After years of controversy and protest, the NYC Planning Commission unanimously voted to reject the rezoning proposal for 960 Franklin Avenue, the residential project in Crown Heights that advocates claim would have cast plant-killing shadows over the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The vote had been expected for weeks after the project lost the support of just about every local politician—including the local community board, the Brooklyn Borough President, and the mayor.
"Today’s unanimous vote at City Planning is a victory for everyone who calls Crown Heights home and all those who use Jackie Robinson Playground and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden," said Municipal Art Society (MAS) President Elizabeth Goldstein. "The rejection of the 960 Franklin Avenue proposal sends a powerful message to developers that the City will not be railroaded into overturning its own carefully considered zoning regulations. This luxury tower condo tower (cloaked, absurdly, as an engine for affordable housing) was a non-starter from the jump. We are relieved to see the developer’s attempts to subvert the public process and demand special treatment roundly rejected.”
For over two years, housing activists as well as Botanic Garden supporters protested the project, which was led by developer Bruce Eichner of Continuum Company. Continuum sought to build two 39-story residential towers, both rising above 400 feet, near the perimeter of the Botanic Garden. The developer said the project would have contributed to the city's need for affordable housing, with half of the planned 1,578 units of housing set to be below market rate.
Opponents to the project, led by a grassroots group known as Movement to Protect the People, argued that the height and density of the buildings were unprecedented in the brownstone-lined area and would have hurt the Botanic Garden as well as altered the character of the mostly four-story neighborhood. They also claimed the rents on the would have still been out of reach for many lower-income individuals.
The project would "have disastrous effects on some of Crown Heights’ most heavily frequented open public places, a neighborhood already identified by the City as underserved by open space," said a joint letter from MAS and Brooklyn Botanic Garden in August.
A rendering of 960 Franklin Avenue with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at left.
Knowing the City Planning Commission planned to reject the project, Continuum filed a lawsuit last week over the commission’s refusal to consider the developer’s “reasonable alternative,” which cut the 39-story towers into a pair of 17-story towers (with 25 percent, instead of 50 percent, affordable housing). Chair Marisa Lago had told the developers their alternative plan was not submitted with enough time to review, but Continuum said it was, and the commission violated its obligations under the State Environmental Quality Review Act to consider it.
“They excluded our alternative scenario, which is arbitrary, capricious, and illegal,” Eichner, the chairman and CEO of the Continuum Company, told Curbed. “The goal is to have the court direct the City Planning Commission to take the hard look that’s required.”
Earlier this month, Curbed published a deep dive into the messy fight over the towers, which they argued was about far more than the shadows over Brooklyn Botanic Gardens—instead, it was a mix of NIMBY-ism run rampant and complicated questions about the future of housing and who gets to decide on it:
The fight over 960 Franklin had every element of every land-use battle in the city, only in this case, heightened, much like the tower itself. But they were so completely overshadowed, to so speak, by the concerns over the Botanic Garden that it became easy to overlook all the other dynamics at play. Like the vision — or hubris — that it takes to try to build a 1,500-unit, 50 percent affordable project more than six times what zoning allows in brownstone-adjacent Brooklyn. Or the tenacity of the local activists who were convinced that a 50 percent affordable project would be a mechanism of displacement and gentrification, such that the local state assemblywoman claimed that, if 960 Franklin were built, it would be “the premeditated murder of Crown Heights.”
