COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: General
The Marines are landing in White Plains sizzling real estate market
KEITH EDDINGS, THE JOURNAL NEWS
November 19, 2007
WHITE PLAINS - The U.S. Marines are taking their search for the fewand the proud to some of region's prime real estate, a
5,100-square- foot Mamaroneck Avenue storefront across the street from
the Ritz-Carlton with an annual rent topping $300,000.
The lease doesn't include parking, meaning the three Marine
recruiters moving from the storefront they now occupy on East Post
Road still will be staring down the barrels of local meter maids, who
have slapped $90,000 worth of tickets on the windshields of their
government vehicles since 2001, making them the city's biggest scofflaws.
"I got the rent I wanted," said Bob Ellis, a landlord and broker in
the city for 53 years, who owns the one-story building at 20
Mamaroneck Ave. that the Marines will share with recruiters from the
Army, National Guard and Air Force. "I had other offers - ridiculous
offers, $38 a (square) foot or so. I've been in the business a couple
of weeks now. I know the projections. "
The $60-a-square foot annual rent for the recruitment center that the
Marines, Army, Air Force and Guard will split is twice what rents
around the Mamaroneck Avenue-Main Street intersection were just three
years ago. That was before Louis Cappelli built City Center and the
Ritz and turned the downtown crossroads into a "green zone" for gentrification.
Next door to the Marines' new home, a People's Bank branch is paying
$76 a square foot for a storefront that fetched less than a third of
that before a Payless ShoeSource outlet gave it up and made way for the bank.
Sue Hopkins, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which
negotiates real estate deals for the armed forces, said the
$300,000-a-year cost of the Mamaroneck Avenue recruitment center is a
bargain considering the Marines are sharing it with three other
service branches.
"The client has been trying to move from the present location for
some time," Hopkins said, referring to the storefront at 150 E. Post
Road that the Marines have occupied for more than 20 years. "Because
the market is so hot in White Plains, we had difficulty finding a
property. There are others in the area that are going for a lot more
- $80 a square foot on the same block."
Watchdogs of government spending are not impressed.
"The bottom line is that there's very little comparison shopping that
happens when taxpayer money is used, whether it's recruitment space
or buying cell phones," said David Williams, vice president for
policy for Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington, D.C.,
group. "You look not only at the cost, but are you really going to
have successful recruiting in a, quote, high-end neighborhood? I
don't think down the block from a Ritz-Carlton is a prime area for recruits."
At their current Main Street home, the Marines enlisted 40 soldiers
in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, said Cpl. Catherine Folan, a
spokesman for the Marines. All but five made it to boot camp.
Paul Wood, top aide to Mayor Joseph Delfino, said other businesses in
the new neighborhood make it a good fit for military recruiters.
"You have a large, diverse population that passes through that area,
so it won't only be the Ritz," Wood said. "The fountain is next door.
The movie theater is across the street. Probably one of the reasons
they considered that location is there's a heavy population of
younger residents."
Wood added that moving so many branches of the armed forces into the
new address - a neighborhood where available on-street parking is as
rare as a smile on an honor guard - will be good for City Hall as well.
"We look forward to having them," he said. "We'll be increasing our
parking fine revenue by three branches."
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of