John Knuff
Title: Partner, Hurwitz, Sagarin, Slossberg & Knuff, LLC
Age: 59
Industry experience: 23 years
Steve Adams
After a career on Madison Avenue working on ad campaigns for clients including Coca-Cola, John Knuff now pitches Connecticut communities on the benefits of housing production. The Milford attorney represents developers seeking approvals from local cities and towns, including an increasing focus on multifamily projects. One client, mall developer Westfield Corp., is proposing an apartment complex next to its mall in Trumbull. Knuff also represented Dockside Waterfront Biergarten and Brewery, which won approval from Milford officials this year for a restaurant and pub that could help revitalize the town’s Devon neighborhood.
Q: What percentage of your practice is land-use representation and has that always been the case?
A: That’s probably 90 percent of what I do, and the other 10 percent is transactional. We do work throughout the state, from Stamford to Putnam. One of the things that’s been keeping us busy is rezoning of the Westfield Trumbull mall, and that is a good example of what is changing in the retail world in general. Online is having a significant impact on the brick-and-mortar retail, particularly in the outlying areas, and shopping centers and malls are facing some significant challenges. The effort with Westfield is to change the zoning for multifamily residential. That’s happening at malls throughout the country. As retail retracts, malls are going toward more of an experiential direction: more entertainment, more restaurants, more multifamily residential. Westfield recently signed SeaQuest Aquarium as a tenant. It’s interactive for families and children, and that helps the mall.
Q: What are their multifamily development plans?
A: There’s about 7 acres that was formerly single-family homes, which Westfield Corp. took 18 years to acquire. At the time they were acquiring those properties, and up until three or four years ago, the idea was still that it would have probably been a retail component. Now it’s purely residential.
Q: Which communities are supportive of higher-density residential projects?
A: In Stamford, my partner Amy Souchuns just got two residential towers approved, and issues about school-aged children never came up. Stamford is a city that encourages development of multifamily. It adds a lot of vibrancy. We also represented BLT (Building and Land Technology), which does a lot of work in the South End.
Stamford is a very different environment than a town like Trumbull. Trumbull recently approved a 200-unit project, but the town really put my clients through the paces in terms of determining the impacts. They’ve come to the decision the type of people who live in multifamily residential are the kind of people they want in their community. The town hired an outside engineering and planning firm, Stantec, that presented evidence only 22 percent of American households are what you call a “typical” household with two parents and children. The rest is single parents or empty-nesters, and that’s a pretty dramatic number.
Manchester recently amended zoning to allow multifamily in what was previously a retail-only zone. Hartford has been very aggressive in converting office buildings into residential.
Q: Is it increasingly difficult for developers to find multifamily development sites?
A: They typically require rezoning, and this is an indication of another trend. More businesses with substantial needs are going to urban settings such as New York and Boston: look at General Electric. Stamford is trying to convert an office park into a very large health club. As the office market has retracted and those tenants are moving to downtown areas, these areas can’t be tenanted and sold.
That’s what happened in Trumbull: the multifamily zone overlaid industrial zones, understanding that most of those uses are no longer viable in Trumbull. It takes a little more creativity and a flexible attitude on the part of the municipalities, and the more enlightened communities are welcoming multifamily residential and all of the good things that come with it, the vibrancy. What towns are learning is their concerns about school-aged children are largely unfounded.
In No Particular Order, Knuff’s Five Favorite Cocktail Bars:
- Velveteen Rabbit in Las Vegas
- NoMad in New York
- Ordinary in New Haven
- Dear Irving in New York
- Tosca in San Francisco
