Catalina’s John Lockhart and architect Jermey Jamilkowski at an October 2022 community meeting. Credit: Maya McFadden file photo An Avon-based developer has chosen to sell off “piecemeal” nine properties in the Hill instead of turning them into 194 new apartments — after spending three y ears trying in vain to find an investment partner who could help make that new-construction vision a reality. John Lockhart of Catalina Buffalo Holdings provided the Independent with that update during a phone interview Monday. “We’re taking a massive financial loss and just moving on,” Lockhart said. Lockhart’s family-run real estate business purchased 326, 348, 354, 370, 380, and 384 Davenport Ave. and 859, 865, and 879 Congress Ave. for a total of $4.35 million in 2023. Those properties include a warehouse, an office building, and a service garage, as well as a three-family house and a four-family house. The sale took place roughly four months after the City Plan Commission granted Lockhart’s company site plan approval in October 2022 to demolish the existing buildings and construct 194 new apartments in their stead. “We have not had any luck in selling the site or finding a partner,” Lockhart said on Monday. “It’s been expensive to hold onto in the interim.” And so “we made a decision that we’ll sell things off piecemeal” in order to pay off their mortgage on the properties and then move on. Lockhart said that his company is already under contract with two prospective buyers for five of these properties. He said that he has offered “cash for keys” to a number of tenants in the residential properties, and that the three remaining households in these apartment buildings should be moved out by the end of the week. Lockhart estimated that his company will have lost roughly $2.5 million on this aborted development when all is said and done. Why didn’t this development happen? He said that, when his company designed the project — as a four-over-one, post-over-podium building — in 2022, “the interest rates worked,” and, while construction prices were on the rise, the project still penciled out. “By the time we closed in 2023, it was already getting much more tight.” The phased-in citywide property revaluation at the time, which saw property values across the city shoot up, only made this development “more and more difficult.” Those are some of the reasons why this project didn’t work out financially. “Unfortunately,” Lockhart added, “a lot of people don’t really believe in the Hill, in that side of the neighborhood. … We were really excited about it,” but couldn’t find the right partners to bring the project to fruition. “I was really excited to do this project,” he reiterated. “I was really excited to build something really new in the Hill” that was different from the many residential projects “creeping [in] from downtown.” Lockhart said that his company — which owns properties in South Dakota, California, and Connecticut — is likely going to double down on its investments in South Dakota. He described Sioux Falls, S.D., as “one of the healthiest cities in the nation” with an anchoring manufacturing employer that is always hiring. “I don’t know if we’re going to try ground-up development” again any time soon, he said. He personally will be staying in Avon for now, as he’s been in Connecticut for a decade and has five kids. The post Developer Drops 194-Apartment Plan appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less