Manhattan Community Board 1 is currently working on a pitch for Mayor Michael Bloomberg to convert a Chambers Street property into affordable housing, a school and a non-profit organization, Downtown Express reported. The letter will be drafted in the next coming days, according to the paper, and it will request that the city choose a developer who will guarantee some affordable housing on the site. [more]

The Community Preservation Corporation’s $1.2 billion redevelopment proposal for the Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg was shot down last night in a 5-3 vote by Community Board 1′s Land Use Committee. The vote isn’t final — the full community board will hear the proposal March 9, after which Borough President Marty Markowitz, the City Planning Commission and the City Council will all have a say — but it is the first public rejection of the project, which entered an eight-month public review process in early January. The plans call for a 2,200-unit waterfront apartment complex, which would require the Kent Avenue site, just north of the Williamsburg Bridge, to be rezoned from manufacturing to residential. The developers have promised to create an open, public space on the waterfront and to designate 30 percent, or 660, of its units for below market-rate housing, far more than what is required by current zoning. Last night’s panel objected that the developer’s affordable housing commitment, as it currently stands, is only 15 years long and that the building plans were too dense. [Brooklyn Paper]

The new Spruce Street school

From the February issue: Newcomers are moving Downtown for a host of reasons, from deals on apartments to historic surroundings. And increasingly, another lure is good schools. They seem to be such a selling point that many of them are now seriously overcrowded. “They play a huge part in bringing people here,” said James Attard, an associate broker with the Tribeca-based Tabak Real Estate, who’s been selling homes there for six years. Top-ranked P.S. 234 on Greenwich Street, which many call a neighborhood jewel, appears to be significantly boosting property values, even when compared to P.S. 89 in Battery Park City, which is itself prized. Indeed, from 2006 to 2010, homes in the P.S. 234 zone were listed at prices about 30 percent higher than those near P.S. 89, according to StreetEasy, the real estate data company, though other factors may be at play. That may explain why even residents who don’t have children are upset over plans by the city to alleviate the overcrowding by reassigning kids from P.S. 234, which is jam-packed, to other District 2 schools through a large-scale rezoning. Adding two schools and carving up the neighborhood into new districts is meant to address crowding. Temporary rezoning was instituted last spring; a controversial rezoning was finalized in late January.

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