de Blasio's real estate overlord donors are ready to get their affordable luxury public housing towers approved

  

6 SQ FT

  First unveiled by Two Trees in late 2019, the project originally called for two towers, one at 650 feet and the other at 600, with 1,000 units of housing. The revised plan calls for a taller 710-foot tower on the southern side and a slightly shorter tower north tower at 560 feet. The proposed number of apartments increased to 1,050 units.

According to a newly launched website for the project, the affordable housing proposed for the project includes 263 permanently affordable rentals designated for those earning 60 percent of the area median income (AMI) and 27 units for those earning 40 percent of the AMI, which would mean $1,366/month and $854/month two-bedroom apartments for those households, respectively.

Two Trees, which created Domino Park as part of its redevelopment of the former Domino Sugar Factory, acquired the three vacant sites for a total of $150 million. The site had been home to Con Edison since 1984, with the steel fuel tanks removed from the site in 2011.

Because a zoning change is required, the so-called River Ring Waterfront Master Plan must go through ULURP, in addition to securing a permit from the Department of Environment Conservation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Two Trees previously told reporters that the land use review process could take at least two years to complete, with the construction of the entire project lasting at least five years. The park would be completed alongside the first building, Two Trees principal Jed Walentas had said.

The developers held meetings with the community at the beginning of last year, but the coronavirus pandemic put those sessions on hold. Following an environmental impact review, the developer aims to complete the ULURP by the end of 2021, as a spokesperson for Two Trees told Brooklyn Paper.

Literally a sandbox for hipsters. 

 

 

Telling it like it is

Ray Rogers condemns NYC's rezoning policies as REBNY policies that benefit fat cat developers like Rob and Jerry Speyer (Tishman Speyer), Jed Walentas (Two Trees Management), Gary Barnett (Extell Development Company) and Daniel Brodsky (The Brodsky Organization). Rogers says REBNY is run by "bullies and racketeers" while speaking at Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer's rezoning hearing in East Harlem (7-13-17).

Did they use Common Core math?

From Crains:

In a contentious hearing, City Council members pressed the developers of the Domino Sugar factory project on the Williamsburg waterfront to explain how many market-rate and affordable-rental units it was planning to build.

Two Trees Management developer Jed Walentas acknowledged that the numbers were not yet final, but that the project is likely to include up to 2,300 market-rate apartments, with as many as 700 affordable units. He said that 537,000 square feet of the 2.2 million square feet of residential space would be devoted to below market-rate apartments.

But Brooklyn Councilman Steve Levin said that based on an analysis the developer's other housing projects, the total number could be as high as 3,000 total units of housing, which he argued would bring added stress on the neighborhood's over-taxed infrastructure, as well as call into question whether a sufficient portion of the project was affordable.

During Tuesday's hearing of the Council's zoning subcommittee, Mr. Walentas was asked to justify his estimates of the total number of rental units that he plans to build. Mr. Levin argued that after examining similar projects built by Two Trees, and based on the total amount of space allotted for residential development, a larger number of apartments could ultimately be built.

"By my calculations, Two Trees could build in their market-rate component somewhere between 2,100 and 2,300 market rate units," he said. "You add to that the 660 or 700 affordable units, and it's closer to 3,000 units that could be developed in the project. And that's a major source of concern for me."

He continued, "Because you're unwilling to commit to a unit-size breakdown of your market rate, and you're unwilling to cap it at 2,300 units, I'm concerned that the opportunity is there, and the math bears it out, for a development that is much closer to 3,000 units than 2,000 units, and that's a major source of concern for me."

It's ok, Steve! Under DeBlasio, developers can build as big as they want if they even mention "affordable housing". Go with the "progressive" flow!

A pyrrhic victory?

From Crains:

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced late Monday a deal under which Two Trees Management Co. would add more affordable housing at its 2.9 million-square-foot Domino Sugar refinery project on the Williamsburg Waterfront. In exchange, the city will grant the necessary permits to allow the re-imagined development to move forward.

"We set out from day one to get the best possible value for the public. This partnership delivers on that commitment," said Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor for Housing and Economic Development, in a statement. She added that the agreement is "a win for all sides, and it shows that we can ensure the public's needs are met, while also being responsive to the private sector's objectives."

The agreement sets in stone a requirement that 537,000 square feet of the project, which will translate to roughly 700 out of the total 2,300 units, be set aside for affordable housing for various income levels, according to the city.

Mr. de Blasio touted the agreement as adding 110,000 square feet of affordable housing beyond the developer's current application, under which just 427,000 square feet of such housing would have been built. And while that is true, Two Trees had already agreed throughout the project's public review process to build roughly 70,000 additional square feet if the city would chip in extra subsidy, though this agreement was non-binding.

Wow, so the developer agreed to 40 more units of affordable housing? That's not like putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound or anything. Either stipulate that the majority of new units need to be affordable, or don't make any affordable. A little here and a little there, when most people living in the city need "affordable housing", is pretty lame, even though it will be trumpeted as a victory.

All this soul-selling to preserve the Domino building, which will be dwarfed by other buildings after this project is complete. If the City Council passes it, which is still a question mark.

Coming soon: skyscrapers with holes in them

From the NY Observer:

When Two Trees Management bought the old Domino Sugar site from CPC Resources and a reluctant Katan Group, a local developer told The Observer that Jed Walentas would be “crazy to go back to ULURP” for a rezoning of the site, which had already been approved for thousands of high-rise apartments.

But going back to to everyone’s favorite acronym (to pronounce, at least) is exactly what Mr. Walentas intends to do. He and SHoP, the New York-based architecture firm that Bruce Ratner tapped to design the Barclays Center and Atlantic Yards after Frank Gehry proved too expensive, called a group of reporters to SHoP’s offices near City Hall on Friday to show off their plans for the site.

The first thing Mr. Walentas spoke about was Two Trees’ desire to expand the amount of parkland included in the project—adding two new acres—and to make it more accessible to the public.

He criticized the open space in the old site plan as something that “felt very much like a privatized front lawn for people who lived there,” and spoke about his desire to pull the buildings back inland to make more space for the quarter-mile-long waterfront park, as well as add a new public street between his buildings and the waterfront.

But the extra park space comes at a price: the towers will have to rise higher to make up for the smaller footprints. The tallest tower on the site would rise to 598 feet, or about 60 stories—much taller than the 340-foot maximum height in the currently approved plan.

Civic group charges that city colluded with Brooklyn developer

From The Brooklyn Paper:

Opponents of a planned high-rise near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO sued to stop the project this week on the grounds that the city colluded with the developer and allowed him to expand the perimeter of his project site to take advantage of zoning perks.

The suit by the nascent DUMBO Neighborhood Foundation names the Department of City Planning, the City Planning Commission, the City Council, the Department of Education, and the School Construction Authority as guilty of improperly allowing the development company Two Trees Management to win a zoning change that paves the way for a planned 17-story project that includes a public middle school as a sweetener to seal the deal.

“There was a concerted effort to advance this project at any cost,” said Gus Sheha, a plaintiff in the case. “When you connect the dots, it’s apparent that people didn’t do their due diligence for a reason: they wanted to pass this.”