Done Deal? The Fight for the City in Brooklyn, 2017
This article was originally published in German for Stadtform: issue Revolution 02/16 and translated by the author
What is the “least affordable” place to live — or not to live — in the United States of America? Brooklyn! This news broke last summer through various real estate media outlets. The conclusion was based on a study that measured “affordability” by the median income one needs to pay off the monthly rates for a median priced single family home. Accordingly 121,7% of a median income are required to pay off such a home within 30 years. Income left aside: Brooklyn has changed tremendously within the last years. The real estate market has conquered one neighborhood after another, continuously shifting towards the East, where Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant are still but then really not anymore considered “affordable.” Along the banks of the East River, from Red Hook over Dumbo all the way up to Williamsburg, but also closer to Downtown Brooklyn, in Dumbo — in Fort Greene for example — I find new luxury condo towers protruding towards the blue sky every time I am there. Some areas of Brooklyn have changed so dramatically within a year that they are almost not recognizable. Urban change, gentrification, affordability and the quality, sometimes even the“authenticity” of a neighborhood are topics city planners, researchers, politicians but also residents are continuously engaged in. I am putting my head above the parapet and claim: gentrification as based on the density of coffee shops where bearded barristas serve a variation of artful patterns in milk foam on cafe lattes originated here, in Brooklyn. Neighborhoods in which such coffee shops reproduce often have experienced a radical demographic change. The percentage of black residents in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill has shrunk from 65% in 2000 to 31.4%, for example. Spike Lee, the filmmaker who used to live in Fort Greene, has been quoted saying “So, if New York City is not affordable then the great art that we have is not going to be here because people can’t afford it. … I don’t see a lot of good coming from gentrification for the people living in those neighborhoods.”
Gentrification and cafe lattes are nonetheless only the easily to be observed symptoms of incredibly complex international real estate business operations, investor dealings and city politics. Often times real estate developers come into neighborhoods just after the hip coffee shops pop up all around and impose their interchangeable ‘international style’ architecture on the image of the city seemingly unopposed.
But is the speedy urban renewal process in Brooklyn really not confronted with harsh resistance? The activists and their motivations one encounters in researching this question could not be more contrasting.
NIMBYSM — Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 6
One interesting form of resistance hides behind the cute sounding abbreviation “Nimbysm”. NIMBY, short for “Not In My Back Yard” describes an ambivalent egoistic stance towards urban development, negatively connoted. A conglomerate of interests groups from Brooklyn that has been accused of Nimbysm has been fighting two new residential developments on the southern end of Brooklyn Bridge Park, also known as Pier 6, for the last couple of years. Together these groups and their influential and often wealthy members, such as Save the View or Save Pier 6, have filed a law suit against the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation (BBPC) to prevent the construction of the two buildings.The BBPC however argues that the buildings are necessary to create revenue to finance the maintenance of the park and the pier and have always been part of the Brooklyn Bridge Park development plan.The two new residential towers are also planned to include 13% “affordable” units. Those are being given to applicants with ‘low’ incomes through a lottery program — social housing in times of neoliberalism. A real estate developer has to include these 13% of affordable units in order to get tax credits from the city. Without this indirect incentive to build affordable housing almost no one would be able to build in the city at all. Even though the plaintive parties argue that they their motive is to prevent having their view blocked of, it can be suspected that they really want to stay amongst themselves. They wouldn’t be against mayor De Blasio’s attempt to build more affordable living space, but just not in their front yard, in this case. This is what an activist from the Save Pier 6 group told me at their booth at the Atlantic Attics street fair a year ago.
The plans for the two new residential towers have been submitted to the DoB (Department of Buildings) last summer, approved by the BBPC, regardless of the ongoing law suit, reports YIMBY, and online media outlet with an optimistic stance towards new urban development projects in the city. 17 ‘affordable’ units and 66 condominiums have been cut from the program and 25% of the ‘affordable’ units are reserved for ‘very low’ income households: this would be 4 apartments in 100. The overall construction project is said to generate a one time revenue of 110 Million US dollars and following a yearly revenue of 2.7 Million US dollars for the BBPC and the maintenance of the highly popular park. It remains to be seen whether or not the activists from Brooklyn Heights will be able to cope with the maximum of 16 residents from the lower end of the income spectrum that are eventually going to move into the neighborhood.
In another — not fully resolved — case of urban renewal a drastic measure came into play: eminent domain. This is the right of the government to appropriate private land for public purposes.
Philemon and Baucis — Atlantic Yards
In his book “All that is Solid Melts into Air — The Experience of Modernity” Marshall Bermann describes Goethe’s Faust as the cultural hero of modernity. The tragedy of urban development climaxes in his analogy when Faust, the ‘developer’, decides that even the last piece of untouched land and its residents, Philemon and Baucis, will have to succumb to his renewal frenzy. Goethe borrowed the names of these residents from Ovid. In his text “Metamorphoses” Philemon and Baucis are the only ones spared from a terrible flood sent from the goods. In ‘Faust’ the two are an old couple living in a small house in the dunes surrounded by Linden trees offering shelter to stranded sailors.
Bermann describes the two as the archetypes of people, growing in number throughout modernity: Those who are in the way, in the way of history, in the way of progress. People that are being classified as obsolete and can be eliminated.
Written in the 1970s, this story reminds much of one of the largest urban renewal projects in Brooklyn that began surfacing early 2000: Atlantic Yards, with guest appearances by Jay-Z, the Brooklyn Nets and Frank Gehry. The whole storyline is difficult to summarize but following is an attempt — whoever is still able to follow is welcome to draw comparisons to Goethes’ Faust and Ovid’s Philemon and Baucis: In 2003 Forest City Ratner launched the project. On a 22 acres lot in Prospect Heights neighboring Fort Greene and Downtown Brooklyn 17 high-rise buildings with mixed use functions — residential and commercial — were to be erected. The master plan was designed by none other than Frank Gehry. The majority of the area consisted of abandoned land owned by the Long Island Rail Road, which was to be sold for 100 Million US Dollars, but was in the end sold to Forest City Ratner for 20 Million US Dollars. In 2017 only two buildings have been completed, one of the being the Barclay’s Center, the arena that opened with a Jay-Z concert in 2012. On a side note: Jay-Z who grew up a just a stone’s throw away in the Marcy Houses, a public housing project, supported the Barclay’s center development. The second finished building is the reputed ‘highest modular residential tower’ in the world: 461 Dean. Behind Barclay’s Center and between the neighboring Brownstone blocks next to a 4 acres parking lot fallow land cuts a deep aisle between Prospect Heights and Park Slope.
Right in the center of today’s arena, in the middle of the playing field, there once stood a relatively new condominium tower. In it lived a young man, Daniel Goldstein, first by himself and then with his wife and baby daughter, until the bitter end when they were surrounded by one of Brooklyn’s largest construction sites. He finally gave in on the ever growing pressure and cashed out in 2010 after years of resistance against the eminent domain clause and as founder of the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Nets, whom the arena was built for initially were sold as well, to the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, but at that point: construction could finally begin. The film “Battle for Brooklyn” accompanies Daniel Goldstein and documents the resistance against the arena, the de-settlement of residents and shop owners and with it the demolition of many buildings. The activists of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn wanted to participate and have a say in the planning process of the huge areal. Their argument is familiar: According to them there was a functioning infrastructure and social network in place in the neighborhood worth preserving. Another group — BUILD (Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development) — rallied for the project and counter-argued that the arena would generate 10.000 jobs in Brooklyn. Until recently it is said to have generated just short of 100 jobs and for the city the Barclay’s Center was a losing bargain. In addition it came out that BUILD received 5 Million US Dollars from Forest City Ratner as “grassroots neighborhood support.” The whole Pacific Park aka Atlantic Yards projects is scheduled to be completed in 2025.
Groups that are, similar to Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, fighting to ensure that certain people and institutions can stay in Brooklyn’s neighborhoods are often citing to combat ‘gentrification’ and ‘social cleansing.’ The Crown Heights Tenant Union and New York Communities for Change for example are advocating against Crown Heights tenants and residents having to leave the neighborhood. Other than providing general legal support for tenants, they are rallying, with small victories gained, against the conversion of the Bedford Union Army, a complex owned by the City of New York, into luxury condominiums. The originally designated developer is not being considered by the city anymore. While the city is looking for a new partner for the renovation, the groups fighting the project — the CHTU and the NYCC — are gearing up to completely stop it.
We are left asking ourselves: To whom does the city belong? To the Nimbyists, the Philemon and Baucis’ who are refusing to leave or the Yimbyists and real estate developers? Who decides what is being built, for whom and how much participation-right do we, as citizens, have?
Walking through Brooklyn today, especially along the streets with older and less high buildings around the Barclay’s Center in fort Green it is hard to distinguish the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ city. Both of them alternate continuously. It is striking how sealed off the architecture of the new buildings stands within the ‘old’ city. The question of the public benefit behind any of the new urban development projects is immensely relevant when residents are being re-settled in the public interest. A site visit is nonetheless anything but revealing. The new luxury high rise towers in Fort Greene rise into the sky in love with no one but themselves, narcissistic. Every once in a while a branch of a restaurant chain can be found on the ground level of on of the towers. Other than that they are meant to be passed by quickly it seems. What is being given back to the city, to the public in exchange for crowded subways, never-ending construction sites and ‘eviction’?
If gentrification doesn’t bring any good, is then the art not to be here, as Spike Lee says?
I think the city is worth fighting for. As contrasting as the activist groups in Brooklyn are, they shed light on the complexity of the problems of urban renewal. The art is, for all of us, to create a city together in which we can all live healthily and thrive. Maybe we all have to fight for it more. It cannot be left to real estate developers and speculators how open Brooklyn is, who will be able to afford to live here and whose view will be blocked. On a local level a good start would be to politically strengthen community boards, but also commission them to fulfill certain quota, such as the percentage of affordable housing.
Film Recommendations:
Battle For Brooklyn (2011): A documentary on former residents and their fight against the Atlantic Yards urban development project.
Batteries not Included (1987): Baby UFOs and urban resistance!
Citizen Jane — Battle For the City (2016) documentary on Jane Jacobs’s activist endeavors.
