Business View Magazine | October 2019

335 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2019 BERL IN, CONNECT I CUT apartments and 7,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space. They should be open by summer 2020.” Edge sees the project, with its market-rate apartments, as instrumental in attracting the millennial generation of workers, who, heretofore, have been priced out of Berlin. “Currently in the Town of Berlin, we have zero market rate apartments,” he remarks, “so Millennials cannot live in our community. The influx, now, in Connecticut is largely professional in the 22-35 age range, who are being hired by Comcast and Eversource and Pratt & Whitney and Cigna and a lot of the other companies in Greater Hartford, and right now, the option is not there if you are one of those folks who want to rent to live in Berlin. This is going to allow Millennials to move to our community and test-drive it; they want to see what a community is like before they make an investment in a house or a condo. Millennials have creativity, excitement, and money, and there’s really not too much better for a community than getting those folks in.” Based on the theory that development attracts more of the same, Edge reveals that Berlin has several other properties in town that are primed for redevelopment. “Behind this development, there are 13.5 acres of land owned by the local steel company, Berlin Steel,” he notes. “We see that being a Phase Two. Exactly what that might look like, we’re not sure. My hope is that sometime in the next five to ten years, if the folks in Washington can get the connection from Worcester to Boston figured out, that would allow somebody to be in Berlin and go to New York City one way, and Boston the other way, and we would be in the geographic center of both of those cities.” “We also have some vacant industrial land and we have some attractive tax abatements in place,” he adds. “When I started here, five years ago, we had a three-year tax abatement on any improvements – you can’t get a tax abatement on what’s there, but you can if you expand or build a new building and add anything new to the tax roll. It was a three-year, 50 percent, 40 percent, 30 Precision Aerospace Machining Forrest Machine Inc. 236 Christian Lane Berlin, CT 06037 860.563.1796 www.forrestmachine.com michael.forrest@forrestmachine.com ForrestMachineSellSheet_v4.indd 1 10/24/18 3:31PM