Waterfront Redevelopment Gets Green Light
The last serious barrier to the Waterfront Redevelopment Plan appears to have been removed with yesterday’s sign-off by the key City Council Committee which included such last-minute holdouts as David Yassky. In announcing the latest step, Bloomberg trumpeted the fact that roughly 33% of the new housing stock to be created will be for low-…
The last serious barrier to the Waterfront Redevelopment Plan appears to have been removed with yesterday’s sign-off by the key City Council Committee which included such last-minute holdouts as David Yassky. In announcing the latest step, Bloomberg trumpeted the fact that roughly 33% of the new housing stock to be created will be for low- and moderate-income residents, arguably the biggest point of contention among the plans critics. More than 10,000 apartments are expected to be built as part of the 175-square-block rezoning which will allow developers to put up buildings as high as 40 stories along the waterfront while attempting to preserve the village scale of the existing inland neighborhoods. “The communities off Williamsburg and Greenpoint win,” said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, “because today there is a guarantee of new and permanently affordable housing, instead of a virtual guarantee that new development would price residents out of their homes.”
What jumped out of the NY Times story at us was the statement that the plan “rivals the ambition and scope of the creation of Battery Park City.” That really put the size of it in perspective. It’s easy to criticize an initiative like this, and we’re sure city bureaucrats and developers will find plenty of ways to screw up, but neighborhoods are like constantly evolving organisms and change is inevitable. As current residents of Williamsburg (albeit latecomers ourselves) and certainly no fans of cookie-cutter high rises, there’s a part of us that’s quite sad about the changes to come, but the unutilized, decaying waterfront was a crime in itself and given the housing squeeze in the City it makes sense to look to this low-density area as an outlet. Would we have reduced the scale of the project? Sure, but we also are not intimately acquainted with the economics of the plan.
Another story in The Times this morning interviewed some Greenpoint residents who in general seemed to have mixed emotions: Sad about losing views of the Empire State Building and some of the small-town feel but glad that the local swimming pool will be made functional again and there will be more customers to buy keilbasas. Yes some longtime residents will be displaced (some renters priced out, some owners cashing out, no doubt) but that is happening to every neighborhood in the City as the effects of the housing boom ripple out from Manhattan into the outer boroughs.
City Backing Makeover for Decaying Waterfront [NY Times]
Not All Greenpoint Residents Object [NY Times]
Mike Makes Housing Deal [NY Daily News]
Housing Plan to Redo Brooklyn Waterfront [NY Post]
Brownstoner, when you the manufacturing zoning in the neighborhood is outdated, I wonder if you actually know what the zoning is now, where that zoning is, and what the planned changes are? And do you know anything about the number and kinds of businesses in those areas? There’s a reason why local community activists are saying 4,000 jobs are at risk with that change in zoning.
It’s hard to get people who don’t work in those kinds of buildings to understand that yes, there are people in there, doing real jobs – jobs that are way better than retail clerk or your other various McJobs. It’s a huge blind spot; as if you lose your ability to see those people when you go to college.
the high-rise factor is a major bummer, but is the plan that all of them would go in at once, or just that they would be allowed in the zoning? I expect that Battery Park City East won’t emerge if the housing market slows down and the first large building doesn’t fill up.
I hope this means expanded service on the G (my former home was at the Clinton/Washington stop so I know the pain) and L trains, but perhaps it will also lead to ferry service from the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront to lower manhattan and midtown east. But if it’s water taxi like in Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights, it’ll be too expensive. They need to have the MTA take over the private ferries like they did with the buses so that you can use your metrocard.
If not for the highrise aspect, I’d like the plan, because it does put height caps on big chunks of the neighborhood. The highrises on the river is depressing though. Just look at Queens West
http://www.queenswest.com/
(look in picture gallery) -These are 40 story highrises on the east river, just over the newtown creek. I just can’t imagine the final development being anything other than sterile highrises, with no life on the street level. We’ll see.
This is not an issue of no development vs. development. I think everyone is for development of the waterfront, there was a proposal developed by communtiy activists and the Municipal Arts Society that encourage buildings of about 12=20 stories and there was the developer proposal for 40 stories. Bloomberg wants to go with the developers proposal. At least they have not been humping the Olympics to justify this real estate boondoggle for campaign contributors.
I don’t think anyone wants to encourage vinyl siding preservation, although there is some wonderful housing in Greenpoint that should be preserved, on par with anything in the Slope or Cobble Hill. And factories that are as wonderful as any in Tribeca. The issue is how the development should happen, it can be done right and it can be done wrong. Remember only two years ago, the “only” solution to the Brooklyn waterfront was waste transfer stations and power plants. Now the only solution is high rise developments, reality is not written in stone. If it was, Moses would have bulldozed Soho and run expressways through Midtown. The anti-urban tower in park proposal that looks to Battery Park City as the model is the wrong direction. Battery Park City was a rejection of New York, something envisioned to draw back weary suburbanites to the urban realm. This isolationist approach is no longer appropriate. I am hard pressed to name a neighborhood or urban development that embraces 40 story buildings that is a functional neighborhood. East Village, West Village, Soho, Park Slope, pretty much all of Paris or London, and even the nice areas of the Upper East Side do not have 40 story residentials. Where are the 40 story residentials on the waterfront? Newport/Pavonia in NJ seems to be the model or Sunny Isles in Florida.
Also if the standard to justify radical rezoning is the quality of new residential construction, then all of New York is pretty much lost. I would even go so far as to say that alot of the modernist construction in WBurg is superior to any of the orange brick retro crap going up in the East Village or Park Slope.
What we need is real human based urban planning, that embraces what humanity has learned makes for good neighborhoods, simply following the demands of developers and big box retailers will not get us there. Also, we need to go beyond mere zoning to consider actual design of the buildings. This is something that has worked to great effect in Vancouver, where industrial areas were replaced with beautifully designed modernist skyscrapers, I contrast this with Hong Kong, where recent clusterfuck developments on the waterfront have no sense of scale or humanity. This can be a great thing or we could be looking at another Trump City, and right now it looks like the latter.
As for the lower income housing, I will believe when I see it, these sort of aspects of deals tend to drop out after the financial “realities” kick in. Remember Battery Park City was supposed to be for lower income and middle class New Yorkers and that never really panned out. I fear that this is being railroaded on the neighborhood with the assistance of the New York Times which wrote two puff pieces on the issue. Time will tell.
one thing that IS worth preserving in wburg, though, is the low-rise skyline. there’s some really bad siding, no doubt. there’s also some really nice five- and six-story factory buildings that have already been revitalized or would have been revitalized if developers weren’t warehousing them in anticipation of the rezoning. there are bridge and river views from a fairly wide area. and there’s enough of a population that it’s pretty hard to get a seat on the L train even at 1 in the morning. i’m petrified at the thought of tens of thousands of newcomers being added to that commute.
I think if brownstoner were biased towards preservation of Park Slope or Cobble Hill, it would be for good reason. there is actually something there worth preserving, unlike williamsburg which has little to offer architecturally except vinyl siding.
If the demand is not there, the developers will back off. David Walentas owned some real estate in dumbo for 20 years waiting for the right timing…
halden, i totally get that a lot of those buildings between kent and wythe are being warehoused. but all they need to do to fill any perceived housing needs is un-warehouse them. they don’t need to put up 30- or 40-story buildings across the street. how long has it taken to sell out the gretsch, a single building, at the height of the buying boom? a year and counting? who the hell are they planning on filling these new high-rises with?
Longtimer – a lot of the buildings you’re looking at are probably being warehoused for redevelopment pending the rezoning. If they are between Kent and Wythe, for instance, that’s probably the case. For the ones that aren’t being rezoned, expect them to pop up as variances very soon.
Southsider – no idea why that building remains vacant. It gets my vote for the absolutely ugliest new building in the nabe, though.
Brownstoner – the affordable housing is only historic IF it gets built. The articles should say “up to 33%”.
As for the neighborhood context, while the waterfront may be a blank canvas, the entire rezoning is a massive upzoning from the existing building stock. Except in the heart of the northside, the rezoning inland will allow building up to 7 stories – and “fat” buildings at that (lots of density as well as height).
As for the waterfront, the Municipal Arts Society ran the numbers on the community plan and showed that there was a significant (ie something on the order of 40%) profit for 25 story highrises with 30% affordable housing.
I think there will be some true archtiecture on the waterfront – there are a number of A-list architects lined up for most of those sites (I think there are only 5 developments – maybe 6). Inland, we’re probably stuck with the C-list architects (plus Bricolage – they get their own separate list…).