Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

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TRD: Bushwick is staying industrial – no residential rezoning for East Williamsburg!

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The Real Deal says that Bushwick, a neighborhood on the L that’s seeing a lot of housing demand spill over from Williamsburg, is not getting a residential rezoning.

TRD describes how the “sought-after northwestern area […] is zoned for manufacturing, so residential building is largely banned there,” but then buries the lede deep down:

And while the city passed a high-profile rezoning for the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront in 2005 — paving the way for high-density housing in formerly industrial sites — no such rezoning is on the horizon in Bushwick, the department of City Planning said.

The North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone, which encompasses a portion of Bushwick, was created in 2005 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as “a sort of policy statement: ‘Hey, these are industrial and are currently used for manufacturing — and should stay that way,’?” explained Mitchell Korbey, head of the land-use department at law firm Herrick Feinstein.

The Bloomberg administration has done a record number of rezonings, but sources said the mayor, along with Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, wants to keep Bushwick’s zoning predominantly industrial to preserve the city’s manufacturing base. Dolgin, for example, said he recently sold a 46,000-square-foot parcel at McKibbon and Bogart streets for $4.37 million, and the site will be used as storage for scaffolds.

In some southern portions of Bushwick, a mixed-use building can be redeveloped as residential, but a variance is required to do that in most of the popular East Williamsburg area, and they are rarely granted, Dolgin said.

The article says that the SoHo loft law is occasionally being used to convert existing structures, and that hotels and hostels are being built since they’re allowed by zoning.

Then again, Bloomberg’s rezoning days are over after the Midtown East upzoning, so his opinion on rezoning Bushwick isn’t terribly relevant going forward. The real question is, what does Christine Quinn think?

  • Jon Geeting

    Bushwick was one of the fastest-whitening zipcodes, as per that report from earlier this week. Around the Jefferson L stop, there are two very short buildings, and two empty lots. Somebody needs to persuade Christine Quinn to support a land value tax.

  • Stephen Smith

    I can’t remember which stops, but whenever I get off the L in Bushwick, I’m always astounded by how many vacant/near-vacant structures and empty lots I have to pass before I get to my friends’ places.

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