Uconn buys planned site of Mansfield apartments
Purchase halts development, angers city officials
After Uconn shocked Mansfield residents by quietly purchasing nearly 20 acres of land the town had planned to use for a new apartment complex, local officials are pushing back, saying the decision will hurt affordable housing opportunities and cost millions in lost tax revenue.
“This purchase undermines years ... of collaborative work with the university,” Mayor Toni Moran said during a Tuesday news conference, calling the move a two-part threat. “They have threatened to withhold access to the sewer system to certain developers, and they have also now raised the specter of: ‘If we don’t like what you’re doing, we’ll just buy you out.’ The impact on our relationship is very severe.”
Uconn confirmed Tuesday the recent decision by its board of trustees to approve the purchase of about 19.4 acres and one house on Route 44 — adjacent to Parcel B of the school’s Tech Park — where the town was planning to build “The Villas at Four Corners,” an apartment complex with about 360 housing units.
Tension between Uconn and the town regarding the land development is longstanding. In July 2020, the university sued Mansfield and its development partners, seeking to appeal the project’s approval by the town’s inland wetlands commission. Some local officials said at the news conference that Uconn’s opposition to the apartment complex is related to concerns about losing on-campus student housing revenue. However, Uconn maintained in a statement that its concerns centered around “the potential impact of the proposed large and dense development on an environmentally sensitive vernal pool on its adjacent property, and the restriction and reduction in potential development that would have resulted on Uconn’s Tech Park Parcel B.”
According to June 30 agenda documents from the Uconn Board of Trustees, the university planned to spend about $4.2 million, plus closing costs, to purchase the land from Capstone Collegiate Communities, based in Alabama, and The J.E. Shepard Company, based in South Windsor — the developers who had been working with Mansfield to plan the apart
ment complex for several years, according to Linda Painter, the town’s director of planning and development.
Two weeks later, the developers withdrew their own plans, the town said, and Uconn’s purchase has since been completed.
Moran said Mansfield was “blindsided” by the pivot. Town Manager Ryan Aylesworth noted the developers were already far along in the planning process, but it the end, he said it probably came down to business.
“They weighed their options, in term of continuing to move forward and go through what was needed ... [the] legal challenges that the university was mounting,” he said.
Close to 15 acres of the land purchased is zoned for higher density, mixed commercial and residential use, Moran explained.
“We don’t have very much land of that sort in our town,” she said.
Mansfield was counting on the planned apartment complex to provide 30 affordable housing units for low- and moderate-income families, as well as $1.4 million in funding for affordable housing in another section of town, and to help relieve the growing need for local student housing, officials said.
“The demand for housing for Uconn students has resulted in the transition of more than 500 single-family residences to rental units,” the mayor said. “That means if you are a family with low or moderate income, housing has become more and more expensive in this town.”
Uconn’s purchase also permanently removes the land from Mansfield’s tax rolls, officials said. While the town can’t tax state land, it receives some compensation through Connecticut’s PILOT program, which provides payment in lieu of local property taxes, according to the state Office of Policy and Management.
Mansfield officials estimated the money the town will receive through PILOT to be about $2 million less annually than it would have received if the land was developed as planned and remained within the municipality — a loss “that will ultimately produce higher taxes for our residents,” Moran said.
Before Uconn bought it, the town earned about $12,600 in taxes annually from the land, Margaret Chatey, the town’s communication specialist, said in an email. Through PILOT, town officials now expect to earn “far less than $6,000.”
“We’re angry about this,” Moran added. “We’re exploring all our options to fight this decision, and any future action by the university . ... The state of Connecticut has really overstepped its bounds in controlling what our town can do in the future.”