Long-vacant lot at 352 Whalley Ave.
Thomas Breen photos
WEB Chair Nadine Horton (with city development deputy Steve Fontana): “There is a lot of opportunity here.”
Nadine Horton can still remember shopping as a kid at the fruit market and neighborhood deli that used to stand at the southwestern corner of Whalley and Winthrop Avenues.
The longtime Whalley resident and community leader singled out the gaping, vacant lot that now occupies that site as one of many underutilized properties now poised to benefit from a recently completed city rezoning initiative targeted at encouraging dense, mixed-use development along the west-side commercial corridor.
Horton urged city staff and fellow Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) neighbors to come up with a community-sourced redevelopment plan for empty lots like 352 Whalley Ave. during Tuesday night’s regular monthly Whalley Avenue Main Street Committee meeting.
Tuesday night’s Whalley Avenue Main Street Committee meeting.
The meeting took place at the police substation at 332 Whalley Ave., just half a block away from the corner lot that Horton said has stood vacant for at least 20 years.
Horton, who lives on Winthrop Avenue and chairs the neighborhood’s community management team, joined Edgewood Avenue resident Frank Cochran and Newhallville resident Devin Avshalom-Smith for an hour-and-a-half conversation with City Plan Director Aïcha Woods, Livable City Initiative (LCI) Neighborhood & Commercial Development Manager Arlevia Samuel, and Deputy Economic Development Director Steve Fontana.
The focus of their talk: what happens next, now that the city has replaced the car-centric, 1960s-era zoning code that used to govern Whalley Avenue between Howe Street and Pendleton Street with new regs designed to promote dense, walkable, and environmentally sustainable development.
“There is a lot of opportunity here,” Horton said about attracting investors and builders to Whalley. “The biggest challenge was the zoning. Now that burden’s been removed.”
Traffic filling the street outside Stop & Shop.
She said that Whalley residents used to refer to the avenue as the “utility corridor” because it had a little bit of everything that one needed to get by in a city: restaurants, grocery stores, hardware stores, clothing shops, doctor’s offices, the list goes on.
Whalley still has many of those services, she said, but they’re all too often surrounded by huge swaths of emptiness — in the form of surface parking lots and fenced-off, underdeveloped lots.
“Why not put a mixed-use development here instead of clustering them all downtown?” she asked.
That’s exactly the type of development this zoning change is designed to encourage, said Woods (pictured at right, with Samuel).
“We’re hoping that this helps spur some development. Whalley’s one avenue that can take some more density.”
Alders unanimously passed the zoning updates this January as the culmination of a years-long push by the City Plan department and LCI to use zoning to spur retail development along three commercial corridors that connect the city’s neighborhoods to downtown: Dixwell Avenue, Grand Avenue, and Whalley Avenue.
Whalley Avenue was the only stretch that wound up being rezoned—thanks in large part to Whalley residents like Horton working for years with city staff at Main Street Committee meetings, and then turning out at multiple public hearings this past summer and fall to voice their unequivocal support for the new regs and the developments they seek to attract.
Dixwell residents stalled their corridor’s rezoning out of a fear that the new laws as written would result in gentrification, while Wooster Square residents stalled the Grand Avenue rezoning out of a fear that it would see the construction of buildings too tall for the neighborhood.
Whalley, looking west from Winthrop.
Horton pointed out Tuesday night that Whalley Avenue is in a bit of a different spot from those two other “commercial corridor” neighborhoods. There are plenty of open spaces to build upon and the buildings that do exist are set back quite far from the street and the sidewalks, allowing for the possibility of taller developments that won’t necessarily produce a towering or overcrowding atmosphere.
So, Horton said, after years of deliberations, the new regs for Whalley Avenue are finally in place. “Now we’re here. Now what do we do?”
Woods recommended that the city and WEB neighbors convene a “neighborhood visioning workshop”: a meet-up that would give city staff an opportunity to describe in detail to Whalley residents what the rezoning just put into place, and that would give residents an opportunity to collectively imagine what they want their neighborhood to look like in the near, mid, and long-term future.
“A Huge Plot We Can Do A Lot With”
That brought Horton to the lot at the corner of Winthrop and Whalley. The long-empty, 0.45-acre parcel of land is privately owned by Mast Equities LLC, an Astoria, Queens-based holding company that bought the property for $199,109 in 2000.
“Is there anything the city can do to force him to do something with that property?” Horton asked. “It’s a huge plot we can do a lot with.”
And for decades, she said, the current owner, who’s name is not identified on the Secretary of the State’s business entity database, has refused to build anything there. Horton said he’s been holding out for a too-high sale price for years.
Woods, Fontana, and Samuel cautioned that the new zoning regulations only control what private landlords are allowed to build on a given parcel — it does not force their hand to build instead of leaving a property vacant, so long as they continue to pay property taxes and keep the property in safe condition.
“It’s a shame that he’s allowed to let that lot sit like that for so long,” Horton said.
“That’s the kind of ordinance the city needs,” Samuel added — one that truly discourages landlords from land banking.
That said, Samuel continued, the new zoning regulations might just pay off for this particular parcel.
She said she’s heard that “now that the zoning has changed, he’s interested in doing something with it.”
Cochran (pictured) said he hopes to see these recent zoning changes help spark an “attitude change” across the city about what this stretch of Whalley Avenue is truly like.
“This neighborhood is a real asset,” he said, in its racial and cultural and religious diversity, its accessibility to public transit and public parks, and its multitude of affordable commercial services.
“It’s not a downtrodden neighborhood where we have to beg developers” to invest.
He said he often hears neighbors talk about how they miss the four bakeries or two hardware stores that used to exist just a few blocks from where they live, but are now long closed. “How do we get a bakery here again?” he asked.
The survival of that type of retail really hinges upon density, Woods and Fontana said. “Shopping is the capstone of economic development,” Fontana said. “It’s not the foundation.” Thus the city’s interest in attracting new housing developers to build denser complexes to bring more people to an underserved area.
Fontana said the city also needs to focus on other safety and quality-of-life improvements—such as more crosswalks, traffic calming infrastructure, tree trimming, lighting — in order to lay the groundwork for a successful retail environment.
“Driven By Community”
Horton and Cochran and Avshalom-Smith (pictured) all agreed that, while those infrastructure improvements are being made, city staff and neighborhood residents all have to keep asking themselves: What type of investment is best for the residents of Whalley?
“It has to be driven by community,” Horton said.
Whalley is both a residential neighborhood as well as a commercial corridor, she said. The city and the neighborhood should do everything it can to make sure that the retail and commercial developments that come in the wake of this rezoning change support current residents’ needs in addition to attracting new foot and bike and car traffic.
“We’re not going to spend $4 on a cupcake or on a cup of coffee” when one of the busiest Dunkin’ Donuts outposts in the city is right across the street, she said. “You’ve got to be real with what the residents can support.”
Avshalom-Smith agreed. The city and neighbors shouldn’t focus only on attracting big new developments to Whalley — they should also pay special attention to the diversity and history that make this area unique, and a place residents have been proud to call home for generations.
“We can’t be the home of the Amistad and turn into what Washington D.C. looks like right now,” he said. “That was formerly the Chocolate City.”
“But it is not just a race thing in that way,” he continued. “This is one of the most diverse cities in the country. We draw strength from having conversations and finding new ways to get out of our old ways.”
Woods encouraged that type of thinking. She said that should be central to the pitch that the neighborhood makes to prospective developers.
“The market and the visioning can be that,” she said. “It can be: This is the kind of city we want to look like. Come join our city.”
Having just one of the commercial corridors rezoned at one time might help to focus developer attention on that strip. You might guess that the other vacant lots will more surely disappear as well, making the immediate neighborhood more attractive.
If the state let us levy a "vacant land tax" in areas re-zoned for development, that would help to raise money and fight against land banking. It would be important to specify that a surface parking lot does not exempt you from the tax (otherwise you will just get asphalt). A vacant land tax downtown would help along Chapel near Orange. Another option would be to allow the city to automatically declare unused land in re-developing areas as "blighted," so that it could be taken from owners (with market-value compensation) and re-sold to willing developers.