Guest Post: Desecration in the Slope
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…
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?
As to the idea of whether it wouldn’t be better to sell the house at top-dollar and then use the proceeds to finance affordable housing…
I think the city has been pursuing a plan of dispersed subsidized/affordable housing, rather than building large concentrations of low-income housing all in one place (like the Fort Greene projects, etc). Sometimes, they sell buildings like this to community groups for below-market prices, other times they get developers to include a certain percentage of low-income apts in exchange for zoning/tax breaks.
I personally think the dispersed strategy is better. Concentrated areas of poverty aren’t good for the people who live there (increased crime, worse school systems, etc), and I think it’s good for both the poor and non-poor to be exposed to each other and live as neighbors every once and awhile.
I agree with the sentiments of Anon and Peeper…
I’m not sure why the 5th Avenue Committee is a “community development” group, rather than a community development group.
The Fifth Avenue Committee has been active for 30 years, and built those god-awful houses between 4th and 5th avenues, near Baltic. God-awful, but important affordable housing for the community and much better than the empty lots that were sitting there after the city knocked down the old houses to build a school, and then cancelled the plans.
Anyway, until 10 years ago, if not more recently, much of 5th Ave was lower-income and pretty run-down. Especially that block, actually — Bergen between 4th and 5th was crack central through the early 90s. Fifth Ave’s just the kind of neighborhood that typically has a community development group pushing for affordable housing, and affordable housing isn’t always able to include preservation of architectual detail.
While I wouldn’t want every house in the Slope to have this sort of renovation, you have to understand the context of this section of the neighborhood. Affordable housing is a top priority for (pre-gentrification) community groups, and the “city-project-specifications” may have been required at the time the project was planned, due to violence in the area. A lot of the stores down there used to have bullet-proof glass protecting the cashier, etc.
[All that said, I don’t know anything about this house, nor about whether the FAC is well-run, etc. Just saying, it’s not unreasonable for them to exist and advocate for affordable housing, etc…]
since everyone knows this is a F.A.C. house, why not call them up & ask them to clean up the front? God knows it only takes a weekend for the front of a building to get all covered with blowing flyers and what not.
Doesn’t anyone from the FAC lurk in here?
Gotta second Anon’s defense of the FAC. Great, well-respected, organization with multi-faceted programs for our community.
Don’t know anything at all about the Bergen St. property or it’s future, but I do know that the majority of felons eligible for halfway houses are not in fact violent, and that housing for homeless and/or mentally ill people should not be dumped in the deep ghetto.
I just popped on here looking for some renovation info, and instead found a buncha NIMBY crap. Yuck.
Do city-owned houses get ticketed for trash!!!! Also, I got 27 grocery store circulars dumped on my sidewalk last week (from the same store, and this was right after I got a ticket because of my neighbor’s garbage). I called the store and spoke to the manager about the potential of getting a ticket because of these dumped circulars and he was very nice and apologetic. I’ve seen signs reading “no flyers,” but I’m sure people don’t care. It’s bad enough, but the distributors assume there are four families in our house, so we get four bags of flyers at once.
Excuse my sense of humor failure, but the Fifth Avenue Committee has been creating and preserving affordable housing for many many years. Big Bubba: if you’re serious about volunteering, walk in the door of their offices and get to know the people there — before you slag them off for not bowing and scraping in deference to your gracious and apparently over-qualified offer of charity. Come on, guys, I love this site and all, but for a bunch of (mostly) middle class property owners to rag on a group that has done so much to stop the displacement of working class people of color is mean-spirited, smug and short sighted.
Regarding the circulars, it’s my understanding that a section of Brooklyn Heights has successfully prohibited the distribution of these. If you put circulars on doorsteps or cars you can get a fine. (or at least this is what I was told) Anyone know what the story is with this or how it happened?
Does anyone know an effective way to stop the littering of circulars and other marketing materials on their property? 311, the NYPD, and the Sanitation Department don’t really give a flying, ahem…
Also, someone told me I could hang an ugly-ass sign outside my house reading “Post no materials”, but 1) I’m not going to compromise the look of my house with such a sign, and 2) the immigrants who deliver this stuff by the truckload don’t/can’t read english and just ignore it.
“I hate the newsday marketeer”:
http://antimarketeer.blogspot.com
IMO, the Fifth Avenue Committee is a joke. I tried contacting them several times about volunteer work, but never got a return call. Zero level of interest in free help from a guy who is a finance professional, a LL, a successful r.e. investor, and a Park Slope resident. That tells me that this is probably one of these groups primarily interested in perpetuating its own completely insular existence, rather than carrying out it’s grassroots community mission.
So, I’m not surprised that such a valuable asset under their ownership is basically just sitting there empty. Why should they be in any rush to get affordable housing in productive use.
Okay, to be fair, it is certainly possible that they are waiting on a C-O or other such paperwork.