The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Don’t destroy Merritt over ‘poorly planned developments’
In his column, “Turn the Merritt into one big bike lane,” Hugh Bailey wants to convince his readers that the Merritt Parkway Conservancy’s opposition to a grossly oversized development adjacent to and highly visible from the Merritt Parkway Historic District is about highways vs. people or a Fairfield County knee jerk reaction to affordable housing. It is not and Mr. Bailey misses the point. The conservancy would not have opposed 120 units of mixed income housing at 5545 Park Ave. on this site if its 84 market rate units were scaled back in size to shrink it from the Merritt’s view. Members of our board and staff members — including architects, planners, environmentalists, transportation and community activists and developers — have created and participated in planning successful affordable housing sensitive to historic districts in their professional careers. And it can be done in this instance.
The Merritt’s historic designation makes possible multi-faceted contributions to the quality of life of all Connecticut residents and visitors by enhancing the way it is managed compared with other state highways. One of a small group of American roads officially recognized as historic places for their scenic qualities, the parkway is among an even smaller subset in an urban-suburban region such as the New York metropolitan area. This makes it all the more rare and valuable as a cultural asset — a linear park you can drive through — widely appreciated for its sculptural bridges and carefully landscaped setting. Management of this high-volume, high-speed road as a historic place provides many environmental and economic benefits. The Merritt’s forested shoulders capture and sequester carbon emitted by the 25 million vehicles it serves each year, as well as capture a significant volume of surface runoff that would otherwise end up in the Sound. Its rich diversity of vegetation provides an exceptional pathway for pollinators. It is an inviting gateway to New Yorkers shopping and vacationing in Connecticut.
Mr. Bailey, however, dismisses these benefits to make us his fictional “bad guy” foil with a “distorted vision” in his fabricated highway vs. people argument, even going so far to suggest turning the Merritt into an Interstate-95 and endorsing highways as “hardly the worst place” to locate huge multi-family residential buildings alongside. Whose vision is distorted? While he is entitled to his opinion that large box-like buildings poking up through the parkway’s treeline would not bother him, does he think it is sensible or humane urban planning to place a six-story residence
atop two stories of structured parking above a paved terrace retained by an 18-foot high wall? The proposed development would have resulted in a housing density greater than most Brooklyn neighborhoods on a parcel of land that is currently zoned as a single-family lot without an inch of on-site greenspace in a location nowhere near any basic urban public amenities such as a park or recreation center.
The Merritt in Fairfield is among its most visually intact stretches. Fairfield’s Town Plan and Zoning Commission’s decision acted within its statutory responsibility to protect the town’s largest historic and scenic resource, consistent with TPZ’s similar decision last year to reduce the height of a proposed development next to the Old Post Road Historic District.
This kind of super-sized development proposal is only made possible by the affordable housing land use appeals procedure known as Section 8-30g, a statute hard-wired to create controversy yet ineffective in lowering housing costs or creating affordable housing. If Mr. Bailey was serious about finding a solution to our area’s housing crisis instead of just stirring the pot, his time would be better spent promoting practicable
ways to make Section 8-30g less confrontational and workable within normative planning standards.
Mr. Bailey also shamelessly cherrypicks his facts about the multi-use trail by omitting the nature of the infrastructure we find unacceptable. To accommodate walkers and cyclists across the Merritt’s steeply rolling terrain, the trail would need extensive switchbacks right up to the auto lanes, edged by a continuous chain link fence to separate it from vehicles. The trail has an astonishing projected construction cost of $6.6 million per mile with no provision for its maintenance. Certainly, those monies would be better spent on addressing our housing needs in Connecticut and in other impactful ways.
Great public spaces such as the Merritt Parkway should not be destroyed to accommodate massive and poorly planned developments. In approving a scaled back development, the Town Plan and Zoning Commission did the right thing in carefully balancing our need for affordable housing while protecting one of Connecticut’s most important historic resources.