No, you can’t live in the Brooklyn Navy Yard: 300 Acres in New York where no one will ever live
By Emma Ryan
There’s a place in Brooklyn on the East River that is every developer’s dream. Located between Downtown and Williamsburg, with Manhattan and river views, waterfront access, a major thread in the tapestry of Brooklyn’s history. And yet, no one lives there.
There’s massive investment in the area – over $2 billion worth planned for the near future. New businesses are popping up all the time. Parks and schools are minutes away in every direction. Transit options are getting better all the time. It's bikeable. In a few years, there will be over six million square feet of floor space available to rent.
This place is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and you can’t live there. You aren’t allowed. No one is.
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The Brooklyn Navy Yard was commissioned by President John Adams in 1801. It was here that the Navy built such iconic vessels as the Civil War ironclad Monitor and the Arizona, which was sunk at Pearl Harbor. It was well into the 20th Century the borough’s largest employer. During World War II, 70,000 people worked there and by the time it was decommissioned in 1967 it still employed 30,000 people.
It was also inhabited. Admirals lived on Admirals Row and as many 2,200 people lived in a single Navy Yard barracks. Even the surgeon had his own home. The city purchased the Navy Yard in 1969 and that, in effect, ended the Navy Yard’s decades as a home address.
From a distance, the Navy Yard looks normal. The surrounding neighborhood of Clinton Hill is nearly identical to many other middle class neighborhoods in Brooklyn – three-story walk-ups, a smattering of schools and small businesses, a bodega on every other corner.
But the moment you get to Flushing Avenue the scenery changes. A wrought iron fence complete with security gates separates the double-wide bike lane from an odd collection of pre-war brick warehouses and modern steel-and-glass high rises. Two hundred ton cranes tower alongside the WeWork office building. It is a strange world of new development colliding with hundred year old buildings, and utterly detached from the neighborhood across the street.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, the non-profit placed in charge of it by the city, hopes to change this soon. Their $2.5 billion investment is focused on bringing 20,000 jobs and hundreds of businesses. They say they will connect with the community while providing much needed middle class jobs.
That sounded good. But what about homes and people? That is when things started getting complicated.
But first, I began with business. What businesses do people in the neighborhood want to see come to the Navy Yard?” A handbag designer said he wanted to see more fashion. An artist wanted more small studios. A pizzeria that delivers to the Navy Yard wanted as many businesses to move in as possible.
But one response stuck with me. Simon J., who wished to not have his last name published, off-handedly said, “Honestly, they don’t need more tech. We don’t need more tech in the world.” The empty spaces, he said, should be carved up “and house homeless people in my opinion.”
Maybe Simon was onto something. There’s plenty of space, even without new construction. Right now the Navy Yard is advertising over 700,000 square feet of floor space available for rent, including the entire ninth floor of Building 303. Could those 50,000 square feet of office space be divided into, say, 90 or so 500 square foot units, an average sized studio in the area according to StreetEasy.
And if not for the homeless, then perhaps for affordable housing? What was stopping the Navy Yard from becoming a neighborhood?
Down the rabbithole I fell.
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The Brooklyn Navy Yard is zoned as M3, which according to the Department of Planning website means areas “with heavy industries that generate noise, traffic or pollutants. Typical uses include power plants, solid waste transfer facilities and recycling plants, and fuel supply depots.” This decidedly is a fair description of a place with the words “Navy Yard” in the name.
What bothered me about this designation though is that there’s only three businesses in the Navy Yard that would fit this description – GMD Shipyard, a ConEdison power plant, and the Red Hook Wastewater Treatment Plant. Everything else in the Navy Yard as far as I could tell would be classified as light manufacturing, or even just plain commercial space. If the water treatment and ConEd plants are too dangerous and polluting to have lofts in some of the buildings, why is it okay to have an outpost of Russ & Daughters iconic lox and bagel shop in the Navy Yard’s nearby Building 77? If WeWork can be safe from heavy industry because it's separated from GMD by an old 100-foot-wide dry dock, why not an apartment above Wegmans? And for that matter what’s a grocery store doing in a place where no one lives?
Bradley McCallum, who lives across from the Navy Yard on Washington Avenue, is an artist who has learned a good deal about the city’s so-called Loft Law, the legal process for converting commercial or manufacturing buildings into code-compliant apartments. “If you think about Soho converting from commercial to residential,” he told me, “that was when the loft law was started. Landlords at that time were starting to evict the artists who pioneered those spaces. And it provided rent stabilization.” McCallum had successfully used the Loft Law to convert the work studio he was living in into a condo that he now owns. This was perfect – a law that is purpose-built to make affordable housing out of old warehouses and factories, and keep it affordable for those who want to live there.
Granted, this law is not focused on creating new residencies in old commercial areas, only legalizing existing ones. But that raised a question: could the law be applied to future residential conversions? After all, it had been modified twice to include more recently occupied lofts. In addition, non-residential zones – which would include the Navy Yard – could be eligible for Loft Law protection if they could be made residential, according to the law, “by minor modification or administrative certification of a local planning agency.”
Minor modification. Easy, yes? Not according to §281 subsection 5(i), which states:
“The term ‘interim multiple dwelling’ as used in this subdivision shall not include (i) any building in an industrial business zone established pursuant to chapter six-D of title twenty-two of the administrative code of the city of New York except that a building in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint or North Brooklyn industrial business zones [...]”
The Navy Yard, it stood to reason, was covered by the Loft Law, because it is, in fact, an industrial zone in the Northern part of Brooklyn and is next to Williamsburg. But here things got murky. According to the North Brooklyn Industry and Innovation Plan, “North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone” is the area surrounding Newtown Creek, and only that area.
Industrial and North Brooklyn. But not the Navy Yard.
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Transmitter Brewing sits inside the Navy Yard, 200 yards from the heavy industry that deems the Navy Yard too dangerous for human habitation. There’s also an urban farm on the roof of one of these buildings.
There has never been a building variance submitted for anywhere in the Navy Yard, at least not that I could find through the city’s records. If there were no variances submitted, then does that mean all of those offices and food packers and coffee roasters and the urban farm fall under the same zoning umbrella as welding and wastewater?
Actually, they do. It turns out that each zoning designation has any number of businesses that can be built within it without needing a variance. These businesses are organized into “use groups” which are then assigned to each zone. For an M3 zone like the Navy Yard, those uses can extend well past what most would consider heavy industry – like repairing ships.
This means that Transmitter Brewing is permissible in the Navy Yard. So too, in theory, are:
A motel (ZR§32-15)
A prison (ZR§32-17)
A trade school, college, or business school (ZR§32-18)
A children’s overnight summer camp (ZR§32-22)
A veterinary hospital or animal shelter (ZR§32-25)
A 10,000ft² nightclub (ZR§32-21)
The more I looked the more baffled I was by the logic. These are all things that are functionally residential in nature. Patrons, guests, and students would all likely be at any of these businesses late, adding to the number of people supposedly endangered by the heavy industry of the Navy Yard. A summer camp?
By contrast, this is what is not allowed in the Navy Yard according to these same zoning laws:
An apartment building
A multi-family house
Any of the houses and barracks the Navy built there previously
A homeless shelter
A college dormitory
Enter Irene Janner, a member of Community Board Two’s Land Use Committee. “The last thing we want is to lose any of the Navy Yard to more developer-driven residential,” she said. She compared the Navy Yard to the 2004 redevelopment of downtown Brooklyn which many deem a disaster because of the strain on local services when the residential development far outpaced the commercial
“The original rezoning was the idea to be only to create about 900 to 1000 new residential units and the rest to be back office space,” she said. “.What happened is all the developers ran in to push for variances for residential because they make more money on that. So we never got the commercial. All we got is 5000 residential [units], overcrowding the schools and all the services.”
If downtown Brooklyn was still fresh in Janner’s mind, it stood to reason that the Navy Yard could present the same set of problems: a rush by developers to build housing without the infrastructure to support all those new residents.
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So what would it take? The city’s Housing and Preservation Department gave me a better sense of the hurdles to overcome in order to make the Navy Yard my home address. In short, aside from the obvious changes to physical infrastructure (roads, transit, schools, etc.), there would need to be a significant amount of community support to even begin the process. So much support that it would need elected officials to back the idea. Then begins years worth of meetings and studies to assess how to accomplish such a plan, plus the redrawing of maps and potential rewriting of zoning laws.
Part of this debate will also involve what kind of housing should go there. In a 2014 academic article titled “Urban Land-Use Regulation: Are Homevoters Overtaking the Growth Machine,” Professor Vicki Been explains the difference between urban and suburban development and zoning. According to Professor Been, New York City behaves more like a suburban town when it comes to zoning and redistricting thanks to “ward-based voting,” like a Community Board deciding what gets built in the neighborhood instead of the city. Been’s paper found that if a neighborhood in the city is being rezoned, homeowners will try to protect their property value by limiting commercial buildings and affordable housing.
So even if you make it through the kafkaesque nightmare that is the city’s zoning laws and get the Department of City Planning to sign off on the idea of building an apartment complex in the Navy Yard, you’ll have to go up against every homeowner and landlord from Brooklyn Heights to Clinton Hill in order to build it. Anyone who has ever sat in on a community board or home owners association meeting can tell you just how merciless they can be if their property value is threatened. I’d rather swim with sharks.
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So why doesn’t anyone live in the Navy Yard? It’s not zoned for it. Even if you decided to be a squatter and make a loft in one of the office spaces, the city wouldn’t do anything to help make it a legitimate apartment. Even if it did, you would not have any neighbors or services. If you wanted any, you would have to get a lot of friends and several elected officials to agree with you. Even if you managed that, it would take years of debates and planning just to get the go-ahead. And the Community Board would fight you every step of the way. You’d have better luck finding a two bedroom apartment in Midtown for under $1000 a month.
Brooklyn Navy Yard won’t be a neighborhood, not for the foreseeable future. At least whenever your friends or family from out of town come to the city, look across the East River to the old Navy Yard and ask “Why doesn’t anyone live there,” you’ll be able to give them a simple answer: “It’s complicated.”