Blumenfeld Development Group has applied to the Town of North Hempstead to build a storage facility on a contaminated Roslyn Heights property with a vacant building.
The property on Jane Street would become an Extra Space Storage building nearly the same size as the currently vacant building: four stories and roughly 98,000 square feet, said Raffaela Petrasek, Blumenfeld Development Group’s director of community and government affairs.
The developer voluntarily applied for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s Brownfield Cleanup Program after finding soil gases. Its application was approved in June and Blumenfeld is now in the process of planning the cleanup with the department.
Preparing for the cleanup will be a monthslong process and residents will be notified about the project and timing of it before any work starts, Petrasek said.
“The site itself right now is in terrible condition,” she said. “It’s an abandoned facility. You have broken windows … We’re able to clean up a site that is a blight and hazard to the community.”
The property is zoned partly residential and partly industrial.
Residents have expressed concern about traffic impacts, but storage facilities are fairly low traffic compared with other commercial buildings, Petrasek said. There will be approximately 690 storage units and Blumenfeld anticipates only having 10 customer parking spaces filled at a time.
“Given the fact that it is a residential neighborhood, it is one of the best facilities that can go there because it is a less intensive use,” Petrasek said.
The new building requires 23 variances for characteristics such as height, floor area and signage, but many of them are characteristics that are already existing with the current building on the property, which would be torn down.
The application went before the Board of Zoning Appeals on June 19.
While the new building would be similar in size to the existing one, it would be set back farther from the neighboring railroad and park and will have more substantial buffers on two sides of the property.
The amount of landscaping would increase by 400 percent, and rather than bumping the edge of the property, the parking lot would have buffers of more than 20 feet, Patresek said.
The parking lot would have 31 spaces.
Blumenfeld has not yet purchased the property but is in contract to do so, Patresek said.
