Essex developer floats plan for taller buildings at outlets complex
Joel Banner BairdESSEX – Reviving the sleepy Essex Shoppes & Cinema shopping center requires the addition of several six-story apartment buildings, its owner says.
The proposal, still at an early design stage, already has mixed reviews over its height and affordability, as well as its potential impact on traffic, schools and stormwater.
Peter Edelmann of EuroWest Properties Inc. has proposed up to 580 residential units for the property while maintaining the current scale of commercial operations.
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Since opening in 1996, the complex of outlet shops has not succeeded as a regional destination, Edelmann said.
“It was never really large enough,” he explained. “The center is looking haggard. If I keep it as it is, it will continue to deteriorate.
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“There’s no real life and soul to the center,” Edelmann continued. “My goal is to bring that to the center, and to the community — with more people and less sprawl.”
At a standing-room only Planning Commission meeting last week at the Municipal Building, Edelmann sought feedback from town officials and the public.
He got plenty.
Echoing a theme that dogged the development of the Burlington Town Center, Essex resident Matt Byrne faulted the scale of Edelmann’s plans.
“The mass and height of the building is not in character with the surrounding neighborhood,” Byrne said.
Andy Suntup termed the project “a mini-city.”
Like Suntup, resident Liz Douillard said she left urban life long ago for Essex’s country setting.
“That’s what drew us here and has kept us here,” Doillard said.
“But,” she told Edelmann, “we want you be successful so you will stay.”
The shopping center’s commercial success — indeed, its survival — depends on increasing its building height above the currently zoned three stories, according to Edelmann’s civil engineer, Paul O’Leary of Essex Junction-based O’Leary-Burke.
“We don’t feel that three stories gives us the density that we need to make the center vibrant and make it practical in the long run,” O’Leary said.
“It’s not just having enough units,” he added. “It’s having enough people in the center so it does seem vibrant; so the local coffee shop and the local bagel place could survive here without depending on drive-thru traffic.”
O’Leary said the new buildings’ visual impacts would be reduced because they rest on land that is about 15 feet lower than adjacent roads.
More than measuring a development’s worth by its height, Essex Planning Commissioner Ned Daly urged the forum to weigh the merits of concentrated growth in the town — particularly if it could be made attractive.
“I’d rather have a good-looking 5-story building than some of those 3-story buildings out there,” he said.
Most of the other planning commissioners voiced support for the scale of Edelmann's proposal.
Resident Walter Lang agreed that more height was needed. He also expanded on the theme of aesthetics.
Architectural interest is key to large, dense development, Lang said: “People want to come and walk through, and enjoy it. And as a result, they use the shops.
“What happens with your place now is, it’s the pits,” Lang continued. “Nobody comes to it. If you want to walk on one side, you take the quarter-mile walk to the other side only if you have to go there, not because you’re drawn.”
Edelmann cautioned against quick judgements of the new buildings. The blocky portrayals of the shopping center’s high-rise facelift he projected on screens are just “place-holders” while he refines the concept, he said.
Edelmann also promised a “best-in-its-class” project, one that might include an 18-lane bowling alley, more restaurants, a brewery, an ice-skating rink, ampitheatre and Chittenden County’s first salt-cave spa.
Resident Paula DeMichele said she would like to see some bread-and-butter improvements, too: apartments set aside for affordable housing and seniors; community green space in which to unwind; pervious paving that would allow more stormwater to soak into the ground; and a town community center.
“There are people who have sold their houses out here after raising their kids here and paying taxes, who cannot afford senior apartments that start at eleven, twelve-hundred dollars a month for a one-bedroom,” DeMichele said.
The redevelopment proposal to the Planning Commission is still in its early stages, and will incorporate some of the ideas floated by the public, Edelmann said.
“What would make this rewarding at the end of the day, is if it works financially, and that the community is happy with it,” Edelmann said. “It has to have a life to it.”
Contact Joel Banner Baird at 802-660-1843 or joelbaird@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@VTgoingUp.