Day: November 12, 2024

Residents gathered at Carmine Carro Community Center to commemorate veterans from within southern Brooklyn’s District 59.

The post Annual Veterans Appreciation Day held at Carmine Carro Community Center appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

After years of negotiations, Continuum’s planned residential tower on the former Spice Factory site near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is set to move forward, with a new agreement reached today between the developer, local council member, and garden leadership on the building’s height and affordability.

The 14-story tower at 962-972 Franklin Avenue will now feature a reduced 10-degree slope, down from the initially proposed 15 degrees, to protect the garden’s vulnerable plants — a change the garden staff requested during the rezoning application process.

In return, Council Member Crystal Hudson and BBG will support developer Continuum Company increasing the limits of the affordable units from targeting families earning an average of 60% of Area Median Income, or $83,880 for a family of three, to targeting families earning an average of 70 and 115 of AMI, or $97,860 and around $170,000 for a family of three.

Rather than setting aside 25% of the 355 total units as affordable housing, as originally pitched, the developer will now set aside 30%, or 106 units, at the higher income levels, Hudson said in the statement.

The updated plans come just over a month after Continuum said it planned to shelve the rezoning and build market rate condos if the original proposal wasn’t accepted, and the day before a City Council Zoning and Land Use Committee vote. An attorney for Continuum told Brownstoner the development team “believes the proposal is workable” and they will be saying more about it this afternoon at a rally outside Council Member Crystal Hudson’s office.

In a press release, Brooklyn Botanic Garden President Adrian Benepe said that after years of “discussion, debate, and vigorous public advocacy, the threat of permanent loss of sunlight for our living museum of plants is over.”

“We are grateful to our elected officials for their steadfast support and diligent work to craft a plan that ensures the sunlight that plants need to survive, protects the Garden from permanent damage, and enables affordable workforce housing,” he said.

Crystal Hudson, the council member who represents the district and who has said she wouldn’t support a development if it harms the Botanic Garden, said in a statement that the updated proposal “meets our joint priorities of protecting the cultural institutions that drive our city’s economy and building affordable workforce housing.”

“We fought for sunlight, and we won,” she said.

She said the project will create “1,000 good-paying union construction jobs and [establish] the first union-financed, built, and operated residential development in the history of New York City.”

Continuum has also committed to funding a number of upgrades at Jackie Robinson Playground, she said.

Continuum’s May 2024 rezoning application was to convert the property from an R6A zoning district to R8A and C2-4, allowing for a 14-story, 475-unit development rather than the seven-story build that would be allowed as of right.

In September, Continuum took people by surprise when it said it was throwing in the towel on the controversial rezoning application just after the City Planning Commission approved a tweaked version of the proposal, designed to protect the nearby Brooklyn Botanic Garden from shadows that would damage its plants. At the time, the developer said it would likely create market-rate condos under the existing zoning.

“A well-meaning project that cannot be financed will not be built,” Rosenberg told Brownstoner in an emailed statement at the time. He said the changes would “significantly impact our ability to deliver on the promises we’ve made to the community – including the creation of much-needed affordable housing units and hundreds of good-paying union jobs. Today’s vote makes that financially unworkable.”

According to BBG and Hudson’s press releases, the negotiations to get the plans back on track, at a time when the city is under pressure to build more housing, included bringing together elected officials, the garden staff, the development team, local unions, and city planning officials.

At a meeting planned for tomorrow, the City Council will “refer the application back to CPC to approve the agreed upon modifications,” a rep for Hudson told Brownstoner. Then, after the City Council’s Committee on Land Use votes on the tweaked plan, on Nov. 21, the full City Council will vote. Then, the proposal will go to the mayor’s desk.

This story first appeared on Brooklyn Paper’s sister site Brownstoner

A roundup of Brooklyn’s cultural offerings this week, from comedy to theater to music to art, and what critics are saying about them.

The post What They’re Saying: live arts in Brooklyn this week, Nov. 12 appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

New wildfires burned Tuesday across the Northeast, adding to a series of blazes that have come amid very dry weather.

The post New wildfires burn in US Northeast while bigger blazes rage out West appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear two challenges to New York’s rent stabilization law, keeping in place a system regulating rents for roughly a million apartments despite landlords attempting to overturn it.

The high court in Washington declined to grant certiorari to two landlords’ challenges, G-Max Management and Building & Realty Institute of Westchester and Putnam Counties. The court did not give a reason for the denial, nor was a tally of the justices provided. The memo did note that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch would have granted certiorari — a legal term where a petitioner seeks review of a lower court decision by a higher court.

Landlords contended that the state’s regulations on eviction protocols, through the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), amounted to unconstitutional “takings” in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The court declined to hear similar cases in February.

The landmark 2019 law banned or curtailed certain practices that had previously been common in rent-stabilized units, such as vacancy decontrol, rent hikes on vacated units, preferential rents, and large increases for major capital improvements.

More than 2 million New York City renters live in rent-regulated apartments. Other localities with rent regulation include the cities of Poughkeepsie and Kingston, and the counties of Westchester, Nassau, and Rockland.

“Since 1969, New York’s Rent Stabilization Law has provided affordable housing for millions of New Yorkers, preventing displacement and combating homelessness,” reads a joint statement from the Legal Aid Society, Legal Services NYC, and Selendy Gay PLLC, which represented the defendants. “We will continue to challenge any and all efforts aimed at eroding the well-established and lawful protections that the communities we serve rely on.”

The 2019 HSTPA amended the rent stabilization law to make big rent hikes more difficult for property owners and has faced several legal challenges from landlord groups.

Reached for comment, a lawyer for the Building & Realty Institute, Kenneth Finger, said he was encouraged by Gorsuch voting to grant certiorari, calling the 2019 statute “devastating to the housing industry.”

“Our feeling, if you want to kill housing, that statute has done more than anything to kill the ability of affordable housing in Westchester and the surrounding counties,” said Finger. “We’re gonna keep working to try to provide affordable, decent housing for the tenants in New York. The HSTPA, we think, was as harmful for tenants as it was for landlords.”

PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP on Monday began announcing his cabinet members for the upcoming administration, including some New York names.

The post Trump announces cabinet picks: Zeldin for EPA, Stefanik to UN appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.