65 Commercial Street: Not a Park

Like I said, its Spring and everyone is thinking parks. And that includes Councilmember (and Comptroller candidate) David Yassky, who has been thinking about 65 Commercial Street for a while now. Tomorrow (14 May) at 1:30, Yassky will be holding a rally on the steps of City Hall to protest the lack of progress in the City’s acquisition of 65 Commercial Street.

65 Commercial Street is one of North Brooklyn’s non-parks. It sits at the far north end of Greenpoint, opposite Box Street. The site, which is owned by the MTA, is situated pretty much at the mouth of Newtown Creek, with great views of the East River. In terms of acquisition, this was supposed to be easy. Prior to the rezoning in 2005, the MTA agreed (in writing) to turn the parcel over to the City in exchange for the City finding an acceptable alternate site for the buses and other vehicles the MTA had been storing on Commercial Street. The City kept up its end of the bargain, and located a number of alternate sites, all of which were rejected by the MTA as being inappropriate for their buses’ needs. But lately, the MTA has removed the buses on their own, and are using the site to store Access-a-Ride vehicles. Presumably, then, since the MTA no longer 65 Commercial Street to store buses, it can now turn the property over to the City.

65 Commercial is not just about parks and open space – its also about affordable housing. That’s because once it acquired it, the City was to have sold the air rights from the property to the developer of the adjacent site on Commercial Street. In exchange for these air rights, the developer was to construct 200 units of affordable housing on Commercial Street.

But wait – there’s more. The air rights sale itself was projected to net the City $12 million (in 2005 dollars). $10 million of that was to go to a “Waterfront Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Fund” – basically a pot of money to facilitate the construction for parcels that made use of the inclusionary housing program on the waterfront. The other $2 million was to go to the creation of a Tenant Legal Fund intended to protect “existing tenants from displacement and harassment”.

So, because the City can’t find a suitable location, the MTA can’t relocate its buses (even though they have already relocated their buses). Because the MTA can’t relocate its buses (which they’ve already relocated), the City can’t acquire 65 Commercial Street. Because the City can’t acquire 65 Commercial Street, it can’t build a park or waterfront esplanade there, nor can it sell the air rights from the property. Because the City can’t sell the air rights from the property, the developer next door can’t build 200 units of affordable housing. And because the City can’t sell the air rights, it also can’t make $12 million. Because the City can’t make $12 million, it can’t help fund new waterfront affordable housing elsewhere (ahem, all of Greenpoint?), and it can’t provide funds to help tenants who are being displaced from their homes. I think its called leverage, and clearly the lever isn’t long enough or the fulcrum is in the wrong place.

Did I mention that this was supposed to be the easy site to acquire?

The Edge, as seen from North 5th St. Pier

It seems that with Spring, everyone is thinking of parks and open space. At tonight’s CB1 meeting, OSA’s Stephanie Thayer made a couple of important announcements. First off, the North 5th Street Pier will be open 7 days a week as of this Thursday. Up to this point, the pier – the only tangible new open space thus far to come out of the waterfront rezoning – was only open on weekends. (Its also a really nice pier.)

Second, the Manhattan Street End Green Space (that might even be its official name) officially opens this Saturday. You can go there now and check it out – it too is really nice.

And last, “next month” NYC Parks is going to break ground on the first phase of Bushwick Inlet Park – the construction of the athletic fields on a portion of the block between North 9th and North 10th Streets.

All of this is good news. And a good start.

Bushwick Inlet Park: The Future
Image via GowanusLounge

As we noted yesterday, North Brooklyn was promised a lot of new open space when the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning was enacted in May of 2005. To date, we don’t have much to show for it. We do have a lot of new condos, which the rezoning enabled. But we don’t have many new parks, which the rezoning promised. Actually, we don’t really have any new parks that the rezoning promised.

One new park that we don’t have but that we might have soon is Bushwick Inlet Park. Or, at least we might have part of it. The entire park is slated to be 28 acres. Most of it will be in Williamsburg, but a small portion will continue north of Bushwick Inlet into Greenpoint. Most of that 28 acres – the part between North 10th and North 14th Streets – is underneath land occupied by a large storage facility and Bayside Fuel Oil. That area also corresponds to the historic home of the Astral Oil Works, Charles Pratt’s massive kerosene refinery and storage facility. Between Astral, Bayside Fuel Oil and the former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, there are a few environmental issues that have to be dealt with before the City can make those blocks parkland. There is also the small matter of acquiring the property, which the City has not yet done.

Bushwick Inlet Park: The Present
Photo: TresspassersWill via flickr

That leaves the one block at the south end of BIP, the block between North 9th and North 10th. For the past couple of years, Enterprise Rental Car has been storing cars on a lot here (which you can see in the photo to the left). But the City did acquire this lot, and has issued plans for its transformation into a park (which you can see in the rendering above and plan below). That plan includes a Parks headquarters and comfort station, an athletic field, a picnic area and a waterfront restaurant. The plan was to have the athletic field up and running and to start construction on the comfort station this summer. The comfort station was to open in Summer 2010. That last bit might still happen, but the athletic field (or anything) opening in Summer 2009 seems pretty unlikely, as the Brooklyn Paper reported last month.

Bushwick Inlet Park: The Proposal
The area highlighted with arrow is expected to start construction this summer.
Image via GowanusLounge.

Photo: animalvegetable on flickr

May 11 marks the fourth anniversary of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Waterfront Rezoning. A lot has happened in four years. Economies have crumbled. Regimes have fallen. The American automobile is more endangered than the American eagle.

Here in North Brooklyn, the last four years have brought construction – a hell of a lot of construction. In Community Board 1, over 1,000 major construction projects have been filed with DOB since May, 2005. Thousands of new housing units are at some point in the pipeline – planned, filed, under construction or occupied. (And despite a global economic meltdown or two, construction in North Brooklyn has not noticeably abated.)

In exchange for all of this new construction, the community was promised a lot. And while the new construction continues full bore, most of the promised benefits of the rezoning have yet to be realized.

On the affordable housing front, the news is mixed. Some of the new housing units going up are affordable to long-term residents. These can be found on the waterfront and far inland. But most of the new construction is going up without making use of the Inclusionary Housing bonus. The first problem was that it took the City awhile to get the IH program online – guidelines for developers were not available until late winter 2006, long after many of the pent up development projects had been permitted and broken ground. The bigger problem was probably the economy – with condos practically minting money, few developers were willing to take the time to qualify for a small bonus that would slow up construction for even a day. It was cheaper to put in stainless-steel appliances, call it a luxury development and watch the money flow. It also didn’t help that the spread between base FAR and bonusable FAR was clearly not wide enough to entice many developers to use the IH program. Add to that the fact that, in retrospect, the program really doesn’t work at R6 levels of zoning – a fact acknowledged by the bump to R7A for the IH program in the contextual rezoning that is now wending its way through the City’s approval process. Where the IH program has worked is at the waterfront developments, where the spread between as-of-right and bonusable FAR is wide enough. But right now waterfront development means Williamsburg – only one project on the Greenpoint portion of the waterfront is anywhere near starting construction. And with 16 of the 19 waterfront blocks in Greenpoint, that leaves a lot of affordable housing in the “potential” column.

Things are arguably worse on the open space front. A lot of new open space was proposed in the rezoning and in the points of agreement negotiated between the City Council and the Bloomberg administration, and almost nothing has been built. The waterfront esplanade is under construction at Northside Piers and the Edge, but is still a ways away from being a public amenity. The North 5th Street pier, which is to be part of this esplanade, is open and may be the only tangible open space addition to have directly resulted from the rezoning. Although it opened in 2008, the East River State Park (the only part-time State Park in New York City) predates the rezoning. Bushwick Inlet Park to the north of that is still in the planning stage. The southernmost section of that park has been acquired and is slated to begin construction soon, but the rest of the park is yet to be acquired (and may require hundreds of millions of dollars of environmental remediation once it is acquired). With no condos being developed in Greenpoint, the waterfront esplanade from Bushwick Inlet to Newtown Creek is years from reality. Transmitter Park at the foot of Greenpoint Avenue has yet to break ground. The sludge tank at Barge Park is still a sludge tank, so no park development can happen there. And 65 Commercial Street is still an MTA parking lot, which means that it is nowhere near being turned into a park.

One bright spot is McCarren Park where (in addition to other work) the City has put up $50 million to renovate the pool. Also encouraging is the fact that NYC Parks is negotiating with waterfront developers to take control of the esplanades (once they are built), with the developers footing most of the bill for maintenance and upkeep. The creation of the Open Space Alliance, not a direct result of the rezoning, is a huge addition to the neighborhood. Also on the positive side, the Manhattan Avenue street-end park has just opened, and the Newtown Creek Nature Walk is a success (albeit an ironic one), but both of those are technically outside the scope of what was promised in the rezoning.

With all the talk of parks and housing, its easy to forget that parts of our community are still zoned for manufacturing. In the aftermath of the rezoning, scads of manufacturers were forced out of newly zoned blocks. The Bushwick Inlet manufacturing enclave – which is surrounded by new residential zoning – was supposed to be one area where manufacturing would be protected by zoning. But that area in particular is looking less and less viable. The manufacturers there don’t have to compete with residential development, but they do have to compete with hotels, bowling alleys, Vespa dealerships and the like. Its not a battle they are likely to win. The bright spots are that the City has finally put together funding to help displaced manufacturers, and has implemented the Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) program to protect industry (a program which is still a work in progress).

Ironically, the area where the community has seen the most progress since May, 2005 is in the promotion of sensible growth. In 2004 and 2005, the community fought hard for height and density levels well below what the City was proposing. The City and the City Council largely ignored the community’s position, and even many within the community saw height and density as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of affordable housing. But since the zoning was enacted, the City has undertaken three separate zoning actions – the 2006 FUCA, the 2008 Grand Street Rezoning and the 2009 Greenpoint-Williamsburg Contextual Rezoning – designed to limit non-contextual building heights and introduce a somewhat more sensible allowable density. The City also stood up to Quadriad’s nonsensical proposal to trade more affordable housing for even more height and density. Finally, there seems to be a recognition that contextual growth matters, and that simply throwing more market-rate housing at the affordable housing problem ultimately leads to more displacement, a more overburdened infrastructure and a less livable neighborhood.

No one expected that all this would take four years. In the boom times of the past four years, it was hard to even keep up on some of these issues, let alone get ahead of the curve. Now, despite the empty City coffers, there might be a chance to catch up. Buy waterfront parkland at a discount. Make the MTA an offer they can’t refuse. Make the IBZ work for manufacturers. Promote a sensible Inclusionary Housing bonus.