‘A Stacked Gated Community’
To The Swarthmorean,
Since the introduction of the proposed condominium project at 102-104 and 110-112 Park Avenue at last month’s Swarthmore Borough Planning Commission meeting our community has struggled to make sense of the impact that this massive development will have on our civic life. The project is essentially a stacked gated community that includes a 40-80 car parking lot at grade and four stories of privately owned housing in a mid-rise tower above. The site will be “scraped,” and the new building will occupy a significant percentage of the buildable area in the Town Center (and an even higher percentage of the buildable area occupied by Historic Resources).
There are a multitude of reasons that this project will be detrimental to our community:
The building’s footprint and massing will dwarf every other structure in the village and its proposed height of 62’ will tower above the 2-3 story cornice line that is the defining feature of our Town Center. (See images of massing model to scale placed in Google Earth.)
“Scraping” the site will result in the loss of historic structures, open space, and trees.
“Scraping and building new” is inherently the least “green” way to build.
The businesses in our town that have weathered the pandemic (and continue to increase in number) will be dealt another blow by construction activity. Two will be shuttered and will not return. Others will be displaced.
40-80 vehicles will enter and exit through a single opening near the Amphitheater, Library, Borough Hall, Community Center, and Ballet Studio. This traffic, and delivery vehicles (FedEx, Amazon, Door Dash, etc.) serving the building, will threaten children, adults, and passing vehicles alike.
The project counters our shared aspiration to foster economic diversity and to provide the rental apartments that allowed many of us to settle in Swarthmore.
This “luxury condominium product” will be priced well beyond the $250,000-$450,000/unit cited in the 2030 Task Force report by U3 Partners.
I spoke recently with the Executive Director of Preservation Pennsylvania, and she referred to the proposed building as a project that is “sad” for Swarthmore. A Swarthmore resident who lives near the project site said in his remarks to the Planning Commission that ``our community will remember two periods: before and after the condo project.” Both are correct and if this project goes forward, we will regret all that we have lost, and how we have been changed for a long time to come. I urge the development team to re-envision this project so that it is in keeping with the aspirations that we share for ourselves and our community.
Christopher Kenney
Swarthmore
