Palmer family update on Noroton Heights Shopping Center

An update to our friends in the community

As many of you know, we had hoped to deliver a beautiful, new Noroton Heights shopping and living experience to the surrounding community by the end of this summer, 2021. Unfortunately, the pandemic and its very unpredictable and severe impact on the business climate greatly impacted real estate development projects across the U.S. and our project was no exception, with the pandemic causing our initial construction lender to withdraw its support in March of 2020. This action was catastrophic to our project and left us in a deeply precarious situation that compelled us to focus all our efforts on stabilizing our financial situation while also focusing on how best to get the project financed again in a very inhospitable lending environment.

We share the surrounding community’s frustration and disappointment with the current unfortunate appearance of our property and we have a very strong sense of urgency to get the project back on track and completed. Please know that we have been working diligently to reposition the project to serve the community’s needs in a manner that will be acceptable to a replacement construction lender so that we can get construction resumed as soon as possible.

We were able to find a local partner to assist us in resuming the project, who shares our vision of “place making” by building a project that complements the Noroton Heights neighborhood in a meaningful way – making it attractive and wonderful place to live, socialize and shop. This has always been our goal from day one. We hope to be able to share more about this partnership in the coming months. At this juncture, our primary focus and goal is to get the project restarted and we hope to present project adjustments to the Planning & Zoning Commission this coming fall.

This has undoubtedly been the greatest challenge our family has faced in our 100 years as local business operators. We want to thank everyone who has offered their kind words of support and we especially thank everyone in the community for their patience as we work to get the project back on track.

Yours Truly,

Gregory Palmer
James Palmer & the entire Noroton Heights development team

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Learn more about this project HERE.