Brendan Parker, assistant director of Red Hook Farms, said he regularly smells the exhaust fumes wafting from the line of delivery vans exiting the Amazon warehouse just across the street from the nonprofit’s sprawling Columbia Street farm in Brooklyn.

“We've seen a massive increase in traffic around the site,” said Parker, pointing out the steady stream of vehicles laden with goods bound for nearby communities. “You’ll see, in a span of two minutes, 40 vans driving out.”

Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has been buffeted with complaints from local residents about pollution, pedestrian safety and other hazards associated with such “last-mile” e-commerce warehouses. Now, the administration is pledging to address the problem.

In a recent letter to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer promised the administration would back future legislation to cut pollution linked to e-commerce warehouses and would propose other rules to restrict the creation of new facilities.

The potential changes would mark the city's most significant regulation of the facilities yet. They have proliferated since the surge in e-commerce during the pandemic, with little oversight by city officials.

An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Environmental justice advocates cite data showing that e-commerce warehouses, dubbed “last-mile” facilities because they represent the final leg of direct-to-door deliveries, are concentrated in lower-income communities of color that are already overburdened by air pollution, traffic and other environmental harms.

A January report by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund found that 1 in 4 New York state residents live within a half-mile of a mega-warehouse bigger than 50,000 square feet. Local councilmembers, environmentalists and neighbors say the number of such facilities has grown, especially in Red Hook, Sunset Park, parts of Williamsburg and the South Bronx.

The Adams administration agreed to the new warehouse rules as part of negotiations over the mayor’s larger commercial real estate plan, called the "City of Yes for Economic Opportunity," according to the letter to the Council speaker and other Council documents. The initiative is the retail-and-business component of Adams' sweeping, three-part “City of Yes” plan to update the city’s zoning rules to allow for more housing, invest in renewable energy and make it easier to do business in the city.

Last week, the Council approved the “Economic Opportunity” package, which includes 18 changes to the zoning rules. Councilmembers and the administration say that regulations on last-mile warehouses will follow.

In her letter, Torres-Springer promised that the mayor's team would advance a bill this year to allow the city Department of Environmental Protection to regulate air pollution from vehicle traffic at a given warehouse. She also wrote that the Department of City Planning would propose changing zoning rules to require a special permit for last-mile warehouses. She said the department would release a draft on the scope of the proposal by the end of March 2025.

The new special permit process would give the Council final say in approving last-mile warehouses, according to Councilmember Rafael Salamanca Jr. of the South Bronx, who chairs the land use committee. Such a permit could also require an environmental review for last-mile facilities to ensure they would not negatively affect nearby traffic, pedestrian and road safety or air pollution, said Councilmember Alexa Avilés, who represents Sunset Park and Red Hook.

Salamanca said he and other councilmembers would have opposed the “City of Yes for Economic Opportunity” plan had the administration not agreed to regulate last-mile warehouses. “It gets to a point where you have to use your power of voting to get the attention of the city,” he said. “There was just no interest in it, and I felt like this was like a do or die. This was the opportunity, the perfect opportunity.”

Casey Berkovitz, a spokesperson for the city planning department, said in a statement that it was "too soon” to provide details on the warehouse and special permit proposals. He added that the department “will be working with stakeholders and experts … to inform any potential policy.”

The Adams’ administration pledges come after Avilés and 28 other councilmembers — a majority of the 51-person legislature — sent Department of City Planning Director Dan Garodnick a letter in early April calling for more regulation of last-mile warehouses.

“We’ve been chomping at the bit for three years now,” said Avilés. "And it's good to finally see some real commitments."

Two years ago, she and a group of environmental advocates called the Last-Mile Coalition proposed changing the city’s zoning rules to require special permits for last-mile warehouses. Their proposal would bar warehouses within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, nursing homes, public housing complexes and other such warehouses.

Following the Council’s approval of the mayor's “City of Yes for Economic Opportunity” plan, the City Planning Commission and Council must again vote on the proposal. Both bodies are expected to give a final greenlight to the plan, according to Salamanca.

He, Avilés and environmental advocates said they would closely monitor whether the Adams administration meets the deadlines put forth in Torres-Springer’s letter.

Alok Disa, senior research and policy analyst for Earthjustice, a national environmental organization that's part of the Last-Mile Coalition, said he would also look out for the technical details of the city’s forthcoming policies. “The devil could be in the details,” he said.

Still, Disa said, “it's maybe the biggest step forward in last-mile regulation in any municipality that I've encountered in the whole country."