State court judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the plan the day after full Council approval. On December 21, 2009, the City Council approved the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s rezoning plan for the Broadway Triangle Urban Renewal Area in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The plan includes rezoning nine blocks, primarily zoned for manufacturing, to R6A and R7A districts in order to facilitate the development of 1,851 residential units, 844 of which will be marketed as affordable. Of those, 488 affordable units will be developed on 35 properties that will be disposed of by the City to private developers. Prior to the plan’s approval, HPD issued site authorization letters to the United Jewish Organizations (UJO) and the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council (RBSCC) to develop 181 affordable units on three assemblages of lots in the urban renewal area.

Opponents of the proposal expressed concern about HPD’s planning process and argued that the proposal would not provide enough affordable housing. The Broadway Triangle Community Coalition, a group representing more than 40 community-based organizations, said the planning process lacked transparency, noting that HPD did not use a competitive bid process when it granted site control to the UJO and RBSCC. On September 9, 2009, before the City Planning Commission approved the plan, the Coalition filed a lawsuit challenging the proposal. The Coalition claimed the proposal violated federal law because of its racially and religiously discriminatory impacts and accused the City of excluding several community groups from participating in the proposal’s planning. (more…)

Community groups opposed to rezoning proposal expressed concerns about HPD’s opaque planning process. On December 7, 2009, the City Council’s Land Use Committee modified and approved the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s proposal to redevelop the seventeen-block Broadway Triangle Urban Renewal Area in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The City created the Broadway Triangle URA in 1989, and HPD’s proposal included redrawing the boundaries of the urban renewal area and rezoning nine blocks in order to facilitate the development of 1,851 residential units, 844 of which would be affordable.

The rezoning would impact nine blocks generally bounded by Lynch Street to the north, Whipple Street to the south, Throop Avenue to the east, and portions of Union and Harrison Avenues to the west. The area’s northern blocks would be rezoned from M1-2, M3-1, and C8-2 to an R6A district. The area’s southern four blocks between Walton and Whipple Streets contain most of the City- and privately-owned vacant land and would be rezoned from M1-2 to an R7A district. C2-4 overlays would run along Harrison, Throop, and Union Avenues. (more…)

Additional 175 blocks of Greenpoint and Williamsburg rezoned. The City Council approved a 175-block rezoning plan for Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and Williamsburg neighborhoods. The newly rezoned area lies east of the City’s large 2005 rezoning initiative. 2 CityLand 67 (June 15, 2005). Unlike the 2005 plan, which concerned redevelopment of the manufacturing-zoned blocks along North Brooklyn’s former industrial waterfront, this new plan seeks to prevent further out-of-character construction along Greenpoint and Williamsburg’s residentially-developed inland blocks.

Originally developed in the 19th and 20th centuries as worker housing, the area has recently seen construction of 200-foot, as-of-right apartment towers along blocks characterized by small, wood-framed, two- and three-story buildings. The Department of City Planning proposed some increased residential density and commercial development, but set height and density limits along streets characterized by two- to four-story residential buildings.

The approved plan replaces the area’s predominantly R6 zoning, which covered 93 percent of the rezoning area. The new contextual zoning districts (R6A, R6B, and R7A) eliminate as-of-right development of large towers without height limits. Planning assigned the R7A zoning district, which allows a slight increase in density, to 44 blocks along the area’s major commercial corridors of Grand Street, McGuinness Boulevard, and Manhattan, Metropolitan, Union, and Bushwick Avenues. The City’s Inclusionary Housing program will now apply to these blocks, allowing developers to increase a project’s floor area in exchange for an agreement to build affordable housing. (more…)

Electric power plant proposed for site where City seeks to build 28-acre park as part of its Greenpoint- Williamsburg rezoning. On April 12, 2006, the Public Service Commission recommended denial of the second application of TransGas Energy Systems, LLC to construct an eight-acre electric power plant at 1 North 12th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on a site that the City plans to condemn for a new 28-acre waterfront park.

After it spent $1.5 million on the option to purchase the site and $10 million in development costs, TransGas filed its first application with the Siting Board in December 2002 to obtain approval of its proposed power plant. After extensive hearings at which the City argued that the plant would curb residential development and interfere with its massive rezoning plan for Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the Siting Board rejected TransGas’ application in April 2004, more than a year before the City rezoned the area in May 2005. The Board’s examiners found that the plant’s visual impact and its effect on adjacent uses could not be mitigated and added that the City’s pending rezoning significantly weighed into its rejection. (more…)

Affordable housing incentive increased; new industrial protection zone proposed. The City Council’s Land Use Committee voted to modify the 183-block rezoning plan for the two-mile East River waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg at a May 2, 2005 hearing attended by Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Planning Commission Chair Amanda M. Burden, and HPD Commissioner Shaun Donovan.

The Land Use Committee had scheduled the vote at 11:00 a.m., but delayed the hearing until late afternoon to allow time to finalize the modifications. Opening the hearing, Committee Chair Melinda Katz explained that as a result of weekend-long negotiations the Committee had delivered one of the “most historic agreements” to come out of the Council. (more…)