Large stores will be permitted near BankNote building
By Joe Hirsch
News@huntspointexpress.com.
The City Council has approved an ambitious rezoning initiative for Hunts Point on, but not before adding a significant change limiting the size of commercial buildings in residential Hunts Point.
The plan is intended to create a buffer between the peninsula’s residential and industrial areas, making the residential area more livable. But some community organizations continue to worry that it permits very large stores—large enough to damage the area’s economic health and diversity.
In response to pressure from local organizations, the Bronx borough president’s office and Council member Maria Carmen del Arroyo, planners included regulations that would keep so-called “big box” stores like Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Ikea from opening.
But while the new regulations limit the size of most commercial buildings to 10,000 square feet, they allow buildings four times that size—
roughly the size of a typical Best Buy or Bed Bath and Beyond–in the residential zone near Garrison Avenue.
“We were hoping they would do better than that,” said Joan Byron, director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Institute.
While Byron conceded that a 40,000-foot maximum won’t be massive “in the sense of Ikea or a megachain drug store,”—Ikea ranges in size from 260,000 to 350,000 square feet, and the typical Target is 126,000 square feet–she worried that by allowing such large spaces for development, “you’ve kind of signed the death warrant for manufacturing.”
Factories, she explained, can’t afford to compete with large-scale retailers at the sums of money required to pay for such large spaces.
Ordinarily, a developer would have to follow the city’s land use review procedure, which includes public hearings at the local community board and a city council vote, to build a store as large as those that will be permitted automatically under the new rules.
“It’s worrisome when there are regulations for other parts of the city that are different for Hunts Point,” said Adam Leibowitz, community development associate at The Point CDC, which has been a fixture on Garrison Avenue since the mid-1990s and was involved in negotiating the details of the final plan with the planning department.
Though he said he would have preferred tighter limits, he credited Arroyo with securing any limits at all. “When she heard we had concerns, she didn’t let it pass,” he said.
The planning department sought to find a middle ground that would be acceptable to everyone, responded Carol Samol, director of the Department of City Planning’s Bronx office.
“We were trying to balance retail of modest size with residential needs, but putting limits on it,” she said.
She called Garrison Avenue the second best area for retail growth in the neighborhood after Hunts Point Avenue, which, she said, was “built out.”
Before presenting the plan to the city council, the planning department also acted to bar hotels and motels from a portion of the industrial district. It acted in response to concerns expressed by local organizations and the borough president that hotels could become havens for prostitution.