Town officials approved a plan for U-Haul to expand its presence on Spencer Street with two new storage buildings.
The project site encompasses 7.12 acres of land between 77 and 113 Spencer St. in Manchester, next to the company’s self-storage facility and across the street from developments like Connect55+, Squire Village and a planned auto body shop.
After receiving a unanimous approval from the Planning and Zoning Commission at its meeting Monday night, U-Haul plans to construct two buildings: a three-story, 36,419-square-foot retail hub and customer storage facility located along the road and a 13,785-square-foot warehouse further back on the property for temporary storage of transportable storage units.
The new facilities would roughly double U-Haul’s floor space on Spencer Street, adding on to an existing 6,000-square-foot commercial storefront at 71 Spencer St. and 48,844 square feet of storage and office space at 53 Spencer St. U-Haul’s other location in Manchester, a facility on Oakland Road primarily dedicated to self-storage, totals 57,570 square feet.
Self-storage has boomed across Connecticut in the post-pandemic years, and Manchester is not the only town U-Haul has recently targeted for expansion. As office vacancies rose and retail units stayed vacant, the company secured approvals for new facilities in Danbury and Meriden.
Though the PZC approved the plan, members asked U-Haul questions about the plan Monday night, both about the layout of the site and the viability of the plan.
PZC member Michael Stebe said he wanted to make sure the existing U-Haul storage would not be neglected in favor of the new facility, as the site would be difficult to redevelop beyond its existing use.
“We’ve had over the course of years a number of pre-applicants and applicants come in for storage facilities and none of them came through,” Stebe said.
William Cintas, marketing president of U-Haul Co. of Central Connecticut, said the two facilities would represent separate products for separate customers, with the new development bringing climate-controlled storage to Manchester.
“The number one thing people are asking for now is climatized storage,” Cintas said. “Your TV, your wedding gown, if you put any of that outside, time is going to take it away.”
Meanwhile, the existing storage facility is more like a “garage,” Cintas said. Many Manchester residents living in apartments don’t have “that extra space to keep that kayak, that ski gear,” and U-Haul does not expect the demand for that style of storage to go away or be impacted by climate-controlled facilities.
Cintas also said the current Spencer Street facility is busier than the Oakland Street location and among one of the top facilities in the U-Haul system.
Bryan Panico, project engineer at Cole Civil + Survey, said U-Haul originally planned to connect the existing facility to the new buildings through a driveway but the landscape was too steep to make it feasible.
