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October 16, 2007
Real Estate Round-Up, October 15, 2007
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
By Sarah Ryley
The Eagle doesn't outright say it, but notes that some community activists are never happy:
Steps away from the proposed Atlantic Yards arena and high-rise project, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is unloading a three-story brick building at 572 Pacific St. along with a few ghosts, according to The Brooklyn Paper. The former single-room occupancy hotel was the site of three murders, said James Vogel, secretary of the Pacific Street Block Association and an Atlantic Yards opponent.
Apparently, that block association shot down a proposal to turn the home into a halfway house, winning a promise by the city to sell it to a developer so it could be converted into three condos. Which is strange, because the group’s “concern” that Atlantic Yards would not provide enough affordable housing or promised services for the less fortunate who live in the area would seem to indicate that they would also support such a reuse for 572 Pacific St.
(Another group, the Prospect Heights Action Coalition, formed in 2002 to oppose the conversion of two buildings into a homeless shelter. But several years later, the group attempted to vilify Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner for evicting these people to build his project, then later forcing their evacuation when a portion of his Ward Bakery collapsed.)
Duffield Street homeowners, fighting the City's use of eminent domain to take their homes, seem to be getting some traction:
In an article about abolitionist activity in Brooklyn, The New York Times seems to lend sympathy to the plight of two Duffield Street property owners who claim their homes were once stops for fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad. Noting that Weeksville, an African-American community in Crown Heights that thrived from the 1840s until the 1930s, was nearly completely demolished until preservationists managed to save a handful of houses, one Duffield Street homeowner said, “There’s no black museum in Brooklyn to celebrate the Underground Railroad … This is the house to do it in. It’s important that the children and all of the people can see what people had to go through to be free.”
Posted by lumi at October 16, 2007 8:28 AM