Brooklyn project drama tests city’s housing push

As Mayor Eric Adams waxes poetic about a “City of Yes,” developers proposing 231 apartments in Brooklyn have heard nothing but “no.”

Plaza Realty is proposing to replace a Staples and a parking lot in Homecrest with an eight-story, mixed-income residential complex including 60 affordable units, a first-floor commercial space and a landscaped rear garden.

Housing advocates claim the 36,500-square-foot project at 1880-1888 Coney Island Avenue would make a much-needed dent in the city’s housing crisis, as well as create jobs. It would mark the largest spike in affordable housing that Community District 12 has seen in eight years.

The local community board has listed housing affordability as its most pressing issue for five years’ running, yet unanimously rejected the project in October, citing residents’ concerns over its height, inconsistency with local architecture and potential to generate traffic.

Others complained that the apartments would be too small to house the neighborhood’s predominantly large families. The local Council member, Kalman Yeger, has indicated he won’t support the project unless the board does, despite its green light from Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

Opposition by the local member traditionally kills a project, but twice last year pressure from Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and the mayor overcame it, saving larger developments in Queens and the Bronx.

Pro-housing group Open New York has seized on Plaza Realty’s plan as one that needs similar help.

“We were happy to see Speaker Adams release her housing agenda to confront the city’s housing crisis, highlighting that every neighborhood needs to do their fair share to create new housing,” the nonprofit said in a statement. “Now she must work with the local member and the rest of the body to approve this project.”

But the mostly white, low-scale neighborhood has killed such projects before. Just blocks away, a project at 1571 McDonald Avenue promising 104 apartments, 37 of them permanently affordable, was shot down in June by the community board.

The Real Estate Board of New York estimates that the city needs 560,000 new housing units by 2030. In Homecrest, an estimated 21 percent of the population is extremely low income, according to a racial equity report.

In a contentious back-and-forth during a Council zoning subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Yeger and Plaza Realty’s attorney Eric Palatnik clashed over whether the project could be brought down from eight stories to five.

“The irony is that the proposed residential building is just a fraction of the allowable building,” Palatnik said, arguing that the conglomerate lot size would allow the privately funded development to be 23 stories. A project of fewer than eight floors simply won’t pencil out, according to the developers.

“If there was a 421a in play, we could come down smaller,” Palatnik said after the hearing, referring to the recently expired state tax abatement for multifamily projects.

The building would hardly be the first of its kind in the area. Close by, several recently developed seven- and eight-story residential buildings line the same avenue, though none have permanently affordable housing.

“The fact that some people believe that their solar panels may be affected by the building, or do not like that the building will be as tall as other buildings nearby, are not what we think are important considerations,” Open New York’s senior policy director, Andrew Fine, said in an interview.

The project meets “all good housing principles,” he said. 

“We cannot solve the housing crisis if the people in the backyard of the project can veto the entire proposal,” Fine added. “Sites like this are about as good as you can get in a built-out, residential neighborhood.”

However, Plaza Realty’s reputation locally has been another hurdle for the project.

“We have dark holes in our neighborhood created by your client,” Yeger said during the hearing, blaming Plaza for stretches of auto body shops and vacant lots between Avenue L and Kings Highway while decrying the developer as someone “whose promises have not been trustworthy.”

“Literally paving paradise into parking lots is your client’s motto,” the councilman sniffed.

Yeger, who views himself as “pro-development” and in support of the urgent push for housing, says it is “ridiculous” to believe there’s no obligation to protect the homes and lives of current Homecrest residents.

“I’m not the guy who says, ‘No, no, no.’ It’s a ‘City of Yes’, but it’s not a ‘City of yes, you can do whatever you want,’” Yeger said.

Yeger is not an ally of the Council speaker and the progressives who make up a majority of the chamber, but predicted they will not override him.

“I believe my colleagues will look at the totality of the record, the totality of the neighborhood and of this application and realize this is not the right guy to develop this kind of thing in this neighborhood,” he said.