Carroll Gardens Seeks Rezoning
From Courier-Life:
05/26/2007
New Bklyn nabe on city’s rezoning radar – Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association meets with City Planning officials
By Joe Maniscalco
Members of the Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association (CGNA) aren’t claiming victory in their battle to rezone their community after a meeting with City Planning last week, but they are guardedly optimistic about their prospects for eventual success.
“It went fairly well,” Land Use Committee Co-Chair Glenn Kelly said. “I can’t say we heard what we were wanted to hear, but we did get some straight answers, which was nice.”
The group presented detailed maps and photographs of Carroll Gardens at a roughly hour-and-a-half meeting with Purnima Kapur, director of City Planning’s Brooklyn Office on Thursday.
The CGNA is leading a community-wide effort to rezone the neighborhood in the hopes of protecting its historic housing stock from out-of-scale and out-of-character development.
“We’re in the queue,” Kelly said. “We’ve given notice we’re interested in doing this and we’ve entered their process.”
Despite the tremendous amount of work devoted to gauging community concerns, and cataloguing and compiling a comprehensive look at the neighborhood’s current housing stock, the rezoning of Carroll Gardens could still be years away.
“They [City Planning] are very backlogged,” said Kelly. “In retrospect, maybe we should have forgotten about the neighborhood survey and rushed in, and we would have been ahead of other neighborhoods. But that didn’t feel right to me. I think we’re in a stronger position now.”
Each day that goes by, members of the CGNA say that developers are driving up and down the neighborhood’s picturesque row house blocks looking for properties to snap up and build soaring new condo towers.
They do not want their efforts to be linked to other efforts to rezone areas around the Gowanus Canal.
Kelly said that while he supports the effort to get more affordable housing for the Gowanus, the CGNA is “ready to move forward” with the rezoning of Carroll Gardens.
“I would expect some support from our elected officials to now push that, along,” he said.
Councilman Bill de Blasio supports a strategy of linking the Gowanus rezoning with Carroll Gardens’ rezoning effort
“I would like to see the down zoning of Carroll Gardens included in the Gowanus rezoning,” he said. “It is important to preserve the unique character of Carroll Gardens at a time when so much development is going on in Brooklyn. We are working to ensure that the Gowanus rezoning maximizes the amount of affordable housing, particularly for seniors.”
The councilman also said that it was crucial that rezoning be “designed to minimize displacement of existing jobs, and to provide opportunities for industrial firms to grow and to locate in the area.”
Kelly, however, says that CGNA efforts to protect Carroll Gardens from overdevelopment have thus far received only “wishy-washy” support from both de Blasio and Councilman David Yassky.
“Thinking outside the box is critical,” she said. “Everywhere you look people have made homes they want to protect. There is a sad trend in tall, glass buildings and big money as opposed to an honest to god focus on what the community needs.”
According to Kelly – who was recently passed over for a spot on Community Board Six – the sea of developer money has effectively drowned out community concerns all over the borough.
“The citizens have many voices, but they don’t have deep pockets,” he said. “The deep pockets get your voice heard much more easily than one citizen trying to live his life. It’s divide and conquer.”
The mayor says he expects the city’s population to balloon to 9 million in the near future, but Kelly is not buying it.
“How do we know the city is going to grow to 9 million?” he wondered. “Where does this number come from? It seems absurd. How do we really know that? Why are they hell-bent on lining the developers’ pockets.”
Pegano says that “cracks are beginning to show” and that the voices of residents opposed to the current course of development are “starting to get through.”
“This kind of development doesn’t keep the heart of the neighborhood beating,” she said.