Greenpoint-Williamsburg Rezoning
A 15-year check-in on how rezoning impacted the development around the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront.
By, Alana Pogostin
It has been just over 15-years since the Williamsburg-Greenpoint area underwent a massive rezoning overhaul, rezoning a 175-block area around the waterfront of northern Brooklyn. The Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront used to be an industrial hub for garment and textile manufacturing, but when the factories started to leave, it became an “it” destination for young, educated, and hip residents. Old warehouses were repurposed into lofts to adapt to the pressing shortage of residential units; these changes highlighted a need to adjust the zoning to accommodate the demand for residential space in the area. When drafting a new zoning plan, the City Council’s key goals were to make the waterfront more accessible to recreational opportunities, make the area more residential, and preserve the community’s low-density, mixed-income, and mixed-use character. The community board and the City Council went about these objectives by weaving in inclusionary housing into the rezoning plan. The inclusionary housing specifications encourage the development of affordable housing by using floor area ratio (FAR), a metric that determines the amount of buildable space allowed on a lot, as an incentive. The incentive works by allowing developers to exceed the lot’s FAR if at least 20% of the units are affordable to the average median income resident.
In this blog post, I use open land-use data provided by NYC Planning to scan for the major land-use changes that have occurred in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area since the 2005 rezoning. The two questions I focus on are:
- How has the height of buildings changed?
- What buildings jumped on the incentive to create affordable housing units, and have a higher than zoned FAR?
Since the 2005 rezoning, huge new developments have surfaced around the waterfront and significantly altered the previously low-lying skyline. Currently, the tallest building along the waterfront is One South First, a 41-story building right off of Domino Park. Prior to the rezoning the tallest building was only 16-stories tall (Map 1). Besides the few eye-catching developments, there has been overall an increase in the vertical development in the area. The average number of floors in the rezoned area increased from 2.5, in 2005, to 3.1 in 2020 (Map 1).
A key element of the rezoning of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area was the FAR changes. After the rezoning the average FAR increased by 0.41, meaning that the amount of building area increased by an average of 16%. In efforts to increase the stock of affordable housing, the City Council allowed developers building along the waterfront to work around the designated FAR if they commit to ensuring that at least 20% of the units are affordable housing. Map 2 shows that there are more buildings that are taking advantage of government incentives to build at a higher FAR. Most developers are not taking the government incentive, and are opting to simply build to the maximum allowed FAR.
My analysis of the changes within the rezoned area of Williamsburg-Greenpoint indicates an overall increase in the height of the buildings and a surge in the number of developments that are reaching the maximum zoned FAR. These findings signal how developers have responded to the trade-off between developing affordable housing units. Most developers have decided to build to the maximum FAR rather than take the FAR incentive. The few projects that did utilize the incentive are concentrated along the waterfront and are 20 or more stories high, hinting that only large-scale high-end waterfront projects can justify creating affordable housing units. The developer’s circumvention around creating affordable units in Greenpoint-Williamsburg makes me skeptical about whether the rezoning was successful at preserving the neighborhood’s demographics.
Data Analysis Methods
The data at the core of maps 1 and 2 are land-use data maintained by the NYC Planning department. The land-use file for 2005 can be found in the here in the archives from Bytes of the Big Apple, and the data from 2020 can be found here. The boundary indicating the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area that was rezoned is also open data provided by NYC Planning department.
To create Map 1, I cut the 2005 and 2020 land-use data to the rezoned area. Then I made created a consistent scale that best highlighted the changes in the building floor area between the two years. I then used this scale to classify the data and create a choropleth map.
To create Map 2, I duplicated the land-use data cut to the rezoned district. I then used the field-calculator to take the FAR’s for different use types to extract the maximum FAR for each tax-lot. I used the field-calculator again to find the difference between the maximum FAR and the built FAR.
To touch-up the maps, I added in a streets shapefile layer and I added in a borough boundaries layer. I selected specific streets, that I wanted to highlight, and exported the selected streets as a separate layer; I used this layer to create labels. I also added in a borough boundaries layer and a neighborhood boundaries layer. I used the borough boundaries layer to show the section of Queens and Manhattan that appears in the map view, and I used the neighborhood boundaries layer to better define the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area by shading it in with a darker grey color.
