The redevelopment of Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, rezoned in 2003 for residential development, is well underway this market cycle, and we’ve got another project to add to the list: 269 Fourth Avenue, between First Street and Garfield Place.
There, a permit application was filed to construct a new 12-story, 26-unit residential building. The project is planned to sit on a somewhat skewed lot with 100 feet of frontage on Fourth Avenue, just north of a larger residential project designed by ODA Architecture and under development by Adam America Real Estate and Silverstone Property Group. The land beneath No. 269 sold about a year ago for $4.4 million, or a bit over $100 per buildable square foot – a bargain compared to what it would fetch today, though the contract (brokered by TerraCRG) had been inked for some time before the sale closed.
Sunset Park-based U.S. Developments Group, which has built a few projects and has a few more under development along the Fourth Avenue corridor, is behind the filing. The architect is listed as Building Consulting Engineering, led by Tony Onyeagoro.
The project at 269 Fourth Avenue is planned to have 39,000 square feet of residential space, spread over just 26 apartments. Given the fairly large units – the ninth through twelfth floors will each have just one floor-through apartment each – and given where we are in the market cycle, we’re guessing the project will be condos.
The residential units will sit atop a base housing a 750-square foot commercial space and a 2,600-square foot community facility space, which the Schedule A filing lists as a day care facility and eating and drinking establishment, respectively. The building is small enough that the developers dodged the Department of City Planning’s minimum parking requirements, which have regrettably encouraged poor ground floor uses in some new buildings along Fourth Avenue.
Planners did make an attempt to correct the problem by requiring active ground floor uses along Fourth Avenue, but they did not address the underlying issues, which include the parking requirements that forced developers to build the unsightly garages in the first place.
In addition to the parking requirements, which fortunately did not kick in for this project, the M1-2 zoning across the street does not allow housing, and robs the neighborhood of the foot traffic that it would need to sustain the healthy commercial establishments and active uses that politicians and planners claim to want for Fourth Avenue – perhaps explaining why the developer is planning a larger day care center than commercial space.
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