Affordable housing lottery opens for Gowanus residential high-rise

NEW YORK — The first residential high-rise built after recent rezoning in Gowanus, Brooklyn hits the affordable housing market this week.
Scaffolding, hard hat areas and new foundations stretch on for blocks along the Gowanus waterfront. It’s a neighborhood under construction. The historic 2021 Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning is beginning to leave its mark. 
“I feel like every day, I walk to work and there’s something different and exciting going up,” said Hazel Lopez, leasing manager at 420 Carroll, the first residential high-rise to be completed as part of the rezoning. 
Jason Hill is the marketing director at Domain Companies, the developers behind 420 Carroll.
“Rezoning to residential has now created this opportunity for residents, developers and the community to again utilize that, that land for better use,” he told CBS News New York’s Hannah Kliger, who has been covering the ongoing construction in the neighborhood.
The two towers feature 360 apartments, 90 of which will be affordable. The lottery for the affordable units opened on Tuesday.
The 420 Carroll high-rise features 27,000 square feet of commercial and retail space, a co-working area and affordable studios for artists. The remainder of the apartments will be market rate rentals. 
“We’re offering studio to three-bedroom homes and it ranges between about $3,000 to $10,000,” Lopez said of pricing.
Move-ins are expected to begin in October.
It’s been a long time coming. The rezoning happened in 2021 and has kicked development into high gear across a swath of 82 blocks. Over the next decade, the city estimates about 8,500 new apartments will be built, bringing about 20,000 new residents. 
Proponents of the rezoning have said it’s an opportunity to increase housing stock. But many residents are opposed to the changes, mostly because of the longtime history of pollution by the canal.
The area has also historically been a haven for artists looking for affordable studio space. Many who opposed the rezoning worry about changes coming to the character of the community. 
As it undergoes Superfund cleanup, the highly polluted land around the Gowanus can only be developed through the state’s Brownfield program. As CBS News New York reported, some worry the state supervised cleanup doesn’t go deep enough. Finally, there are questions about how the city’s sewage system would be able to handle tens of thousands of new residents in an area that sees the effects of combined sewage overflows first hand.
“The Gowanus rezoning area is subject to kind of some of the strictest regulatory requirements. And that plan … protects the current and future residents in addition to the environment,” Hill said of developing on the site.
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