The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has thousands of plants, like this bonsai tree, which draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

Push for High-Rise Next to Brooklyn Botanic Garden Becomes Battle Over Shadows

by · NY Times

Most people agree that New York City needs more housing. But in the heart of Brooklyn, a proposal for a high-rise with hundreds of new apartments has hit an unlikely sticking point: orchids.

As envisioned by its developers, the building would be 14 stories with a mix of affordable and market-rate apartments in the high-demand neighborhood of Crown Heights, just north of its border with Prospect Lefferts Gardens.

But the building would cast shadows over a celebrated botanic garden’s collection of rare and exotic plants. Orchids might stop flowering, ficus trees could shrink and dozens or even hundreds of species would have to be sent to other gardens in sunnier parts of the country, according to garden officials.

On one level, the fight is another example of the city’s fraught debates about the housing crisis. It underscores the tension between accommodating all of the people who want to live in New York and safeguarding the kinds of things that make the city appealing in the first place.

But the back-and-forth also highlights the strange cross-pressures that city planners must sometimes face in New York, such as weighing the need for new housing against the preservation of the beloved home of many unusual plant species.

“We are confident there is a solution that will protect the garden from severe shadows while allowing for much-needed affordable housing,” said Adrian Benepe, the president and chief executive of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, home to the plants at the center of the dispute.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden officials said that some plants would have to be moved to sunnier parts of the country if the garden was overshadowed by the proposed high-rise apartment building.
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

A tug of war has played out over several years, leading to a hearing before a City Council subcommittee on Wednesday and an expected vote on the proposal next month. If the Council votes to change the zoning rules, the high-rise project — with its shadows — can move forward. If not, the developer, Continuum Company, can go ahead with a smaller building of luxury condominiums that is allowed under current rules.

And yet, the plan has appeared to reveal where even the most fervent cheerleaders of development may draw a line. Affordable housing advocates who have championed other developments in Brooklyn — and who ordinarily argue that all new housing, even if it is not uniformly affordable, is worth building to help ease the crisis — have not openly lent their support to the project near the garden.

The City Planning Commission has already tried to strike a compromise with a different design: a building with a roof sloping at a 15-degree angle, which would reduce the shadows but also cut the number of units in the building to 355 from about 475, with roughly a quarter considered affordable. The garden wants the building shrunk further.

“Any reduction makes the project financially untenable,” said William Wallace IV, senior acquisitions officer with Continuum, at the hearing on Wednesday. “There is an extremely tight profit margin.”

Under the 475-unit proposal, 119 apartments would be made affordable for low- and middle-income families. The 355-unit compromise would work financially only if its affordable units were geared toward middle-income rather than low-income households, Continuum has said. The additional housing could be helpful at a time when New York’s rental vacancy rate is at a 50-year low, according to recent city figures.

Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, who has been one of the most vocally pro-development city officials, said this project goes too far. But he also said the situation was unusual and that “the approach here should not set the precedent for additional widespread reductions in development capacity citywide.”

When the Brooklyn Botanic Garden first opened 113 years ago, it was surrounded by fields, said Mr. Benepe, its president. After the city grew, planners in the 1990s established building size restrictions around it to make sure the plants would not be affected by shadows. The garden is 52 acres and has housed tens of thousands of plant varieties, including bonsai trees from Asia that are hundreds of years old and giant “corpse” flowers that release a pungent stench when they bloom once every few years. The garden promotes its annual display of cherry blossoms and hosts school field trips.

Since the building size restrictions were put in place, housing around the garden has become even more sought-after, partly because of green spaces like the garden and nearby Prospect Park.

Since 2010, the median rent in Brooklyn’s Community District 9, which covers the area where the development would be built, has increased more than 50 percent to about $1,400, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The city estimates that the district has added more than 3,600 housing units during that period.

Continuum bought lots to develop the site near the garden in 2017. First, the company tried to get approval for a 39-story, five-tower development there, which the community board and city officials soundly rejected.

The current proposal for 475 units, on a smaller slice of land, arrived in 2022. It would be financed by a union-run housing investment fund and built with union labor, the development team said, in an attempt to woo the community.

But garden officials and other local activists again balked. In a June resolution, the community board said the development was “grossly inconsistent with the character of the neighborhood” and that the “adverse impacts outweigh the nominal increase of affordable housing stock proposed in the project.” Opponents also said that most of the apartments would not be affordable to people living in the neighborhood.

Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, whose district includes the development site, will have the greatest say in the garden’s fate, because the City Council traditionally defers to the local council member on land use decisions.

At the hearing on Wednesday, Ms. Hudson said she was still worried about the effect of the shadows, even with the Planning Commission’s suggested compromise. She also expressed concerns about the affordability of the apartments and community spaces included in the development.

Mr. Benepe and other garden officials know that any development will most likely mean dealing with some new shadows. City planners have been trying to figure out how much each new minute of shadow could affect thousands of plants from around the world that grow in the garden.

Rowan Blaik, the garden’s vice president of horticulture, said the part of the garden where the shadows would fall is the part that now gets the most light, which in turn supports the most sensitive plants. It is also where the city, which has helped build the garden, has subsidized conservatories and nurseries.

The developers had agreed to give the garden $500,000, under the 475-unit proposal, to install lights and other equipment to help plants grow.

But amid the continuing opposition from the garden and its supporters, the developers have said that they would abandon both of the proposals with affordable units and instead build the entirely market-rate condos. Ian Bruce Eichner, the chief executive of Continuum, said it would not seem to be “in the public interest” for the project to end up that way, considering the “supposed rhetoric” of people who have been pushing for more affordable housing.

But the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is a nonprofit, is focused on protecting its plants, not on easing the city’s housing crisis. Ultimately, Mr. Benepe said, the garden would accept the condos instead of a larger rental building.

“We have no grounds to fight it,” he said, adding, “We live with what we live with.”

Around the New York Region

A look at life, culture, politics and more in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.