Bushwick’s industrial past may have a second lease on life.
On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito unveiled a 10-point action plan to add more industrial jobs in the City and modernize its industrial policy. The plan includes a fund for new manufacturing space and, more contentiously, a stricter permitting process for hotels planned in industrial zones.
Bushwick, along with neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Long Island City, are labeled as Industrial Business Zones (IBZs) and are therefore protected under de Blasio’s plan. Several insiders have said hotel developers will likely have to go through local business owners and community groups in order to begin construction on new hotels.
In May, we reported news of two potential hotels coming to Bushwick and East Williamsburg: a 9-story hotel at 25 Stewart Street and a 7-story hotel at 71 White Street. No new developments on these hotels have been reported since.
Speaking to Yimby, Leah Archibald, who works to protect 10,000 industrial businesses in North Brooklyn as executive director of Evergreen, pointed to a hotel in East Williamsburg’s manufacturing zone that might suffer because it’s next to a bustling manufacturing operation.
“There’s a hotel going in across from Boar’s Head Foods [on Bogart Street], and they have 600 trucks,” she explained. “They run 24 hours a day, they start loading up their trucks at 4 am. If there was some sort of permit and community oversight process, that would’ve been caught before the pilings struck the ground.”
While new hotel construction might be at a stand-still, plans for office spaces in Bushwick and East Williamsburg continue to grow, with The Jefferson and 95 Evergreen currently in the works.