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Coastal Resilience Design Studio students created conceptual plan that helped Claymont receive $1.5 million grant

Throughout its history, Claymont, Delaware, has had a special connection to the waters of the Delaware River. Located near the mouth of Naamans Creek in the northeast corner of Delaware, Claymont has been occupied since at least 1200 A.D., according to the Claymont Historical Society. The creek is named after the chief of the Lenape, the Indigenous people who inhabited present-day Delaware, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and Hudson Valley, New York.

But when two major highway projects — I-95 and I-495 — began in the early 1960s, Claymont suddenly found itself separated from the water.

Reconnecting Claymont to the water, and infusing the census-designated place with more green spaces, has been a refrain from the community that Delaware House Representative Larry Lambert has heard frequently — both from growing up and living in the community and serving on the board of the Claymont Renaissance Development Corporation (CRDC).

So when a 300-plus-acre site near the river that was once home to a steel mill and is now owned by the Commercial Development Company opened up for a redevelopment plan, Lambert said that getting a riverfront park was one of the community’s main priorities.

“One thing that has always been consistent when we got community input on what they would like to see [in the area] is a riverfront park,” Lambert said. “Getting a riverfront park is us delivering to the community what the community asked for.”

Having grown up in Claymont, Lambert said he remembers hearing stories from older residents about how they used to go down to the water and fish. When he was a teenager himself, Lambert and his friends found creative ways to navigate from Claymont down to the river.

“You can clearly see when you go down there that at some point, the community likely did have access to this riverfront,” Lambert said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to return Claymont back to what it once was.”

In order to get funding for a riverfront park, however, Claymont needed a conceptual design that could show off the park’s potential, including social, economic and environmental benefits.

That’s where the University of Delaware and students from the Coastal Resilience Design Studio (CRDS) stepped in.

Using the former steel site as a starting point for the park, and using the community’s input gathered from the North Claymont Area Master Plan, which held a series of three community workshops conducted in 2017 by the Wilmington Metropolitan Area Planning Council (WILMAPCO), the students in the CRDS were able to put together a Riverfront Park Conceptual Plan for Claymont.

Through Lambert, that design eventually found its way to the Bezos Family Foundation and helped secure a $1.5 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund’s Greening American Cities initiative.

Brett Saddler, executive director of the CRDC, was emphatic in his praise of the design put together by the CRDS students and said that without the design, it might not have been possible to get the Bezos grant.

“We were looking for a way to put together a concept design for the park, but we didn’t have the resources to hire a design firm,” Saddler said. “Unless you have a visual representation to show how we’re going to make this happen, the idea is not going to get any traction. It’s just going to be this vague idea floating out there in the ether.”

Philip Barnes, assistant professor and policy scientist at UD’s Joseph R. Biden Jr., School of Public Policy and Administration’s Institute for Public Administration who also serves on the board of the CRDC, suggested to Saddler that the CRDS might be able to put together a plan. Saddler said when he received the students’ final project, he was impressed by how professional it looked.

“When I got a copy of the draft, I was floored,” Saddler said. “I thought it was as good as anything that we would have spent $50,000 on — minimum — for a concept plan from a professional design firm. We’re ready to hit the ground running to continue fundraising, and we have that leg up because we have a great plan done by the UD students as a concept.”

The plan aimed to create a space that provided recreational opportunities for the community, such as riverfront access, trails, sports fields, an event space and a marina. This plan would also help to enrich Claymont’s regional profile and offer resilient solutions to ensure the longevity and vibrancy of the development in the face of a changing environment.

Jules Bruck, an affiliated faculty member at UD and director of the University of Florida’s School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, said the CRDS was happy to partner with the CRDC and other partners involved with the project, including Delaware Greenways, the East Coast Greenway Alliance and Delaware Sea Grant (DESG). In partnering with the East Coast Greenway Alliance, the plan looked to create connectivity with the East Coast Greenway, which consists of 3,000 miles of trails from Maine to Florida across 15 states.

The CRDS, a partnership between the Delaware Sea Grant College Program, the University of Delaware Sustainable Coastal Communities Initiative and the University of Delaware Landscape Architecture Program, was led by Bruck, DESG coastal communities development specialist Ed Lewandowski, and Ben Muldrow of Arnett, Muldrow, LLC, at the time the project was completed.

Lewandowski said it was a special feeling to have the opportunity to put together a plan for the town that he grew up in.

“I’m a product of Claymont. My father worked at the old steel mill, and the property along the riverfront represented an opportunity for a multitude of outdoor discoveries during my childhood,” Lewandowski said.

Students involved in the project came from UD, Penn State University, Northwestern University and Wilmington University. The two UD students who worked on the project were Ryan McCune, a 2022 environmental engineering graduate, and Delaney Pilotte, a 2023 landscape architecture graduate.

As for the overall goal of the design, Bruck explained that they were using community input to try to best meet the needs of the Claymont residents.

“We were looking to provide recreational opportunities for the community and how people from the community could access river fronts through trails, maybe put in sports fields or event space, and even a marina,” Bruck said. “Then, we wanted to establish connectivity to all the surrounding communities and enhance Claymont’s regional profile.”

As Claymont is also getting a new SEPTA train station and DART Transit Hub, which is expected to be operational in the fall of 2023, the CRDS was also working its design around the new station.

In addition, Bruck said it was important for the CRDS to do a coastal site analysis to ensure that the park would be viable now and in the future.

“Overall, all of our projects are about designing resilient solutions to make sure that they will live on during a time of changing environments,” Bruck said. “We did a site analysis to try to understand what the coast had to offer, and in terms of sea-level rise, of how things were going to change over time. We also looked at transportation units and where the transportation system was going, and we tried to understand the residents’ concerns to get at their sense of place. Once we had that information, we determined the design goals.”

Gainey, who has worked on many CRDS projects, said he is always amazed at how a diverse group of students from backgrounds including landscape architecture, civil engineering and environmental engineering can come together and create a cohesive design plan.

A proposed marina would include a 7,700-square-foot building to house a restaurant or community recreation center, with a boardwalk to provide recreational fishing opportunities.

“When doing the project, we imagined the waterfront park as an opportunity to link the surrounding communities and provide opportunities where we found gaps — such as the conditions and proximity of the parks surrounding the Claymont area at the time,” Gainey said.

Having the chance to design a park in an area formerly used for industrial purposes was also appealing to Gainey, and he said that he enjoyed the opportunity to create a park that would benefit the Claymont community now and in the future.

“Along with creating the opportunity to promote community building, there is inherent value in the many features of our design that foster economic and human-based growth through visitors and presenting a suitable park that addresses the feedback received locally and incorporates sustainable growth,” Gainey said. “One thing I've enjoyed greatly about projects like this one is identifying creative ways to incorporate direct feedback from the local community in ways that feed off the CRDS team's many disciplines.”

With the initial plan completed, and the Bezos’ funds in-hand, the next step is to raise additional funds to take the riverfront park from a concept to reality.

“This will be a deliberate process that will take years, and we appreciate everyone’s patience,” Lambert said. “But as you can see, we’re taking meaningful steps. For me, it’s really about the ‘we.’ It’s about the ‘us.’ That is what Claymont is about. Claymont is about solidarity. It’s about looking out for your brother and sister. Claymont is a strong, vibrant town, and we’re always making sure that we listen to each other. Together, our impacted communities, we’re going to keep working hard until we make sure that we return access to those green spaces and to the river.”

CLAYMONT – A cold-storage and distribution company aims to invest upward of $170 million into a new facility at the former steel mill in Claymont.

While most of the millions of square feet built in Delaware in the last five years is typical four-wall warehousing, Georgia-based Agile Cold Storage aims to build a climate-controlled warehouse at its First State Crossing project off Naamans Road in northern Delaware.

Agile is a 3-year-old, third-party logistics provider that stores and distributes for other companies. It has two existing warehouses in Georgia with a third on the way, but this would be its first out-of-state expansion for the Gainesville, Ga., company.

John Ripple, senior vice president for automation at Agile, explained that each facility typically supports three to five customers, and that the Delaware facility would bring one existing Agile customer to it with another bringing its operations from the Port of Newark, N.J.

Agile plans to import food products at nearby ports to distribute within the mid-Atlantic region. The 265,000-square-foot warehouse would be built in two phases, with construction aimed to begin this fall and last upward of five years. It will support the creation of 130 new jobs, with an average annual salary of about $56,000.

To support the hiring and construction, the state’s job investment board, the Council on Development Finance (CDF), approved on Monday a grant from the taxpayer-backed Strategic Fund worth more than $4.56 million. It’s the largest grant approved by the CDF this year.

“We are excited that Agile Cold Storage is choosing Delaware for its next facility. This will create good jobs and economic investment in Claymont,” Gov. John Carney said in a statement after the grant’s approval. “Their operations will build on Delaware’s strong foundation in food manufacturing and transportation, helping our region’s supply chain.”

Ripple told the CDF that geography played a big part in Agile’s interest in the Claymont site, as it lies about midway between the Port of Wilmington and the Packer Avenue Terminal in Philadelphia.

Right now, existing customers that are utilizing the Philadelphia terminal are being shipped to South Jersey and then back west to end users, and Ripple said that Agile would prefer to bring those products to Claymont. Another client that is using the Port of Newark, N.J., would like to come to the Port of Wilmington, but there isn’t any cold-storage capacity, he said.

The Agile warehouse would lie near the Interstate 95 interchange across the road from the former Tri-State Mall. It marks a departure from the original development plan from Community Development Company (CDC) announced before the pandemic, which had targeted the 31-acre parcel for office and retail development.

CDC Executive Vice President Stephen Collins has said that the downturn in office demand amid the new work-from-home and hybrid work trends convinced his firm to pursue a new best use for the site that was previously the steel mill’s scrapyard.

“This was originally slated to be a high-rise office building but, as you know, the market for office space is pretty slow right now and this very attractive cold storage facility came forward. So, we were able to strike a deal with them,” Collins told the state’s planning office this past spring.

The project has been approved for expedited review by New Castle County’s Jobs Now program and the Delaware Department of Transportation, potentially speeding the time to build for the industrial-zoned site.

In Delaware, there are only four current cold-storage warehouses, with two on the Port of Wilmington site to accommodate produce leaving refrigerated ships. The warehousing niche has been seeing growing demand by investors, however, with 39% of investors expressing interest in the industry in CBRE’s 2022 Investor Intentions Survey – up from 7% in 2019.

Megan Kopistecki, the senior manager for business development at the state’s public-private economic development agency, Delaware Prosperity Partnership, which has been working with Agile on the project for about a year, emphasized the demand for newer cold-storage space.

“Demand for cold storage facilities is at an all-time high right now. More than 70% of all storage facilities in the U.S. were built before 2000, with the average facility more than 40 years old. Older facilities lack the taller ceilings and the wider column spacing that allow for increased inventory and more efficient operations,” she said.

Cold-storage warehousing is considerably more expensive to build than regular warehousing because of the industrial chillers and insulation required to keep refrigerated or even subzero temperatures in a space. Those costs usually lead to higher asking rents and longer leases though, providing some job stability for local markets.

At First State Crossing, the cold-storage warehouse would join a traditional, 385,000-square-foot speculative warehouse being built just to the southeast by First Industrial Realty Trust, a top publicly traded real estate investment trust. It would also sit across the street from another redevelopment project where New York-based developer KPR will raze the former Tri-State Mall and build a 525,000-square-foot distribution center.

The trio of projects aim to kickstart the Claymont economy that has suffered following the closure of the Evraz steel mill, with CDC aiming to invest upward of $1 billion to reimagine its site with retail stores, offices and housing too.

CLAYMONT — Within 18 months of initial discussions, Agile Cold Storage celebrated officially starting sitework on its $170 million cold-storage facility at the former Claymont steel mill off Naamans Road.

The 265,000-square-foot warehouse at First State Crossing lies near the Interstate 95 interchange and within 10 miles of the Port of Wilmington. Although the entire project is projected to be built out over the next five years, Agile representatives aimed to have the first phase of 165,000 square feet of space done by early 2024.

But what was also critical to bringing this project to fruition was the relatively quick turnaround from first discussions to putting a shovel in the ground, Agile Cold Storage President and CEO Don Schoenl said. The Delaware Prosperity Partnership started conversations with Agile in August 2022, and New Castle County government’s Jobs Now program accelerated the plan review process.

“It’s not an overstatement to say that if you didn’t have expedited ability to approve projects, we probably wouldn’t be here right now because our competition would be building somewhere else,” Schoenl said during a Friday groundbreaking ceremony. “Even though it has been a while that we’ve been talking about it, in our jurisdictions we still wouldn’t be here today about to break ground on part of the facility.”

Agile is a 3-year old, third-party logistics provider that stores and distributes for other companies. Although the company itself is young, its management team has 20 years or more experience in the cold storage sector. Schoenl himself held key roles in Nordic Cold Storage and AGRO Merchants Group.

Those connections helped form Agile’s customer base, which Schoenl said include the largest fruit and vegetable importers from South Africa and Morocco as well as protein exporters from South America, Australia and New Zealand. The Port of Wilmington was a major draw for the cold storage company, with more than 6 million tons handled and much of it is fruit from South America, Central America and North Africa.

The port ranks among the top gateways for fruit and juice concentrates, with a 850,000 square foot on-dock refrigerated warehouse complex. It is also a chief banana port in North America, with Dole Food Company and Chiquita Fresh North America bringing cargo weekly.

Schoenl also added that among Agile’s clients, which he declined to name, many were looking to bring products from Ohio and Pennsylvania to be exported to the world. Right now, existing customers that are utilizing the Philadelphia terminal are being shipped to South Jersey and then back west to end users.

“We couldn’t make this investment without the infrastructure from the Port of Wilmington and the tremendous road infrastructure being right here on I-95,” Schoenl told reporters. “But it’s also about the availability of qualified labor. You can build a great building in a great location, and if we don’t have great associates to work with our service, levels won’t be where our customers need it to be.”

The next warehouse in Agile’s second phase at First State Crossing may include next-generation technology and automation. The company has two warehouses in its home state of Georgia and a third on the way, which will use automated storage and retrieval systems. In the next six months, Agile plans on starting projects in Pennsylvania, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas and New Orleans.

“This is not just the old warehouse I worked with in college. This has technology, and then you’re looking at a whole different skill set in education of technical work and automation. It’s not just driving a forklift or pallet truck,” Schoenl said.

In total, Agile Cold Storage plans on bringing 130 jobs to Claymont, supported by a $4.56 million taxpayer-backed grant. The first phase aims to hire 100 people, once the warehouse is open. While there will be support services in human resources and IT, most of the staff hired will be loading and unloading containers.

The average annual salary for Agile employees to be hired is estimated at $56,000, and Agile representatives said they plan to hire mainly from the Claymont community.

“This area had been neglected, and that is not the case anymore,” Claymont Renaissance Development Corp. Executive Director Brett Saddler said. “I’ve always looked at what’s happening here as a snowball going down the hill. It starts out slow, and then it picks up speed. I am incredibly excited about Agile and what it means in bringing technical, good-paying jobs. Thank you for choosing us.”

First State Crossing is becoming a hub of economic activity to revitalize Claymont, which has stumbled since the Evraz steel mill closed in 2013. Local officials and the Claymont Renaissance Development Corp. have been working on affordable housing projects to draw residences, but projects at the business park like a speculative warehouse and Aglient hope to recreate some of the jobs lost with the mill.

First State Crossing also sits across the street from another redevelopment project where New York-based developer KPR will raze the former Tri-State Mall and build a 525,000-square-foot distribution center.

New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer recalled that when he was a child, he came to the Tri-State Mall to watch “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.” Now, he pointed to the construction zones as signs of progress for northern Delaware.

“This is a meaningful site to people of our state and the whole region. We are in competition every day, not just in New Castle County and Delaware, but in the Philadelphia area and the country,” Meyer said. “If we can’t win the day with a cold storage site by our port, there’s another port that will get the benefits. So we must win.”

When elected county executive, Meyer created the Jobs Now program, which offers an expedited plan review to non-residential developers to bring new or add jobs to the county. Applicants may have a pre-exploratory meeting with the county’s planning, engineering, permits and inspections divisions, as well as public works, Delaware Department of Transportation and the state Fire Marshal’s Office.

The county and state review teams identify possible challenges and a timeline for hearings. Applicants then provide plan submissions in that timeline, which are reviewed by county staff within five days.

“In the past, when it came to permits, licenses and zoning variances it would take forever. So we wanted to create a program that eliminates that problem, because time is money,” Meyer told the Delaware Business Times. “I think it matters more than any sort of benefit that we’re giving out like tax benefits – to look an investor in the eye and say, ‘if you want to create jobs here, we’re going to help you do it.’”

French-based water supplier Veolia Water Delaware released a boil water advisory after a large water main break on Darley Road in Claymont. A public notice was released around 2:05 p.m. and can be found on the company's website. The company said customers were notified by phone, text and email.

Veolia Water Delaware said late this morning, it was alerted to a large water main break on Darley Road affecting areas of Claymont, including Hillendale, Ashbourne Hills and Carpenter. Emergency crews responded to the alert and are attempting to repair the break.

The water supplier said it has issued a boil water advisory for approximately 2,000 customers located in the highlighted map below. Veolia asks that these customers boil their water until further notice.

This announcement comes days following the announcement of another water main break in the lower Delaware County, PA and North Wilmington areas.

Updates are being reported on the water utility company's website and social media channels. Veolia Water Delaware is responsible for serving more than 100,000 residents in Delaware, according to its website.

How to boil water

Veolia Water Delaware is warning customers that water coming from the tap may be contaminated with disease-causing organisms including bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Customers should use boiled or bottled water for drinking, making ice, washing dishes, brushing teeth, and food preparation until further notice. To use properly treated tap water, they advise:

Untreated water can cause symptoms such as nausea, cramps, diarrhea, and associated headaches.

Veolia acquired New Jersey-based water service company Suez last June. It claims the deal made it the leading environmental services company in North America. In April 2021, Suez announced it was making $11.4 million to maintain and improve its water system in Delaware.

Contact reporter Anitra Johnson at [email protected]. Join her on the Facebook group Delaware Voices Uplifted. Support her work and become a subscriber.

CLAYMONT – Overlook Colony is a more than century-old row home community off Philadelphia Pike that was built as workforce housing following World War I.

Since then, it has played an important cornerstone to industry in the Claymont community, but while many of the units have since been acquired by private landlords, about three-dozen are managed by Interfaith Community Housing of Delaware, a nonprofit affordable and low-income housing developer.

As tax credits on the Overlook Colony units were set to expire, however, they were at risk of turning to market-rate units as well, potentially pricing out many tenants in need.

In stepped New Castle County, which allocated $2.3 million from its federal American Rescue Plan Act funding and $400,000 from the county’s Housing Trust Fund to pay for renovations to the units and subsidize their cost to ensure that they could continue to be offered at below-market rates to eligible tenants.

It equates to less than $900 a month for a recently renovated three-bedroom unit, according to Darlene Sample, executive director of Interfaith Community Housing.

“The problem of housing affordability is serious,” County Executive Matt Meyer said at a press conference Wednesday. “We’re on the frontlines of that crisis. We’re very careful with the resources that we have to make sure we’re not deploying them all in the city of Wilmington.”

The funding announcement came just a day after the Delaware State Housing Authority released a new report that detailed the rising need for affordable housing in the state. It found that at least 250 rental units aimed at households earning half or less of the state’s average median income (AMI) would need to be built each year for a decade to meet the pace of population growth here.

In New Castle County, about 4,000 housing units at or below the AMI would need to be built by 2030, according to the report.

One way that the county can support development of affordable housing is through subsidies to developers that would offset profit losses if they had sold or rented them at market rates. While the federal ARPA funding from the county and state has helped support the development of affordable housing, it is limited funding that will have to be spent by the end of 2024.

Meanwhile, New Castle County’s Housing Trust Fund levies an impact fee on property rezonings to support such subsidies. Meyer told Delaware Business Times that his administration is considering ways to bolster the fund into the future, including potentially levying the fee on market-rate housing built under by-right zoning too.

“We’re hearing from all sorts of employers that they want to hire here, but their employees have nowhere to live. So, we’re working on it with money and we’re also working on it by making some changes to New Castle County code so that affordable housing developments can be built across our county,” he said.

The Meyer administration has also worked with Habitat for Humanity’s “Almost Home” program that places unsuccessful Habitat applicants in subsidized housing while they receive counseling to repair their credit score.

“So, after a year or two they’re in a place where they can own a home. It’s like a ladder to homeownership that hopefully, even once the subsidy stops, results in them being a homeowner who’s accruing equity in a really valuable asset,” Meyer said.

The county’s Vacant Spaces to Livable Places (VSLP) program has also been successful in reducing nuisance properties over the last six years by half. That program essentially sends unresponsive and tax-delinquent properties to sheriff’s sale, and redevelops them in-house or through sale to private developers. While all of that housing isn’t affordable, Meyer estimated that 500 of the roughly 600 homes sold through the process were in an affordable range while putting millions of dollars back onto property and school tax rolls.

The VSLP program helped to turn around other neglected portions of Overlook Colony through new ownership and renovations.

Brett Saddler, executive director of the Claymont Renaissance Development Corp., which is spearheading the larger redevelopment of the community from its industrial past, said Wednesday that he was thrilled to see additional support come to affordable housing in Claymont.

“As much as we sometimes focus on Darley Green or new residential projects, we also have to ensure that our longtime residents and properties are taken care of too,” he said.