photo by Benjamin Lovosky
Sad, all those yellow 660 T-shirts gone to waste. In case you haven’t followed the local news the past few years, a quick refresher. The New Domino developer Community Preservation Corporation Resources (CPCR) said they would go 50% better than the “encouraged” 20% affordable housing component in developing the old Domino Sugar site to build 30% or 660 affordable units. They claim to be friends of the community and committed to affordable housing. They also want the benefit of the 25-year property tax abatement, a perk for adding affordable housing. Oh, and let’s not forget they want government subsidies even though they’re a not-for-profit lender for affordable housing.
They really, really want to max out market rate housing on the eleven-acre waterfront/upland site. Project Manager Susan Pollock stated repeatedly in community meetings that in order to build this “generous” amount of affordable housing, huge zoning changes—vastly beyond those approved in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint 2005 waterfront rezoning—would be required. This translated into 16-story buildings upland (whereas the 2005 rezoning calls for no higher than six on upland blocks facing Kent Ave.), and 40-story giants on the waterfront parcel negotiated down to 34 stories, but still high enough to dwarf the towers of the Williamsburg Bridge.
