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

 

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.

Judge approves luxury public housing over-development around toxic Gowanus Canal

 

 NY Post

A Brooklyn Supreme Court judge allowed City Hall to move ahead Monday with controversial plans to build thousands of apartments near the Gowanus Canal, the site of one of the biggest pollution cleanups in the country.

Judge Katherine Levine made the ruling after the Department of City Planning offered to hold hearings for the proposal outside and virtually — instead of entirely by video conference, as officials had previously sought.

City planners have been pushing to rezone Gowanus since the Bloomberg administration — arguing the area would be far better served by building housing amid the city’s pressing shortage than by hanging onto warehouses, which have had little use since heavy industry moved out of the Big Apple.

Under the current proposal, developers would be allowed to build more than 8,500 apartments in the neighborhood — 3,000 of which would be rent-stabilized and set aside for low-income, working-class and middle-class families.

The exact income levels have not yet been determined. Officials estimate it could take until 2035 for all of the newly allowed buildings to be finished.

Boondoggle streetcar line will require that new bridges be built

From the NY Times:

The Brooklyn-Queens streetcar proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio could require the construction of two new bridges, one over Newtown Creek and a second over the Gowanus Canal, a top administration official said on Friday.

At a briefing for reporters, the official, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, and other administration leaders made public new details about the streetcar proposal, with the potential need for the two bridges among the most notable and expensive elements of the planned system, which would run between Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens.

While the exact route has not been finalized, Ms. Glen said, planners have determined that the Pulaski Bridge, between Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens, and the bridge that traverses the Gowanus Canal at Hamilton Avenue near Red Hook, Brooklyn, may not be able to accommodate streetcars.

While a developer-driven yuppie connector streetcar is being planned for neighborhoods that already have subway lines running through them, residents of southeastern Queens will still require multiple bus transfers to get to a subway or the LIRR, and no one at City Hall cares.

Will the real Bill DeBlasio please stand up?

From The Daily Beast:

In 2004 de Blasio was a paid adviser to John Edwards’s presidential campaign. And in this year’s mayoral race, his rhetoric about “a tale of two cities”—a line he has used to critique growing income inequality—has echoed Edwards’s rhetoric from 2004 about the “two Americas.” Yet while serving on the City Council, he frequently found himself on the wrong side of progressives in his district (admittedly not hard in ultraliberal Park Slope) and was sometimes blasted for favoring developers and real-estate interests over community concerns about congestion and quality of life.

For example, he sided with a developer in opposing the designation of the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site—even as nearby residents said that the city was ill equipped to carry out the cleanup on its own. He pushed to allow luxury housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park. And he was one of the primary backers of the controversial redevelopment of Atlantic Yards into a basketball arena for the Brooklyn Nets—a nearly decade-long fight that pitted local residents against powerful real-estate interests.

De Blasio’s most important maneuver has been to capitalize on liberal frustration with Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“He said that it was necessary to stop the tide of gentrification, but everyone knows this was the most gentrifying thing to ever happen to Brooklyn,” says Lucy Koteen, a local political activist who backs current City Comptroller John Liu. “He is not wrong about the ‘tale of two cities.’ But look at his record. Did he help level the playing field, or is he on the side of developers who have gotten rich displacing people?”

From the NY Post:

The City Planning Commission rep appointed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — a critic of big developers — voted with the administration 93 percent of the time, records show.

One of those votes was to approve Extell’s West Side tower that includes a “poor door” separating subsidized tenants from those paying market rents.

A de Blasio spokesman said the rep actually fought “the poor door,” but Extell found a way around her objection.

De Blasio’s rep has voted in favor of 554 out of 595 projects since 2010.

Capital New York has a good wrap-up of his development stances in the past.

Brooklynites have brains

From NY1:

Decades of pollution left the Gowanus Canal toxic. The federal government designated it a superfund cleanup site.

Developer Lightstone Group believes its planned 700 unit residential buildings are environmentally friendly, and that some of the associated construction will actually help clean the water.

More than a dozen residents, though gathered on the bridge over the canal Thursday expressing their concern to mayoral candidate William Thompson.

"We're very concerned about what we see as a very wrongheaded, ill-conceived design," said Warren Cohen of Save Gowanus.

Many are worried the development will make flooding in their neighborhood worse during storms.

"It's safe for them," Cohen said. "They stay dry. We get wet, and unfortunately, we get wet with toxic water."

Yet when development happened on brownfields in LIC, and along Flushing and Newtown Creeks, no one said a thing.

Wake the hell up, Queens.

Boat race a pro-development stunt

From DNA Info:

Critics are calling a boat race on the Gowanus Canal this weekend an "irresponsible" stunt designed to advance a pro-development agenda.

They point to the fact that the Lightstone Group, a developer that wants to build a 700-unit housing project on the polluted canal's banks, is a sponsor of the race.

"Lightstone is trying to send the message out that it's safe to be in the canal and it's not as bad as everyone says, but I think most likely it's worse than everyone says," said Carl Teitelbaum, a member of Save Gowanus, which advocates for "responsible development" on the canal.

He noted that recent heavy rains have churned up putrid scents from the canal. "The idea of putting people in there, of putting kids in there — it's completely crazy," Teitelbaum said.

Close to 30 teams have signed up to brave the canal's toxin-laden waters — which are a SuperFund site — during a regatta this Saturday. The field of competitors includes a Canadian team, a paddle boarder and City Councilman Brad Lander.

Live next to Lavendar Lake!

From the NY Post:

They’ve gotten the green light — so long as developers of housing along the toxic Gowanus can keep out the bright-green canal water.

The City Planning Commission today OK’d the controversial plan to build 700 rental apartments along the shores of the highly polluted Brooklyn waterway after the developer agreed to a redesign protecting residents from flooding that might be brought on by a future Hurricane Sandy.

The Manhattan-based Lightstone Group is set to break ground later this year on the project along the shores of Bond, Carroll and Second streets after satisfying new floodplains for the next century set up by feds.

Lightstone is pulling the housing back another 17 feet so that 66 ¹/₂ feet will separate the canal from the closest planned building.

Lobby areas would be raised more than two feet so they’re 10.6 feet above the floodplains. Heating, air conditioning and power systems would be moved out of the basements of each building and relocated to upper-floors.

Lightstone’s project would include 560 market-rate and 140 affordable rental units. The firm insists that the decade-long Superfund cleanup won’t affect construction.

But Councilman Brad Lander, who represents the area, said he “still believe[s] it’s a mistake to move forward with” such a densely populated project near the canal.

Ya think?

Housing price spikes and dips in Brooklyn

From the Daily News:

Brooklyn home prices soared in several sought-after neighborhoods, but plummeted or stayed flat in more than half of the borough’s communities in the past eight years, new stats show.

The data from real estate website PropertyShark.com reveal a tale of three deeply-divided Brooklyns.

The biggest price spikes came in hipsterville Williamsburg, genteel Prospect Lefferts Gardens and surprising up-and-comer Gowanus where home prices surged 52% to $668 per square foot.

Disappointing drops occurred in solid middle-class enclaves like Mill Basin and Canarsie.

The most dramatic fall-off came in crime-riddled Cypress Hills, where home prices dropped 30% since 2004 to an average $147 per square foot.

At Brooklyn’s other extreme Gowanus - even with its notoriously polluted canal - saw a 52% surge in home prices to $668 per square foot.

Concrete king owes $20M in fines

From DNA Info:

The Brooklyn developer and concrete tycoon who hopes to expand his Red Hook shipping terminal with toxic landfill owes the state tens of thousands of dollars in fines for illegally dumping into Gowanus Bay.

Records show the amount John Quadrozzi is on the hook for could be as much as $20 million.

Quadrozzi, the owner of Gowanus Bay Terminal and the 46-acre Gowanus Industrial Park in Red Hook, left a large pile of potentially contaminated fill on a broken pier near the bay in May 2006, according to court documents provided by the state's Department of Environmental Conservation.

The fill, comprised of dirt and other unknown materials, washed into the water during high tide shortly afterward. The pollution "compromised the ecology of the shoreline," the DEC said in an email to DNAinfo.com New York.

"Since the origin and composition of the material is unknown, it is…possible (not certain) that the material contained chemical constituents that would…not be acceptable in tidal waters," a DEC attorney wrote.

"The environmental consequences may have included... the clouding of waterways and interfering with the habitat of living things that depend on those waters."

The DEC ordered Gowanus Industrial Park to pay the state $60,000 in civil penalties in May 2007, an amount that was to be submitted in 10 monthly installments through 2008. The company has yet to pay $45,000 of that original fine.

The DEC also directed GIP to remove an 18-foot-tall, 200-foot-long corrugated metal fence it had installed without permission between Henry Street Basin and the Red Hook Recreation Area, which effectively walled-off the area's waterfront views.

Quadrozzi and his company ultimately fought both orders and submitted only the first three payments totalling $15,000, the DEC said.

They also left the fence in place for more than a year, contending that it kept trespassers out of the terminal and "promote[d] the health of the people of the State of New York by preventing a spreading of dust" — a claim the DEC labelled "a stretch at best," according to court documents.

Quadrozzi and GIP eventually removed the fence in 2009, but only after an appeals court found their contentions against removing the fence "without merit."

The fines could multiply hundreds of times over. In 2008, the DEC filed suit seeking $10,500 for each day the remainder of the outstanding $60,000 fine has not been paid since May 23, 2007, plus an additional $10,000. To date, that amounts to nearly $20 million.

The fines, however, have not stopped Quadrozzi from seeking to expand the Gowanus Bay Terminal, located in Gowanus Industrial Park.

Sounds just a little insane

From DNA Info:

Brooklyn concrete magnate John Quadrozzi wants to take toxic sludge dredged from the Gowanus Canal Superfund site, ship it by barge to Red Hook and dump it into the Gowanus Bay to expand a shipping terminal he owns.

The proposal, discussed at a Brooklyn Community Board 6 committee meeting Monday night, would allow Quadrozzi's Gowanus Bay Terminal on Columbia Street to accommodate larger ocean-going ships by extending the terminal into deeper waters.

The plan would also create more land above water, adding to the property that Quadrozzi rents to industrial businesses.

Many questions — from who would pay for which parts of the project, to what exactly will be dredged from the canal, to where the sludge will be shipped, how it will be treated, and whether Quadrozzi can even legally expand his terminal — have not been addressed.

Cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, [Quadrozzi's spokesperson] said, would involve dredging only the lowest-level contaminants, which would then be mixed with a "concrete-like…stabilizing material" that could safely be deposited in open water as landfill.

Not all pols think shorefront development a good idea

From Pardon Me For Asking:

It would seem that Hurricane Sandy and the massive flooding caused by the storm is causing some politicians to take a stand against building in low-lying areas.
I just received a letter from Councilman Brad Lander's office that was sent to David Lichtenstein, COE of Lightstone Group in regards to the company's proposed Gowanus development at 363-365 Bond Street. The site, adjacent to the Gowanus Canal, is located in a Flood Zone A and was evacuated both during Hurricane Irene in August 2011 and during Hurricane Sandy just two weeks ago.

This is a brave step for Councilman Lander and I applaud him for it.

Below is his letter to David Lichtenstein.

NYC needs a thorough sanitization

From the Daily News:

The flood waters that inundated the region mixed together a hazardous stew of oil, industrial chemicals and raw sewage that could leave a lasting scar on the environment and make cleanup more difficult and costly.

“This has blown away all worst-case scenarios,” said Paul Gallay, president of the environmental group Riverkeeper.

Gallay and other advocates are that worried that Sandy’s fury washed away toxic materials from Superfund sites like the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.

“It is a pretty serious concern,” said Laura Haight, an environmental specialist with the New York Public Interest Research Group.

State and city officials said they are working to address the environmental issues and are urging New Yorkers to avoid contact with standing water left over from the floods.

State Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens announced Thursday he was dispatching emergency management teams to storm-impacted areas to assist local officials with the clean up.

Bloomberg doesn't see flooded Gowanus as a problem

From The Politicker:

With Hurricane Sandy hitting New York, flooding has already occurred along the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal. Though the worst floods are expected to occur this evening when high tide combines with the strongest part of the storm surge, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his deputies don’t expect the toxic waters to do serious damage. Politicker asked the mayor whether he expected heavy flooding on the Gowanus tonight and what environmental or health risks the waters might pose for residents at his press conference at the Office of Emergency Management in Downtown Brooklyn early this evening.

“Tomorrow morning, it will be all over,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “It will be all over late tonight. Actually, the Gowanus Canal flooding should be going down in a couple hours.”

Mayor Bloomberg also invited Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway to weigh in on the situation with the canal. Mr. Holloway said he didn’t think the waters would put people in danger and he’s confident the city can clean up and flooding along the waterway, which is one of the most polluted in the country.

Hipsters on houseboats

From the NY Post:

A group of intrepid Brooklynites have spent at least a year living on four houseboats moored on the ultra-toxic Gowanus Canal, where they’ve been floating under the radar of city agencies that monitor safety regulations.

A recent study by the US Environmental Protection Agency -- which is overseeing a $500 million Superfund cleanup of the 1.8-mile canal -- has warned boaters not to fall in because the waterway is a cancer-causing cesspool.

Three of the houseboats, occupied by hipster 20-somethings, are docked behind a truck lot off President and Bond streets. Neighbors said they’re known for late-night canal parties and pretty girls sunbathing on the decks.

While the boaters have docking permission from property owners, the floating homes still must pass city Buildings and Fire department safety inspections to be considered legal.

One top city official said it’s “highly unlikely” the city would allow houseboats on the Gowanus, adding the residents could face fines for docking “illegally.”

Bell tolls for Toll Brothers

From the Brooklyn Paper:

The “Superfund stigma” has claimed its first victim, as a development company that once envisioned a 500-unit complex along the banks of the fetid Gowanus Canal has officially bailed on its five-year pursuit of the project saying that it can’t wait for the federal government to complete its proposed 10-plus year clean-up.

Toll Brothers walked away from a $5.75-million down payment it had made on canal-front land just south of the Carroll Street bridge, making good on a promise to abandon its plan if the federal government designated the waterway a Superfund site, as it did in March.

Toll had entered a contract to purchase the property from Joseph Phillips and Citibank in 2004, and made its down payment on the eventual purchase price of $20.6 million, according to court papers filed last year.

Had the project advanced, Toll would have purchased a total of three parcels on two adjoining blocks to build a mixed-income project with 477 apartments in a complex of townhouses and buildings scaling as high as 12 stories.

EPA tells Bloomberg to go jump in Lavender Lake

From the NY Times:

The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it was designating the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn a contaminated Superfund site, opening the way for a cleanup of the long-polluted waterway.

The decision comes as a blow to the Bloomberg administration, which had proposed a cleanup that would avoid such a designation. The city argued that the designation could set off legal battles with polluters, defer completion of a cleanup and torpedo construction by developers deterred by the stigma of a Superfund label.

The E.P.A. estimated that the federal cleanup would last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million.

The agency, which first proposed that the canal be designated a Superfund site last April at the urging of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, made its decision after reviewing comments from the public, city officials and others.

Developer claims there's no crap in the creek!

From Courier-Life:

The city’s alternative plan was hatched only after it was announced that the [Gowanus] canal could be named a Superfund site. Developers like Toll Brothers cheered the city’s plan, saying it is the only way their massive residential development project planned along the canal could proceed.

While Newtown [Creek], which snakes through Greenpoint, Williamsburg and parts of Queens, is one of the most polluted waterways in the nation, it doesn’t have the problem of sewage overflows like the canal does, noted David Von Spreckelsen, senior vice president at Toll.

How dumb (or high on drugs) can you be to make such a stupid statement like that? That stink on 49th Street ain't Chanel Number 5, pal! There's also a GIGANTIC sewage treatment plant on the Brooklyn side that discharges CSOs when we have heavy rain. Why did the newspaper allow this statement to be printed as fact when it's far from it?

Who will clean the creek & canal

From Courier-Life:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced it could take 16 years to fully clean Newtown Creek, though local businesses and property owners fear that the effects of the agency’s Superfund recommendation could be felt immediately.

In September, the EPA made a recommendation to add the Newtown Creek to the federal Superfund site after several months of sampling. The EPA has increasingly scrutinized Netwon Creek, along with the Gowanus Canal with the goal of long-term remediation, though the cleanup of the sites could escalate into tens of million of dollars.

At two separate meetings in North Brooklyn hosted by the Newtown Creek Alliance and the Newtown Monitoring Committee, Williamsburg residents took the opportunity to ask EPA officials about the effects of environmental remediation in North Brooklyn, after Walter Mugdon, director of the EPA’s Division of Environmental Planning, gave a detailed presentation about the Superfund process.

“Our experience now is if a site is declared a Superfund site, property values may drop but they will quickly rebound when people realize it is going to get cleaned up,” said Mugdon, at an NCA meeting at St. Cecilia’s Church Auditorium. “Do people want to have a business near a waterway that is clean or dirty? Chances are they are going to say they want a cleaner one.”

Mugdan said that the EPA has been reaching out to five companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Phelps Dodge, BP-Amico, and National Grid — which could be potentially responsible parties for contamination and significant financial contributors toward its cleanup, as well as smaller mom and pop businesses located on the Creek which may share some liability.

From Courier-Life:

The United States Navy and the City of New York could be the latest entities footing the bill for the clean-up of the fetid Gowanus Canal, this paper has learned.

The Environmental Protection Agency sent out notices to the two last week, informing them that they could be potentially responsible for the paying for the polluted waterway’s cleansing, should it be designated a Superfund site.

EPA spokesperson Elizabeth Totman said the Navy’s connection to the canal comes by way of facilities it formerly owned and/or operated adjacent to or near the Gowanus Canal and for facilities where the Navy directed and oversaw government contractors which owned and/or operated facilities adjacent to the canal. The U.S. Department of the Navy and contractors’ facilities include, but are not limited to, Navy piers at 33rd and 37th Streets; Naval Supply Depot at 850 3rd Avenue; Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp., Ltd. yards at 19th and 27th Street; Sullivan Dry Dock at the 23rd Street Yard; Todd Shipyards at Pier A, Tebo Plant at 23rd Street, and at the Erie Basin, Totman noted.

The city’s responsibility comes through previous/current ownership of an asphalt plant, incinerator, a pumping station, storage yard, and Department of Transportation garage. Taken collectively, the uses may have added to fouling the canal, considered one of the most polluted waterway’s in the nation.

Crazy times on the Gowanus Canal

From the NY Times:

The Bloomberg administration, sensing a chance for revitalization, rushed to rezone 25 blocks of the Gowanus area for nonindustrial uses, identifying more than 60 development sites with a potential to generate at least $500 million in tax revenue. It didn’t appear to be a deterrent that the canal was, quite literally, still something of a cesspool. New York is, after all, a city where people have proved themselves willing to live almost anywhere, where no location, be it smelly or notorious (think the meatpacking district or Hell’s Kitchen or Brooklyn’s Myrtle Avenue, formerly known as Murder Avenue), seems to be beyond the reach of gentrification. But the case of the Gowanus Canal has put that assumption to an extreme test. The redevelopment process was creeping forward when, in April, the federal Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was considering adding the Gowanus Canal to its Superfund cleanup program, which is reserved for the nation’s worst hazardous-waste sites. The move surprised and enraged city officials, who warn that the “stigma” of being included in the program could halt economic improvement indefinitely.

It was the same story everywhere along the canal: developers had come bearing watercolor renderings of an idealized blue waterway, flanked by condo buildings and walkways full of joggers and strollers. At Carroll Street, next to a landmarked retractile bridge, we saw a grove of poplars and an informal outdoor performance space that was slated to make way for a 450-unit complex of condominiums and town houses developed by Toll Brothers, the national luxury homebuilder. Farther along, past a string of moored boats of uncertain seaworthiness, there was another proposed residential development site. Doubling back to the canal’s south end, where there was a strong smell of petroleum, we paddled by a six-acre lot, owned by the city, that was intended for a 770-unit, mixed-income apartment complex, with an adjoining park, boathouse and waterside cafe. Then, near the Seussian pile of a scrap-metal yard, there was the coup de grâce of impending yuppification: a construction site that was supposed to become a Whole Foods.

All of these projects were proposed at the height of New York’s real estate boom, and nowadays, regardless of the outcome of the Superfund controversy, some of them look very much like the products of mania. But whether they actually come to fruition, the plans have already altered the canal’s identity, after decades of neglect, by making it into something valuable enough to fight over. Since the arrival of the developers, numerous competing interests have stepped forward to stake their own claims to what Bill Appel, the head of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation, calls “a vast wasteland.” The urban homesteaders who have moved there want it to remain an eccentric hideaway; artists want to preserve its postapocalyptic look; a civic group, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, proposes to create a public park atop an innovative filtration system that acts like an artificial wetland.

Painting by Walter L. Mosley

Only Bloomie's hand picked cheering section allowed

From Found in Brooklyn:

F.I.B's eyewitness news team showed up this afternoon for Bloomberg's celebration of the start of work on the Gowanus Flushing tunnel finally starting (of course it took the threat of halting development to proceed) and said that no one who really lived in the community was allowed to watch or participate in it! The usual suspects were there for this private celebration. You know, Toll Brothers, our former lame-o Councilman Bill DiBlasio, Buddy Scotto and his crew, Borough President Marty Markowitz, assorted politicians and the people who love them and of course the press.

"Eight members of the DEP Flushing Tunnel Rehabilitation Stakeholders Committee were barred from entering and taking part in the celebration that is going on as I type this email at the Flushing Tunnel Station on Douglass Street. These 8 people and others spent many, many hours of their time freely to review documents and provide input into the planning for this effort since DEP convened the group in 2002.

TODAY BLOOMBERG SAW FIT TO LOCK THESE COMMUNITY PARTICIPANTS OUT OF AN EVENT THAT THEIR DONATED TIME HELPED TO BRING ABOUT.

Just wanted all of you to know how concerned citizens who give their time to better their community and all of New York City get treated by the current mayor of NYC."

Photo from YourNabe.com