Father and son team Robert Christoph Sr. and Jr.’s RCI Group has made slow but substantial progress at the Steelpointe site over the past decade-plus but wants more time to respond to future market conditions with construction just starting on a couple thousand units of proposed housing. The prime acreage is located on the lower East Side, near downtown between Interstate 95 and the harbor. Under that agreement, which ends in 2052, the developer is allowed to use a chunk of the real estate taxes due Bridgeport to instead pay off the borrowing funding Steelpointe’s infrastructure, like roads and utilities. That subsidy is known as tax incremental financing. Bridgeport, according to city officials, currently receives $650,000 in annual property tax payments from Steelpointe, with the remaining balance of around $1 million reinvested in the infrastructure. Bridgeport’s tax share will grow as the years pass and more gets built out. But, he continued, when the Christophs seek to borrow to help finance the infrastructure improvements, those preferred terms are often 30 to 40 years long. And since a hotel and about 2,000 housing units are still in the future, RCI wants to push out that 2012 agreement by a couple of decades to 2072.
https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/bridgeport-steelpointe-tax-deal-extension-20258569.php