A Bedford Stuyvesant-based non-profit is helping local residents set up small businesses in their neighborhood, the New York Daily News reported.

The Brooklyn non-profit, Shops of Lewis Avenue Merchants Association, which started out as a group of business owners on Lewis Avenue, is now expanding, and neighbors are interested in opening shops as diverse as a bakery and a gardening store.

“There’s a different way business gets done when you know you’re serving your next door neighbor or the lady around the corner,” said Monique Greenwood, president of association. [more]

Six Bedford Stuyvesant homeowners are accusing developer Delight Construction and indicted Department of Housing Preservation and Development official Wendell Waters of demanding extra cash for their city-subsidized homes, they told the Daily News, and of leaving them with subpar construction on the buildings.

The homeowners, who won a housing lottery for homes along Lexington Avenue, made their down payments in 2005, the News said, but have since run into problems related to move-in delays, requests for more money to clean up suspected contamination, and plumbing and heating malfunctions.

“Either we paid the money or we could walk away from the contract,” said Onika McLean, one of the owners. [more]

Several neighborhoods are changing significantly along ethnic and racial lines, the 2010 census reveals, according to news reports. In Bedford Stuyvesant, for example, the population is only 60 percent black, the New York Times reported, down from 75 percent. And in the older Bedford section, blacks have become a minority for the first time in 50 years.

John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, attributes the change in the neighborhood to the fall in the crime rate and improvement of subway conditions. [more]

Click image to see full map of proposed historic districts

The Landmarks Preservation Commission and Brooklyn Community Board 3 will convene tomorrow night to host an open forum on four new proposed historic districts within Bedford-Stuyvesant and one expansion of an existing landmarked district in the neighborhood, according to neighborhood organization Bedford-Stuyvesant Society for Historic Preservation. If the plan were to go through, a combined 75 blocks in Bedford-Stuyvesant would be encompassed in the landmarking. TRD [more]

When a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone saw one of its walls collapse during a dubious renovation in January, few could have anticipated the community conflict that would emerge from the accident. While homeowner Robert Providence said that the unlicensed work that led to the collapse, which was being conducted in the basement of his $770,000 townhouse at 329 MacDonough Street, was done without his permission, the onus fell on him to restore his home in Bed-Stuy’s historic district. Although city officials had originally ordered the building be demolished due to safety concerns, neighbors successfully lobbied to keep it around. Providence has since wound up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but preservationists are happy — even if they can’t show their enthusiasm monetarily. “No one has the money to help,” Providence said.

Juny Francois, an attorney and developer, bought a Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2003 for $350,000; today it’s worth more than twice that.

From the February issue: Imagine you host a party and no one comes. That was broker David Behin when he unveiled the 29-unit condo project 111 Monroe last year in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He put the building, with its slick glass-and-stone façade, large, clean apartments and huge windows, on the market last January and didn’t get a single bite. “It was a project where anyone who walked into the building said, ‘Wow.’ But it was tough as nails to try to get anyone to buy,” said Behin, executive vice president of the Real Estate Group New York, a residential brokerage. “And we probably went out with prices that, even though we reduced them, were still too high.” The developers lowered the price of the units, twice. Two-bedrooms, for instance, fell from $495,000 to $450,000. The developers also offered to pay buyers’ closing costs and got the building approved for FHA loans, meaning qualified buyers could purchase units with as little as 3.5 percent down. And they could pluck down just $2,000 to sign the contract and make the rest of the down payment over time. The result? The units started moving. By December, he had contracts on half of them, he said.  [more]

The development of the Broadway Triangle, a 31-acre site in Brooklyn bordering Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, has been temporarily halted due to a court order from a Manhattan judge. The injunction was handed down yesterday, after Monday’s City Council approval of Bloomberg’s plans for the site. The ruling came down after a lawsuit was filed Tuesday, alleging that minority groups in the region were left out of the rezoning process. The city will be barred from taking further actions to develop or rezone the region until a hearing in March.

A slew of discounted Brooklyn brownstones is coming on the market. A bevy of three- to four-unit residential buildings in Bedford-Stuyvesant can be had for under $300,000, for example, according to Ofer Cohen, the managing director at TerraCrg Commercial Realty Group (see full report after the jump). “I’ve got a list of 10 of them right now,” he said. But investors looking for a steal in prime neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens or Park Slope may need to wait a little longer. According to a report released today by TerraCRG, 51 percent of non-residential mortgages that began foreclosure filings in the past year in Brooklyn were for three- to four-unit residential buildings, and 80 percent were for mortgages under $1 million. Cohen added that the majority of the foreclosures took place in lower-priced neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy and East New York. “The weaker neighborhoods are seeing more of this,” said Cohen, who recently sold a non-performing mortgage note on an eight-family building in Crown Heights for $400,000, a 50 percent discount. [more]

A final vote on the city’s Broadway Triangle proposal is expected for Oct. 19, despite the widespread community opposition to the rezoning plan for the vacant space that borders Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick. According to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the rezoning would allow for 1,850 new apartments, about half of which will be reserved for affordable housing. A coalition of around 40 local groups has been adamantly protesting the project, arguing that it was unilaterally conceived and didn’t take community concerns into account. “The HPD is always doing this and it has to stop,” Ward Dennis, chair of the land use committee under Community Board 1, said. “It’s a good plan, a good contextual plan, the kind we’ve been advocating for. The problem is, the process stinks.”

A three-bedroom cottage on Cobb Isle Road in Water Mill saw a $2 million price cut today. PropertyShark.com has debuted its new interactive New York City crime map. A new affordable housing complex opened in Bedford-Stuyvesant. For more click here. TRD
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