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Originally Posted by tackledspoon
Highrises and luxury skyscrapers are very different. You could build a fairly large high rise on this lot without picking away at the fabric of the neighborhood. I'm all for the development of Brooklyn, but I think it should be done with consideration for the traditional neighborhood structure of Brooklyn. I actually did look into the site and see that it was built on a vacant lot, but the fact that it's an improvement over a vacant lot doesn't justify the scaling of the project or the type of development that it's going to encourage in the area.
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How is this picking away at the fabric? If the original fabric included rundown buildings and empty, trash-strewn lots, could that fabric be that good to begin with?
And you need to explain further the differences between a highrise and a luxury skyscraper that you are claiming are so different. I don't see what the difference is.
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Originally Posted by tackledspoon
I'll ask that you not put words in my mouth. I never claimed that the existing building stock in Fort Greene was unique, only that it was beautiful and functional.
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And as I showed you, quite a few of them were NOT beautiful but actually made the neighborhood look cheap and decrepit. Kroy didn't take photos of those places but I know there are plenty of those rundown junks there.
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Originally Posted by tackledspoon
For large-scale projects, I believe that uniqueness is a necessity, but for low and mid-rise developments, functionality is king. These buildings are nothing special in isolation, but working together, they provide an excellent urban fabric.
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This building is unique both in it's shape and it's modernity. There's nothing around there that looks even remotely like it. And even if it wasn't unique, there's no need to make every highrise unique.
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Originally Posted by tackledspoon
Buildings like this one are not designed to lower demand or price. Building a 30-story luxury condominium tower in the middle of a (relatively) reasonably priced neighborhood is more likely to create more demand for similar projects and thus lead to the further degradation of the neighborhood and the pricing-out of people who have lived there for decades. Brooklyn does have to build up, but it doesn't need to build skyscrapers, particularly ones of the luxury variety.
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Ah, so now we come to the real reason behind your disdain for this building. All that "out of scale" or "destroying the fabric of the neighborhood" BS was just that: bull.
You are deadly afraid of gentrification. The problem with that kind of logic is that it is inherently flawed. Let me tell you how.
Let's say, they ban all these new luxury towers here.
Do you think that people with money are all of a sudden going to overlook Fort Greene and go elsewhere? No. They're going to rehab/tear down the charming lowrises and the rent would go up just as, if not faster than before the ban. Read Greenwich Village, SOHO, Tribeca, etc.
People with lots of money are willing and able to move into this city. There are no parts (other than the really bad areas) that are offlimits. The only people losing are the very people you are worrying about. Towers or no towers, this is going to happen but with towers this is at least going to slow it down somewhat.
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Originally Posted by tackledspoon
Again with the putting words in my mouth. I am not anti-development and I don't deny that this is an improvement over an empty lot, but almost anything would have been an improvement.
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Frankly I don't care what you are. You may not be anti-development but you are a classic NIMBY. "Build the towers in Manhattan, I don't care but don't build it here in Brooklyn." If that is not NIMBYism, tell me what is.
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Originally Posted by tackledspoon
Go take a walk through Hell's Kitchen, where projects like this are a dime a dozen. On blocks dominated by these things, even when there's retail in the ground floor, street activity is minimal. Time and again, studies have shown that big, filing cabinet-style residential towers encourage insularity.
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Hell's Kitchen was downzoned and towers like this does not exist in it. The only towers are on the fringes of Times Square on Eighth Ave.
A block on Eighth Ave. has more pedestrian activity than all of Ft. Greene put together.