And the floodgates open in Brooklyn - The City approves the rezoning of a 175-block area of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Hipsters, meet condo towers. | nytimes (map)
The plan, which is expected to be approved by the full City Council next week, imposes some novel requirements for developers seeking to build the housing. In order to build to the maximum height of roughly 30 or 40 stories, they must keep at least 20 percent of the homes affordable to low- and middle-income New Yorkers, making it among the most ambitious such programs in the nation, city officials say. And the developers must build the waterfront esplanade, which will eventually be turned over for management to the city's Parks Department.
The rezoning in north Brooklyn is coming together as the city moves aggressively to spruce up its aging waterfronts, many of which have been in decline for more than a generation as New York's ports lost their prominence. Earlier this year, the city approved the rezoning of a huge swath of the Far West Side of Manhattan for office space and housing and has finally begun putting in place a plan to support a mix of uses, including a cruise ship terminal, on the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn.
But the north Brooklyn plan, whose final version came after intense negotiations between the City Council and Bloomberg administration officials, could yield one of the most extreme transformations of a neighborhood in decades. Inland from the water, the plan seeks to preserve the low-rise scale of the areas, where four- and six-story apartment buildings predominate, as well as the mix of light industry and residences.
To that end, the plan will designate a 22-block area near the Bushwick Inlet, just beyond the East River waterfront, as an Industrial Business Zone, which brings with it special protections and benefits for businesses operating or moving there, and create a $4 million fund to preserve manufacturing jobs in the neighborhood.
The plan also creates 54 acres of parkland, including a 28-acre park with an Olympic-quality aquatic center on the river. The waterfront, though, will see the most striking change, and is the scene of the city's broadest test of inclusionary zoning, which allows developers to build larger buildings in exchange for setting aside some of the apartments as lower-cost units.
2 Comments
1 question for this council, is there a plan to introduce more infrastructure (i.e. another subway line) which will transport the new inhabitants into manhattan?? Anyone here tried to get on the L at bedford b/t 8:30 and 9:30 on any given weekday?? hellish as is.......
and I kind of enjoy the derilict urban fabric of greenpoint as is.........bring on the yuppies, brooklyn's next park slope.
Good point on the transportation issue...perhaps a B-burg Ferry? Please not. Other issues; this is always a dilemma.There is is the battle between long-sited urban planning and pure economic mining of seemingly underused land. As an architect I don't deny the value in building to develop areas of infill that would unify and complete urban fabric that has been severed or damaged over time. But to REPLACE or DISPLACE existing populations by creating a situatiion which potentially creates large scale rifts in the demographic and social structure of a given neighborhood can be very dangerous. So this is a two fold problem; one being the sensibility of the physical built solution and the popoulation who will inhabit it. I agree the persistent desire to walll off riverfront with towers is peculiar. Why not maintain the general scale of the riverfront? If the views of the river/skyline are deemed the points of value, than by building lower at the river the views are maintained for a greater number of dwellings further back from the waterfront. Therefore the neighborhood as a whole gains value in part by its collective connection to the waterfront. While this is the one small aspect, it could represent an attitude about the value of the neighborhood as a whole and not just a select portion (riverfront). The thought of a "Battery Park" scenario if quite frightening.
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