♦ Read on for Sustainable Long Island Board President Ruth Negron-Gaines’ column in this month’s Networking Magazine on revitalizing vacant auto dealerships on Long Island:
Everyone benefits from walking; which is why you often hear so many Long Islanders promote walkable communities across the region. It improves health, cuts down on car fumes and added pollution, and keeps downtowns bustling. For quite some time, Long Island has been built for cars with no real planning efforts considering room for wider sidewalks, effective cross streets, and ways to ease traffic congestion. The need for community members to walk or bike as often as they can rather than drive a car is prominent, but what you may not realize is that need may be for an entirely different reason than the elements mentioned above.
Long Island is home to over 6,800 brownfields throughout Nassau and Suffolk County. These real or perceived contaminated sites can be abandoned gas stations, neglected warehouses, and even deserted dry cleaners. Surprisingly, a growing number of brownfield sites island-wide are now being identified as vacant auto-dealerships. The economic downturn has impacted the auto industry’s already long-standing problem of closing down dealerships and leaving fragments of blighted land and economic sinkholes in already struggling downtowns. It’s no longer just the car that provides challenges for Long Island communities, but the lot you drive off from as well.
However, there is hope. When properly dealt with, redevelopment of these areas can present prospects for successful community revitalization projects. Redeveloping closed dealerships that are in the heart of downtowns or bunch together along high visibility corridors can offer municipalities a chance to meet multiple goals, such as job creation, tax base expansion, and increased environmental protection. Engaging community members in an area-wide process to retrofit these closed dealerships can produce pedestrian oriented streets that enhance mobility as well as support a dense, vibrant mix of shops, offices, and residences.
Dealerships across the country are being redeveloped into community anchors that reinvigorate the neighborhood and stimulate the local economy. In Indianapolis, a 9,200 square foot empty Dodge dealership is being replaced with freestanding buildings occupied by retail stores and restaurants. In California, a once closed dealership has been transformed into an arts hub of Nevada County; a 21,000 square foot multi-use facility including a 300 seat theater, two art galleries, and additional classroom space. Right here on Long Island, Connecticut-based Trammell Crow Residential, has plans to redevelop the former Hempstead Ford property on Franklin Avenue into a five- story apartment complex with about 150 market-rate units.
The parkways, highways, and main streets these dealerships are often located on would see significant improvement if redevelopment occurred as well. The idea of walkable communities would come alive; allowing the expansion of transportation choices such as walking, bicycling and the use of mass transit. This effort would enhance Long Island communities by making the area accessible to everyone despite age, mobility, or income.
Long Island—one of the oldest American suburbs with both inner and outer ring suburbs—has dealt with a range of smart growth issues ranging from brownfields, NIMBYism, and car-dependence. We must tackle these challenges in order to bring these vacant car dealerships back to economic productivity. The strong desire to recycle stretches of land for needed, retail, industrial, medical, or affordable housing purposes, only grows stronger when passing by a literal junkyard of old show rooms, service stations, underground fuel storage tanks, and ghosts of pesky salesmen.
