Residents Sue Fresh Direct Over Move to the Bronx
New York Times
By Winnie Hu
After months of protesting FreshDirect’s move to the Bronx, a coalition of residents and community groups took their fight to a Bronx courtroom on Monday to accuse New York City officials of systematically understating the traffic problems and other impacts on their neighborhoods.
The coalition, South Bronx Unite, has filed a lawsuit in Bronx Supreme Court to block the online grocer’s move to a vacant site in the Harlem River Yard. In February 2012, city and state officials announced that FreshDirect, which had outgrown its Queens location, was being offered an unusually large $127.8 million package of cash and tax breaks to move to the Bronx rather than to New Jersey.
In oral arguments in court on Monday, lawyers for South Bronx Unite argued that officials had failed to sufficiently assess the environmental impact of FreshDirect’s move because they relied on a 1993 environmental review of the site and did not take into account either the increasingly residential character of the area or future traffic as FreshDirect’s business grew — all in a borough plagued by high rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease.
