Snags in Greenpoint-Williamsburg Re-zoning

By Paul Moses

For more than a year, the ongoing controversy surrounding the city's re-zoning of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront has been reported on in such papers as the Greenpoint Star, the Daily News' Brooklyn section and the Village Voice. The New York Times has now contributed a Nov. 6 piece by Damien Cave, "City Sees Growth; Residents Call It Out of Control." I was glad to have read to the bottom of the piece, because that's where gracefully worded heart of the story was:

The gap between the sprint of the market and the amble of government may also have doomed the expected growth of affordable housing inland, where most people live. The city promised in its plan that 640 new apartments for low- and middle-income families would be created in these areas over roughly a decade.

While developers on the waterfront have taken advantage of a provision that let them construct taller buildings if they set
aside at least 20 percent of the apartments for such families, most developers inland have not bothered with a similar program.

With only nine units scheduled so far to be built inland, according to Housing Preservation and Development, Mr. Doctoroff conceded that
the city’s incentives for providing less expensive housing inland may have arrived late, after developers formed their plans.

“There might be a slight timing mismatch,” he said. “But I
don’t think it’s significant, and I don’t think it will, over all, undermine the program we put in place.”

David Yassky, the city councilman representing the area, offered a harsher assessment, calling the housing program inland “a failure.”

Peter Gillespie, a member of the community advisory board created to work with the city after the rezoning, said several hot-button issues
still needed attention.

The city has met only twice with the advisory board, “and it
took us a lot of effort” to get those meetings, he said. At the second one on Thursday, community residents asked the city to establish a part-time community liaison to handle all the construction complaints. Members of the board also wanted to know why two properties set aside for waterfront parkland — by the Bushwick inlet and on Commercial Street — had not yet been acquired.

The delay in acquiring the second property, owned by the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has held up the $2 million for a “tenant legal fund” to fight harassment and displacement. Under the provisions of the rezoning, the money was set to come from the sale of air rights to the site.

City officials said they had struggled to find an appropriate new location for the transportation authority and that they would
find another way to finance the tenant program. But it might take several months, advocates said.

And for some people, they said, that may be too long. “We
needed that money two years ago, three years ago and now,” said Mr. Bikowski, the tenant advocate. “There’s no reason to wait until the thing is over.”

The two paragraphs I've highlighted in bold ought to have been more prominent in the story. Instead, the story has a much weaker theme higher up:

City officials say that their plan is right on schedule, especially by the waterfront, where construction has started on projects that will produce 460 below-market apartments, plus an initial few acres of parkland.

But among many residents and community leaders, there is a nagging sense that the government has not moved fast enough to keep pace with developers.

I would say there is something more than a "nagging sense" among community leaders that the city government has failed them. The annual Community District Needs Statement for Greenpoint-Williamsburg's Community Board 1 begins this way:

"There is a wave upon us. Not a wave of destruction but a
wave of construction. ... This tide of grief has already created a climate of highly inflated rents, denied lease renewals to residential and commercial tenants and a forced exodus of longtime commercial tenants into the less desirable areas and even out of state .... this wave destroys dreams for the homesteaders, the poor, middle working class of this community - the people who chose to stay, when in fact it was not trendy or chic."

The community board notes that the city's plan to protect local residents against displacement, reached as part of the re-zoning deal, has yet to be implemented:

"By the time the trickle down effect of affordable units come on line, the community will have been resettled by new faces from other
areas and the displaced residents a mere memory."

The news that a good chunk of the affordable housing envisoned in the May, 2005 re-zoning may not materialize is an important development with significant implications. The Greenpoint-Williamsburg re-zoning was hailed as a groundbreaking plan when it was announced. But if the ground broken turns out to be the lesson that a massive inclusionary zoning plan won't work as planned, it will become much more difficult to do the next time.

Atlantic Yards and Housing Displacement

By Paul Moses

I spent some time not long ago speaking to elderly people who were swept from their apartments in the wave of housing displacement that followed re-zonings in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Fourth Avenue in Park Slope. Now, the Atlantic Yards project poses the possibility of further displacement in Brooklyn.

The draft environmental impact statement for it certainly doesn’t ease concerns that more elderly Brooklyn residents and others will be forced from their apartments by rising rents. The DEIS essentially treats the people living in the most vulnerable areas, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, as invisible. The basic argument is that they’re on their way out anyway because of gentrification, so it can’t be said that the Forest City Ratner Companies’ project will displace them. Or, as the report puts it: “By 2010 and 2016, based on the existing trend and even absent the proposed project, it is likely that many of the households living in unregulated units in the tracts identified above would not actually be at risk of indirect housing displacement.” They won’t be at risk because they’ll be gone, the analysis assumes.

That conveniently excludes the possibility that the announcement of the Atlantic Yards plan has driven up property values and rents, thus helping to push out tenants in smaller buildings not protected by rent laws. This analysis sidesteps an issue that should be a serious part of the debate over a project that clearly has both benefits and drawbacks.

We’ve taken a particular interest in the issue of housing displacement in our work at the Center for the Study of Brooklyn; a transcript of a forum with some experts is available on our Web site.

There certainly were differing points of view at the gathering we held on June 9, 2006 at Brooklyn College. But there was no disputing that gentrification can put a neighborhood’s residents at risk.

Lance Freeman, a Columbia professor whose studies of gentrification have gotten a great deal of attention, made that clear. He has found that residents in gentrifying areas in New York City don’t move at a greater rate than people who live in neighborhoods that are not gentrifying. That conclusion tends to be applauded by those who don’t think gentrification is something to worry about. But Prof. Freeman also found that poor households living in gentrifying neighborhoods “had an average rent burden of 62 percent,” which he described as “astronomical.” He added: “The people who were staying were paying exorbitant amounts of their income toward rent.”

And Brad Lander, director for the Pratt Center for Community Development, noted that crowding in apartments was up sharply.

So the poor living within three-quarters of a mile of the Atlantic Yards project may not vanish as quickly as the environmental report suggests. In any case, the stories of those residents should not be lost in a mass of data.

The Rev. Jim O’Shea, director of Churches United for Fair Housing, made a similar point in his remarks at our forum:

“A couple weeks ago a man called the office and said that his pastor had recommended that he call me. He said, `I’m 78 years old. I’ve lived in Greenpoint my whole life. I’m a widower, I have no one else, and I was paying $500 a month for rent. It’s a small house, I’ve lived in this building my whole life.’ He said that someone had just bought the building, and they want $1,750, and the landlord told him he needed it next month, and he said, `I don’t know what to do.’ As he was telling me this, he was telling me his story. He talked about his wife, Greenpoint, the church, and all the things that happened, the history, the community, and all these things – nice stories about who he was. But at the end of all those nice stories he got back to the question. `Can you help me, Father? What can I do?’ And I said, `I don’t know what you can do. You can put your name on a list and put in an application for senior housing.’ But ultimately there was nothing he could do. He didn’t know where to go. And I think that’s what displacement is about in Greenpoint-Williamsburg. It’s the reality that all of a sudden this man’s apartment is very valuable. But his life, his story, was not that valuable, so he has to move on.”

This is a story being told many times over in Brooklyn these days. It should not be invisible.

Paul Moses is director of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn and a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College/CUNY.

Housing Links...

Below are some links to websites concerned with housing displacement and gentrification in Brooklyn. For even more info, visit our Reports page.

The Differential Impact of Gentrification on Communities in Chicago.

Study by The Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University-Chicago

'There Goes the 'Hood': Gentrification in New York City

Story by Farai Chideya on National Public Radio's News & Notes with Ed Gordon, July 20, 2006

America’s Rental Housing: Homes for a Diverse Nation.

Report by Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies shows how apartments are being lost to demolition at a quicker rate than they can be replaced

Furman Center Report Examines Housing and Neighborhood Conditions

NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Policy report on rapidly increasing rents in New York City

"Brooklyn on My Mind" event October, 23rd

Brooklyn on My Mind, a reading series featuring prominent Brooklyn writers, will resume at Brooklyn College on Monday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. in Whitman Auditorium. In this series, Leonard Lopate of WNYC Radio's "The Leonard Lopate Show" moderates the discussion and readings by some of the foremost writers living in and/or writing about Brooklyn.

On Oct. 23, three authors, from three continents, all living in New York City, discuss the state of the American novel and the global and market forces that are reshaping it. Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and Specimen Days, Colum McCann, author of This Side of Brightness and Dancer, and Francisco Goldman, author of Long Night of the Chickens and The Divine Husband, will participate in a discussion and reading.

A View from Brooklyn: Remembering Who We Are

By Paul Moses

When we held a forum at Brooklyn College to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the Brooklyn Eagle, we intended it to be something more than an exercise in nostalgia.

Our interest was in how Brooklyn is being covered today, an important factor in determining whether anyone pays attention to its issues. Rev. Raymond A. Schroth, the author of a history of the Eagle and nephew of the paper's last publisher, explained it well. "For me," he said, "a newspaper is a community's means of remembering. Without a newspaper's steady re-presentation to its readers of who they are and where they have been, an urban community is little better than an amnesiac who has been told his name but has no idea what the name connotes and symbolizes and, therefore, little sense of his true talents and possibilities."

For some time now - going back to the early 1990s, when I wrote a weekly Brooklyn column in New York Newsday - I've complained about the thin coverage Brooklyn gets from a Manhattan-centric news media. The Eagle warned in its final editorial that Brooklyn was "doomed to be cast in Manhattan's shadow" as a result of the loss of its daily newspaper. That may be a bit dramatic, but I'll say this: Nowhere in the country do so many people get so little local coverage.

But now there's some good news to report: Brooklyn has its own around-the-clock television news channel, Cablevision's News 12. The programming, which started June 14, resounds with the voices of Brooklyn.

Its young reporters get out through the entire borough - they don't just cover downtown and Brownstone Brooklyn - and into the neighborhoods. They are based in offices at East 18th Street and Avenue Z; 800 E. 92nd St., 900 60th St. - again, not just downtown. I'd like to say that this is a good journalistic strategy; it's been my experience that the location of the office helps to shape the focus of a news organization's coverage. But, like much else in Brooklyn these days, it was more a matter of finding the real estate; the news bureaus are located in previously existing Cablevision offices.

The coverage lives up to the station's motto, "as local as local news gets." That refrain, repeated through the day, may be parochial. I've noticed that the best of the station's anchors manage to deliver that line with a twinkle in the eyes. But major news organizations are starting to discover it is good business to pursue local markets, and few overlooked markets are as large as Brooklyn's.

A typical story I've seen was about the East New York community garden about to be bulldozed. It's what the station is particularly good at - getting voices from communities heard. And you can keep up with news about crime, fires, government announcements, traffic.

I may be asking for too much here, but no one will mistake News 12 for "60 Minutes"; it's certainly not investigative. So at this point, News 12 doesn't fulfill Brooklyn's need for edgy, in-depth journalism.

But the station does succeed in the vital role of telling Brooklynites who they are so that we don't become, collectively, like the amnesiac Father Schroth referred to in his talk.

If there is one problem so far with News 12, it's that its availability is limited to the 280,000 households that subscribe to Cablevision, which has a city franchise covering only portions of Brooklyn. This is a problem with the borough's weekly newspapers, too. While they can do some fine coverage, it's contained to specific sections of the borough. Brooklyn needs its own public square in the form of Brooklyn news sources accessible to all Brooklynites.

Hopefully, News 12 soon will be available to Time-Warner cable customers in Brooklyn. Deborah Koller-Feeney, spokeswoman for News 12, said this was under negotiation. I've found that News 12 complements Time-Warner's New York 1, which, in my view, does the best television news coverage of New York City.

At a time when much of Brooklyn is being re-shaped, the borough needs all the coverage it can get. There should be a lively discussion of Brooklyn's future.

If you'd like to enter this discussion of how Brooklyn should be covered, you can start by checking a transcript elsewhere on this Web site of the March 15, 2005 forum the Center for the Study of Brooklyn sponsored with the Brooklyn Studies Program @ Brooklyn College and the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. Respected reporters who cover Brooklyn - columnist Jimmy Breslin; Times reporter Diane Cardwell; Post reporter Patrick Gallahue; former Newsday reporter Ron Howell; Daily News Brooklyn Bureau Chief Joanne Wasserman -- offer some interesting insights. You can also check an article I wrote in City Limits magazine on the Eagle.

But what do you think?

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