Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

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

Stranger Than Fiction Having People Live on Top of Branch Libraries - New YorkJeremy 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.
Book seller by the library, H Street FestivalIn DC, certain groups in the neighborhood would rather keep this library, the metal portable R.L. Christian branch "building," as is...

A Living Library  Metropolis Magazine  October 2002.jpgrather than create a community-augmenting space such as the Hollywood branch library in Portland Oregon. (Photo from Metropolis Magazine. See "A Living Library."

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