Stranger Than Fiction? Having People Live on Top of Branch Libraries

Jeremy Lange for The New York Times. A group proposes replacing the Brower Park library branch on St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with a bigger library and housing.

Those pesky New Yorkers are again ahead of the curve when compared to DC. I have written about this issue quite a bit in the past few weeks. From the article:

In Brooklyn, a community development group has proposed tearing down four deteriorating branch libraries and redeveloping each site — an undertaking that the group says could produce more than 30,000 square feet of new library space and as many as 200 apartments for low- and moderate-income tenants.

Meanwhile, Enterprise Community Investment, a national company that finances low- and moderate-income housing, recently completed an inventory of nearly every branch library in New York City, to identify those whose age, condition and neighborhood zoning might make them candidates for redevelopment to create housing.

“City-owned land is becoming more and more scarce,” said Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, the group that has been working to redevelop the four branch libraries in Brooklyn. “We have to look at every possible option for redevelopment — specifically, the things the city has control of. And it’s a win-win situation.”

Library redevelopment is one of several unorthodox approaches to producing low-priced housing that are cropping up in places where population growth and land costs have driven housing prices up. In New York and other cities, developers are collaborating with churches to redevelop church-owned properties, and with government agencies to turn parking lots into parking structures with housing on top.

This makes sense to me. Of course, in DC, we can't trust the government to actually build a project of quality.
In DC, certain groups in the neighborhood would rather keep this library, the metal portable R.L. Christian branch "building," as is...

rather than create a community-augmenting space such as the Hollywood branch library in Portland Oregon. (Photo from Metropolis Magazine. See "A Living Library."

Index Keywords: libraries; mixed-use; housing