"Triangle" Rezoned for Housing

The "Broadway Triangle" is a 31-acre vacant lot in Brooklyn on Wallabout Street, bordered by Flushing Avenue, Broadway and Union Avenue. Details of the plan, surprise, are a bone of contention.

The city has already granted development rights (without competitive bids, it is reported) for the city-owned sites in the Triangle to the nonprofit United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg (UJO) and the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council. The UJO helps families in need living in the predominantly Chassidic (Hasidic) community of South Williamsburg and the Jewish communities in Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. UJO says it represents more than 50,000 community residents and 148 not-for-profit religious, educational, charitable organizations and civic associations.

A lawsuit was filed in September 2009 charging the city’s plan discriminates in favor of Hasidic Jews by including too many three and four-bedroom apartments in the plan. Hasidic families, the lawsuit contends, tend to have large families.

The suit is also at odds with the plan to keep the building heights at eight stories, which opponents charge is a concession to Orthodox Jews who cannot take an elevator on the Sabbath. The suit also contends that eight-story buildings translate into fewer housing options for the Latin and Afro-American communities in the area.