Bethel man eyes Danbury’s demand for self-storage
DANBURY – There are 10 self-storage facilities within three miles of Great Pasture Road at the Bethel border, including one on either side of Ethan Draper’s family’s landscaping business.
If that seems like self-storage overkill, it isn’t, says Draper, a 25-yearold business school graduate, who just finished a 15-month active-duty stint with the Connecticut Air National Guard, distributing vaccines and COVID tests in Danbury.
“While there are 10 existing self-storage facilities within this 3-mile radius of our facility, eight of these 10 facilities are at 100 percent capacity with the remaining two at 95 and 98 percent capacity,” Draper told the city’s Planning Commission at a public hearing last week. “[A] leading consultant and management company in the self-storage industry who conducted a site and market feasibility study (found) … within the submarket of our location that there is 300,000-squarefeet of unmet self-storage demand.”
The solution, Draper said, is to build a 48,000square-foot enclosed selfstorage building with “state of the art security measures, management software and cutting-edge Bluetooth enabled access systems to keep the facility … safe and secure.”
The $2 million project calls for demolishing all but one of the buildings on the Draper’s 1.5-acre property at 12 Great Pasture Road, to create a threestory climate-controlled storage building with 470 rental rooms, ranging in size from 25-to-200 square feet.
“Living in the BethelDanbury area my whole life, I have seen the exponential growth of apartments and condominiums which as we all know lack storage space,” said Draper, who grew up in Bethel and played football at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, where he earned a business management degree. “We will be adding 48,000 square feet of storage space that will absolutely benefit the residents of Bethel and Danbury.”
Danbury planners want more details about parking and what precautions Draper would take to protect the floodplain in the back of the property. Draper has already received a wetland permit and a variance to have smaller yards than would otherwise be permitted.
“I’m no expert on self storage or parking but there’s 470 units proposed for this use, and unless I am missing something there’s four parking spaces on the site plan … that doesn’t strike me as a lot of parking spaces,” said Arnold Finaldi, chairman of the city’s Planning Commission, which continued the public hearing on Draper’s proposal until its next meeting in March. It’s a pretty large building on a relatively small piece of land when you compare it to the size of the building.”
Draper’s consultant said a larger self-storage facility on Danbury’s west side was used as a model.
“We’ve done a lot of research on this, and we feel that this is more than enough parking,” said consultant Michael Mazzucco during last week’s public hearing. “We thought we did enough, but we will do some more work on it.”
Draper said his facility would stand out from the crowd.
“Our building will have sleek and contemporary appearance, different from the standard archetypal drive-up self-storage facility,” Draper said. “Access will be through glasssliding doors with motion sensors, underneath a contemporary facade, using LED lighting.”
The site in question is just west of the Bethel border, near Fuel Cell Energy, in an industrial zone. The home closest to the street would be reduced by half and converted into an office. The other buildings on the site would be demolished, according to blueprints.
The Draper family also owns two lots south of the site in question, which may be in play someday if the Planning Commission approves the new building.
“If this project is as successful as we expect and hope it to be we also plan on developing the … property at 14 and 16 Great Pasture Road,” Draper said. “By doing so we would be creating one large state-of-the-art contemporary self-storage facility that fits in with the surrounding commercial businesses.”