For those of you that forgot to mark you calendars, tomorrow is Rezoning Day. That’s right, it is five years since the City Council approved the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Waterfront Rezoning. On May 11, 2005, the City Council and the Mayor’s office finalized a package of promises that paved the way for the enactment of the rezoning.

Since it’s Rezoning Day, you might be wondering how the City is doing on all of the promises it made in 2005. I certainly am – so I did some poking around.

Things have slowly improved on the open space side of the equation in the past year. The first phase of Bushwick Inlet Park is now open as a soccer field (and a rather nice one at that). 0.28 acres down, 28 to go. Unfortunately, no headway has been made on the acquisition of the rest of the future Bushwick Inlet Park, so there is no waterfront access, no picnic area, no dog run, no bosque, no gardens and no great lawn. A waterfront pier opened last year at Northside Piers, the first taste of the publicly-accessible waterfront that one day is to run from North 3rd Street to Newtown Creek. That day is still far off, even for the Northside – the esplanades at 184 Kent, Northside Piers and the Edge are still not publicly accessible, and construction activity on land has rendered the pier a part-time amenity.

Up in Greenpoint, waterfront access is farther out on the horizon – there can be no waterfront esplanade until there is waterfront development. Work is soon to be underway at Transmitter Park, so maybe the public will have a real park to enjoy by the time we get to the 6th anniversary. But that’s the good news for Greenpoint. The bad news is that sludge tank is still where it has been for the past five years – smack dab in the middle of a proposed waterfront park. And 65 Commercial Street is still in the hands of the MTA, which means that it too is still not a park.

Over the past year, there have been some positive developments on the parks and open space front, including the beginning of construction of McCarren Pool, the opening of a skate park at McCarren, and the opening of a playground at East River State Park. Technically, none of these are a direct result of the 2005 rezoning. But they are all welcome improvements to a community that ranked 39th City-wide in terms of per capita open space before the rezoning. Since 2005, Greenpoint and Williamsburg have added a lot more people (with more to come), but we haven’t really added that much more open space. Certainly not enough to increase – or even hold the line on – our open space ratio.

On the affordable housing front, not much has changed since last year’s report. Two waterfront developments are nearing completion, and both of those are generating affordable housing units through the inclusionary housing program. But none of the other waterfront sites are remotely near breaking ground, so what we see now is what we’re going to get out of that program for a while.

Upland, no developers that I know of have opted in to the inclusionary program. One development was supposed to create a dozen or so off-site units of affordable housing, but the market rate portion of that project is stalled (or nearly so), and the affordable portion of the project is still an empty lot. Other than that, the upland inclusionary program has not lived up to the City’s expectations.

City-owned sites aren’t faring much better. Some affordable units were created at Cook Street using a City-owned parking lot. The rest of the City-owned sites are meandering their way through the approval process. In the 2005 Points of Agreement between the Council and Mayor’s Office, 20 City-owned sites were identified for the development of 1,345 units of affordable housing. To date, none of those units of housing has been constructed. The closest to completion of the 14 units of senior housing being developed by North Brooklyn Development Corporation at the former Herbert Street Police Station. Only 1,331 units to go.

What’s the hold up? It took the City close to three years to issue RFPs for a series of small sites and one pretty big site (Greenpoint Hospital with 265 units). It then took the City two years to award the Greenpoint Hospital RFP – the result being that not a spade of dirt has been turned on any of these sites. But at least they’ve been awarded – that MTA site at 65 Commercial is also supposed to generate air rights that will create 431 units of affordable housing. Once the city acquires those air rights. And once someone buys them from the City and builds affordable housing next door. In other words, not any time soon.

Manufacturing jobs continue to suffer as a result of the rezoning, despite numerous promises and programs that were supposed to make manufacturing viable in the small pockets that were still designated for such uses. The problem is that bars, restaurants, bowling alleys and hotels continue to be more viable uses than manufacturing in the Bushwick Inlet area – no surprise, given that these few blocks were completely surrounded by new residential use in 2005. The continued success of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center show that manufacturing is still viable in Brooklyn, but the sector is easily suffocated by short-sighted policy decisions.

A yar ago, things were looking brightest on the good growth front. Writing about sensible growth last year, I said:

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.</

This was written in response to a follow-up action by the City and two contextual rezonings, all of which restricted height and created a manageable density level upland from the waterfront. These actions – covering over 200 blocks – were all a direct result of promises made in 2005 and they were important steps forward for Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Another important step forward was the community’s decision not to support Quadriad’s 20-story on Berry and North 3rd Street.

But now we have Domino to contend with – a rezoning that makes 2005’s rezoning look downright quaint. That isn’t necessarily the City’s fault. The Council, in 2005, required the City to “work expeditiously to commence public review” of the Domino rezoning. That public review has commenced, largely on Domino’s terms. Hopefully the City will scale it back and retain the affordable housing.

So there you have it – the state of the rezoning, 2010. Things are looking up on open space, even if we have a long, long way to go. The outlook is less rosy on affordable housing, downright bleak on industrial retention and murkier on sustainable development. Not exactly flying colors.

Just how much money are the Domino developers making off of their project? No one knows, and CPCR, the lead developer of Domino has refused to say.

But the Greenpoint Star’s Dan Bush has found an answer. And if the numbers he has dug up are remotely based in reality, that answer is a lot. Almost half a billion a lot.

The problem is, the numbers may not be based in reality – they are three-and-a-half-years old and come with a host of caveats. Dan’s article is very well-reported, and sorts through the numbers pretty carefully, as well as the problems with them and what they might or might not mean. I strongly suggest you read what he has to say before reading on here.

The numbers Dan found came from the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which appears to have prepared the document in order to determine the impact of the landmark designation of the refinery on the overall project. HPD and CPCR both claim that the developer had nothing to do with the production of the numbers, but the basic structure of the development scenarios analyzed mirror CPCR’s actual development proposal quite closely, so clearly HPD some idea of what it was doing and what CPCR was planning at Domino (the document was prepared about 9 months before Domino released its plans publicly). For instance, the total number of units in all four scenarios is between 2,100 and 2,400 (Domino is proposing 2,200 but the zoning would allow up to 2,400). The total number of affordable units is between 630 and 714 (Domino is proposing 660). (One key difference is that the target number for affordable units is 35% – Domino only proposed 30%.)

HPD analyzed four development scenarios, with net profits in the $380 million to $450 million range (between 42% and 50% return on cost). Those are huge numbers, and remarkably, they only cover a portion of the project. They exclude all of the development on the upland site, and they assume no income from retail or parking on the waterfront parcels. They are also based on a full residential build out of the waterfront parcel, and we now know that about 20% of the site will be commercial office space, not residential (the office space was added to the scope of the project after 2008).

Of course the big caveat is that HPD’s numbers were done in late 2006, a very different market from today. HPD’s analysis assumes that market-rate units on the waterfront will get $900 per square foot. Both HPD and CPCR say that those numbers are out of date – late 2006 was near the top of the market, the world has changed since then, we don’t know when we’ll see those kind of numbers again, etc., etc. But according to StreetEasy, the average asking price at the Edge is $926 a foot, and the average sale price is $918 per foot. There may be some gross/net apples/oranges in this comparison, but $900 a foot for prime waterfront may not be too far off the mark, even in today’s market.

So what does it all mean? Well first off, CPCR has never said that it isn’t going to profit from the development. While the Daily News continues to operate under the misapprehension that CPCR is a non-profit, for its part, CPCR has always said that this a for-profit venture. And certainly Domino’s investors – led by developer Isaac Katan, who acquired the property in the first place – expect to make a profit.

And there is nothing wrong with that. We live in a market-based economy and without profit, we would have a lot less housing – affordable and otherwise – built. It also shouldn’t be a surprise that there huge potential profit here – considering the low price that CPCR and friends paid for the property ($55 million in 2004 – between $23 and $27 per buildable residential square foot by HPD’s calculation), the project should be profitable. CPCR has spent tens of millions of dollars just developing the plans for the project and getting them approved – those are not non-profit numbers.

The thing is that CPCR decided early on that what every other waterfront developer got in 2005 was not good enough for them. They need more – specifically, more market-rate density. A lot more market-rate density. And in order to justify that more, CPCR is saying that their project is different. They have to pay to rebuild the wharf for the waterfront esplanade. They have to pay to preserve the refinery. They have to cross-subsidize the additional affordable units with additional market-rate units. (None of these expenses are necessarily extraordinary or unexpected – every waterfront developer has costs associated with constructing bulkheads, piers and esplanades; CPCR is not the only developer on the waterfront with historic preservation costs; HPD assumes that there will be up to $70 million in housing subsidies available for the waterfront portion of the project. But I digress.)

In order to account for all of these unique factors, CPCR says that it has to have more market-rate units and a series of special permits to allow greater height, reallocation of floor area throughout the site and a huge number of parking spots. All of these permits and extra density come at a cost to the community and the city. Increased market-rate density means accelerated secondary displacement on Williamsburg – Southside and Northside. It means that the amount of available open space per capita drops throughout Williamsburg. It means thousand more people on Williamsburg’s buses and subways. It means thousands more cars on Williamsburg’s streets.

Given that CPCR needs so much more, and bases its case for all the “more” that it needs on “unique” factors and economic viability (the project “just doesn’t work” at lower density), the Community Board and local politicians are right to ask for some transparency in the process. None of these people are looking to kill Domino, but they do want to make sure that the community and the City get a fair deal. CPCR and its partners say they are giving the community a fantastic deal, but without transparency, we all have to just take their word for it.

So where does that leave things? Well, until CPCR does share, the only numbers the public has to work with are the numbers in the HPD report. And they are big. Very big.