City lawmakers said this week that they will push to put limits on last-mile package delivery warehouses as part of Mayor Eric Adams’ business-focused rewrite of zoning laws.
The distribution facilities, run by companies like Amazon and UPS, have proliferated in recent years amid the rise of ecommerce. That has led to traffic and pollution problems in several semi-industrial outer-borough neighborhoods like Red Hook, Brooklyn and Hunts Point in the Bronx, where fleets of trucks now fill the streets with what critics say is little regulation.
City Council members see a chance for reform in the mayor’s City of Yes for Economic Opportunity plan, which faced its first hearing on Monday ahead of an eventual vote by the council in the coming weeks. The plan currently includes 18 different zoning changes that would generally loosen rules about where businesses can operate and how large they can grow — but lawmakers said Monday that the package would be incomplete without tackling last-mile facilities.
“The city needs to rethink comprehensively how packages are being delivered to homes, and the concentration of large packaging warehouses in certain neighborhoods,” said Kevin Riley, a Bronx councilman and chair of the zoning subcommittee.
More than half of the 51-member council have signed onto a letter calling on the Adams administration to consider requiring a special permit for last-mile facilities — adding a new regulatory hurdle, like the permits that are now required for all new hotels. Lawmakers also want the city to define last-mile facilities in the zoning code, since their current hazy status has made it hard for residents to even track where they are being built.
The charge is being led by Brooklyn council member Alexa Avilés, whose district includes six last-mile facilities in various stages of construction in Red Hook — some spanning up to 1.1 million square feet — and another few in Sunset Park. Despite the facilities’ obvious impact in the form of air pollution and truck traffic, Avilés’ constituents have only been able to track their spread by reading the real estate publications that cover each new warehouse sale, she said.
“The counting has been left to the community,” Avilés said in an interview. “The impacts here are basically hundreds to potentially thousands of trucks additionally a day, in a manufacturing district that is already mixed with residential.”
Avilés said she had tried to persuade the City Planning department to include last-mile reforms when it was initially drawing up the zoning package last year, to no avail. City Planning Director Dan Garodnick seemed somewhat receptive during Monday’s hearing, agreeing that the facilities needed to be regulated.
“Last-mile facilities are a challenging topic for us as a matter of policy,” said Garodnick, while not committing to any reforms. “I think it is time for us to work on a solution here … whether in zoning or through other programs.”
But City Hall spokesman William Fowler downplayed the possibility on Tuesday, saying in a statement that a new special-permit rule “is not legally allowed to be added to the proposal” since its scope has already been set in stone. Fowler said the Adams administration takes the facilities’ effects seriously and is “committed” to addressing them elsewhere.
Avilés noted that a much-anticipated map of environmental hazards released by the Adams administration last week mentions last-mile warehouses as a contributor to poor air quality.
Besides worsening truck traffic, she noted that the facilities are often based on the waterfront yet lack the infrastructure needed to load goods onto boats — a missed opportunity in a moment where the city wants to ship more products along its waterways as a climate-friendly alternative to trucking.
Lawmakers have recently taken other steps to try to rein in last-mile facilities. Avilés spearheaded a law passed in November that will require the Transportation Department to redesign the city’s truck routes with the aim of reducing pollution, especially in neighborhoods with large numbers of warehouses. Another law will require the city to designate “heavy-use thoroughfares” in each borough and install air-quality monitors along those roads.
Adams’ City of Yes business plan got a fairly friendly reception from the council on Tuesday, with lawmakers largely agreeing that the city’s zoning code, written in 1961, needs updating to reflect modern-day industries. The administration’s proposals include allowing “clean” manufacturers like 3-D printers and breweries to operate in regular commercial districts, letting life-science labs expand more easily near hospitals, and making it easier to open a business in a vacant storefront.
Some lawmakers objected to provisions that would permit more commercial uses in residential areas, such as allowing businesses on the upper floors of mixed-use buildings and creating a process to allow corner stores in residential districts.
“A lot of these changes will adversely — or at least they feel that they will adversely — impact these bedroom communities, heavily residential communities,” said Kamillah Hanks, a Staten Island Democrat.
The administration’s package will face a final council vote by late May. The present debate may pale in comparison to the fight that looms later this year over the mayor’s housing plan, dubbed City of Yes for housing opportunity, which would change zoning to allow for more residential density nearly everywhere in the city — a notion likely to meet resistance in low-rise neighborhoods wary of new development.
A third City of Yes plan, focused on changing zoning to enable more climate-friendly construction, was approved in December.
Nick Garber , 2024-04-09 18:46:19
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