There are many reasons to be concerned about Amazon’s last-mile warehouses moving into Red Hook. Perhaps one of the most alarming is the threat these warehouses may pose to children.
There will soon be two delivery stations in Red Hook, which combined total more than 600,000 square feet. One of those Amazon facilities is right next to BASIS Independent Brooklyn, a PreK–grade 12 private school.
I spoke to the BASIS school’s Director of Communications, Jo Goldfarb, about the situation.
“I think that people need to understand that no one is in control of how many of these mega-warehouses are coming to Red Hook,” Goldfarb said.“ So far they’ve been very responsible about honoring our arrival and dismissal times but we’ll need to see it happen in practice. Right now we are very focused on ensuring that proper traffic signage and enforcement of pedestrian safety laws are in place.”
Goldfarb also said that the police have been really helpful about enforcing safety precautions and she has also worked with Vision Zero Safety, the Red Hook Initiative, Resilient Red Hook and Uprose to make sure that safety precautions are in place.
In addition to concerns about keeping children and others safe with trucks coming in and out of Red Hook, there are health concerns related to the pollution caused by the truck engines. Doctors have called the neighborhoods surrounding distribution centers “diesel death zones,” and while an average of 10 percent of children in New York have asthma, in Red Hook, 2it’s 25 percent.
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Goldfarb praised the work of locals like Jim Tampakis, who is working to encourage the distribution centers use greener modes of transportation. He is trying to get the City to force Amazon to utilize our waterways to bring in merchandise to their warehouses. Waterways that surround us.
“We would love the help of the community in reaching out to local officials about the importance of regulating these E-commerce distribution hubs, since no one has placed a cap on how many can be brought to a neighborhood,” Goldfarb said. “We’re not sure of the long-term effects of having so many of these hubs in one community, which is scary. This information is critical for all members of the Red Hook community to know before these sites are completed.”
Goldfarb mentioned that last-mile warehouses have been able to bend the rules in their favor and say they’re building the facilities ‘as-of-right’ (meaning the existing zoning allows them to do so.)
Columbia University students did a study on last-mile warehouses and the study reported the same alarming point: “Numerous loopholes allow companies to build these facilities ‘as-of-right’ without the consent of community boards, zoning boards, or the city, leaving communities without a say in what happens in their own neighborhood.”
Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened in Red Hook. The warehouses are close to opening and now Red Hook locals must figure out a way to make them a good neighbor.children
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