In the Village Voice, a story about developers pushing the envelope:

On a Saturday morning in April, neighbors on a quiet Brooklyn block on
the southern edge of Park Slope looked into their backyards to see
workmen erecting a construction fence on their properties. In
brownstone Brooklyn this is the face of war: sneak attack by
developers. One irate woman called her lawyer, who told her to call the
cops, who promptly tossed the workers off the site. But it was a brief
retreat. The developer quickly arrived, offering $3,000 in cash for the
right to work on their properties. His goal, he said, was to start
digging a big hole where a new building would rise on what had been a
100-by-100-foot parking lot on 15th Street between Seventh and Eighth
avenues near Prospect Park.

Instead of taking the money, neighbors got busy. Arthur Strimling,
a theater producer whose rear yard faces the site, consulted with
others to find out what was up. What they found amazed them. For
reasons officials are still at a loss to explain, the city’s Department
of Buildings had wrongly issued a construction permit for a nine-story
structure. The permit, which had been evaluated several times before
being approved by agency plan examiners, called for a new apartment
house dwarfing its low-rise neighbors. The 57,000-square-foot building
was to include three below-grade floors for parking and a medical
facility, its air vents pointed at backyards on 16th Street.

Even odder, the 47 apartments were designated for use as
"faculty housing" for staff of an Orthodox yeshiva located some four
miles away in Brooklyn’s Midwood section. This claim was immediately
suspect since the permit listed the wrong address for the yeshiva.
Neighbors also learned that the so-called "faculty housing" exception
that let buildings be twice as big as otherwise allowed was declared
null and void last year by the City Planning Department.

There is good reason these days for residents of Brooklyn’s
neighborhoods to feel a bit paranoid. Last week, an internationally
acclaimed architect, the Canadian-born Frank Gehry, who lives in
Southern California, unveiled his idea of what downtown Brooklyn should
become