Fort Greene & Clinton Hill Downzoned but Some Projects Slip Through
From the Downtown Brooklyn Star
Downzoned, But Still on the Uprise
Dateline : Thursday, August 02, 2007
By Shane Miller
The city may have voted to downzone portions of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill last week to preserve its low-rise character, but that doesn’t mean that some major high-rise development won’t be going ahead as planned.
Last Wednesday, the City Council voted to rezone 99 blocks in the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill area, including the historic Wallabout Bay district, a predominately low-rise neighborhood full of Antebellum wood-frame rowhouses. The new zoning would place a three- to four-story height restriction on many residential streets.
“We are not against development; we are against out-of-scale buildings located on our historic rowhouse blocks,” Councilwoman Letitia James said of the rezoning.
The plan does call for an upzoning along the neighborhoods’ commercial corridors, which include Myrtle and Atlantic avenues and Fulton Street. Those strips would be reserved for mixed-use retail and residential development, with an affordable housing component as well.
But the downzoning comes too late to stop several projects that exemplify the “out-of-scale” development James alluded to.
Two of those projects are located at 99 Grand Street and 122 Adelphi Street. Because the foundations at each site were finished before the City Council approved the rezoning last Wednesday during their stated meeting, the 11-story towers planned for each site will be able to proceed under the old rezoning.