By Helen Klein
As spacious old houses are torn down to make way for multi-family condominiums, activists in East Flatbush are pushing forward with an effort to get the community down-zoned. To that end, Community Board 17 will be holding a public hearing on rezoning the neighborhood on Thursday, January 25, from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at St Paul’s United Methodist Church auditorium, 3714 Avenue D. “We are having the public hearing because the community board will be sponsoring the request to the Department of City Planning (DCP) for down-zoning for the entire CB 17 area,” explained Albert Payne, the chairperson of the board’s Land Use Committee. Payne said that the board’s intention was to create a “comprehensive application.” With that in mind, he noted, the hope was that a large crowd would attend the hearing – not only residents, but area businesspeople, as well as elected officials and block association members. The goal of the down-zoning, Payne said, would be to re-map the neighborhood with zones that mirror the built environment. The problem of over-development often arises because of a mismatch between permissive zoning and the built environment, which, in large portions of East Flatbush, is largely made up of one and two-family homes. Because many of the structures are free-standing, and because they are built on relatively large lots, they are vulnerable to over-development, in a borough where blocks are being torn apart at a rapid pace as speculators with deep pockets buy out homeowners, tear down the homes and put up boxy condominium structures which both increase the borough’s density and change its streetscape. “We are going to request that the zoning comply with what is already there,” he stressed. “We are asking for continuity and conformance to what we currently have. We are asking that the Queen Anne’s and Craftsman bungalows we have be preserved, and that we get zoning that prevents community facilities from putting on gigantic additions that would be in violation of the zoning if they were regular developments.” The concept of down-zoning has been on the board’s radar for the past several years. Under former Land Use Committee Chairperson, Leithland Tulloch, the board had pushed area elected officials to get the process started, focusing specifically on two areas that were identified as particularly vulnerable: One bordered, generally, by Lenox Road, Brooklyn Avenue, Avenue H and Bedford Avenue, and one bordered by East New York Avenue, East 98th Street, Linden Boulevard and East 51st Street. Zoning in these areas is R-6, which would allow apartment buildings to be constructed. In 2005, a request from the board, which was supported at the time by the four councilmembers who represented the area, had been submitted to DCP. However, despite a raft of correspondence between the board and its city councilmembers, the down-zoning has languished.
