Fund Raising

A positive step for rezoning Prospect Lefferts Gardens

Dear Neighbors,

Broad support prevails throughout our neighborhood for a contextual rezoning by City Planning to prevent out-of-scale buildings like the 23-story luxury building at 626 Flatbush Avenue. Lack of appropriate zoning in Prospect Lefferts Gardens has lured developers seeking big profits threatening our community, stressing our infrastructure, while failing to preserve affordable rent.  Only community-defined contextual zoning can protect the neighborhood from changing overnight into a place we won’t recognize.

Unfortunately, however, controversies and delays surrounding recent efforts by our Community Board (CB9) to request a zoning study from City Planning have left many of us in PLG without confidence that CB9’s process will result in benefits for our neighborhood. Because the current agenda of City Planning seems to rely more on removing than imposing limits on developers, we feel we would be foolish to deal with the City unprotected by professional expertise.

We therefore propose to take a positive step as a community. And we’re asking for your moral and financial support. 

We feel strongly we must retain a professional planner to develop a zoning plan tailored to our specific needs. Such a plan would serve as a basis for negotiation with City Planning. Given the lethal combination of developers’ aggression and our unique vulnerability, there is no time to lose.

Paul Graziano is a deeply experienced planner with many successes in helping neighborhoods preserve character. (Explore Paul’s background http://www.paulgraziano.com/biography.html.) We want to retain Paul to develop a comprehensive, defensible zoning plan for PLG, taking into account both our desire for preservation of neighborhood character and diversity and the City’s agendas regarding housing and development. We think hiring Paul will not only help us arrive at a clear basis for negotiating with the City but also serve as a means for focusing community discussion on the rezoning issue.

Our immediate goal, therefore, is to raise $6000 to enable Paul Graziano to begin the first of four phases of work on the rezoning study. Concerned Citizens for Community-Based Planning have already raised $3000, and we’re in the process of forming a non-profit organization and establishing a dedicated bank account for the project. We have high hopes that raising many modest contributions toward the goal will empower community action, and we’ll be scheduling an event to further discuss the effort and report progress. In the meantime, no contribution is too small (or too large!).

There are two ways to donate:
(1) Credit or Debit Card - choose an amount and click the donation button on the right
(2) Checks should be made out to Concerned Citizens for Community-Based Planning and mailed to 190 Lincoln Road, Brooklyn, NY 11225.

To learn more about how zoning and other planning issues affect PLG, see the following website:

Concerned Citizens website www.CB9rezoning.org

Thanks for any support that you can give this effort to develop a plan to protect our neighborhood.

Signed,

Bill Hogeland and Gail Brousal, 87 Fenimore Street             
Alan P. Berger, 190 Lincoln Road
Suwen Cheong & Barnabas Wolf, 79 Fenimore Street                    
Sarah and Alex Prud'homme, 219 Lincoln Road
James Betts & Grace Kessler Betts, 227 Lincoln Road                    
Rebecca Burrows & Erik Addington, 246 Midwood
Grahame Conibear & Sandra Skoblar, 47 Sterling Street
J. Milton, Fenimore Street
Denise Dostaly, 55 Sterling Street
Susan Kuralt Smith & Nat Smith, 99 Hawthorne Street

Building Heights

Buildings under 50ft: (8253 buildings, 96% of CD9)
Buildings 50ft-70ft:  (278 buildings, 3% of CD9)	Buildings 70ft-80ft:  (52 buildings, <1% of CD9)
Buildings 80ft-100ft: (15 buildings, <1% of CD9)	Buildings over 100ft (25 buildings, <1% of CD9)

Data Source: NYC City Planning (Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, or PLUTO)
Map: OpenStreetMap, PLUTO, NYC Building Footprints