The bulldozers took a half-century breather in Flatbush, deterred from razing the neighborhood’s deep reservoir of single-family detached Victorian-style homes by the 1961 zoning code and the city’s decades-long descent into crime and despair.
But the neighborhood’s housing market has rebounded mightily, and there are still a number of single-family homes zoned for reasonable densities outside of the wealthy white areas to the west of the Brighton Line tracks.
And so, another single-family home – handsome enough in its day, but decaying and woefully inadequate for the neighborhood’s 21st century demand, not to mention un-contextually small compared to the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s apartment buildings that dominate the block – bites the dust.
Earlier today, an application was filed to construct a seven-story, 23-unit at 62 East 21st Street (also known as Kenmore Place), between Caton and Woodruff avenues, in an area of Flatbush variously called Prospect Park South or Prospect Lefferts Gardens by brokers. The demolition permit for the old structure has yet to be filed, but it’s likely only a matter of time.
The 23 apartments will be spread over nearly 16,000 square feet of space with no ground-floor retail (none is allowed), for a rental-sized unit average of under 700 square feet. The building will have four apartments on the first four floors, three units on the fifth, and two units each on the sixth and seventh floors.
Borough Park-based Abe Wald is the developer, while BMG Design Build, led by Boaz Golani, is listed as the architect.
The developer bought the property a few months ago for $1.65 million, or a bit over $100 a foot – much more than the $900,000 it fetched near the height of the last market cycle, in mid-2006.
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