(Credit: West Station LLC/Russ Faden via Springs Planning, 2022)
The building proposed at the intersection of West Avenue and Station Lane in Saratoga Springs includes commercial space on the first floor of the West Avenue leg, and residential space throughout the rest of the 24,000-square-foot building.
Russ Faden will bring a Subway Shop in a mixed use building to the corner of West Avenue and Station Lane in Saratoga Springs. His sketch plan for the building went before the Saratoga Springs planning board, Thursday Dec. 8. Sketch planning is one of the earliest steps in the planning process.
Faden, who owns 33 Subway stores in the area — up from 28 in May — said this is the largest project so far that he has taken on.
"It's not a huge project, but it's a nice project for the area,” he said.
The building plans include nearly 24,000 square feet across four floors of an L-shaped building. The plan will see office, retail and restaurant space on the West Avenue leg of the building and resident apartments on the second through fourth floors. The first floor of the Station Lane side will be residential, as well.
Fifty-six residential units are planned, and the building will have 58 parking spaces in the basement along with a surface lot behind the building.
An earlier plan had commercial uses on the first floor along Station Lane. Faden said the change to residential was not really a recognition that Saratoga Springs needs more housing but recognition of the reality of the site.
The property slopes down along Station Lane, making access to entrances there difficult; it would not be conducive to retail, pedestrian traffic. Faden said it also is not a great location for retail since the street dead ends at the Saratoga Springs train station parking lot.
"Station Lane, that has very little visibility,” he said, especially when compared to the traffic along West Avenue. It just made sense to move from commercial to residential on that leg of the building. He added: "Office is hard to fill."
Faden said this store will replace another that is already running, but he would not share which and added that the project completion date is years away. The landlord who will lose the tenant will have a lot of time to react.
"We probably won't get approval [of the current plans] until at least summer or next fall,” Faden said. "We're two-and-a-half to three years before we even have it built."
The Planning Board sounded generally positive when speaking with Yates “Scott” Lansing of Lansing Engineering about the project. He said a version of this project made its way through the planning process from 2017 to 2020 and was tabled at that time.
Planning board members asked about walkability since there is no close crosswalk in that midblock location, and Station Lane does not continue east through West Avenue, which might allow for a crosswalk.
They also wondered about the access between the parking lots behind the proposed building and the medical office building just to the north. They asked questions about the public benefit portion of the development. All the questions will be addressed in subsequent meetings.