Acme Smoked Fish Expansion Approved by City Council

Speaking of the Bushwick Inlet IBZ and its rifeness with office space, City Council approved the rezoning of the Acme Fish site on Banker Street. Rubenstein Partners and Gensler architects – the same team that developed/designed 25 Kent Avenue – is behind this proposal. (25 Kent, by the way, is really a quite wonderful experience. Needs more people obviously, but the architecture and (in particular) urban design are quite nice.)

All Parking

A lot of people have been speculating as to what an “as-of-right” development at the CitiStorage property might look like. The property – promised as a park in 2005, but still in private hands – is zoned for M3 (heavy industrial). The likelihood of a rezoning to residential use or to a lesser degree of M zoning is pretty close to nil, at least for the foreseeable future. Councilman Steve Levin has said that he would never support such an action, and all of the other elected officials – Congresswoman, Borough President, Assemblyman and State Senator – have all gone on record as opposed to any actions that are not for a park. The Mayor has said that his administration would not approve a rezoning over community opposition.

That explains why the owner’s recent marketing package for the property describes it as “as-is, where-is“. Anyone buying this property is buying M3 land. Still, it is M3 land on the Williamsburg waterfront, and M3 can include office and retail use (but not hotel use – that is only allowed in M1). So an as-of-right development could include some mix of office and retail uses, for which there is certainly a market in Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

It turns out, though, that it may not be that easy. M3 zoning comes with some pretty hefty parking requirements. On top which, the property is subject to additional restrictions as a waterfront site and as part of the Williamsburg/Greenpoint Waterfront Access Plan (WAP) established as part of the 2005 rezoning.

All of this boils down to this – any substantial “as of right” development of the property for commercial use would need contain an almost equally substantial parking structure.

The math works out like this – according to Cushman & Wakefield’s set up for the property, there are about 588,000 square feet of development rights. For Use Group 6 (commercial retail and office use) M3 zoning requires 1 parking space for every 300 square feet of development. That means 1,920 parking spaces would be required for a full build out. A standard parking space is 300 square feet, which means that the required parking would amount to 588,000 square feet. Parking (within limits, see below) does not count as floor area, so the total envelope of the as-of-right development at full build out would be just under 1.2 million square feet.

That parking cannot go anywhere.

It can go underground, but this property is in a flood zone and has a water table about 4′ to 5′ below grade. Underground parking is very expensive, but underground parking below the water table is doubly so.

The parking could go in an above-grade parking structure. Under the WAP, any parking under 33′ in height would not count as floor area. A parking structure 33′ high would allow three stories of parking, so the parking could be consolidated on about 1/3 of the site.

But there are more restrictions. The WAP requires that all parking be wrapped by commercial or residential uses to a depth of at least 25′. So the footprint available for parking would be a smaller area at the center of the lot. And by putting parking there, you can’t use that area for ground-floor retail use. So the mix of office to retail shifts strongly in favor of office, with only smaller ground-floor retail footprints.

M3 zoning also has height limits. Street walls are limited to 60′ (six stories), and overall height is limited to 110′ (11 stories). A penthouse rule under the WAP can raise that height limit to 150′ (15 stories) in areas. But if a big chunk of your building base is occupied by a 3-story-tall parking structure, the envelope available for retail and office use starts to shrink considerably.

Add to this the setback requirements of the waterfront zoning regulations and the open space requirements of the WAP (15% of the site needs to be waterfront open space), and things get tighter.

Not to mention more expensive. Even above grade, structured parking is expensive. And there isn’t enough room at grade to just build a parking lot (talk about paving paradise…).

This is one of the issues that led the developers of 25 Kent Avenue to pursue a rezoning to allow office and commercial construction at its M1-zoned property without the hefty parking requirements. City Planning recently approved that rezoning, but it was contentious, and in the process, the abandoned a broader rezoning for the area. That rezoning would not have extended to the Bushwick Inlet properties across Kent Avenue.

There is some relief available. With permission from DOB, you can reduce the area per parking space to about 225 square feet, or about 441,000 square feet. But that requires fully-attended parking – a more expensive proposition. There is also a variance available through the Board of Standards and Appeals, which could cut the number of parking spaces in half. But that is a discretionary process, and just about every level of city government has gone on record stating that they would not support any discretionary actions for this property. As is means as is.

The upshot is this – as-of-right development at the CitiStorage site comes with very restrictive open space, building envelope and, in particular, parking requirements. Those parking requirements would add significantly to the cost of development on the property, and any knowledgable buyer looking at this property must be taking this – and the downright toxic political environment (and actual environment) surrounding this site – into account in pricing their offers.

Industry is not Manufacturing: Tax Breaks to Set Up Shop in NYC

Tax credits from NY State are helping VICE move to 60,000sf at South 2nd and Kent (and add 525 employees) and Amazon set up a photo studio in a 40,000sf spot at Kent and North 12th (creating over 175 jobs). Both sites are in areas still zoned for manufacturing. Helping the moves are $6.5 million and $2 million in tax credits, respectively.

How NYC’s Decade of Rezoning Changed the City of Industry

Eli Rosenberg, with a long, and very smart look at exactly why the Bushwick Inlet IBZ (and others) are broken:

But the massive redevelopment of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfronts and the sudden desirability of the area was having a trickle down effect on even the IBZ, a small wedge in the middle of the vast rezoning that had transformed the two formerly industrial neighborhoods. A night market and concert venue had replaced the bakery across the street, with the leasing agents pitching the “central location and existing, vibrant night life scene.” A restaurant with a $125 dollar tasting menu had opened inside the IBZ a few blocks away. And the Wythe Hotel opened in Spring 2012 on the edge of the zone, quickly becoming a “summertime Eden” for a fresh crowd of jetsetters—a beneficiary of the nearly 200 blocks of rezoning the city pushed through in 2005, turning Williamsburg from an industrial neighborhood into a development free-for-all, as gleaming condo towers rose along a waterfront once blanketed by factories.

(A small point – people like to make a big deal about the Bloomberg administration’s 124 rezoning (“nearly 40% of the city’s acreage”), but they forget that many of those rezonings were contextual in nature, and did significantly change allowed uses or increase in any meaningful way the allowable density of development.)

Bushwick Mall

Bushwick Daily has pictures from a Massey Knakal brochure marketing a proposed “Bushwick” Mall on Bogart Street in East Williamsburg. It’s not really clear if Massey Knakal is marketing the property (i.e., trying to entice someone to develop it) or if they are trying to market the project (i.e., someone is already planning to build this and is looking for tenants). Either way, this project seems to be more about the Bushwick Hotel than the Bushwick Mall.

Monster Island Going Down – What’s Next?

Monster Island, RIP

Monster Island, prepped for demolition.

The block-sized property on Kent Avenue between Metropolitan and North 1st is finally getting demolished. Sidewalk sheds and permits went up early this week, and demolition of one of the River Street buildings was in progress as of yesterday.

What the future holds for this site is unclear. The property – once home to Monster Island, Duff’s, Mollusk and other Williamsburg 2.0 establishments – is still zoned for manufacturing use. That zoning designation was always tenuous at best, but since the rezoning of Domino seems to make little sense. Con Ed has already cleared its site across River Street (also with no plans for redevelopment), and despite the earlier rumors, it seems unlikely that Chetrit, who owns this site, will be putting a Whole Foods here. There are no permits on DOB for this site, so it’s anyone’s guess what is in store. Perhaps a rezoning (it would make a lot of sense to rezone all of the remaining manufacturing blocks along Kent between South 3rd and North 3rd), perhaps a new hotel (which seems to be the new highest and best use for M-zoned lots in Williamsburg 3.0).