The opening of Cube Smart on Mill Plain Road — the first of three recently approved self-storage facilities to come online — completes the transformation of the intersection at Aunt Hack Road that just a few years ago was home to prominent dirt lots.
The 100,000-square-foot climate-controlled storage facility, built by a Georgia-based development company, is across the street from a recently opened Burger King drive-thru restaurant and a Caraluzzi’s Market plaza that opened in late 2022.
“With the growth of multifamily developments in the Danbury market, self-storage is a needed resource for the community,” said Aaron Sommer, who runs Georgia-based Diamond Point Development with his brother, Jason Sommer.
In the year that it took to rock-blast the 3.5-acre property and build the three-story self-storage building at 95 Mill Plain Road, 149 downtown apartments have come online at developer Dan Bertram’s Brookview Commons complex, and the first half of a 360-apartment project is nearing completion at the west side office park known as The Summit.
At the same time, two other self-storage facilities were approved by Danbury on the east end — a four-story self-storage building on Sand Pit Road, and a self-storage facility on the same block near the Bethel border where two self-storage facilities are already located and a third is nearing completion.
The businessman behind that proposal, Joseph Putnam, told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2023 that “competition breeds success” and that “being in competition will be good for all of us.”
Putnam, who plans to build three self-storage buildings on a 7-acre property on Great Pasture Road, was approved one year after a mother-and-son team from Bethel were approved to build a self-storage facility between two existing self-storage facilities.
The reason: Danbury’s underserved market.
The Danbury market area has “300,000-square-feet of unmet self-storage demand,” said Ethan Draper, a Bethel business school graduate, during a 2022 public hearing. The shortage, he said, is due to “the exponential growth of apartments and condominiums, which as we all know lack storage space.”
Aaron Sommer, from the Georgia development company that built the new west side Cube Smart, agreed.
“The other reason is people are more transient than they used to be,” Sommer told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2023. “They don’t live at the same place for 50 years or work at the same place for 50 years the way they used to. Now when they want to leave, they leave.”
As a result, Sommer said, some residents don’t have the space they need in their new places.
West siders may not have realized that the new Cube Smart is open. On Tuesday, a heavy-duty earth-moving tractor sat next to a huge dirt pile in front of the new facility, where a handful of red pickup trucks were parked while a crew worked to install a sidewalk along the front of the property.
Much of the property’s landscape was also yet to be planted.
