Although that walk-in closet felt spacious during the apartment showing, the pile of boxes that form outside it on move-in day can reveal a skill in tetris that we never knew we had. Issues that most New Yorkers can agree on are far and few between, but lack of apartment space seems to be a grievance at the forefront. Sometimes though, tetris skills are no match for shrinking square footage.
A common remedy to this is a storage unit, or two, leading to storage facilities popping up all over the greater metro area, especially in Brooklyn, to meet resident demands.
Just this week, storage facility builder, Storage Deluxe, paid $42 million to acquire a development site at 74 Bogart Street, in East Williamsburg. Right off the Morgan L train stop, the development site is nearby Ichiran’s, Roberta’s, and other local businesses.
They are set to begin constructing a huge facility, reaching seven stories, and spanning 220,000 square feet—a task that is forecasted to amount to over $50 million in development costs. They plan construction to finish by fall 2021.
Because Storage Deluxe only develops facilities, CubeSmart will operate the building on a day-to-day level, seeking to serve the rapidly growing Williamsburg and Bushwick areas.
With storage spaces opening at increasing rates in New York City—with Bushwick alone, having an art storage space started development in December 2018 and a self-storage space opened in May 2017—locals and activists are growing uneasy on how this affects the community, at large.
Because these storage facilities take up large amounts of property that can be used for other productive means, that employ more community members, New York City rolled out regulation that restricts storage facility development in industrial areas neighboring Manhattan.
This is ultimately a smaller component in a larger plan to free-up real estate and create jobs for industrial and manufacturing needs, a growing legislation trend in other larger cities, such as Miami, San Francisco, and Charleston.
Regardless, Andrew Ehinger, an executive involved with acquisitions at Storage Deluxe, is focused on meeting storage demand, of which he thinks there is plenty of room to grow, told Crain’s, “With all the residential and commercial activity, there is a growing need for storage in Brooklyn. The rule of thumb in the storage business is that within a 3-mile radius there’s demand for 7 square feet of storage per person. In Brooklyn that adds up to millions of square feet of demand, and when you consider supply, there’s quite a deficit.”
Cover image courtesy of Google Maps.
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