A rendering of the Whole Foods slated to rise in Gowanus, Brooklyn

Next week, the fate of Whole Foods Market’s first Brooklyn outpost will be largely decided, when two City Council panels vote on whether to grant the variances needed for the project to move forward, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The vacant Coignet building, at the corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street in the Gowanus neighborhood, is the landmarked building at the center of the debate. The proposed store would wrap around the historic building, and its lot size would need to be decreased in order for construction to begin. [more]

Clockwise from top left: Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Fourth Avenue corridor and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz will formally present his plan to significantly expand on a recent bid by the Department of City Planning to rezone Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, the New York Post reported.

Markowitz wants to encourage retail development along a seven-mile stretch of Fourth Avenue from Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill to the Atlantic Ocean in Bay Ridge. City Planning’s proposal was to start at Atlantic Avenue and continue 56 blocks south to 24th Street in South Slope. Both rezoning would ban new apartments and parking lots on the ground-floor of new construction projects, and demand that half of ground-floor space be committed to retail. [more]

Several retailers are pushing the City Council to pass a bill to create a Chinatown Business Improvement District that they believe would improve business conditions in the neighborhood, the New York Times reported. Under the plan, property owners would have to pay annual fees to enhance street cleaning, outdoor lighting, security, tourism and signs to steer visitors.

Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation, estimated that 35 percent of the neighborhood’s 1,891 property owners would pay $200 or less a year and 74 percent less than $1,000. But other property owners oppose the plan, saying they have already been suffering financially since the September 2001 terrorist attacks. [more]

The City Council today passed a resolution in support of New
York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into
the mortgage packaging practices of several banks and it calls upon
a taskforce of 50 state attorneys general to preserve his investigatory
and prosecutorial powers, according to New York’s Martin Act, in any
settlement with major financial institutions.

At the end of last month, Schneiderman was removed by Iowa State Attorney General Tom Miller as a leader of a panel
negotiating a settlement with U.S. mortgage servicers after he was
accused of trying to undermine the work of the group. — Miranda Neubauer [more]

The New York Public Library has sold the Annex, a storage space located at 530 West 44th Street, to the New York City School Construction Authority for $40 million, according to public records filed with the city today.

The sale of the Annex, which housed materials from the library’s collections, closed earlier this month after Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council approved SCA’s plans to build a high school at the site.

The materials stored at the Annex, between 10th and 11th avenues, have been relocated to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and to the library’s storage facility in Princeton, N.J. [more]

Sunnyside, Queens (source: Dept. of City Planning)

The City Council today approved the rezoning of Sunnyside and Woodside, which aims to protect the lower-density character of those neighborhoods while allowing for a moderate increase in residential and commercial density along main corridors, according to the Department of City Planning. Encompassing about 130 city blocks, the zoning area had been unchanged since 1961. With the neighborhood growing and becoming more diverse, the current zoning can result in unpredictable building types leading to out-of-character construction, according to the Department of City Planning. –  Miranda Neubauer [more]

As of today, it’s officially illegal to have roll-down metal security gates protecting storefronts in New York City. According to the Daily News, the new law, which was passed by the City Council in 2009 and went into effect today, gives business owners with solid metal gates until 2026 to replace them with gates that are at least 70 percent see-through. Though some small business owners have complained about the cost of the new gates, which they also say are less secure, the intent is to allow law enforcement officials to see inside locked-up stores should they ever respond to a call late at night. “When the police or firefighters roll up to a place at 2 a.m. to respond to a call, they’ll be able to know right away whether a cat set off the alarm or whether there’s a guy in there with a machine gun,” said Peter Vallone, chair of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. [more]

The cost of City Hall’s renovation has soared to $119 million, or nearly twice the original budget for the project. According to DNAinfo, workers installing sprinklers in the building have uncovered new and “alarming” water damage to the ceilings, among other needed fixes, sending costs through the building’s decaying roof. That roof was, in fact, the original, 2009 impetus for a $65 million renovation plan, after a ten-foot section of the ceiling in a second-floor committee room collapsed. Workers have since been reinforcing, painting and re-plastering the roof of the Council Chamber and replacing the stars and rosettes that had sustained damage. The rehab is slated for completion in March 2012. [more]

Notoriously stubborn New York City co-op boards would see their power wane if two bills being kicked around the City Council become law. The Observer reported that the two bills, known as the “Fair and Prompt Co-op Disclosure Law” would require co-op boards to make a decision within 45 days of application submission and provide a written response explaining a rejection. As The Real Deal previously reported, perceived discrimination has become too closely intertwined with co-op boards’ decisions. Though the bills’ origination date back to 2006, widespread opposition helped keep them grounded, but the Real Estate Board of New York recently switched its position and backed the bills providing new pressure to pass the proposals. Comments

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City Council member Gale Brewer announced that she will launch an investigation into building conditions within the city’s real estate portfolio after the Daily News reported hundreds of open code violations at city-owned properties. Among the high-profile buildings implicated in the report: One Police Plaza and the Manhattan Criminal Court, each of which have around 100 violations, Gracie Mansion, which had 16, and the Department of Buildings’ own headquarters at 280 Broadway, which had 20. Most of the infractions aren’t a threat to safety, but some are more serious, like the four Environmental Control Board violations at One Police Plaza, including one for failing to prove that emergency exits have their own power supply. [more]