WHAT’S GOING THERE Bayberry Town Center, self-storage coming
Two warehouses delayed for traffic concerns
Spring is here again.
That means baseball, of course. (And we tried a lot of food at the ballpark, for better and for worse.) It means flowers, and fresh produce, and Blue crabs and beach traffic.
But it also means construction season is officially in swing. The development pipeline is appropriately filling in with more and more projects proposed, approved or rejected each week in Delaware, including some warehouse and shopping center projects.
In a busy-as-dickens session on March 26, the New Castle County Council approved a long-awaited project that will finally bring a supermarket to the planned community of Bayberry. As expected, the council unanimously gave consent to the long-gestating Bayberry Town Center project, at the Jamison Corner and Boyds Corner roads.
This will mean 145 new town homes, at least 30,000 square feet of office space, and nearly 250,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, including a Weis Markets grocery store — the first in New Castle County.
But the Land Use Committee and council agendas are packed with still more projects, and a lot of land use activity as developers fight to get their projects approved in time to start construction in the early warm season — and as other long-proposed projects get going.
One warehouse project is approved. Two warehouse projects are delayed
Amid a local uproar against warehouse projects that might cause extra truck traffic — which caused New Castle County Councilman Penrose Hollins to publicly worry at the March 26 council meeting that the county is becoming the “warehouse capital of the Northeast” — the County Council did find a version of warehouse construction they like. That is to say: self-storage. Sentinel Self Storage received a unanimous OK to build 80,000 square feet of self-storage along an awkward sliver of a parcel in St. Georges Hundred, trapped between Dupont Parkway and Route 1 at Hyetts Corner Road. The address is 2229 DuPont Parkway.
The self-storage will comprise 32 buildings with self-storage units of various sizes, with each building including about 2,400 square feet. The site will also include a “flex warehouse space,” with a small, single 28,000-square-foot structure suitable for mid-sized business use.
But amid a busy docket, one more warehouse proposal was tabled — and another stayed on the table.
Councilman Jea Street tabled plans for a 100,000-square-foot bulk-storage warehouse planned near the port, on a parcel that was already being used for bulk storage, including salt. In a March 19 Land Use meeting, Street said he’d previously been overruled after asking for additional oversight on a Fed Ex project years ago, and he’s never heard the end of it after numerous problems with truck traffic. He won’t act hastily here, he said.
The 527 Terminal Ave site owned by Cheyenne Properties, which currently acts as a holding area for shipments from the port, would receive a 108,000square-foot warehouse that would provide dry storage. The project engineer, representing Port Contractors Inc., said truck traffic mainly occurs on private roads, and public traffic would not be greatly affected by warehouse construction.
Street said he’d rather hold off on believing them. Instead, he sent the project back to the Department of Land Use, and potentially DelDOT, for a longer look at possible traffic effects on residential neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the Logisticenter at Jamison Corner — a proposed 2.3 millionsquare-foot warehouse project and political hot potato that’s drawn ire from residents of the fast-sprawling suburbs near Middletown — remains firmly affixed to the legislative table, and was not considered this month.
Avenue North mostly leased, as law firm Morris James plans to leave Wilmington headquarters
In a move first noted by the Philadelphia Business Journal, Wilmington litigation firm Morris James declared last month that they’ll be exiting their downtown Wilmington offices in 2025, taking over the first six floors of the office tower on Delle Donne’s massive Avenue North project, outside city limits in North Wilmington.
Morris James will maintain a satellite office in Wilmington, near the courthouse.
The Avenue North project, whose construction is well underway, encompasses a 12-story office tower, 50,000 square feet of retail and more than 300 residences. The office building is now more than three-quarters leased, the PBJ reported.
Nearly half of that office space, 43,000 square feet, will now be occupied by Morris James, who said in a February statement that they had also considered remaining at their current Wilmington headquarters. Their decision to move to Avenue North was clinched by Avenue North’s “distinct blend of amenities, superior building quality, available space, and strategic geography make it the ideal setting for our continued growth.”
This underlines a post-pandemic “flight to quality,” as top tier legal and financial firms increasingly flock to newer, spiffier and more amenitized spaces — but also amounts to a blow for Wilmington’s downtown, as Bank of America also announced plans this month to eventually move 500 jobs out of its remaining Bracebridge building at 1100 French St. in Wilmington.
Want to know more about what’s coming to Delaware? Contact reporter Matthew Korfhage at mkorfhage@delawareonline.com. Also, join our Facebook group What’s Going There in Delaware and sign up for our newsletter at bit.ly/3cYSfqW.
JERRY HABRAKEN, DELAWARE NEWS JOURNAL