A city businessman who wants to put three self storage buildings on the same end of the block where two similar facilities are already in business and a third has been approved says the market demands it.
“Competition breeds success,” Joseph Putnam, owner of an auto body garage, said of a 7-acre property near the Bethel border that he wants to develop with three self storage buildings. “Being in competition will be good for all of us.”
Putnam’s property on Great Pasture Road is across the street from Prime Storage, a property he developed as a self storage facility and sold, and Safe and Sound Storage. Between the two self storage yards is a 1.5-acre site that was approved in 2022 for a 59,000-square-foot self storage facility.
It was during the approval process for that $7 million proposal by a mother-and-son team to build a self storage facility between two existing ones that city leaders heard testimony saying Danbury’s self storage market is underserved.
The Danbury market area has “300,000-square-feet of unmet self storage demand,” said Ethan Draper, a Bethel business school graduate. The shortage is due to “the exponential growth of apartments and condominiums, which as we all know lack storage space.”
The veteran attorney for the young businessman agreed.
“There is a rash of self storage projects and applications — some of them under construction — in the general area, going from New Milford and Brookfield down into Ridgefield,” attorney Neil Marcus said during a public hearing in 2022. “It’s amazing how this market is underserved.”
Also in 2022, a Georgia-based developer of indoor self storage buildings that is expanding in the Northeast began work to transform a vacant 3-acre site on Mill Plain Road into its first Connecticut location.
The application by Putnam to develop his Great Pasture Road property, which was scheduled for a public hearing last Wednesday before the city’s wetlands commission, is the first step in an approval process that requires a zoning permit, special exception approval by the city’s Planning Commission and site plan approval from Danbury’s professional planning staff.
The property in question is in an industrial zone bordered by FuelCell Energy to the west, a roofing supply store and a sign shop to the north, a commercial building to the south, and the self storage yards to the east.
Blueprints call for demolishing a frame home on the property and constructing three buildings – a four-story structure and two smaller boomerang-shaped buildings. Construction will have to tip-toe around the environmentally sensitive Sypaug Brook.
“The septic system will not have a negative effect on the wetland or the brook as the brook is more than 160 feet from the septic leeching area,” says the application to Danbury’s Environmental Impact Commission. “Even though work is proposed relatively close to the wetlands with the detention basin there are no direct encroachments into it.”
