Whole Foods Gowanus May Not Be Dead After All
Check out the response from Whole Foods to the Brooklyn Paper’s story this week…apparently the high-end grocery chain has not definitely wiped its hands of it. Click here for prior Brownstoner coverage and click through for the memo… TO: Craig Hammerman FROM: Mark Mobley Whole Foods Market DATE: July 10, 2009 RE: Update on Whole…
Check out the response from Whole Foods to the Brooklyn Paper’s story this week…apparently the high-end grocery chain has not definitely wiped its hands of it. Click here for prior Brownstoner coverage and click through for the memo…
TO: Craig Hammerman
FROM: Mark Mobley
Whole Foods Market
DATE: July 10, 2009
RE: Update on Whole Foods Market’s plan in Brooklyn – “Reports
of our demise have been greatly exaggerated”
I am writing with just a quick update to let you know that recent reports
of Whole Foods Market’s demise in Brooklyn seem to have been greatly
exaggerated! As you may have seen, the Brooklyn Paper published a story
this week that inaccurately suggests we have definitively decided not to
pursue the development of a store on our property at 3rd Street and 3rd
Avenue and further that we are planning to sell the property. This is
simply not true and we have sent a letter to the Brooklyn Paper editor
clarifying our position and requesting a correction.
You may recall that last Fall I sent you a memo explaining that Whole
Foods Market had begun re-evaluating our plans for our property and that
we would be working to identify potential development partners for a
Brooklyn store. That is exactly what we have been doing in recent months
and we are continuing these efforts in hopes of arriving at a potential
development scenario that will enable us to finally come to Brooklyn .
Therefore, while nothing has yet been finalized and we are still not in a
position to be able to share any additional information, please be assured
that we will be back in touch as soon as we are able to provide more
details about our plans.
Sit back and relax because this will be a long posting.
Whole foods is being disingenuous. The way a developer develops property like this is either on spec with their own money(non existent in the current economic situation) or with a loan from a venture capitalist also non existent. The other way is to sign a lease with a credit worthy client go to a lending source with that lease and loan money based on the cash flow from the lease. In the later case this directly relies on the credit worthiness of the prime tenant. When Whole foods decided not to develop this property itself, it has to put its own credit worthiness on the line. Everyone is gun shy about that kind of creditworthiness. Look what happened to Linen N Things and the electronics company that just went out of business. They have left lenders holding literally hundreds of relatively new and onetime quite creditworthy properties throughout the country. These sites will have to be adsorbed before a new round of lending for retail stores take place. The one exception is retailers that can afford to bankroll these developments themselves(Walmart can and BJ’s can- very few others can)…so when Whole Foods said no we won’t do it ourselves it doomed this project for a large number of years if not forever.
I’ll add a ‘strongly agree’ w/ Pole & daveinbedsty but 2 friendly amendments and one four letter food for thought (had to do it):
1) It’s larger than Brooklyn and Gowanus. We’ve gotten to the point where transparency itself is polarizing. The process becomes a siren song: “all those willing to throw any baby out with the bath water, please identify yourself and step forward immediately.”
2) no one mentions this four letter food for thought: JOBS.
Whole Foods person… Here’s a new location currently looking for a tenant. Big commercial lot on Seventh Ave between 19th and 20th Streets. Easy accessible to your delivery trucks… Prospect Expressway ramp right there for shoppers…
Pole….when I agree with you, I strongly agree.
Whole_Foods_Market, you have to take the What with a grain of salt. Organic French Sea Salt @ $20 the ounce, naturally.
Now where’s Benson when we need him to complain about low journalistic standards?
This is why Brooklyn is finished. It takes a decade to build a simple free standing grocery store and parking lot on a piece of land that has been vacant since not longer after World War II ended. Hitler, the favorite historical figure of many brownstoner readers, conquered most of the European continent in three years. We in Brooklyn, a county with a population 5% that of Germany in 1939, can’t even build a grocery store in five years!
Wait – i thought Gowanus was going to be cleaned up and it was going to be some condofilled riverfront utopia?
Return of the what-if,where you be.
Basement mentalist, I think maybe it means “we don’t have the money to do it on our own and need a sugar daddy to jump start the clean-up/construction process — especially since it is a clean up and development that would benefit the entire neighborhood(s), so why should WE be footing the ENTIRE BILL, when guys like Ratner get everything on the taxpayers’ dime?” That’s my guess anyway.