Friday, September 24, 2021

City approves luxury public housing development on Gowanus Canal while it's still being dredged of toxicities

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THE CITY 

 With nearly unanimous approval Wednesday from the City Planning Commission, the long-in-the-making rezoning of Gowanus heads to crucial negotiations between key City Council members and Mayor Bill de Blasio over the Brooklyn neighborhood’s future.

The final result will be key to the de Blasio legacy: It’s the administration’s first effort to use rezoning to spur racial and economic diversification of one of the city’s whitest and increasingly wealthy neighborhoods.

The proposal is also the linchpin of efforts to clear up the polluted area, home to the infamous Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site. And the rezoning bid comes as a similar de Blasio-sponsored effort in SoHo and NoHo in Manhattan appears bogged down by intense opposition.

“The status quo is not one that tends toward inclusion or remediation and open space,” said Michelle de la Uz, head of the nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee, which will build 950 units of affordable housing under the Gowanus plan. “People have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that more development can improve the neighborhood.”

Opponents, though, are pressing environmental concerns, from toxicity to the flooding brought by climate change.

“New York City may want to push this through as quickly as possible,” said Linda LaViolette, co-chair of the outreach committee of the opposition group Voice of Gowanus. “However, City Planning has yet to answer many important questions regarding the environmental impact statement.”

The plan to both rezone the area and clean up the pollution from decades of industrial activity has been in the works for years. The current proposal targets an 82-block area, from Atlantic Avenue to 15th Street, bounded by Fourth Avenue on the east and stretching west variously to Bond and Smith streets.

 he rezoning would allow the construction of more than 8,000 new apartments, open space and public amenities like schools. About 3,000 of the apartments would be deemed “affordable,” with many set aside for low-income New Yorkers.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

The key to the de Blasio legacy is his son's Afro !

ron s said...

And the WTC recovery site was safe for the workers too!

Pinky said...

the hipsters and transplants will love it! Meanwhile REAL New Yorkers wont have a decent place to live!

Unknown said...

If it's not safe, they should evict the current residents.

If it's safe, no reason not to build.

Disgruntled Citizen said...

It's called a brownfields but build those affordable housing units. the landlords are crying for money. We can't have that.
The natives called it lavender lake because of all the industrial sewage pumped in it.

Anonymous said...

A picture is worth a thousand words ~ Fred R. Barnard.

Anonymous said...

Brad Lander is a carpetbagging scumbag creep

Anonymous said...

Build baby build! Fuck the communists ..,

Anonymous said...

"Brad Lander is a carpetbagging scumbag creep" Like most NYC DeMoRats !

Anonymous said...

And the WTC recovery site was safe for the workers too!

The towers were full of asbestos.
Once airborne...

Anonymous said...

Dumb hipsters. They’d swim in an arsenic pool if the nabe was hoo. Wasn’t the Gowanus Canal area supposed to. become the Venice of Queens?
Kiss my ass! What is the collective IQ of this borough anyway?😂😂😂