Friday, March 5, 2021

Yesterday, I highlighted an article in the Times about Amazon’s expansion and how it has reminded me of our repeated calls for DOT to release the Smart Freight Management plan and conduct a comprehensive traffic study for Red Hook. At the…

Yesterday, I highlighted an article in the Times about Amazon’s expansion and how it has reminded me of our repeated calls for DOT to release the Smart Freight Management plan and conduct a comprehensive traffic study for Red Hook. At the risk of living in yesterday’s news, the article highlighted the important point that NYC has far less industrial space than many and even much smaller cities. 

For example, Chicago, which has a 3rd of our population, has nearly ten times the industrial square footage with 1.2 billion square feet. Such stats help reinforce why we’ve insisted that, among other conditions, the pending Gowanus rezoning must tie into the expansion of the neighboring Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone(IBZ).

Speaking of the IBZ, the only virtual ULURP we've reviewed so far, which is for the planned Monadnock Headquarters at 300 Huntington Street, had its first City Planning Commission hearing yesterday. The application was to change the M2-1 zone to an M2-3 zone resulting in a substantial reduction in parking space requirements. After an extensive hearing back in December, we approved it unanimously, with the applicant agreeing to return and present the final design and details to us in the future. 

On that technical, and I’m sure exciting note, I’ll recommend you keep reading but more importantly, that you stay safe and have a good weekend!

This is the web archive of a newsletter originally sent by email to Brooklyn Community Board 6 subscribers on Friday, March 5, 2021. The email edition may contain additional event listings and links.