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FeedA Tale of Two Town Centers
In two very different areas—tony Greenville and bucolic Townsend—two very similar stories of development and opposition are playing out. Do they signify progress?
(page 1 of 4)
Not in My Back Yard
(Even if it Was Approved Before My Neighborhood was Built)
The Gale family has lived in Townsend Village II, a paint-by-numbers spiral of 100 4,000-square-foot homes just south of Middletown, for just a year. Everything in their community, still under construction, seems to speak of the American Dream. Maple saplings will one day grow to shade the streets. Basketball hoops spring from blacktop driveways on Esch Street. A pink tricycle is parked in an open garage on Karins Boulevard.
Standing in his yard, Brian Gale stops jabbing his shovel into the ground to gesture toward the swath of neighborhoods that surround him. “You look around here,” he says, waving his hand, “and almost every house has small children.”
Less than 200 yards from his home is a barren spot slated to become The Shoppes of Townsend. Gale is opposed. So is his next-door neighbor, Martine Adams, who leaves her kitchen to come out and join Gale’s conversation.
“Our concerns as residents run the whole gamut of concerns that every parent has, such as our children’s safety, sharing a common intersection,” Gale says, “not to mention that there tends to be a bad element that gravitates to strip malls of this kind.”
But most of all, the opposition is about traffic.
Townsend Town Council gave preliminary approval to The Shoppes of Townsend on July 2. The project will include two 6,500-square-foot restaurants, a 6,400-square-foot convenience store and gas station, a 23,000-square-foot retail pad, a 22,800-square-foot retail-office building, a 4,000-square-foot bank, a 9,000-square-foot day-care facility and parking lots.
And even though it’s the type of project some area residents have wanted for years, it’s one that hasn’t gone over well with others.
“We don’t want to see an influx of unfamiliar people, increased traffic, pollution from a gas station, and no place for our kids to play,” Adams says. “This is the eroding of the dream that we have for our families.”
At Triple Bea’s Deli and Restaurant on Main and Commerce, owner Beatrice Wyatt has greeted her frequent customers with small talk and home cooked food for the past three years. A lifelong resident of Townsend, Wyatt used to swim as a child in Silver Lake near St. Andrew’s School. It was a bucolic existence, so the Shoppes of Townsend proposal is, to her, the latest in a series of attempts to destroy the character of the area she once played in.
“These developers are forgetting one thing, and that is that Townsend is a small town,” Wyatt says. “They’re trying to weed us out and take our country look away. It’s bad enough that all of the developments are here, but I promise you, this project will make Townsend look tacky. If you want tacky, drive eight minutes up the road to Middletown.”
Opposition to the Shoppes of Townsend echoed Wyatt’s feelings on June 4, when more than 75 Townsend residents attended a town council meeting to voice their concerns to a presentation by Karins Engineering, the local engineering firm that planned the project.
Attendees told council that the proposed site would trigger a staggering increase in commercial development, like that along the Del. 299 corridor between Middletown and Odessa. Residents opposed the plan specifically on their fear of increased traffic, a hazard for the many children of Townsend Village II who use the bus stop at the entrance on Del. 71.
The designers have met some conditions, including creation of a visual buffer between the retail and residential areas, increasing the number of tree lines that separate the proposed complex from Townsend Village II, and installation of a traffic signal at the entrance to the community, pending approval by DelDOT.
Page 2: Not in My Back Yard (Even if it Was Approved Before My Neighboorhood Was Built), continued...
