With the charred wreckage of Mafales Plaza gone, a developer is preparing to build a four-story mixed-use building on Bristol’s Main Street that’s partly intended to offer nearby housing for Bristol Hospital and Wheeler Health employees.
The new structure will have 28 apartments of mostly workforce housing, with a ground floor that could include a restaurant, developer Stephen Shapiro said Tuesday.
Overall, the project will cost somewhere in the field of $7 million to $9 million, Shapiro said, and will benefit from a state financing initiative aimed at providing more housing for Connecticut’s health care workers.
“We’re trying to be a big supporter here of workforce housing for our cops, our teachers and in this case our health care workers,” Shapiro said in a brief talk at the site with Mayor Jeff Caggiano and Sabrina Trocchi, president of Wheeler Health.
The goal is to help workers at Wheeler’s headquarters and clinic downtown along with Bristol Health’s medical office center next to it.
In a brief presentation, Bristol Mayor Jeff Caggiano, second from left, talks about plans to replace the destroyed Mafale’s Plaza with workforce housing for health care employees. Joining him were, from left, Sabrina Trocchi of Wheeler Health, developer Stephen Shapiro and state Rep. Joe Hoxha. (Don Stacom/The Hartford Courant)
“It’s so they can live in close proximity to where they’re working and have a reasonably priced place to live while they’re serving the community,” he said.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration is testing out a system of financial incentives for developers who build housing near hospitals, and the Bristol project was the second one in the state to qualify, Shapiro said.
“An important component of workforce development is assuring we can recruit and retain our staff,” Trocchi said. “That includes having access to affordable, accessible housing. We know if our staff are living locally they’re going to stay with us longer. And that’s what we want, so we’re very excited about this project.”
The building will go on a roughly two-thirds-of-an-acre property where Mafales Plaza stood before a devastating 2022 fire. Several retail and service businesses either relocated or closed afterward, but Caggiano said the city was able to work with Shapiro and the property owner to quickly arrange a transfer. Shapiro’s 37 Main St. LLC bought the land for $215,000 last year.
The vacant lot where Mafales Plaza stood in Bristol will be getting a four-story, mixed-use building, developer Stephen Shapiro said. (Don Stacom/The Hartford Courant)
There will be 22 one-bedroom apartments in the range of 700 square feet, and six two-bedroom units around 900 square feet each.
There might be a couple leased at market rates, but Shapiro said the vast majority will be priced in three tiers: For people earning 60% of the area’s median income rents would be about $1,200 monthly; those making 80% would pay about $1,600; and those making 100% would pay roughly $1,800 to $1,900.
“But even 100% of AMI is lower than market rate because of the pricing of housing,” he said.
A 2022 fire destroyed Mafales Plaza in Bristol (Courtesy of Bristol Fire Department)
The first floor of the new building is set aside for retail. Shapiro said he’d like to bring a good restaurant to attract people to the lower part of downtown.
Caggiano said Bristol has benefitted from getting an experienced developer who is rapidly preparing to begin work on site, which has been a vacant lot since the last wreckage of Mafales Plaza was trucked away. The new apartments will be part of a modern housing wave that is drawing younger people to the city and reviving the once-stagnant downtown, Caggiano said.
Shapiro’s Gold Coast Realty has done extensive development in Bridgeport as well as Trumbull, Fairfield and other Fairfield County suburbs. This year he has been advocating for a massive public works plan: a bridge linking Long Island and Connecticut. It would run more than 10 miles across the Long Island Sound from Bridgeport to the Sunken Meadow Parkway in Kings Park.
