City Council Approves Arrow Linen Rezoning

The City Council gave the green light to a controversial project turning a Brooklyn commercial laundry facility into apartments, following a long and heated battle between YIMBYs and NIMBYs.

Lawmakers on Thursday approved a rezoning that is expected to create 250 apartments in the high-income neighborhood of Windsor Terrace. After 18 months of negotiations, Andrew Esposito’s Apex Development and Brooklyn Council member Shahana Hanif reached a deal to make 40 percent of the apartments affordable to households making, on average, 60 percent of the area median income.

At a press conference before the vote, Hanif called the rezoning “one of the highest proportions of affordability in a private rezoning without any public subsidies in New York City history.”

But the project is far from a done deal. The developer must now land a construction loan to build the two 10-story buildings at 441 and 467 Prospect Avenue.

The approved version of the development is shorter and wider than the initial proposal. Besides 100 affordable apartments, it includes a child care center as well as a community space for survivors of domestic violence.

The project is one of the first rezonings to be approved following the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity text amendment, whose tenets allowed more flexibility to make the building bulkier and shorter without reducing the number of units.

Hundreds of residents protested the development as too big, its units too expensive. The project also had a substantial number of supporters who called the opponents perpetual naysayers.

Arrow Linen was founded in Brooklyn in 1947 by Sicilian immigrant Ambroglio Magliocco, whose family still owns the site.

“A few loud folks opposed transforming this space… but we stood firm because we know what’s at stake amidst our city’s housing crisis,” Hanif said. “We cannot pass up opportunities to ease these challenges.”