by Joe M 
This week’s CB1 ULURP hearing focused on the development at 77 Commercial St. which is just up Newton Creek from the Greenpoint Landing project that we covered last week. 77 Commercial street is currently a vacant commercial building that was purchased in 2012 by Manhattan-based developers, Chetrit Group. What makes this development notable is that it sits next to the long promised, but never delivered Box Street Park at 65 Commercial Street.
65 Commercial…
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Beginning with Bloomberg’s 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, which with the sweep of his pen, added unprecedented value to the North Brooklyn waterfront, there is so much wrong with this project (and adjacent Greenpoint Landing project) that one is at a loss where to begin analyzing this albatross. I must say that the developer indeed has a right to build yet… the 77 Commercial parcel while zoned R-8 allows a maximum of 15 stories, so in order to get the 30- and 40-story towers, the city (shame on you) sells 304,000 SF of development rights from 65 Commercial for $27/SF. I’d love to see that appraisal (none was done you can be certain), and the city’s justification for the sale is to pay for the Box Street park because the city has only $1M (only $1M!) to pay for the park when the promise of the city in the rezoning was for it to create the park(s) and greenway in North Brooklyn. Next, infrastructure on the site: there is none! The G train is at India Street, and the alternative is a schlep over the Pulaski Bridge to catch the 7 train in LIC. The site is on the Newtown Creek, America’s most toxic waterway. Affordable housing? That’s the rotten carrot thrown out there to get Greenpointers comfortable with the project. The “affordable” units will mostly be studio and one-bedroom units, so that leaves out Greenpoint families. It would take about a $61K income to “afford” a one-bedroom which the majority of Greenpoint residents do not earn. Then there are the flooding issues, but the developers/architect solved that pesky issue by raising the ground level of the development with no thought whatsoever as to the impact on the surrounding area (the homes of current residents) it will have when the next Sandy comes along. Where is our city council? Let’s hope they do not approve the transfer of air rights to this site. The city is also doing a side deal with Greenpoint Landing Associates to sell about two acres so they can build larger. All for shame!
Thanks for the reporting. Here are a few more stats to wrap our heads around:
G train – MTA just did a full line review in July https://www.mta.info/nyct/service/G_LineReview.htm
This report shows that trains are running at 86-88% capacity during peak morning hours from the Greenpoint Ave. Station. They are raising $700,000 to make some improvements, but the only extra trains they will be adding will be during evening 3pm-9pm (every 8 minutes rather than every 10). Can you imagine between 5,000-10,000 more people trying to board the G train at Greenpoint Ave. every morning? The city’s answer to this in the 2005 Williamsburg -Greenpoint Rezoning Environmental Impact Statement is that the G train is underutilized, so it is a non-issue. This is one of many reasons why many people are demanding a hault to all construction until there is a new Environmental Impact Statement specific to north Greenpoint.
Affordable Housing – at the meeting, the folks from 77 Commercial St. told us that this is what they will offer in terms of affordable housing :
Low-Income Units (80% AMI = yearly income up to $51,600)
Moderate-Income Units (125% AMI = yearly income up to $80,625)
Middle-Income Units (175% AMI = yearly income up to $112,875)
Hmmm, is it worth it to get 200 of these “affordable housing” units in exchange for both a 30 and 40 foot tower? I appreciated all the people at the meeting who spoke up about what kinds of affordable housing are really needed in Greenpoint. The lawyers for the developers responded that they are doing what is legal (and economically of best interest on their end) and have no interest in talking with the community about our affordable housing needs.