The city’s pitch for the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan is a clean one: a community-led rezoning that delivers 4,600 homes, more affordable housing than the area built in the previous decade, and over $235 million in neighborhood investment. The City Council adopted it in May 2025. Sixteen Bed-Stuy residents now say one piece of that “community-led” plan never got the community part.
The piece is the parking lot behind Girls’ High School at 457 Nostrand Avenue, a city-owned lot tucked behind a landmarked 1886 building. The neighbors, representing themselves with resident Ramón Chicón arguing the case, are asking Kings County Supreme Court to reverse the 2025 rezoning of that site and restart the public review. Their claim, per Brownstoner’s reporting, is specific and procedural: the city added the lot to the plan after the environmental scoping window had already closed, which they say meant “Community Board 3 residents were effectively excluded” from the review the city’s own land-use rules require.
This is the part that complicates the easy read. They are not trying to stop affordable housing. The rezoning clears the way for a building of up to 15 or 16 stories and 240 apartments that, by the plan’s terms, must be 100 percent affordable, with at least half the units set aside for households earning between zero and 50 percent of area median income. The neighbors are asking the city to redo the process it skipped, not to kill the housing that process would produce.
The collision underneath is over what the lot already does. The Brooklyn Adult Learning Center, which uses the lot, says the program is already at capacity, has been denied its own requests to expand, and holds resource and health fairs for students on the same pavement the city wants to hand a developer. So the public land in question is contested twice over, by the residents who say the review was rigged and the adult-education program standing on it.
The case is live. At a March hearing the judge rejected the residents’ request for a temporary restraining order after the city said no construction is expected before 2029, and ordered both sides to file the rezoning timeline for a hearing set for June 3. Council Member Chi Ossé has pushed back on the exclusion claim and pointed to the project’s deeply affordable rents, per Brownstoner, so the affordability the city is selling and the process the neighbors are challenging are now both in front of a judge.
The full rezoning, the seven public sites and the affordability terms are laid out on the Department of City Planning’s Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan page, and the case itself is in Kings County Supreme Court, where the June 3 timeline filings are the thing to watch for whether the court makes the city run the review again.
Featured image: Jim.henderson / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
