Stamford’s waterfront bargains

421 Ocean Drive West, Stamford, CT: so cool! Sells for $1.575M.

Of course, only to a Greenwich resident do these prices look cheap, but still, check out this recent sale on the tip of Stamford’s West Ocean Drive. This is real waterfront, the type that, with a similar house and land size (1/2 acre), might easily fetch $4,000,000+  in Greenwich.

Be sure and look at the interiors, last updated in the 1990’s, but it’s a tribute to the designer that, all these years later, it is still a very cool pad.

421 Ocean Drive West, Stamford, CT

Listing agent: Charles Nedder

Selling agent: Barbara Ryan

Stamford Is Booming

James Bond’s arch-enemy, Spector (SpectorGroup.com)  plans this exciting building for downtown Stamford.

I was at a “business breakfast” Wednesday at Riverside Yacht Club and listened to Thomas Madden, Director of Economic Development for the City of Stamford talk about how well Stamford is doing. Could he be accused of having a bias? Sure, that’s his %#@&-ing job, after all, but still, he makes a convincing case.

Among other startling facts, I learned that within the next year, Stamford developers (like FD Rich) will have added over 8,000 apartments and hotel rooms. The town is positively packed with high-earning young people (average income $108,000) and loads of companies are moving here from all over the globe.

You’d never know any of this from reading the dear old Stamford Advocate because, like our own Greenwich Time, the Advocate views its home town as the enemy. So there’s no one place to turn to get the full picture, but hell, drive around Stamford’s waterfront districts and look for yourself, it’s amazing.

How can this be happening in a state with such a virulently anti-business environment? Because for years now, even when now-governor Malloy was mayor,  Stamford was pro-business, actively encouraging downtown development. More recently, under it’s current mayor, David Martin, the city’s taken steps to make it easier and easier to open a business here (goodness, what a radical concept, someone run and tell Professor Obama!)

Mayor David Martin * appears to be truly exceptional. For those of you impressed by college degrees, how’s this: He’s an MIT grad, where he earned degrees in biology and economics. He then went and got an M.B.A at Stanford.

All of that counts for exactly nothing in my book, but there’s something else. He has, I am told, a “private sector mentality”, or at least, he actually understands the private sector. Imagine if we had a guy like this as President of the United States! (but no, we’ll settle for Hillary)

 

• are you sitting down? he’s a Democrat!