Bayberry may finally get a supermarket, 145 new homes and maybe a fitness center
After years of planning, multiple revisions and more than a thousand homes built, the master-planned village of Bayberry looks like it will finally get its Town Center.
The ambitious plans for the Bayberry Town Center mixed-use project call for 145 townhomes, 30,000 square feet of office space and nearly 250,000 square feet of retail and restaurants. Retail plans include a 64,000-square-foot Weis Markets supermarket, a pharmacy, a gas station, multiple drive-thru restaurants, a potential fitness center, and multiple other flexible retail or restaurant spaces.
The plans will go to New Castle County for final approval at the county council meeting on Tuesday, March 26. The project is bounded by Jamison Corner Road to the west, and Boyds Corner Road to the south.
The planned community northeast of Middletown has undergone swift development since construciton began in 2010, Blenheim Homes developer Jay Sonecha told the Land Use committee on March 19, adding more than 1,700 homes.
But the shopping center at Bayberry's heart has long been delayed, despite vocal and perhaps even impatient support from the surrounding community. Sonecha acknowledged that the project had taken longer than some would have hoped.
"The reason why the Town Center has taken as long is it has, is you need 'rooftops'" Sonecha told the Land Use Committee. "You can plan all the retail you want. You can dream all you want. But it will be for no one if there are no rooftops."
Bayberry needed a "critical mass" of housing and customers, Sonecha said, to attract a large anchor tenant.
Weis Markets is planned as the anchor tenant for Bayberry Town Center
For Bayberry, that anchor tenant turned out to be Weis Markets.
Bayberry spans 1,500 acres between Route 1 and Route 301 and is one of the drivers of growth north of Middletown. Since 2010, about 1,700 homes have been built and sold in Bayberry. Another 1,000 are planned, and hundreds more units are coming to surrounding communities.
But no supermarkets have yet been built there. Residents must drive into Middletown for their shopping needs — a 15- to 20-minute trip that can balloon with traffic.
"The residents have been clamoring for commercial for a long time," Simi Sonecha, vice president of Blenheim Homes, told Delaware Online/The News Journal last year, after Weis confirmed its plans to anchor Bayberry. "This is going to be one of the premier retail centers in the lower two-thirds of Delaware."
Previous coverage: Grocery store planned for the fast-growing Bayberry community north of Middletown
The Weis Markets location in Bayberry will be the fourth in Delaware, and the first in New Castle County.
Founded in central Pennsylvania more than 100 years ago, Weis Markets has nearly 200 stores in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, West Virginia, Virginia and Delaware. Its existing three First State locations are in Millville, Millsboro and Lewes.
Simi Sonecha declined last year to offer details on other retail, restaurant or office tenants planned for Bayberry Town Center, and did not respond to inquiries this week about new tenants or timelines for the project. As of the middle of 2023, Blenheim Homes projected that supermarket construction would be completed in 2025.
No opposition surfaced for Bayberry Town Center
Though a vote of county council must still approve the project, neither council members nor members of the public offered any opposition to the Bayberry project last week
Instead, at the New Castle County Land Use Committee meeting on March 19, the finalized plans were greeted with the legislative equivalent of ticker tape and confetti. Multiple council members thanked the community of Bayberry, and the developers, for their continued commitment to the project.
Councilman Bill Bell praised developers for not "walking away" during the many obstacles and delays to the project — not least of which was a worldwide pandemic. Another version of the Bayberry Town Center project had already been approved by council in 2020.
2020 coverage: Middletown area is set to grow again with a 70-acre retail, residential development
Councilman David Carter said it was hard to believe it had been more than 20 years since he and Sonecha first met to discuss the seeds for what would become Bayberry Town Center.
"I remember coming out and meeting with you, and you laying a plan out, and showing me a vision that you had of the future, and what you felt this could be and what it would do," Carter said. He called it extraordinary — both that the plans had taken so long, and that it seemed so close to fruition.
Carter also said that planned communities like Bayberry and Whitehall offer a new template for how communities could be planned in New Castle County, and in Delaware.
"This has been an exercise in patience," Jay Sonecha told the Land Use Committee. "When I go back to 2010, this was 1,500 acres of empty farmland with nothing on it. And there were many doubters that anything would ever happen, and be completed, the way it was envisioned. But we were determined and fortunate."
The ordinance allowing Bayberry Town Center to exist will go to a vote before the full council on Tuesday, March 26.
Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all things related to land and money: openings and closings, construction, and the many corporations who call the First State home. Send tips and insults to mkorfhage@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: What's happening with the Weis Markets at Bayberry Town Center?
