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.

Goldman Sach’s Urban Investment Group is putting $61 million into rehabilitating affordable housing in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx through the New York Equity Fund, a partnership between the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and two affordable housing non-profits. The investment, which is the largest the 20-year-old NYEF has ever received, will allow for the restoration of 568 units in 47 buildings, with work expected to begin in just a few weeks and finish by 2011. NYEF has invested $1.6 billion in the city to date, having built 24,000 apartments designated for families earning less than 60 percent of the area’s median income. “It is important that Goldman Sachs stepped up to the plate and invested in the fund at a time when it is hard to raise capital,” said Abby Sigal, vice president and New York director of Enterprise Community Partners, one of the non-profits affiliated with NYEF. Goldman’s UIG has previously played a role in funding more than 3,100 projects throughout the city. [Crain's] [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.”