Among New York City progressives, a common refrain is that real estate developers won’t build housing that’s affordable to middle-class New Yorkers on their own, so they must be forced into it through programs like mandatory inclusionary zoning.
Regular YIMBY readers know that this is not true in many neighborhoods on the city’s fringe – developers in the northern Bronx and eastern Queens are more than happy to build market-rate housing at prices that won’t break the bank, if land is properly zoned for development (or, as is usually the case for neighborhoods that have been built out for generations, redevelopment).
And now, we can add East Flatbush to the list of neighborhoods where affordable market-rate apartments pencil out – at least, where they’re allowed.
Great Neck-based Bokhour Developers found one such site at 576 Lenox Road, just east of Albany Avenue. There, the developers (who have also done at least one project in Brighton Beach) bought a 60-foot-wide lot holding a single-family detached home, which they intend to demolish and replace with a four-story, eight-unit apartment building. The eight apartments would be spread over nearly 7,000 square feet of residential space, yielding rental-sized units of approximately 850 square feet each – two each per floor. Seven parking spaces (six outdoors, one in a garage) would be included in the project, the exact number required by the city’s zoning code.
The main thing standing in the way of more of this sort of construction in inherently affordable neighborhoods like East Flatbush is, of course, zoning. East Flatbush has a nearly blanket R5 zoning designation, allowing for floor area ratios of just 1.25 – about a third the scale of a six-story tenement, and completely inadequate for the torrent of demand that the neighborhood is facing as Brooklyn’s West Indian community is gentrified out of closer-in neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Flatbush proper.
While it’s true that East Flatbush lacks the transit access of some Brooklyn neighborhoods, it’s a short bus ride away from the Church Avenue stations on the 2/5 and B/Q on the very frequent B35 bus. While it would be nice to live in a world where the MTA were competent and proactive enough to improve the speed of the B35 (likely with faster boarding through off-board fare payment, as on the Select Bus Service lines) or to build the long-planned subway beneath nearby Utica Avenue, the city’s supply of affordably-priced new housing should not be held hostage by the MTA’s failure to improve transit in central Brooklyn.
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