A lot of the parking lots in Williamsburg have vanished over the last few years, swallowed by the towers and mid-rises that now line the avenues, but you can still stumble onto one if you walk enough blocks. There’s a fenced one on Bedford Avenue, between South 2nd and South 3rd, chain-link and barbed wire, sitting in the middle of one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. If you’re supposing this lot wasn’t always for car storage, of course you’re right.
Previously, 317 Bedford Avenue held a four-story building with sixteen apartments.
Sixteen families, over a store
We know from the building’s 1960 Certificate of Occupancy what stood here: a Class A multiple dwelling (the Multiple Dwelling Law’s term for a building people live in full-time), an Old Law tenement, brick, non-fireproof, four stories, thirty-nine feet tall. Four apartments on each of four floors, sixteen households, over a ground-floor store. It filled the entire lot, no rear yard, walk-up all the way up. This was a Business Use District under the 1916 zoning rules, the city’s original designation for mixed commercial-residential streets, from a time when the code had no floor-area cap, no yard requirement, and no parking minimum.
None of that could be built here today. Under the current zoning (R6 with a C2-3 commercial overlay, on a sixty-foot street the code treats as “narrow”), the most residential floor area you can put on this parcel is about 6,688 square feet. The old building was around 12,000. Zoning often tries to make sure new buildings match the existing character of a block, but it just as often makes it impossible to replicate the very buildings that gave the block its character in the first place. This is one of those blocks.
The rehab deal that fell apart
By the early 1980s the tenement had cycled through a string of distressed owners and defaulted mortgages, and the City of New York ended up owning it outright through tax foreclosure. This was ordinary for the era. The city’s inventory of foreclosed buildings ran into the tens of thousands, and its strategy for getting them back onto the tax rolls was the HPD auction program: sell the building cheap to a private buyer, with a repair covenant attached to force a fix-up.
That’s what happened here, and it fell apart. In December 1982 the city sold 317 Bedford to a private buyer for $3,750 (not a typo, a genuine fire-sale price even then), with a repair agreement attached to the mortgage that required a Certificate of Occupancy within two years. Sixteen months into that window, the Department of Buildings declared the tenement unsafe. Three months later, in May 1985, it was demolished. And three months after the demolition, the buyer signed the empty lot back over to the city, the repair covenant unmet and the city’s own purchase loan still unpaid against the land.
You can’t reconstruct the full story of those eighteen months from the handful of documents preserved in ACRIS, the city’s property-record database, but the shape of it is clear enough: a building that went from occupied to unsafe to rubble on a two-year clock the buyer never came close to beating, and a city left holding a hole in the ground.
Vacant land, no strings
Two and a half years later the city tried again, this time without strings attached.
In November 1988 it sold the empty lot to Hiljo Realty Corp, a company controlled by Joan and Edward Lenoci, for $54,000. The higher price came with a catch for the city: where the 1982 sale had demanded a rehabbed, occupied building within two years, the 1988 sale demanded nothing at all. The deed record flatly classifies the property as vacant land, with no repair agreement, no deadline, and no covenant of any kind. The city sold the asphalt as asphalt.
The Lenocis were fixtures on this block. They had owned 330 Bedford Avenue, a few doors up, since 1969, and had run Hollen Air Conditioning, a family HVAC business incorporated in 1960, out of it. Edward Lenoci still runs the company from that address today. When they bought the empty lot down the street in 1988, it became what it has been ever since: the yard for the business, a place to keep trucks and equipment.
The island that four rezonings skipped
The zoning at 317 Bedford hasn’t changed since 1961, which is strange for this stretch of Williamsburg, because the blocks around it have been rezoned four times in twenty years. Every one of those actions drew a line that stopped just short of this lot.
The big one was the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, which remapped 183 blocks, opened the waterfront to residential towers, and created the Waterfront Access Plan and an inclusionary housing bonus. Nobody deliberately carved this lot out. The 2005 action was about converting land that couldn’t yet hold housing, mostly old manufacturing and industrial zoning along the water, and 317 Bedford was already zoned for residential use, so it wasn’t what that rezoning was for.
The 2008 Grand Street rezoning mapped contextual, height-limited districts across thirteen blocks to protect the low-rise character of the area, with its southern boundary running along a line between Grand Street and South 1st Street, a couple of blocks north of our lot. As part of that rezoning, the city swapped the old C2-3 commercial overlays for C2-4 overlays specifically because the C2-3 rules required more parking, which the Planning Department’s report called inappropriate for “transit-accessible locations with small lots.” So the city cut the parking requirement for that kind of parcel, everywhere north of a line a few blocks up. But 317 Bedford sits near the L at Bedford Avenue and the J, M, and Z at Marcy, which makes it a transit-accessible location with a small lot too, and it kept the old, heavier C2-3 rules anyway.
Then the 2009 contextual rezoning swept in 175 more blocks, explicitly excluding everything already handled in 2005 and 2008. Afterward, the Borough President’s office noted that “non-contextual R6 zoning still remains in the southern section of CD 1” and asked the city to study those leftover R6 areas. Nothing came of it. Later rezonings further south, including the 2017 Pfizer sites action, passed this stretch of Bedford by too. When the city extended a Bedford Avenue commercial overlay in 2020, its report described the surrounding zoning and mentioned, almost in passing, the C2-3 strip “along Bedford Avenue between South First to South Fourth streets.” That strip is our lot. The city’s own planners note it exists without ever proposing to touch it.
An illegal parking lot, hiding in plain sight
For most of the time Hiljo has owned it, the lot has operated as a parking and storage yard without any legal authorization, and for a long while nobody with enforcement power seems to have cared. A parking lot in a residential zone requires a permit and a Certificate of Occupancy for that use, and this one had neither. It sat behind a chain-link fence on a busy avenue, in plain view, for roughly a quarter century before the city first wrote it up.
When enforcement finally came, it barely registered. In 2012 the Department of Buildings cited Hiljo for running an unpermitted parking lot on the vacant lot. The violation came with an $800 fine, which Hiljo paid. Six weeks later Hiljo filed an application to legalize the lot as six spaces with a curb cut, and that application was disapproved the following spring. The disapproval didn’t matter, because Hiljo apparently kept parking cars there exactly as before. The dead application sat on the books for another decade before Hiljo formally withdrew it, and across those eleven years the lot kept operating. In 2020 came a second citation, for keeping dead vehicles and shipping containers on the site “contrary to city records,” with a $500 fine, also paid. A couple hundred dollars a decade is not a deterrent. It’s a rounding error against the value of a free yard in the middle of Williamsburg.
But what could go here instead?
Quite a lot, actually. The lot runs about 3,040 square feet, and under R6 Quality Housing rules on a narrow street that’s a base of 2.2 FAR, or roughly 6,688 buildable square feet, rising to about 2.64 FAR with the density bonus the city added in City of Yes. That translates to a building with a street wall of about four stories that then steps back for a partial fifth floor: the code lets you go to a 45-foot base height, then requires a setback before you continue up to the 55-foot maximum. Figure six to ten apartments over a small ground-floor retail space.
That’s a real building, and it’s the kind of small building that the New York code uniquely makes workable. Five stories or more triggers an elevator requirement, which eats into a small floor plate, but New York has long been more permissive than most of the country about letting buildings this size get by with a single staircase instead of two. That single-stair provision claws back much of the floor area an elevator consumes, making infill on a 38-foot lot far more viable here than in cities that mandate dual stairwells.
A new building here would also have the advantage of not paying full property taxes, at least not at first. Under the state’s current 485-x program, a small rental building like this (6 to 10 units, outside Manhattan) gets a full exemption on the value of the new construction for its first decade-plus, in exchange for keeping at least half the units rent-stabilized. But that’s nothing new. Some version of this deal has existed since 1971. Before 485-x there was 421-a, and before that its earlier iterations, and a small building would have gotten essentially the same treatment: pay tax on the land, pay little or nothing on the structure, keep the units stabilized while the benefit runs. The mechanics differ at the margins, but for a building this size the two programs land in about the same place. The tax break on new housing isn’t the new part of this story, and it isn’t the problem.
Is the demand there? Consider the lot directly across the avenue, on the same block. Hiljo owned 334 Bedford too, holding it from 1981 until December 2022, when they sold it for $3.05 million. The buyer cleared the rough three-story building that stood there and put up five stories of apartments over a ground-floor shop, the exact building this piece keeps describing. So the owner of our parking lot knows precisely what a Bedford Avenue lot is worth to a developer, and precisely what gets built when one changes hands. They watched it happen across the street.
What actually happened here instead
You might figure it was only a matter of time before the owner built something, or at least flipped the lot to a developer for a large profit like they did across the street. That doesn’t appear to be the plan, at least not yet. Because what Hiljo actually did, starting in early 2025, was file to legalize the parking lot.
Over the following year Hiljo pulled a permit for a new curb cut, put in a storm-drainage system, and worked an alteration application through the Department of Buildings, all toward a single goal spelled out in the filing: a Certificate of Occupancy for a “parking lot for 7 vehicles.” In January 2026 the city issued it. One story, zero dwelling units, seven spaces, use group “Business and Service.” Two months later Hiljo cleared both old violations off the books by filing the certificates of correction it had skipped for years, which the city accepted the day they came in.
I’m glad the lot finally has a Certificate of Occupancy. I just wish it had come after someone built a building. Instead, within a couple of months of the city passing City of Yes, the most significant pro-housing zoning reform in a generation, the owner’s move was to hire an engineer and spend a year making a parking lot permanent. And sometime this summer a broker’s sign went up on the fence, “Parking Available,” which wasn’t there the first time I walked past. The spaces are for rent now.
The tax code quietly picks a side
To understand any of this, you have to understand that the Department of Finance means something particular by “market value,” something most people would not expect. For a commercial parcel like this one, the city doesn’t estimate what the lot would sell for. It estimates value from the income the current use throws off, and the current use is a parking lot. So the city looks at seven parking spaces, capitalizes the rent they’d bring in, and calls that the property’s market value. It isn’t, in any normal sense, what the land is worth. It’s what the asphalt earns.
You can ballpark that income yourself. There’s no public listing for the asking rent, but comparable open lots in Williamsburg run somewhere around $300 to $500 a month per space, so seven spaces might gross a few tens of thousands of dollars a year. Run that through the assessment machinery and you get a “market value” in the low seven figures. For 2027 the city puts it at $967,000, and the resulting property tax bill is about $37,000 a year.
Set that against the $3 million a lot across the street just fetched for its development potential. The land at 317 Bedford is plainly worth some large multiple of what the city taxes it on, because the city is taxing a parking lot, not a Williamsburg development site. Part of what keeps the number down is the tax class: as a parking lot, 317 Bedford is assessed as Class 4 commercial property, valued off its current-use income. Put a six-to-ten-unit apartment building on it and it becomes Class 2 residential, valued a different way. The city has built a system where the unbuilt version of this parcel is worth less, on paper, than the built one, and taxes it accordingly.
This is not a loophole. It’s the design. Commercial assessments are phased in over five years, so a lot whose land value is climbing fast gets a tax bill that permanently lags behind. The system effectively hands a tax break to whoever owns the most rapidly appreciating land, which, by definition, is a group already doing quite well. And it means the same code that would forgive the property tax on a new building’s structure for a decade is already forgiving most of the tax on the land underneath it, whether or not anyone ever builds. New York is, in a real and measurable sense, subsidizing this business to keep housing off a parcel in a neighborhood and a city that badly need more of it.
The zoning finally allows it. The tax code still won’t.
None of this required anyone to break a rule. This is not a story about anyone cheating. Every tax bill got paid, both fines got paid, the city’s own purchase loan got paid off early. And the same owner who sits on this parking lot sold the lot across the street to a developer three years ago and let five stories of housing go up on it. Hiljo will build a Bedford Avenue lot out, or let someone else, when the incentives line up. On this parcel they don’t, and the property tax system is a large part of why. It never gave the Lenocis any reason to do anything but keep the lot exactly as convenient as it is.
The reforms that finally make housing feasible here (the parking mandate lifted by City of Yes, the density bonus) are genuinely new, most of them a year or two old. It would be unfair to expect a building to have sprouted already, and I don’t. These things take time, and the development pipeline is slow.
But it would help if the rest of the city’s policy weren’t quietly working against those reforms. We spent twenty years drawing careful zoning lines around this block, lifting parking mandates one parcel at a time, and building a whole new apparatus to encourage small housing. And underneath all of it, the property tax system keeps sending the same message it sent in 1988: there’s no cost to leaving good land idle, so you might as well park a few cars on it. Sixteen families used to live here. Whether anything ever replaces them depends less on the zoning now than on whether the city ever decides that holding this lot empty should cost its owner something.
Imagine being this angry about a single parking lot and thinking it matters at all on the scale of all new housing in the city. You should mind your own fucking business if you’re going to live in New York. This is not doing that.