Mayor Backs Massive Atlantic Ave Rezoning In 'Moonshot' Housing Plan

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — It's the city of yes in northern Crown Heights.

Mayor Eric Adams has set his sights on a long stretch of Atlantic Avenue that the local community board has been trying to get rezoned since 2013, he said in a major housing address Thursday.

"We have already begun working with the central Brooklyn community to bring in affordable housing through the Atlantic Avenue mixed use plan," Adams said Thursday.

"This plan will also deliver commercial industrial jobs and infrastructure improvements to Crown Heights in Bedford Stuyvesant."

The announcement marks a major change from past administrations' stance on the community-led rezoning study, known as M-CROWN, a project to rezone Atlantic between Vanderbilt and Nostrand avenues.

For years, the city's planning office told the community board that M-CROWN was off the table unless part of a larger mayoral rezoning process.

Yet, in Thursday's announcement, Adams explicitly highlighted M-CROWN as the foundation for his City of Yes Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan.

"This is our mission," Adams said. "Our moonshot.”

Thursday's announcement already has at least one local official cheering, even if the details in Adams plan are scant.

"This process has gone on for a long time and the community board is anxious to see this vision realized," CB8 member and community activist Gib Veconi told Patch. "It has to be a good thing."

According to Veconi, Adams the Borough President was a vocal M-CROWN supporter and that support has not waned with his move to City Hall.

The mayoral administration has met with Crown Heights board members over this year, as recently as last week, Veconi noted.

The Mayor's announcement addressed infrastructure needs but he did not make explicit the board's major goal of requiring an amount of non-residential floor area to be reserved for light industrial job creation.

Veconi told Patch that keeping industrial jobs in the neighborhood is a primary goal of M-CROWN, which stands for Manufacturing, Commercial, Residential Opportunity for a Working Neighborhood.

"We want a mixed-use neighborhood but we actually want mixed-use buildings," Veconi said, adding that the CB8 vision calls for buildings where "residential [units] cross-subsidizes light manufacturing use."

Since the document is preliminary, and light on details, Veconi said it's hard to say if the city is excluding this goal. But the requirement has caused officials to bump heads with CB8 members in the past.

M-CROWN was born in 2013 from a CB8 subcommittee that wished to initiate its own rezoning plan — partially as a result of the community's experience with the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project — in a part of the neighborhood currently zoned for manufacturing and industrial use only, a historically prime target for developers.

Instead of piecemeal rezoning, M-CROWN sought to create a more thoughtful approach that would hopefully benefit the community, with support for both affordable housing and light manufacturing jobs while also meeting the infrastructure needs of the neighborhood.

But under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city planning department's reluctance to move forward has seen a number of spot rezoning across the M-CROWN area, including several developments along Atlantic Avenue.

While it seems clear that the current mayor supports the plan, current projects could now face uncertainty.

At 962 Pacific, a 150-unit project that was praised by CB8 members just last week for the efforts made by owner Nadine Oelsner and her attorney Richard Lobel, who has been involved with a number of spot rezonings in the area, had made to meet M-CROWN frameworks without asking for a quid-pro-quo.

"Most proposals offer higher public benefits for increased density," Veconi said, "but they aren't asking for a higher framework."

A lack of parking requirements allows a massive 30,000 square feet for "M-Crown priorities uses," said Oelsner, including a 10,000 square feet for early childhood development, with the rest for light manufacturing.

The nearby 5th Avenue Committee would serve as the affordable housing administrator, and public outdoor green-space was added to the proposal after a comment made at the last meeting by another board member.

"They are offering significantly greater public benefits than are required," Veconi said.

But Oelsner warned the CB8 Land Use Committee last week, their fourth time meeting, that unless their application moves forward soon, she was "at risk of losing the property," Oelsner said.

If Oelsner is required to wait for the full rezoning, as some board members had told her she should, despite having made significant strides since the spring to exceed M-CROWN requirements, she told the committee that the property — and the progress towards those M-CROWN goals — could be lost.

"We have been told to stop and start multiple times over the last few years," Oelsner said, "and the financial strain of this uncertainty is no longer sustainable for us."

Read More:

• Yet Another Apartment Tower Proposed In North Crown Heights: Records
• Controversial Atlantic Avenue Towers Get Green Light From City Council
• Last-Minute Deal Paves Way For Atlantic Avenue Study, Apartment Towers
• 2 More Towers On Brooklyn's Atlantic Ave Rejected By CB Committee