As Fourth Avenue’s construction boom stretches south of the Prospect Expressway in Brooklyn, condos are rising on the neighborhood’s less desirable blocks, closer to the traffic-clogged avenue and further from Green-Wood Cemetery. One such project is in the works at 186 21st Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Greenwood Heights.
New building applications were filed this morning for a five-story apartment building on the 50-foot-wide site. It would have 26 units spread across 25,040 square feet of residential space, yielding an average unit of 963 square feet.
The first and fifth floors would have only three units each, the second floor would hold six units, and the third and fourth stories would have seven units per floor.
The project will also include a 13-space parking lot on the ground floor, which is exactly the amount required by the zoning code.
Issac and Stern will design the building, and Sterling Town Equities will develop it. The Clinton Hill-based firm picked up the lots at 186 and 190 21st Street for $6,000,000 in June. A nondescript two-story office building and a parking lot currently occupy those two properties. The development site also includes a little two-story, two-family house, but the building hasn’t changed hands yet.
Fourth Avenue’s zoning has been contentious since Bloomberg took office. His first City Planning Commissioner, Amanda Burden, pushed through a rezoning of the former industrial corridor to encourage residential development in 2003. But the city’s onerous parking requirements mostly created garages and other uninviting ground floor uses along the major thoroughfare.
Although City Planning tried to correct the problem by requiring active ground floor uses on Fourth Avenue, it hasn’t made any effort to change the M1-2 zoning on the western side of the avenue, which forbids residential development and ground floor retail.
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