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We’re on vacation this week and frankly don’t plan on logging a whole lot of hours in front of the computer. So we were happy to see this ready-to-run post show up in our mailbox yesterday. Anyone else is welcome to submit this week, too. Pictures preferred.

To make a long story short…On a beautiful Park Slope brownstone block, the city owned a house: 384 Bergen, between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. It apparently had been taken for back taxes owed, the city then gave it to a community development group, the 5th Avenue Committee, to renovate for housing. This took many years. Now the renovation is complete, and the building sits empty, collecting garbage. It was developed using typical city housing projects specifications: it appears to have been stripped of details inside, the entry is aluminum sash, corridors have fluorescent 2×2 lighting fixtures, bright yellow high intensity parking lot style fixtures in back. What is the future of this building? Will the future residents have an interest in its context? What will it take to get public agencies to be more sensitive, or at least: first do no harm?


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. since i can’t help myself from writing one last thing: affordable housing in one brownstone on bergen street is exactly NOT concentrating poverty. and programs that convey individual, formerly-abandoned buildings to private owners are different from programs that build public housing. in new york, these are two separate agencies: housing preservation and development (HPD) for the former, the housing authority (NYCHA) for the latter. HPD pretty much stays out of the building after the rehab is done, whereas NYCHA manages the property. and, unlike in chicago, baltimore, philadelphia, detroit, etc., projects in NYC are not being torn down–in fact they’re in pretty good shape. and one reason (of many) is that they’re not all clustered in one part of the city, they’re all over.

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