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A Question of Balance:

The Greenpoint-Williamsburg Rezoning Last October, the Bloomberg administration officially unveiled their proposal to rezone the waterfront of Greenpoint Williamsburg from industrial to residential and park use. In principle, it’s a great idea. New York urgently needs more housing, especially affordable housing. The neighborhood desperately needs more open space. The industrial land uses by the water (if not in other parts of the neighborhoods) have largely declined. Opening up the waterfront, allowing for new housing construction and building a new park are all excellent objectives.
But the details of Bloomberg’s proposal are disturbing. Citing the cost for developers of building affordable housing and public waterfront access, the city has permitted them to build towers of up to 40 stories. Even in Manhattan, this would be a significant prospect. For the largely low-rise neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, it’s positively frightening. The neighborhoods – particularly Greenpoint – are distinguished by their low-rise, village-like quality. For them to be surrounded by a wall of 22 towers rising up to 400ft would damage their character forever. Further, independent analysis shows that the densities are not necessary. Developers can receive good returns and still construct affordable housing and waterfront access with towers in the region of 15-20 stories. To put this into perspective, this is about the height of the Richard Meier buildings adjacent to the Hudson on the West Village. Neighborhood preservationists there complained about those heights, but the communities of Greenpoint and Williamsburg have indicated that, given their goal of seeing more affordable housing, it’s a density that they can live with. But so far, the city isn’t listening.
Worse, the City’s proposal for building affordable housing is deeply flawed. The Administration has offered developers both a density bonus and access to city subsidies in order to build affordable housing - a scenario experts call ‘double-dipping’, referring to the two different benefits that developers would receive. At the same time, the city has offered developers a separate, attractive option that allows them to build at a reduced density with no affordable housing. Given the relunctance most developers have shown in using city subsidies historically, many experts think developers will simply chose to build with no affordable housing.
The reality is that so-called ‘double-dipping’ is bad policy. Instead of offering developers a density bonus and use of subsidies under a voluntary program, the city should require affordable housing at a reasonable density that allows for sufficient economic returns. In a recent study by NYU Law school, a mandatory requirement was shown to be economically viable for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront. Housing advocates overwhelmingly prefer affordable housing to be required in new developments because the evidence from other US cities confirms that it not only works but produces far more affordable units than voluntary schemes.

If the city insists on offering extra density to developers in exchange for building affordable housing, it must do so in way as to ensure that the incentive is sufficient to induce affordable housing without permitting extreme densities. This can be best achieved by reducing the density developers can build without including affordable units, with a significant density bonus that allows them to build up to 15-20 story towers if a proportion of the units are affordable. Subsidies should then only be given to those developers who want to provide even more affordable units.
The community has demonstrated an overwhelming preference for balancing the need for affordable housing with a contextual scale to new development. Rather than cynically attempting to divide the community by presenting the choice between affordable housing and a contextual scale as mutually exclusive, the city should work harder to see that the two are balanced. The Communities own plan for the area was entitled ‘A Question of Balance’, and the City must rise to the challenge of balancing the area’s needs without failing to guarantee affordable housing or generating extreme densities.