the town, it’s what the town wants,” Commissioner Joseph Mule told his colleagues during a hearing on the North Point plan. “This is a neighborhood basically, and that’s what we need. We’ve got a developer here who’s really serious about this.”
It appeared that a strong selling point of Woodsonia’s proposal was that it reuses rather than demolishes the hundreds of thousands of square feet of former MassMutual buildings.
The campus was built in the 1980s and at one point held more than 2,500 employees. Employment was down to about 1,500 when the insurer closed the Enfield facility and consolidated operations at its Springfield, Mass. offices.
“We want to reuse existing buildings instead of having them site there and literally rot away,” Commissioner Walter Kruzel said Thursday night, emphasizing the damage to the office sector since the pandemic.
“It’s not going to come back. You’re not going to get a manufacturer to come in there and build anything, it’s not set up for that,” Kruzel said.
Attorney Carl Landolina said the North Point plans retains the three four-story office buildings, which will have a total of 178 apartments. The plan is to add another 129 units by constructing a fourth building.
North Point would have studios and one- and two-bedroom units ranging from 681 square feet for the smallest to 1,980 for the largest.
“This is a beautiful, well-kept property that hasn’t been used in quite some time. We’re excited about adaptively reusing it for housing and other public facing amenities,” said Eric Zuena, principal of Rhode-Island based ZDS Architecture and Interiors. “There are some wonderful bones here.”
There will be 12,000 square feet of commercial space for some form of restaurant or food service, but the details haven’t been determined yet, according to the developer. Plans include tenant storage space, fitness centers, an outdoor pool and more.
The development plan includes 157 for-sale townhouses, mostly on land that is now the overgrown employee parking lot.