There are signs that the housing market in Brooklyn, New York, may be inching toward recovery, according to recent analyst reports. And even though the borough is not a major source of real estate bargains, it is home to some interesting urban-green projects with residential components.

One of them, a home with a ground-floor retail store in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, is being built to Passive House standards by locally based Loadingdock5 Architecture. And if it performs as expected, it will be the first such building in New York City to earn Passive House certification.

In fact, the project, which includes 1,290 sq. ft. of store area and mechanical rooms, and 2,125 sq. ft. of residential space, is nearing completion. The exterior of the 8-in. concrete masonry walls has been clad in 7 in. of expanded polystyrene insulation and an exterior insulating finish system. The windows have been installed and, according to Loadingdock5 principal Sam Bargetz, a blower-door test will be scheduled shortly after a modified Bilco roof hatch is installed and sealing has been completed on the still-exposed interior of the concrete masonry and the steel deck that extends off the rear of the second floor.

“We are quite confident that we will get to the 0.6 air-changes/hour” performance standard that is among the requirements for certification, Bargetz told GBA. (Loadingdock5 performed a blower-door test a couple weeks ago as a demonstration for students at Parsons The New School for Design.)

The interior sealing should be completed next month, added Bargetz, who trained as an architect in Austria, came to New York in 1997, and is a certified Passive House consultant. He runs Loadingdock5 with Werner Morath, who also studied architecture in Austria and came to New York in 1997.

An ungreen zoning snafu

But while the Loadingdock5 Passive House is progressing as planned, a 4,000-sq.-ft. live-work structure we mentioned back in May, planned for Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood and net-zero-energy performance, was derailed last week when the city’s Department of Buildings denied the project a building permit because its planned residential component is at odds with the zoning for the lot, which is designated for manufacturing.

The project’s developer, technology and media entrepreneur Jay Amato, notes in a recent blog post that he chose the site, a corner lot, because it afforded the best sun exposure in the area for the solar power system he planned to install on the building. Amato said he received unofficial assurances that his permit request would likely sail through to approval, in part because the “caretaker’s apartment” portion of the project would be incidental to its primary use. He is now trying to figure out where to go from here.