Tag: rezoning

City Seeks Developer to Finance Parks on Greenpoint Waterfront

The Daily News is a bit confused about the air-rights sale at 65 Commercial Street.

The sale of the air rights themselves is not a “new plan” – it was one of the points of agreement between the Bloomberg administration and the City Council back in 2005. What is new is that those same points of agreement earmarked the funds from the sale of the air rights was supposed to go towards a $2 million tenant legal fund and a $10 “waterfront affordable housing and infrastructure fund”. As I understand it, the tenant legal fund was funded by the City a few years back, when it became clear that the air rights transfer was not imminent. But I don’t believe the infrastructure fund was ever funded.

The headline of the News, and some of the quotes from “a developer who asked to remain anonymous” in the article also imply that this is a wide open RFP. It is actually quite a narrow one – there are only two developers who can reasonably use the air rights from 65 Commercial, and they are the owners of the adjacent properties to either side: 77 Commercial Street to the east and the massive Park Tower site to the west. A small market, indeed.

Transmitter Park and the 2005 Rezoning

08/22/2012 | Comment

Everyone (see below) is reporting that Transmitter Park is finally set to (re)open this Saturday as an actual (as opposed to ersatz) park. Which is great news, and long overdue.

But everyone also seems to be confusing an important detail about the 1.6-acre park – it was not “promised” as part of the 2005 rezoning. Rather, it was a commitment that predated the rezoning by a number of years. The Post, which first reported the opening, is just one example (I’m not picking on the Post here – they actually come closest to getting the facts straight):

[The] Bloomberg administration has yet to deliver roughly 50 acres of parkland that officials promised North Brooklyn residents in 2005 while pushing through a controversial rezoning plan which has brought thousands of high-rise apartments to Williamsburg and Greenpoint’s waterfronts… When it opens, the project at the former WNYC radio transmissions tower site on the river’s edge between Greenpoint Avenue and Kent Street will be first of this promised green space fully delivered.

The 2005 rezoning actually proposed to add about 38 acres of open space as part of the sweeping transformation of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront. Of that, about 28 acres was new parkland proposed by the City, 5.6 acres was in the form of new waterfront esplanades (à la the Edge & Northside Piers), and 4.8 was new open space that was added in last-minute negotiations between the City Council and the administration (this includes the someday park at 65 Commercial and additional parkland at Barge Park).

On top of those 38 acres, the City’s environmental impact statement (EIS) identified about 9 acres or so of parks and open space that was already planned. Some of that planned open space came in the form of public esplanades for developments such as Kedem Winery, Schaefer Brewery and 184 Kent Avenue (the latter two of which have been completed). But the baseline (“future without proposed action” in EIS-speak) also included the 6-acre East River State Park site, the .2-acre Manhattan Avenue street end park and the 1.6-acre Transmitter site.

This is all clearly laid out in the EIS that the City itself prepared in 2005 (to the extent that anything is clearly laid out in an EIS):

Within the Greenpoint sub-area, there are two open space resources that are expected to be developed by 2013 (see Figure 5-3). The WNYC Transmitter Site, located at the western terminus of Greenpoint Avenue at the East River, is slated for development by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) by 20131 as a waterfront park. The site currently contains a one-story building used by DPR for maintenance, and formerly contained two transmitter towers (now removed). The approximately 1.6-acre site would cater to passive recreation use and is scheduled to have a pier constructed in approximately 2 years.

So while Transmitter Park was identified in the EIS, it was identified as a park that was already “on the books”, not as one of the parks that was part of the package that the City “promised in exchange for permitting luxury housing along the waterfront“. If you do include those “future without proposed action” sites in your calculation, the total additional parks and open space goes from 38.2 to 47.0 acres. (There actually have been other additions since 2005 – notably, the 4.5-acre McCarren Park Pool, which was not included in any of the City’s 2005 EIS calculations.)

In other words, the opening of Transmitter Park is not a case of the City following through on its commitments from the 2005 rezoning, it is a case of the City following through on its commitments from years before the 2005 rezoning.

Regardless of how you count the numbers, I’d also argue that Transmitter is not the “first” park to come of the 2005 rezoning. The Manhattan Avenue Street End park was completed a few years ago, as was the soccer field at Bushwick Inlet Park.

But no matter how you count it, the opening of Transmitter Park is a big deal.

More coverage here:

City to Open Transmitter Park This Weekend [DNAinfo – who also needs to demote Lincoln Restler]

Long-Awaited Greenpoint Park To Open This Saturday [L Magazine – and Brooklyn Magazine]

New Open Space to Open in Greenpoint [Brooklyn Paper]

Greenpoint WNYC Transmitter Park Will Finally Open Saturday [Gothamist]

Better Late? B’klyn Park Finally Opening [Post]

1. Which I think means that the City is ahead of schedule in opening the park, though it’s not clear what “2 years” refers to in relation to the pier.↩

Albest Site Marketed for $27 Million

The former Albest Metal Stamping building at 9 Kent Avenue is being marketed as a potential hotel or office building – but notably not for any sort of “industrial” use. It is becoming very clear that the industrial-retention part of the 2005 rezoning – which included reserving a big area around Bushwick Inlet for traditional manufacturing use – was a big missed opportunity. Given the transformation of industry in Brooklyn over the past decade, the opportunity for a new kind of mixed-use zoning – lighter impact industry below with residential above (something the city refused to consider at Bushwick Inlet or anywhere else) could be a big promoter of local jobs.

Instead, we are manufacturing hotels, bars and bowling alleys.

City Reneges on Promised Brooklyn Waterfront Parks

06/19/2012 | Comment

Wsj map

Source: Wall Street Journal

I’d been meaning to write a wrap-up post on last week’s City Council hearing on the status of the 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg & Greenpoint waterfront, including the many articles that led up to the hearing. Happily, the Working Harbor Committee has done that for me – written a concise, informed wrap-up of the many articles already written. So I’ll just link to that, put up this very excellent graphic prepared by the Wall Street Journal and pull a particularly good quote from Council Member Steve Levin:

This is about credibility, doing what you say you’re going to do,” said Levin. “You have no concrete plan. When you want to do something, you have a plan.

OK – and I’ll add this: since the 2005 rezoning was based on environmental assessments that assumed that the city would build parkland, at what point does the city’s failure to build that parkland (or even make good faith progress toward doing so) make the EIS a faulty instrument?

City Won’t Promise to Finish Two Long-Stalled North Brooklyn Parks

06/19/2012 | Comment

As the Brooklyn Paper reports, the Bloomberg administration has refused to commit to any goals or deliverables on the acquisition or construction of Bushwick Inlet Park or 65 Commercial Street. (I guess everyone has given up on the expansion of Barge Park?)

Financial mismanagement and planning gaffes have also stood in the way of both planned open spaces.

Bloomberg officials originally valued [the soccer field block] on the southern edge of the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park at about $12 million, but a judge ruled that the area’s residential rezoning meant its value was almost eight times higher.

The city eventually settled with the property owner and bought the parcel for about $93 million, according to court papers and Council testimony…

Money to build a park at Commercial Street dried up too.

In 2007, city budget hawks removed $13 million of the $14 million allocated to the park’s development and spent it on other projects.

Contrary to the headline, I don’t think anyone expects that this administration will finish either of these parks before January, 2014. But the administration can ensure that the parks will be built someday by negotiating contracts to buy all of the Bushwick Inlet properties and by moving the MTA off the Commercial Street lot once and for all.

Neither of those actions will ensure that the parks are completed anytime soon (as I said elsewhere, we are looking at decades), but they will ensure that North Brooklyn has a clear path to getting the parks we were promised seven years ago.

Brooklyn Waits on Promise of a Park

06/14/2012 | Comment

Wsj map

Stuck in Park
Source: WSJ

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy article (and excellent graphic) on the fight to get the Bloomberg administration to follow through on the parks and affordable housing it promised Williamsburg and Greenpoint in the 2005 rezoning.

Often there are community benefit components that make rezonings more acceptable than they otherwise would be,” said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, whose district includes the Williamsburg waterfront. “If those promises don’t mean anything, it’s going to be a lot harder to move forward with similar community-remaking projects


Residents, Pols Irked Over Slow Parks Progress

The city promised to build three parks — 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park, Barge Park, and a park on Commercial St. in Greenpoint — as part of a 2005 waterfront rezoning to allow housing towers. Only a 7-acre chunk of Bushwick Inlet Park with a soccer field has opened.

The City Council’s Parks and Waterfront committees will be holding a hearing on the 2005 rezoning and its unkept promises.

LPC Warehouse RFP Issued

Brownstoner has published the full text of the press release for the Landmarks Warehouse RFP. This is the site at 337 Berry between South 4th and South 5th Streets that was promised as affordable housing in the 2005 rezoning. CB1 pushed hard to get the City to agree to some additional community benefits, most notably a local presence on the development team. And lo, HPD delivered:

As part of the RFP’s threshold criteria, at least one Principal of the development team must also be a locally-based development company

That probably does not mean that a local partner is required, but it comes darn close. Los Sures should have the inside track here, assuming that they can put together a viable proposal and convince the city that they can pull the project off.

The ‘Drastic Miscalculation’ That Stalled the Greening of Greenpoint-Williamsburg

You might have missed it, but last week was the 7th anniversary of the City’s 2005 rezoning:

In 2005, the mayor pushed through a rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, allowing for significantly higher development along the waterfront, and promising a series of parks and open spaces strung like beads along two miles of the neighborhoods’ shorefront…

Certainly, much has changed for the better in Williamsburg, from a waterfront access standpoint. The esplanade in front of the Edge and Northside Piers is well-trafficked and much-loved. Transmitter Park at the end of Kent Avenue, though not yet finished, is in use by Greenpoint residents.

Unfortunately, progress on the development of the waterfront access and open space is not very promising – in fact, recent developments at 65 Commercial Street are a huge step backwards.

The best the City can do at this point is to point to the huge sums of money they have spent to date (“the largest in any Community Board district”) as justification for not actually building much in the way of parks. The problem is, most of the money has been spent acquiring industrial property at residential valuations (that would be the “drastic miscalculation”), leaving very little left over for remediation, let alone construction of actual parks.

Much has changed for the better – McCarren pool is opening soon, as is the waterfront portion of the Bushwick Inlet soccer field site and Transmitter Park (the latter, a promise from the Giuliani era, finally fulfilled by this administration). But despite this progress, we are years away from realizing three-quarters of the promised incremental open space.