Blake St. Office-To-Apts. Plan Advances

A plan to build another 144 new apartments in Westville Village moved ahead, amidst praise for a densifying west side and concerns about pedestrian safety on Blake Street.

That was the result of Wednesday night’s latest regular monthly meeting of the City Plan Commission. The four-hour-long virtual meeting took place online via Zoom.

The local land-use commissioners voted unanimously in support of two applications related to a Brooklyn-based developer’s plans to build out 144 new apartments at 446A Blake St, which is currently home to a surface parking lot and a former factory building-turned-office complex.

Those votes included the approval of a coastal site plan and the recommended approval of a zoning ordinance text amendment to modify Planned Development District (PDD) 103 to increase the total number of allowed residential dwelling units in the PDD from 293 to 437.

Those new apartments, in turn, would come from the residential conversion of the existing office building at 446A Blake St., as well as the construction of two new apartment buildings on either side of the current structure. 

The project would set aside 7.5 percent of the proposed new 144 units at rents affordable to tenants earning up to 80 percent of the area median income (AMI), which currently translates to $89,400 for a family of four.

The 1.89-acre site at 446A Blake St. is owned by a holding company controlled by Tom Gelman and Yair Barda of Brooklyn, as well as by a California-based company called Moonars LLC. (The PDD already includes 293 market-rate apartments at the adjacent Wintergreen at Westville complex, which has the separate street address of 400 Blake St., and which is owned by a different company.)

“I think this is another real opportunity to engage Westville and Westville Village,” local attorney Jim Segaloff said in support of the project.

“I’m convinced that getting people out on the street, living in the area, getting involved in the retail, it’s all a good thing, if it’s done in the proper way.” This project represents just that, he said. ​“There’s going to be amenities, landscaping, and instead of seeing a parking lot there, it will be a very attractive and upscale building that will just be transformational for our community, and particularly for Westville.”

Wednesday’s favorable votes by the City Plan Commission don’t represent the last needed approval for this 144-apartment plan.

The proposed PDD amendment now heads back to the Board of Alders for a committee hearing and a final debate and vote by the full city legislature. 

If the alders approve changing the underlying zoning to allow for 144 new apartments, then the developer must come back to the City Plan Commission for a detailed review of what Segaloff described as the ​“classic site plan issues” — such as parking, lighting, stormwater management, traffic flow, apartment sizes, building height, and other zoning-related requirements.

This project represents just the latest in a handful of large residential developments underway or coming soon to this stretch of Westville. Right next door, the local megalandlord Ocean Management is currently constructing 129 new apartments at the site of the former 500 Blake Street Cafe. And a few blocks away, a Branford-based developer working with local investors Mendy Paris and Sim Levenhartz recently unveiled plans to knock down two commercial buildings at Whalley Avenue and Fitch Street and construct in their stead 245 new waterfront apartments.

Density Vs. Traffic On Blake

During the public hearing portion of Wednesday night’s meeting, Westville Alder Adam Marchand pressed Segaloff, local architect Sam Gardner, engineer Ray Paier, and traffic consultant Steve Mitchell on how this project might affect pedestrian safety on Blake Street.

“This scale of development, I think, would have many benefits, but one of the challenges would be more pedestrian traffic on the local sidewalk system,” Marchand said.

That in theory is a great thing. But ​“Blake Street is pretty scary” right now, he said. ​“People drive fast. It’s also an area where there’s a long queue, people get impatient with the lights, and they blow through the intersection to not miss the cycle,” particularly at the intersection of Blake and Valley Streets. He pointed out how easy it is to walk to Westville Village on the sidewalk from 446A Blake St., but how difficult it can be to cross Blake Street to get to the park and playgrounds on the other side of the street.

“I worry about having lots of families in the area all of a sudden dealing with a scary Blake Street,” particularly when it comes to fast-driving cars on the block, he said.

Segaloff and Mitchell said that, in their initial review of the proposed project’s impacts on local traffic patterns, they focused on vehicular traffic — and found that the ​“net amount of traffic would actually decrease” with the planned conversion of commercial to residential use at 446A Blake St.

“There is no question that the focus was primarily on vehicular traffic” in this initial review of the project’s traffic impact, Mitchell said. ​“It is true that we did not necessarily focus on pedestrians at this step.” But that doesn’t mean that the development team won’t focus on pedestrian impacts as this project advances to the Board of Alders and then, pending approvals there, returns to the City Plan Commission for detailed site plan review.

He said that ​“pedestrian beacons” and ​“other traffic calming measures are not off the table by any means. They are all things that need to be looked into.” Mitchell also said that the developer’s preliminary study of car speeds on the block ​“found that the speeds were not excessive” on that stretch of Blake Street.

He also pointed out that he 500 Blake St. development project should see upgrades to the traffic signal at Valley and Blake ​“to add a pedestrian phase there.” That may address some of the concerns raised by Marchand Wednesday night, he said.

Marchand encouraged the applicant to focus on pedestrian impacts as this project moves forward. He promised to raise these very concerns again during the aldermanic committee hearing on the PDD amendment. ​“It’s just an important concern,” he said.

During the commissioners’ deliberations on the 144-apartment proposal, Marchand returned to his concerns about pedestrian safety — and his praise for a densifying Westville — as he urged his colleagues to support the project.

“I want to speak in favor of the process of having more residential density down by Westville Village,” he said. ​“That’s the starting place where I’m at. But we want to make sure it’s done well.”

He reiterated his concerns about pedestrian safety issues on Blake Street, particularly in regards to kids accessing the playgrounds, baseball fields, trails, and public park across the street from the planned new apartment complex.

He also praised the developer for preserving the existing brick office building, which ​“harkens to a former industrial era” when factories operated on the river in Westville. ​“Having elements that refer back to that time add value and charm tot he project.”

With that, he moved to approve the coastal site plan application and to recommend that the Board of Alders approve the PDD amendment, and he and his colleagues voted unanimously in support.