Demolition permits have been filed for three adjacent two-family homes located at 294, 296, and 298 East 163rd Street in Fleetwood, The Bronx. The existing buildings are all two stories tall, with heights ranging from 20 to 25 feet. Each building has a total floor area of approximately 2,500 square feet. The demolition cost for each property is estimated at $25,000.
Egris Haxhari of H20 LLC, located at 1866 Unionport Road in The Bronx, is listed as the owner behind the applications. Gjovan Rroku of New Line Construction, located at 2444 Bouck Avenue, also in The Bronx, is listed as the filing representative for all three demolitions.
All three demolition applications are currently in the Plan Examiner Review status as of October 24, 2024. No new building plans have been announced yet for the lots.
Transit nearby the properties includes the Harlem Line Train, along with the B, D, and 4 trains.
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It is criminal to destroy these wonderful-looking buildings.
This is not Fleetwood. It the heart of Melrose. Or the “West Bronx” as we natives call it.
Criminal?
There was a time when these were beautiful, but considering they’ve been neglected and slathered in aluminum and plastic siding for 50 years, I wouldn’t exactly describe these biting the dust as heartbreaking. These are exactly the kind of homes that have made way for better higher density apartment buildings for 100 years as the Bronx developed. Just channel all that energy into advocating for better design of the structures that do replace them because old hold-outs like these are guaranteed to keep disappearing.
You just stated part of the problem. The Bronx has too high of a rate of rentals to ownership. Demolishing all the houses is literally part of what allowed the borough to fall apart in the South and West. How many of the units that replace them are ownership? That’s part of the problem. Brooklyn kept much more of its housing stock and that’s part of why it was able to recover from urban decay much faster (I don’t include Queens because it didn’t suffer as much)
Brooklyn’s rental buildings largely didn’t burn down either (except in Brownsville and parts of Bushwick)
Correct. But that’s my point. Even areas like Bedford Stuyvesant and Fort Green and other places that did have decay – they still had large swaths of owner occupied parts. To say nothing of places like Prospect Heights and Park Slope and such. With such a high rate of rental ownership – when the time came to take all the insurance money and burn down the buildings – that’s what happened in the South and West Bronx. They couldn’t do the same thing in Brooklyn because it had a higher rate of homeowners
Great point. Not enough townhouses are built on top of it. When they destroy homes they destroy character that neighborhoods once had