Friday, January 23, 2015
Tall and Skinny
Permits were filed at 371 Lincoln Road for the below, according to YIMBY. Looks like that's just east of Nostrand. I find it interesting that this is what can become of 20' x 100' lots, which is essentially my house and hundreds throughout the neighborhood. Would be weird to see town homes come down and these go up all over the place. Some would cheer. Most would not. Of course, they already dot the neighborhood, on Ocean, on Hawthorne, on Crooke. Historic district blocks, of course, are protected, but that leaves dozens of blocks UNprotected. Wave of the future? I suspect a zoning code could protect three-story rows from becoming chopped up like this, but that would be for the next phase of the zoning process.
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7 comments:
That's currently a vacant lot, and that rendering just shows you what you can do with a 20' x 100' lot with FAR of 2.43 in an R6-zoned district. PropertyShark, in its description of the R6 zoning, notes that, "[a]s an alternative, developers may choose the optional Quality Housing program regulations to build lower, high lot coverage buildings that reflect the traditional neighborhood streetscape."
Clearly not the alternative chosen here!
They need to start by blanketing the general CB9 area with R6B designations for streets and R6A designations for avenues and boulevards, unilaterally I may add, which would result in downzoning along with upzoning in certain areas. This should be default with adjustments here and there. Going with this approach will likely be significantly cheaper than going block by block and determining what we should have. Although for some blocks, it should have a negative impact; in general, it would provide a positive result. C overlay designations would be pretty obvious and wouldn't require that much time. Just my humble opinion to end all this drama.
Isn't this inside the area upzoning was requested for at the same meeting the anti-626 Flatbush people made that the most important item of all? Remember Crown Heights was saying it's to expand houses to fit bigger families? Which I knew was not the reason at all for the requested upzoning because I'd already seen these condos starting to be built wherever it was allowed in South Crown Heights. The approval for the upzoning in South Crown Heights sailed on through so these kind of ugly, quickly built, cement condo buildings are going to eventually cover that neighborhood. I myself find large numbers of these buildings on small residential streets far more alarming than one nicely designed very tall building on the busiest avenue in Brooklyn. 626 Flatbush was a huge distraction from what was more important and more appropriate to tackle - finding agreement on the correct zoning for Empire and downzoning the smaller side streets.
No it's not in that area. And you are right, 626 and others like it is far from the only issue.
Still, 626 is why we're having the discussion at all. We've pretty much moved past that to a discussion of quality housing and Empire, so you're right on the money.
Interestingly, if you look at the building permits, the developer magically got a FAR of 2.96 in an R6 zoned lot (max. FAR 2.43). I wonder how that happened... It's also supposedly a Quality Housing project.
R6 is 3 FAR if you're within 100 feet of a wide street (I assume Nostrand in this case)
If that's the case, they are using Quality Housing to gain a FAR of 3.0 but therefore have a height limit of 70', which is the height of the proposed building. If this block had already been contextually zoned to R6A, the developer would be allowed the same height, 70', and the same FAR, 3.0. The only way that the potential height of the building could be reduced is through contextual DOWNZONING.
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