Northeast Philadelphia’s Bustleton neighborhood is getting a new warehouse at 1685 and 1719 Fulmer St., a wooded area that was previously the site of a townhouse proposal.
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The over 123,000-square-foot warehouse proposal comes from Georgia-based developer Stonemont Financial Group and the global asset manager Nuveen.
The 50-foot-tall warehouse would be built on land zoned for industrial uses, so it does not require zoning approvals. It is subject to community feedback only because it is large enough to trigger consideration by the city’s advisory-only Civic Design Review committee.
In January, the Fulmer Street property was purchased for $2.75 million by a limited liability company associated with Nuveen’s industrial investment team in Dallas.
The lot was sold by an LLC associated with Warminster-based County Builders, a suburban developer that hoped to build 60 townhouses or 48 duplexes on the wooded site.
“I’m disappointed the residential developer decided not to go forward with this project,” said Jack O’Brien, president of the Greater Bustleton Civic League, who planned to support County Builders’ plans at the city’s Zoning Board of Adjustment. “The community greatly prefers residential over additional industrial.”
But while County Builders’ project had been embraced by the Greater Bustleton Civic League, a group of neighbors who live close to the site fiercely opposed the residential project during tense community meetings.
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“A small group of immediate neighbors were vocally opposed to basically any development, but they were especially opposed to the residential development,” O’Brien said. “And their comeback [to the residential builders] was we’ll take industrial. So, that’s what we’re left with.”
When presenting the proposal to the Greater Bustleton Civic League, the warehouse developers told residents that they do not yet have a tenant for the proposed building but are marketing the location.
The architect for the 1685 and 1719 Fulmer St. warehouse development is Ware Malcomb, a national design firm. A request for comment from the project’s zoning attorney was not returned.
Recent years have seen a burst of new warehouse projects in Northeast Philadelphia, which contains large tracts of developable land. Much of that property has been zoned industrial and saw little interest from builders for decades.
But as the recent surge in ecommerce and other kinds of new, nonmanufacturing industrial uses have grown, more of these properties have been seeing increased interest from developers.
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