A few months ago, I wrote about a well-maintained loft building at 70 Wyckoff Avenue whose landlord was trying to rezone the property and the surrounding area to prevent its tenants from being evicted. The building has fifty-one units, many of whose tenants have been living there for several years and working in local schools and the nearby Wyckoff Hospital. This spring, after strong objections from Councilwoman Diana Reyna, that rezoning application was rejected by City Council.

Tenants of the building who spoke at the Council hearing are now wondering what will happen to their building while anxiety is slowly increasing among residents living in similar loft-style buildings that are zoned for manufacturing or commercial on either side of Flushing Avenue.

According to Richard Bass, a planner with Herrick Feinstein LLP who is representing the landlord at 70 Wyckoff Avenue, the Department of Buildings will not evict people from the building unless it is in an unsafe condition — and 70 Wyckoff is up to code. Recent upheaval in the DOB leadership may also prevent other vacate orders from being carried out in Bushwick, Ridgewood, or Williamsburg.

The building is in the crosshairs of a political fight that reaches back not only to the death of a firefighter in Greenpoint following an episode of arson and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront rezoning three years ago but arguably decades earlier when factories throughout North Brooklyn closed down, becoming vacant spaces on the urban landscape.

Councilwoman Diana Reyna argues that illegal occupancies of loft buildings should not be tolerated and landlords should not be rewarded by granting applications for a change of use. Their office believes that a conversion could set a detrimental precedent for commercial buildings, that the landlord knew what he was doing and that tenants knew they were signing commercial leases. Sound familiar?

Except it may not be. Landlord Alan Goldman appeared before Community Board Four earlier this year in his application to rezone several blocks surrounding his building. Goldman is one of the few landlords who have taken the legal steps to convert his building from manufacturing to residential use. It has been a five-year process of clearing hurdles at the Department of City Planning, which advised Goldman and Bass to pursue the larger rezoning, before seeking approval from the Community Board, Borough President Marty Markowitz’s office, and City Council, which rejected the application.

Over the coming weeks, Bass will be preparing a variance, which will only change the use of the specific site. Councilwoman Reyna can weigh in on the matter, but she will not be able to vote on the matter, as the application will instead appear before the Board of Standards and Appeals.

Bass thinks the tenants will be all right in the end, but it may take a while.

“This particular building, this site, is where a change of use is the most appropriate thing,” Bass said. “There are lots of buildings that should not be converted. This one should be converted. It should have been converted twenty years ago.”

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