By the end of the year, the massive Claymont redevelopment project named First State Crossing should have its first two pieces in place.
The first will be a long-awaited commuter train station, but the second won’t be the previously announced four-story office building. Nor will it be a mixed-use residential and retail project near the train station. Those plans are on hold right now, but groundbreaking for a 358,000-square-foot distribution center is less than two months away.
Commercial Development Company (CDC), which purchased the 420-acre former steel mill site in 2015, first announced its redevelopment plans in late 2019. At the time, some longtime residents hailed the plans as the biggest thing to occur in this community in Delaware’s northeast corner since, well, the opening of Worth Steel in 1918.
Those plans of the St. Louis, Missouri-based developer called for lots of things – completion of the train station, office buildings, some retail space, apartments, townhouses, even a park and maybe a marina – but, as has happened with many projects because of the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the timeline and the sequencing of its components needed some adjustments.
“It’s a unique site, a former steel mill,” said Richard Hall, general manager of New Castle County’s Land Use Department. “We want it to be a vibrant place for mixed-use development. We’re starting to see some of that now.”
Touting “high demand for ready-to-occupy logistics facilities,” CDC Executive Vice President Stephen Collins announced on January 12 that CDC had sold a 28-acre parcel to First Industrial Realty Trust, a Chicago-based owner and developer of industrial real estate. Site preparation is now underway and Collins said First Industrial expects to break ground in March and have the warehouse ready for occupancy in October. (Collins declined to disclose the purchase price, but the Delaware Business Times reported it as nearly $11.5 million.)
The warehouse will be built on a wedge-shaped parcel bordered by Philadelphia Pike on the east, Naamans Road on the north and Interstate 495 on the south and west. First Industrial is building the warehouse on speculation. It hopes to find one to four tenants attracted to the building’s 68 dock door positions, 40-foot ceilings, LED lighting and parking for 241 trailers.
Access to the building will be from Philadelphia Pike along Transit Center Drive, a new roadway now under construction.
“It’s going to be a pretty good-looking building, but not as nice as an office,” Collins said.
The warehouse has received all the needed approvals from New Castle County. All that’s needed now is a pre-construction meeting and securing building permits, said Janet Vinc, land development planning manager in the Land Use Department.
Also, Collins said CDC is close to announcing plans for a second warehouse just west of the first one. It would be closer to the merge of Interstates 95 and 495 and access would be from Naamans Road, across from the nearly vacant Tri-State Mall, where another developer, New York-based KPR Properties, is planning yet another warehouse on the 41-acre site.
Both Collins and KPR representatives have tried to minimize concerns that the sites would bring traffic congestion, saying that much of the activity at distribution centers typically occurs in the evening or early morning, not during commuter rush hours.
Brett Saddler, executive director of the Claymont Renaissance Development Corporation, noted that many area residents had hoped to see more retail and residential on the former steel mill and mall sites but these distribution centers “will bring hundreds of new jobs to the Claymont area.”
Adjusting priorities
With plans for the warehouses nearly settled, now it’s time for Claymont residents, and the developers, to turn their attention to land on the east side of Philadelphia Pike, Saddler said, “to the train station, the offices, the residential, the park.”
Before COVID hit, the east side of the pike had been the redevelopment priority.
Construction of the train station, about a half-mile north of the existing station, has moved ahead steadily. The commuter complex, named in December in honor of retired state Sen. Harris B. McDowell, a longtime advocate of mass transportation, is expected to be completed this fall, Saddler said.
But other pieces of CDC’s master plan felt the impact of the pandemic.
The four-story office building with an adjacent parking garage near the train station had been first on the developer’s timeline.
“We did have a prospect [to lease the building] but COVID put the nail in the coffin,” Collins said. “Now companies are trying to figure out how many of their employees will be working in the office, how many will be working from home.”
When the office market rebounds, “we’ll be ready to build,” Collins said. Most of the steps in the county’s Land Use process have been completed but plans for the building have not been recorded, Vinc said.
When the office building project stalled, CDC shifted its attention to residential, submitting to the county a concept plan for the mixed-use residential-retail project between Philadelphia Pike and the railroad line. The proposal remains in a preliminary “exploratory plan” stage with the Land Use Department, where reviewers have raised concerns about “the lack of integration of uses,” with the residential and commercial portions “separated into silos,” Vinc said.
As movement slowed on the office and residential fronts, CDC “needed to show a return on its investment,” Saddler said, and pivoted to construction of the warehouses – the latest in a countywide trend to develop sites convenient to interstate highways and rail lines for the still-growing logistics industry.
After the details for the second warehouse are worked out, Collins said CDC will turn its focus to the projects between Philadelphia Pike and the Delaware River.
Development for the long haul
Projects the size of First State Crossing can easily take a decade or more to complete, Collins said. One rule of thumb he uses is construction of about 100 housing units a year, and the overall plan now calls for a total of about 1,300 townhouses and apartments.
Refining the plans for the mixed-use residential-commercial piece to gain county approvals would be the next priority, with Collins hoping to break ground for the 300 apartment units in the first quarter of 2024. Neither Collins nor Saddler is certain how the retail portion of this segment will evolve. A convenience store, like a Wawa or Royal Farms, could fit at the corner of Philadelphia Pike and Transit Center Drive, Saddler said. Other possibilities, Collins said, include small restaurants and a grocery store.
“It’s not going to be a mall – more like a strip shopping center,” Collins said.
In any event, Collins and Saddler said, the retail will follow as the first apartment units near completion. “Businesses want to see some rooftops before they commit,” Collins said.
To the east of the railroad tracks, facing the river, plans call for even more housing, about 700 townhouses and 300 apartments, resembling Darley Green, the successful nearby townhouse and apartment community whose opening in 2009 breathed new life into Claymont.
“Multifamily [housing] is hot right now,” Collins said. With these units within walking distance of the train station, he hopes they will prove appealing to professionals commuting to work in downtown Philadelphia.A riverfront playground
Between the river and the large residential area, the First State Crossing master plan calls for a park whose features could include an amphitheater, event spaces, a wildlife habitat, athletic fields, a dog park and nature trails for pedestrians and bicyclists. The concept under consideration was developed nearly two years ago by a team of University of Delaware students.
“It’s still very tentative. There’s no signed agreement,” said Tracy Surles, general manager of the county’s Public Works Department, but the approach currently envisioned is that the developer “would fund and construct the improvements, and then the county would take over and maintain it.”
“The plan is still a little fluid,” Collins said.
The final piece of First State Crossing is a marina that could be built at the north end of the park, just below where Naamans Creek flows into the river. “That’s a few years down the road,” Collins said, and some dredging would be required to permit boats to dock there.
It is likely that the marina, if built, would be privately owned and operated, and not part of the county’s park system, Surles said.
“The county does not have a lot of waterfront,” Surles said. “This is a very unique site – a great opportunity for the county and the state.”
