Despite ongoing community concerns, work will begin this month on a 6-story, 48-room Comfort Inn on Webster Avenue in Norwood, as the McSam Hotel Group moves ahead after struggling for more than a year to convince neighbors that the project will be good for the area.

The hotel will be the developer’s first project in the Bronx, where they expect to see significant economic growth in coming years.

“Property values in the Bronx and Manhattan have gone up, unlike Brooklyn and Queens,” said Patrick Jones, special counsel for the McSam Group. Addressing a concern of local residents, Jones added that his client does not plan to sell the hotel once it is built, though the McSam group has done that with other properties.  

Last month, local Community Board 7 voted not to support the hotel, saying they believed it wasn’t the right fit for a Webster Avenue corridor that the Board is trying to rezone in an effort to attract more residential development. For years, the arterial street running alongside the Bronx River has been filled mostly with parking lots and auto and metal shops.

A new hotel – which residents fear will devolve into a “hot sheet” motel like others across the Bronx River in Wakefield – was not what the Board had in mind when it began planning for the future.

“Webster Avenue will undergo some positive changes. However, this change may not entail the need for a motel,” said Barbara Stronczer, a CB7 member who lives close to Webster Avenue.

Added Greg Faulkner, chair of Community Board 7, “We remain very much opposed to the construction of the hotel.”

Other nearby institutions, such as PS/MS 20 (located just 50 feet from the hotel lot) and Fordham University, have already expressed their displeasure at the location of the project.

A spokesperson for the United Federation of Teachers, whose members participated in protesting the hotel two summers ago, said the union’s position has not changed: They do not want to see a hotel constructed so close to a public school.

Critics say they simply don’t believe the hotel will succeed. That concern prompted the Bronx borough president’s office to request a feasibility report, which McSam completed in December.

The report, which evaluated the borough as a whole, said if it relies on Internet bookings and customer preference for brand-named establishments, they believe they will attract a diverse group of guests, from tourists planning to visit the Botanical Gardens, Bronx Zoo and Bay Plaza Shopping Center, to family and friends wanting to be close to the Montefiore Medical Center, Jacobi or Bronx-Lebanon hospitals, or the local colleges.  

The report determined that McSam’s hotel project is feasible and expects the rooms, rated at an average of $175 per night, to stay at least 65 percent booked each year.

Compared to the 200-room hotel McSam is developing in midtown Manhattan, the Bronx hotel is small change for developer Sam Chang, called “the Comfort Inn king of New York” by the New York Observer. To date, his firm is involved in 50 hotel projects throughout the five boroughs.

Faulkner read the feasibility report and said the Board remains “skeptical and leery” of the project and wishes the developer would choose a better location for business.  He pledged to monitor the hotel closely to see that they keep their promises to the community.

The Land Use Committee for CB7 meets again on Feb. 26. At the meeting they will talk with officials from the city Department of City Planning to begin envisioning what Webster Avenue could look like if rezoned for residential or mixed-use. But since McSam has the right to build with the street currently zoned for heavy commercial use, Faulkner said he just hopes the owners will be good neighbors.

“We’re not looking for failure,” he said. “Hopefully we’re wrong and [the hotel] will enhance the community. If we’re wrong, that’s great.”