Home Depot’s plans to build a “small” 100,000 s.f. store on 64th street in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, got nailed by area residents this week, who said the store was too big, and would make congested traffic in the area even worse. Developer Andrew Kohen told the Daily News that the Home Depot store would come with 400,000 s.f. residential (240 units of housing) and office space on a former Long Island Rail Road railyard. Kohen said his work has “improved the neighborhood one building at a time, and I want to continue that work.” Home Depot already has four stores in Brooklyn. Kohen needs to get a zoning variance for the plan, and neighbors don’t want him to get it. They say the entrance and exits to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is already a nightmare. “I guess it bothers me a little bit that it’s going to be so close to home,” said one neighbor. “Sixth Ave. is a nightmare as it is, and the entrance to the Verrazano is over there, which is horrible,” Residents also complained that the area is one of Brooklyn’s few remaining manufacturing areas.
Residents in Red Hook, New York recently lost a heated battle to Swedish furniture maker IKEA. Big box retailers are crawling all over Brooklyn, taking former industrial sites and turning them into retail suburbia. Residents often have no money to fight the developers, and are unable to hire experts to present their concerns and legally represent them.
