Tag: affordable housing

17 Years

05/03/2022 | Comment

Via North Brooklyn Neighbors, the cover of the New York Times, 17 years ago today. Marking the finalization of the deal to rezone the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront. The rezoning itself was enacted 8 days later. As I noted in an earlier linked post, 17 years on only a third of the promised Bushwick Inlet Park has been completed. Less than half the total open space promised has been created. And I’d guess a bit over half of the promised affordable housing.

Cover of the NYT, May 3 2005

In the papers…
via North Brooklyn Neighbors


Thoughts on River Ring

08/30/2021 | Comment

River Ring – the proposed rezoning by Two Trees of the former Con Ed site at Metropolitan and River Street – kicks off its ULURP review with a Community Board 1 Land Use committee meeting on Wednesday. Hopefully the CB recommends for changes but does not follow the lead of those who want to kill the project outright. This is a chance to rezone one of the last waterfront parcels on the East River, locking in a significant open space connector, affordable housing and more.

First off, this site should be residential. Period.

River Ring master plan

River Ring Master Plan
via FieldOps

There is no valid public policy reason to leave this zoned for heavy manufacturing. It should be smaller (floor area), which will make it shorter (not a big deal for me, but everyone else keys on the height). The open space is visionary and should be a model for future waterfront development – every developer should be held to this standard. It has everything community activists have been clamoring for and will connect the Southside waterfront and the rest of the neighborhood. There should be more affordable housing and it should be more affordable. 30% to 35% of the units, at a project-wide average AMI of 40%.

Hopefully CB1 supports the residential zoning *with* conditions. As they did for the 2010 Domino Rezoning (pre-Two Trees). In 2010 the CB did not say that residential use was inappropriate at Domino – rather that developer was trying to supersize the density. They should say the same thing here – support residential use, affordable housing and open space, but see it done better. (This would also be consistent with CB1’s District Needs statement, which lists affordable housing as the top TWO (of three) key issues for the community. It would also be in line with CB1 recommendations on other waterfront projects – Kedem Winery (420 Kent), Certified Lumber (Rose Plaza) and Shaefer Landing. Saying that this one parcel should be kept as M3 zoning doesn’t make sense in light of all these prior recommendations.)

There really is no valid public policy reason to leave the former Con Ed property zoned for M3 (heavy manufacturing). What kind of residential and how much can be debated, but if you are arguing to leave this as manufacturing you are not engaging in an honest debate. (The only other valid use I could see here is a public park. That would cost upwards of $300M for acquisition and construction – given the City’s track record at Bushwick Inlet, I’m not holding my breath. Not to mention that Parks would never build a build a waterfront park to the level of quality and design that Two Trees is proposing.)

This site should have been rezoned for residential years ago. In 2005 Domino was still in operation and it made sense to leave the area from Bway to N3 as manufacturing. But Domino closed shop just as that rezoning was going through, making the M zoning has been an anachronism. 11 years ago, when the first Domino Rezoning came through CB1, I asked why the City wasn’t developing a plan for the whole area – I still think that they should have. But instead, these parcels have been rezoned piecemeal – zoning, not planning, once again is the norm in NYC.

How much residential? I do think that the density being proposed is too much. Not a lot too much, but a bit too much. Back of the envelope, maybe 10% too much – the zoning should be straight R8, 6.5 FAR with the inclusionary bonus, same as the rest of the waterfront towers. (Yes, the waterfront sites from the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront rezoning have a blended R6/R8 zoning, but on zoning lots that are 2 to 3 times the size of River St. and go all the way out to Kent/West. Blended zoning here would kill the affordable cross subsidy.)

Two Trees is also seeking a zoning waiver to reduce parking below what is required by zoning. Grant it. More parking means more cars, there is solid documentation for this. And more parking also means less affordable housing, there is solid documentation for that too.

In terms of the overall proposal, I love the waterfront access and open space. Field Ops design is truly transformative and is pretty much everything that open space advocates in the community have been asking for for years. It is resilient, both diurnally and annually. It is the first truly resilient open space on 4 miles of waterfront. It brings the public to the water without bulkheads, wharves or “get-downs”. It avoids the use of rip-rap and other unfriendly barriers between people and the water. The design reuses the pod wharves from the Con Ed site in creative ways to deal with the tides and currents of the East River. Most importantly, it CONNECTS the waterfront – the Northside esplanades to Grand Ferry Park, something that I and others have been advocating for years now. And it does so in a way that is a thousand times better than the waterfront esplanades of the 2005 rezoning. (Like at Domino, Two Trees promises to maintain the park rather than turning it over to Parks Department to manage – that is a very good thing too.)

(Also worth noting here for the proponents of leaving the M3 zoning intact – there is no requirement to provide waterfront access under the existing zoning – this property falls outside the Waterfront Access Plan, which requires public access to the waterfront. If an as-of-right development were to provide any waterfront access (and they don’t have to), it could be 100% private. No public access, not even an esplanade.)

As for the architecture, OK, meh. For me, BIG’s whole schtick is about, well, big ideas with no nuance. The massing here is fine – yeah, the towers are ginormous, but any reduction in FAR will quickly knock off a lot of those small floor plates. Cut back the FAR 10% and I bet the height drops by 25% or more. I‘ve never been an opponent of height on its own. Everything on the waterfront is out of context with the neighborhood, but the overall urban design here is so much better than the 2005 paradigm.

The buildings from the 2005 rezoning – 40 stories with large floor plates on blocks that 400’ deep to the river set in semi-private compounds – are more offensive in terms of urban design than what is proposed here. Take a walk down South 1st from Kent and compare that to a walk down North 5th from Kent. The Battery Park City model on which the 2005 rezoning was based is just not good urban design, especially on very deep blocks, and 1 South 1st is great proof that taller buildings on smaller floorplates are more pedestrian friendly.

On affordable housing, there should be more. 30% to 35% at an overall average 40% AMI. Maybe this is unrealistic with existing subsidies & inclusionary housing, but if the city, state and feds aren’t going to build affordable housing they should at least pay others to do so. (Keeping this site zoned M3 means no affordable housing at all. 200+ units won’t be built under an M3 (or M-anything) scenario.)

And please, change the name.

Williamsburg Bar Crown Vic Is Closing To Make Way For “Major” Development Project

05/10/2016 | Comment

This is a bit dated, but Gothamist reports that Crown Vic is “100% [closing], it’s just a question of when”. “When” could be another five years. The property (which extends from South 2nd to South 3rd, and includes about half a block of frontage on Wythe Avenue) was rezoned in 2011 to allow residential use, with up to 20% of the site being affordable housing. Since then, it has been acquired by Manhattan developer Flank. Back in 2011, the owner of Crown Vic claimed to have a 10-year lease. Flank has said that they plan to develop the site “once the retail leases expire”, though a but out is certainly possible.

Flank has also acquired a similarly-sized site at two blocks south at Grand and Wythe.

Spitzer’s Kedem Winery Gets Bigger?

06/16/2015 | Comment

SPITZERweb3 superJumbo

ODA’s New (and bigger) Plan for 420 Kent

Eliot Spitzer is revealing his ODA-designed plans for the former Kedem Winery site on the Southside waterfront. The property was rezoned in 2006, and the as-of-right development more or less conforms to the rest of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront zoning – a 5.0 FAR, 20% affordable at 80% AMI, publicly-accessible waterfront esplanade. The only real difference is the height, which at 18 and 24 stories is closer to the Schaefer Landing precedent than what was allowed further north (35 to 40 stories).

But according to the Times, Spitzer’s plans call for 856 units of housing, which is almost double what was predicted in the 2006 rezoning documents (450 units back then), and he is now showing three towers instead of two. At first I assumed that the project had shifted unit sizes – pretty dramatically. Looking at BIS, though, I can only find two New Building permits, totaling 470 units in two buildings (16 and 18 stories).

420 Kent Avenue

The Old Plan

As recently as last summer, Spitzer was showing renderings (below) that matched the 2006 rezoning (that architecture was by Pasanella Klein Stolzman & Berg). So where did this third tower and extra 400 units come from?


Short-term vs. Long-term Affordability

The affordable units, of which 20 percent [about 18 units] will be permanently affordable, will be distributed to people earning between $23,000 to $105,000 per year.

Big change from 0% affordable, so kudos to Antonio for working that deal. But how long will the other 27 “affordable” units be affordable?

Inclusionary Housing Program Not Making So Much Housing

According to a new study by Brad Lander’s office, the City’s inclusionary housing program hasn’t created as much affordable housing as the City predicted. That’s not really a surprise, and neither is it a surprise that most of the inclusionary housing generated has been on the Williamsburg waterfront and on the far west side of Manhattan at Hudson Yards. It’s not a surprise because those two areas are some of the few places where the incentives are deep enough to compel participation in the program. In most of Greenpoint & Williamsburg where the program was put in place, the incentive is really not that great, particularly once the market heats up.

Except on the Greenpoint waterfront – it will be big there.

Via WNYC

Ugliest, Scariest, Most Horrible

The last thing Greenpoint ever wanted was a wall of buildings. This is the ugliest, scariest, most horrible plan.

It would have been great if all these people cared back in 2004 or so when all of this was getting approved. Olechowski is right – there was a lot of activism within the community to get a better plan out of the rezoning (going back to the mid 1990s), but what was approved is what was approved.

And except for the height of 77 Commercial, just about everything here is what was approved in 2005. And the height of 77 Commercial has an actual community benefit attached to it – a new park next door at 65 Commercial. Whether that is a trade-off worth making is another question.

Greenpoint Landing Lands Tonight

05/06/2013 | Comment

Park Tower Group Greenpoint

Greenpoint Landing (via Crain’s)
Architect: Handel Architects

Greenpoint Landing – the 22-acre development at the north end of the Greenpoint waterfront – is scheduled to make its public debut at a Community Board 1 meeting this evening*. From what I’ve heard to date, the project itself is largely as of right – the number of units, tower heights, tower massing, etc. are all what was approved in the 2005 waterfront rezoning (as Matt Chaban notes, the development has gone from glassy to a more “contextual” brick with punched window openings).

What is new is that the developer will be constructing the affordable housing that the city had committed to as part of the 2005 rezoning (Greenpoint Landing is building 20% inclusionary on their property, and building additional units on a city-owned site that is being wrapped into the project – the number of affordable units isn’t actually increasing from what was promised). The other new thing is the inclusion of a school as part of the development – this latter bit might be the only thing that requires an actual zoning modification.

There is another item on tonight’s agenda that will require a zoning modification – the new development up the street at 77 Commercial Street. That project is acquiring the air rights from the MTA parcel at 65 Commercial Street. The air rights purchase will allow the city to construct the park it committed to build at 65 Commercial, but also certainly taller and bulkier development on the adjacent 77 Commercial site.

The Greenpoint waterfront has been aslumber ever since the 2005 rezoning was approved (eight years ago this week). Greenpoint missed the last real estate boom, but seems destined to get caught up in this one, and when that happens, it will make the Northside and even Long Island City look quaint by comparison.

*Pardon the Facebook link – CB1’s website is too useless to link to.↩