🏛️ How Historical Landmarks Show Up in Bed Stuy

🌟 Author’s Note

Happy Sunday to the 126 members of the Better Block Project 🚀 As a quick update, I will be shifting the Better Block Project updates to monthly instead of weekly. While I love writing every week, balancing my day job and two energetic young children has made it too much for me. Moving forward, you'll hear from me on the first Sunday every month, so the next update will be May 3rd. With that, here is the TLDR for this week’s update:

• Building Permit and Historical Landmark data is now available in BetterBlockGPT. If you ask a question about a block or address, this data will show up as well

• While neighborhoods like the West Village and Park Slope are heavily landmarked, Bed Stuy still has limited historical landmarking

• The lack of historical landmarking is correlated with lower rents and lower rent growth, but my 🌶️ take is it is still worth it

• We improved a bunch of other stuff in BetterBlockGPT: better results when you ask about a specific address, 24 months worth of data and better answer behavior

🏛️ How Historical Landmarks Show Up in Bed Stuy

This week, I added two new data sources into BetterBlockGPT. Now, data about active building permits on your block and historical landmarked buildings will show up when you query about a block or a specific address. There is so much construction happening on almost every block in Bed Stuy right now, so now you can easily understand what’s happening on your block and what stage it is in. Historical landmark data also shows you what buildings are protected from future development, given they contribute to the historical character of the neighborhood:

Landmarking buildings is somewhat controversial. Many who want to build more housing across New York cite landmarking as a barrier to new development, given the restrictions. On the other side, landmarking protects historical architecture that so many of us deeply value. NYC Open Data provides a transparent map of landmarking across New York City, and the difference by neighborhood is stark. If you take a look at the West Village, almost 100% of it is landmarked:

If you review Park Slope and Prospect Heights, two of the most desirable neighborhoods for young families in Brooklyn, they are also both heavily landmarked:

However, if I compare that to Bed Stuy, you can see that only the southern part of the neighborhood has been landmarked, while much of the northern part of the neighborhood (where I happen to live), has not.

The result of the lack of landmarking is those of us living in Bed Stuy see a lot of construction. But is it impacting our rent? StreetEasy has a incredible data dashboard that summarizes this by neighborhood. The theory is that more landmarking makes it more expensive, which in aggregate is roughly true. As an example, the median rent in Park Slope is $4,226 while the median rent in Bed Stuy is $3,400.

In addition to that, the construction is actually causing the price of rent to grow more slowly in Bed Stuy compared to Park Slope. In Park Slope, median rent grew 8% YoY in February 2026. In Bed Stuy, median rent grew only by 6% in February 2026.

🧑‍⚖️ So, should we landmark more in Bed Stuy?

My take: Yes. While I know landmarking makes it harder to the build, many of the neighborhoods that we all love and cherish are the way they are because we decided we wanted to maintain the architecture. For what it’s worth, I also think we should upzone a lot in Bed Stuy and allow people to build taller buildings, particularly on large corridors like Atlantic, Fulton, and Broadway. Many conversations about housing will often force you into one of two extremes: either you believe in preserving the neighborhood or you believe in building more housing, but you can’t support both. Personally, this doesn’t make any sense to me.

If you ask people which are some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in New York, Brooklyn Heights or Soho or the West Village or more, there is almost certainly a lot of landmarking that has happened. So the counter argument that “landmarking = bad” doesn’t really hold much water to me. At the same time, I do believe we have to be excited about building the future (and not just preserving the past), and willing to build much taller buildings in the same neighborhoods to maintain affordability. We can have our cake 🍰 and eat it, too.

✨ New features for BetterBlockGPT

In addition to adding in building permit and landmarking data to BetterBlockGPT, I also spent last week tuning BetterBlockGPT to give better answers based on questions people were asking. Some updates we made include:

• When you ask about an address, you will have the option to only return information about that specific address, or the nearby block

• Extended data available to 24 months in the past, from 12 months. Note, this is dependent on the data set (e.g., NYPD data is not available yet for 2026)

• Improved filtering to ensure the results return match that block or address exactly (it still isn’t perfect, so let me know if you get something wrong here)

• Fixed the way the answer response shows up, so you don’t have to scroll up to see your summary

That’s all for this week’s update! As usual, if you like what we’re doing at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone you know that is looking to get more engaged in the neighborhood.

See you next month,

David