A third party study will tell Concord City Councilors whether helping the company redeveloping the Steeplegate Mall pay for infrastructure is in their best interest — but several lawmakers are skeptical of the idea from the outset.
“Between the spending of the council and the school board right now, we can’t keep passing on further expenditures” to taxpayers, Ward Two Councilor Michele Horne said. “They want us to subsidize some of the more expensive forms of housing while we have people leaving our city for a lack of affordable housing.”
The proposal to put hundreds of housing units, small- and large-scale retail — including Costco and Whole Foods — and more on the roughly 60 acres off Loudon Road will require upgrades to water, sewer, roads and other infrastructure in the area.
Typically, projects of that size have to fund those improvements themselves. But Onyx Partners, which bought the Steeplegate Mall and Regal Cinemas properties last year for around $22 million, has reached out to the city to see if it would help cover those costs, claiming that it may not be able to afford to on its own. City Council approved just over $6,000 Monday to pay for half of an independent study which will look into whether that’s a good idea. Onyx will pay for the other half.
City Manager Tom Aspell’s office declined to answer questions from the Monitor about how much the infrastructure improvements related to the development would cost or how much Onyx is asking the city to cover.
Horne argued that if Onyx really needed this partnership, the company should cover the whole cost of the study. Councilors Stacey Brown and Jeff Foote sided with her.
Aspell noted that a public-private partnership, if pursued, could be used by the city to leverage the developer to incorporate affordable units into the plans.
Concord doesn’t have a track record of doing that. While the city has given assistance to developers before, it hasn’t always pushed for — or rewarded — the inclusion of accessibly priced housing options.
The city bought the former Department of Employment Security building on South Main Street for more than $1.5 million, then poured more than another million into asbestos clean-up to ready it for demolition. Three years ago, the property — the land alone is valued at over $1,000,000 — was sold by the city for just $350,000 to the Flatley Company, which tore down the old state building and constructed 64 market-rate units, now dubbed the Isabella Apartments, on Main Street. Studio apartments in that building go for $1,700 per month, and one-bedrooms start at $2,100. There are no affordable units.
In contrast, the city has so far turned down requests from developers behind the proposed Monitor Way project for a partnership where the city would help extend Whitney Road to provide access to the development — an initial request for the city to cover the full $16 million cost of the road was rejected, and the follow-up offer where it would fund a portion, at $4.7 million, has poor prospects. Aspell was dismissive of the developers’ request during budget talks this spring, citing how this cost would fall on taxpayers.
“You have a developer saying, I’d rather have all the taxpayers pay for my road so I can receive the benefits of this. Let the community pay for this,” he said at the time. “In this budget, we’re saying, that’s a good project for the developer” to pay for.
Monitor Way plans, so named because much of the land will be purchased from the parent company of the Concord Monitor, would build nearly 1,000 housing units along the Merrimack River in Penacook. About 150 of those units would be workforce housing, in part thanks to assistance from the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority.
Third-party studies aren’t typical when the city considers partnerships with developers, but the Steeplegate redevelopment’s scope isn’t normal for Concord, either, Aspell said.
Notably, the city doesn’t have to do what the study recommends either way.
Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com.