A 'haunted' hospital gets a new tenant, and Newark gets more townhouses

What's Going There in Delaware is Delaware Online/The News Journal's development newsletter, tracking what's coming to the First State. If you like what you’re reading, tell your friends it’s free to sign up here​. Email tips, questions and brilliant story ideas to Matthew Korfhage at mkorfhage@delawareonline.com.

It's been another busy summer week for the Delaware development calendar, in a summer full of busy weeks.

A perhaps-haunted hospital will be soon be home to forensic techs. More than a dozen restaurants have opened or plan to do so soon, including a hall of Indian curry and sweets and multiple other ice cream shops. 674 more houses were approved north of Middletown. And a new controversy is erupting in Dover surrounding old houses and a new proposed parking garage.

Oh, and Airbnbs have folks in New Castle County fired up and/or confused. Here's what's going where in Delaware.

"Haunted" Emily P. Bissell Hospital gets a new tenant

Will the "haunted" Emily P. Bissell Hospital be occupied once again?

The onetime tuberculosis sanitorium in Brandywine Springs was once a symbol of hope, named after a great Delaware philanthropist who sometimes dabbled in the wee vice of anti-suffragism. But by the 2000s, it was a state-run, low-income nursing home that The News Journal called a “disgrace to the state of Delaware” where “hopelessness hangs in the air, thick and inescapable as the odors of incontinence.”

After finally closing in 2015, the hospital has mouldered empty as the state solicited proposals and quietly mulled its fate.

Nature returned, News Journal reporter Isabel Hughes documented in an occasionally haunting 2022 piece about the uncertain future of the hospital : Birds chirped cheerily, she wrote, while twisted vines "snake across the roof" and brush and trees forced themselves into broken porches.

"While the main building has been less touched by nature, it doesn't take much to wonder if the cold air that escapes from the holes in several boarded-up windows belong to souls of those who died here," Hughes wrote.

Anyway, the famously spooky building, a target for adventurous break-ins by ghost hunters and graffiti artists alike, will finally have a new purpose, according to an article Thursday by Delaware Online/The News Journal's new statehouse reporter, Olivia Montes. The Emily P. Bissell Hospital will instead become.... a lab and office for the state's Division of Forensic Science.

Wait, did we say it would become less spooky? Oh well.

Century-old Newark homes to be demolished by student rental company

Newark City Council last week approved the demolition of two century-old homes on Corbit Street by a developer who specializes in student housing.

The owner and developer plans to replace the rental houses with a dense tract of five three-story townhomes, each with four bedrooms.

The area on which the Corbit Street property sits was once home to a largely self-sufficient Black community called New London Road — now site of a historical marker — that has slowly been edged out by University of Delaware and its students since the 1960s. The area is now mostly occupied by college land and student housing.

Homes dating back as far as the Civil War, a physical reminder and marker of this community, have also slowly been demolished and replaced in a neighborhood-wide refurbishment that began to accelerate in the 1980s, as detailed in a paper by UD student Colin Willard in 2021.

"The community’s housing stock was relatively substandard in quality, and in some cases residents even struggled to find buyers for homes. This meant that developers could acquire these homes at little cost, and quickly transform them into student rentals or knock them down completely to build 'luxury apartments,'" Willard wrote.

Developer Mico Slijepcevic argued before city council on July 8 that these new townhouses would not be rented at luxury prices, and that their four-bedroom design — smaller than some more expensive student townhouses nearby — may be attractive to families and not just UD students. The lack of a big backyard may curb parties, council members noted.

Anyway, Newark's council unanimously approved code variances needed to build the new townhouses, clearing way for demolition of the century-old houses now there.

Comprehensive Rezoning 'Take 2' keeps on truckin'

It's hard to remember — sometimes last year feels a lot like a decade ago — but by the end of 2023, one of the biggest controversies in New Castle County was a fight about a bureaucratic process called comprehensive rezoning.

Specifically, the fight was all about an ordinance called 23-083 that would have rezoned dozens of properties at once in order to square the county zoning map — which determines the type of projects that can be built on any given property — with a 2022 comprehensive plan that guides growth and development in the county.

That ordinance went down in flames in February amid hue and cry, as a citizens group packed usually staid planning board and land use committee meetings with protest signs and fiery commentary.

Department of Land Use general manager Charuni Patibanda then introduced a new comprehensive rezoning effort called 'Take 2," designed to roll out all these rezonings district by district, in a long and drawn out series of presentations and meetings.

So how's it going? Well, it's been unventful.

The rezonings have been wandering through a long county process in mostly humdrum fashion. In a planning meeting Monday, the Land Use department laid out more than a dozen such rezonings, almost all open space being rezoned from commercial or industrial to "suburban." This laundry list received a collective no-comment from the public, and approvals from the board.

The next day, a Land Use Committee meeting convened to discuss rezoning four such parcels. The meeting lasted a grand total of 7 minutes.

Previously in June, the rezoning of three northern-county districts proceeded largely without comment or opposition, with unanimous assent from county council.

Soon, parcels in the more controversy-filled parts of New Castle County, south of the canal, will wind their way into public meetings. We'll see if decorum continues to reign. But for now, the biggest controversy of six months ago feels like a distant memory.

Bureaucracy feels... well... bureaucratic again.