In the borderlands between East New York, Brownsville and Ocean Hill, one developer is planning supportive housing on an industrial block that the city plans to rezone for residential. New building applications were filed today for a six-story development at 2414a Atlantic Avenue, between Sackman Street and East New York Avenue.
Plans call for 18 units divided across 4,464 square feet of community facility space, for an average unit of just 248 square feet. The building will also have 4,000 square feet of commercial space, but it will likely be used as offices or some other part of the facility. The first three floors will be devoted to “multipurpose community facility purposes,” and the top three floors will have living quarters.
While we can’t say for certain, we suspect this is a for-profit homeless shelter. The buildings on either side, 2402 and 2416 Atlantic Avenue, appear to be shelters and have racked up a lengthy list of building violations over the past few years. The Daily News mentions 2416 Atlantic in a 2013 piece about Hurricane Sandy victims being housed in shelters and SROs, but doesn’t offer much information on the building.
The city generally forbids community facility uses without a special permit in M1 zones, but homeless shelters are allowed as-of-right.
Permits list the developer as Adlife Family Services, headed by William Boateng. When we called the number on the permit, the person who answered the phone refused to tell us what the building would be. Meanwhile, deeds say the owner is a Bronx-based outfit called the Kings Hotel.
The 2,000-square-foot vacant property sits inside a triangle of Ocean Hill close to Broadway Junction, where the city is getting ready to rezone several blocks from manufacturing to residential and commercial uses as part of its big East New York redevelopment plan.
This stretch of Atlantic Avenue is particularly inhospitable, because the elevated highway cleaves the street in two. But the south side of the block is lined with several small apartment buildings and a recently completed affordable housing development for low-income families.
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It’s not really correct to say that most community facility uses are forbidden in M1 districts– UG 4 uses are allowed. And they actually get more FAR than industrial and commercial uses. Also the Out Lady of Loreto is not public housing, it’s just regular HPD-funded affordable housing (the difference between the two is actually pretty huge).
Thanks for pointing that out about Our Lady of Loreto, I’ll correct it. As far as I can tell from the zoning resolution and DCP’s page on M-1 zones, most community facility uses are generally not allowed as-of-right in M1 zones – they require a special permit. If that’s not the case, I’d love to know the specifics.
ZR 42-10 (Uses permitted as of right) specifies that UGs 4A, 4B, and 4C are allowed as of right in M1. The specific uses that fall in those groups are defined in ZR 22-14. Common community facility/institutional uses like churches and health care facilities are included among these.
Thanks! I’ll look up those sections in the ZR and take a closer look.