2026 Theses Master's

Where the Zone Ends: An Early Warning Framework for Industrial Displacement in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg IBZ

Chen, Wayne

The Greenpoint-Williamsburg Industrial Business Zone (GW IBZ) in northern Brooklyn was designated in 2006 to protect the remaining manufacturing base from displacement pressures generated by the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning. Twenty years later, no systematic tool exists for identifying where within the IBZ active production uses are currently at risk.

This capstone builds that tool for Evergreen Exchange, the IBZ’s managing organization. The study develops an Early Warning and Operating Conditions Framework using 16 binary indicators across four categories (Value Pressure, Use Reconfiguration, Curb Stress, and Adjacency Pressure), assigned to 445 industrial lots using six public datasets and tested for spatial clustering with a Getis-Ord Gi* hotspot analysis. The analysis identifies 33 statistically significant hot spot blocks in three corridors: Berry-Kent-Wythe along the waterfront edge, Banker-Dobbin-Norman in the IBZ core, and Franklin-Greenpoint Avenue along the northern edge. Qualitative evidence from business surveys, a focus group with nine operators, and a key informant property tour corroborates the quantitative findings. The rent gap between industrial and non-industrial uses on hot spot blocks runs 5:1 to 12:1, and the Industrial Business Incentive Area co-location model has produced buildings whose financing structures exclude industrial tenants.

Recommendations are organized into three lanes: annually refreshable monitoring indicators that Evergreen can maintain using the same publicly available datasets, corridor-specific agency actions directed at named blocks and named agencies, and a reformed co-location financing model based on the GMDC Brownsville Industrial Center at 805 Rockaway Avenue. The framework and data are designed to be reproduced by Evergreen annually.