Permits Filed: 631 East 18th Street, Ditmas Park

Most of Ditmas Park’s freestanding Victorians are protected by low-density zoning or landmarking, but there’s one at the corner of East 18th Street and Foster Avenue that’s primed for development.

Developer Oleg Krasnitsky has filed applications to erect a seven-story apartment building in place of the home at 631 East 18th Street. The development will hold 35 apartments spread across 23,983 square feet of residential space, yielding 685-square-foot average units.

The filing shows a community facility on the cellar and first floors, but no square footage is listed for a community use. Apartments will start on the second floor, with six units per story through the sixth floor and five units on the seventh floor.

The building will also have a parking lot with spots for three cars and an open recreation area on the first floor.

Sheepshead Bay-based architecture firm Zproekt will handle the design.

This project benefits from juicy R7A zoning, and the 5,200-square-foot property happens to sit inside an inclusionary housing zone. So the developer gets to build about 4,000 square feet larger in exchange for renting 20% of his units—seven apartments—at below-market rates.

The same owner has held onto the property since 1976, but it may have just changed hands. A tax lien sale certificate was filed with the Department of Finance in August, but no new deeds have hit the public records yet.

When the city rezoned Flatbush in 2009, this block was upzoned. Meanwhile, most of the residential blocks around it were even more tightly zoned to preserve the existing houses, effectively preventing any new development. And only a block north of here, the Ditmas Park Historic District preserves six blocks bounded Dorchester Avenue, Ocean Avenue, Newkirk Avenue and East 16th Street.

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