In many downtowns across New Jersey, surface parking lots are being removed to make way for new residential or mixed-use development, creating more walkable and transit-friendly business districts. This reverses a decades-long trend in the state, where suburbs and exurbs with miles of roads lined with single-family homes have been created.
As stores closed in the downtowns and buildings were demolished to make way for parking lots, malls and shopping centers sprung up miles away that could only be reached by vehicle. Now, a parking lot in Bloomfield is set to be replaced by a mixed-use building-marking another step in Bloomfield’s ongoing renaissance.
According to a legal notice from the Township of Bloomfield, the parking lots most recently run by the Bloomfield Parking Authority at 2-6 and 26-34 Farrand Street, which stretches north alongside the New Jersey Transit tracks from Washington Street, are going to be removed and replaced with a new six-story building.
The bottom two floors of the building will be a parking garage with 314 spaces, while the upper four floors will contain 176 apartments. The notice states that a “2,700 square foot common area for use by either the public or residents of the development” will also be included inside.
According to Bloomfield Life, 48 of the units will be studio apartments, 84 will contain one bedroom, and 44 will contain two bedrooms, and the parking garage, part of which will be available for public use, will be run by the Bloomfield Parking Authority.
The project was granted Preliminary and Final Major Site Plan approval by the Bloomfield Planning Board back in May, and the decision was memorialized by the Board during its June 13th meeting. The developer, Lackawanna Station Urban Renewal, LLC, was registered back in January, according to the New Jersey Division of Revenue and Enterprise Services.
The property is located within the Bloomfield Center Redevelopment Zone, just yards from the recently completed Avalon Bloomfield Station mixed-use development. Residents of the new building will be situated within close walking distance of the Bloomfield Public Library, the businesses in the community’s downtown, the main Bloomfield Train Station, which offers service to Newark, Hoboken, Montclair, and New York, and DeCamp and New Jersey Transit buses to communities across the region.
