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When city planners rezoned much of downtown Brooklyn 17 months ago, it was meant to make the city's third-largest business district even larger. Now it is looking more and more like a bedroom community.
It is not just the half-dozen condo projects sprouting up around the edge of downtown, transforming weed-strewn parking lots into glassy towers.
Even the 10-block area envisioned as the "commercial core" of the new downtown is leaning residential. The developers of the two sites furthest along in the planning process are suggesting that as few as 200,000 square feet of office space might go up where two million square feet were once envisioned, with the balance going for hotel rooms and apartments. A third property owner wants to erect a hotel right in the middle of a site where a 20-story office tower was supposed to be built. An existing office tower in that central core- -7 MetroTech Center, the 1930 Verizon building--was purchased last April to be converted into condos.
In other words, Brooklyn's booming residential market has overtaken the supply of office space--making it harder for roughly 19,000 jobs that were originally seen as the fruit of the rezoning to find their way into the new downtown.
Brooklyn's boosters say they are not worried about the awkward start of what Mayor Bloomberg once called "a key part of our strategy to preserve and grow jobs." After all, people used to complain that downtown Brooklyn, and especially MetroTech Center, Forest City Ratner's 15-block office complex at the north end of the rezoned area, shut down at 5 p.m. Now it looks like downtown Brooklyn is just going to be waking up then.
Party on!
"We believe residential is still important," said Lee Silberstein, a public-relations consultant representing the Downtown Brooklyn Council, a division of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce that conceived of the rezoning and convinced Mayor Bloomberg to adopt it as his own. "The more people living there, the more it becomes an around-the-clock community, and that will make it more attractive to businesses in the long run."
Mr. Silberstein is also a spokesman for Thor Equities, a shopping- mall developer that controls arguably the most important site downtown, which is zoned for a 1.2 million-square-foot office building....