A sprawling 68-acre proposal near Stonington's Exit 92 has ballooned again, with developer Breslin Realty now pitching 598 residential units alongside a supermarket and a row of restaurants just off I-95. The project, known as Liberty Crossing, is scheduled to go before the town's Architectural Design Review Board as it inches through the early stages of local review.
The proposal targets the site at 480 and 534 Liberty St., near the Rhode Island state line.
Version history aside, the scale keeps shifting. The Hartford Courant described the current proposal as four three- and four-story multifamily buildings paired with more than 110,000 square feet of stores and restaurants, spread across what the paper called a roughly 67-acre wooded site along Route 2. The Courant also noted the submitted materials do not specify whether the multifamily units would be apartments or for-purchase condominiums.
A Moving Target on Size and Units
Earlier coverage from The Westerly Sun described a proposal of 305 townhomes and 94 apartments — 399 homes total — on a site it put at 68 acres between Route 2 and I-95 near Exit 92. The proposals have differed in scale and composition, while the final unit count, tenure type, and acreage remain unresolved.
Whatever the final number, the Courant's reporting on the current version lays out a detailed mix: 74 studios measuring 540 to 610 square feet, 250 one-bedroom units of 750 to 850 square feet, and 217 two-bedroom units, plus a series of townhouses, duplexes and quadplexes with two- and three-bedroom layouts. The commercial component would reportedly include stores and restaurants, plus a 30,000-square-foot supermarket space.
Neighbors Still Waiting on Traffic and School Studies
At the June presentation, Breslin's development team said it planned to conduct school and traffic impact studies.
Residents who turned out in June raised a familiar list of worries: construction noise, overcrowding in Stonington schools, impacts on wildlife, falling property values, and especially traffic.
How Liberty Crossing Compares Locally
Stonington has approved large residential additions before. The Planning & Zoning Commission signed off in April on Groton-based Lattizori Development's plan to add a 44-unit building at Harbor Heights. Liberty Crossing, if built anywhere near its larger proposed versions, would be much larger.
Breslin Realty is a Long Island-based developer. The company's online listing has also claimed that more than 2,000 new multifamily units have been built in the surrounding neighborhood since 2016, though that figure comes from the developer's own marketing materials.
Comparable mega-projects are emerging elsewhere in Connecticut too. In Simsbury, the Silverman Group has proposed 689 homes on the former Hartford Insurance campus, including 616 apartments, 54 duplex units and 19 single-family homes, with 207 units reserved as affordable housing for at least 40 years, according to the Hartford Business Journal.
Liberty Crossing's Route 2 Location
Liberty Crossing would sit along Route 2.
