Simon Property Group, the owner of the Roosevelt Field Mall, has once again applied to the Town of Hempstead Board of Appeals for a special permit to expand the mall to include a new department store and a retail connecting that department store with the rest of the mall. This application comes approximately 16 months after the board of appeals denied their last request, which involved an increase in the Floor Area Ratio (FAR). Now, after acquiring two new parcels of land and making some other adjustments, thus increasing the amount of land to be considered in the FAR, Simon is claiming that they can build this extension without increasing the FAR.

Within the last two months, the Town of Hempstead has received, from the Simon Property Group, a building permit application and site plan for the construction of this additional space at Roosevelt Field Mall. With the application, the Simon Group noted that there is currently a special permit allowing for a FAR of .69608 and that due to an increase in the size of the overall property, the FAR after the completion will be .69587, which is still within the parameters of the current special permit.

The Floor Area Ratio is a figure used in commercial zones, as a guideline for how large a building can be on a particular lot. The area where the mall is located is currently zoned to allow a .4 FAR, meaning that the land can be occupied by a building with the square footage which is 40 percent of the square footage of the total property. This FAR was established in 1989, after the mall had already been built and then they were granted a special permit to exceed this amount even further in 1995 in order to increase the FAR from .529 to .696 in connection with the Nordstrom's addition to the mall. On March 24, 1999 the board of appeals denied their request to extend the FAR even further to .75 to allow for the addition of Sak's Fifth Avenue. The Village of Garden City played a major role in the objections to this proposed increase.

Simon has now revised this plan in an effort not to keep the FAR within the current limits. One way they did this was by acquiring the Andover Parcels, which are lots 34 and 35, located between Macy's and Stewart Avenue. This increases the total square footage of the property, thus increasing the allowable square footage of a new building. In addition, Simon is closing the Woolworth basement and basement storage and is asking, as part of the special permit, that because this basement area will no longer be in use that it not be considered in the FAR. "In the normal course of an application, a storage area would be considered part of the floor area," said Marlene Kastleman, from the Town of Hempstead Communications Department. Also, the revised plan calls for a two-story, rather than a three-story department store and retail area. According to the site plans, the department store would be 100,000 square feet and the retail area connecting it to the mall would be 34,000 square feet. It is through these adjustments that Simon has determined that their FAR would remain within the limits it currently has. It is because this is still outside the established FAR for the zone, that the Simon Property Group must still get a special permit in order to expand further.

According to Kastleman the application is just beginning to be reviewed and no hearing date has been set.