A new megadevelopment proposed for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal and surrounding blocks could reshape the future of Red Hook and the Columbia Street Waterfront. But for many residents, the project and the process for winning its approval recall an earlier plan gone wrong.
The plan includes modernizing part of the port and adding about 5,000 market-rate apartments, along with 2,700 more affordably priced units, and investing $200 million into the long-neglected Red Hook public housing development nearby.
Some residents see parallels to two decades ago, when New York State’s economic development authority steered a controversial plan to build a new neighborhood around a centerpiece arena, the Barclays Center. The project, known as Atlantic Yards, bypassed the city’s typical land use review process but was supposed to feature hundreds of units of affordable housing atop a Brooklyn rail yard.
The plan faced fierce opposition from residents at the time, some of whom warned against taking officials at their word.
Those warnings proved prescient. Many of the commitments baked into the deal never happened, and the project developer failed to deliver any of the affordable apartments above the railyard, even after entering a legally binding agreement with state officials and local community groups. In fact, they never even built the costly platform needed to construct affordable housing over the train tracks.
Despite that, the state has declined to enforce costly penalties for the deal gone bad.
Now the specter of those failed promises looms over the proposal to construct new housing on underused land a little more than 2 miles away.
A 28-member task force elected officials and community leaders is meeting Wednesday ahead of a twice-postponed vote later this month. They’re currently scheduled to cast ballots on June 27 on whether to allow the state and city to move forward with a comprehensive residential and industrial overhaul of 122 acres on the Brooklyn waterfront while circumventing local review laws through a process known as a general project plan, or GPP.
If it’s approved by the task force, the proposal will then move into the environmental review phase where the city’s Economic Development Corporation will outline a more detailed plan.
While the city’s housing shortage would seem to necessitate the 7,700 units proposed for the waterfront project, some task force members — and a host of local residents — are denouncing the plan and the rushed process for winning its approval.
“We’ve all seen through Atlantic Yards what can happen with a GPP — even when it seems like commitments are made,” Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso wrote in testimony for a public hearing last week. “We can’t just take one agency’s word for what is and isn’t feasible here.”
Reynoso’s opposition is a bit of a surprise. He’s an inaugural member of a club of sorts for elected officials who say they favor new housing development. But parts of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal are still an active cargo port and industrial zone. And he said he worries about “chipping away at what little manufacturing land we have left.”
“That is why I am opposing housing development in this plan,” Reynoso added.
But Economic Development Corporation President and CEO Andrew Kimball has likened the waterfront revitalization plan to previous projects at Brooklyn Navy Yard and along Brooklyn Bridge Park. And last Thursday, he tried to convince city councilmembers that bypassing the usual land-use process — one that includes those same councilmembers — was the right move for a project of such “regional importance.”
Kimball’s agency acquired the rights to the waterfront property in a deal with the Port Authority that exchanged control of the Howland Hook industrial waterfront on Staten Island last May.
“When people look back on this transaction,” Kimball said. “They’re going to look at it as one of the best deals that the city of New York has made on economic development in recent history.”
Economic Development Corporation officials say the housing is needed to help fund the costs of repairs to the terminal’s aging piers and infrastructure stretching south from Atlantic Avenue to Wolcott Street. Kimball assured residents and local elected officials that 35% of the new homes would be priced for low- and middle-income renters. The agency also plans to improve the shipping container port to make the Brooklyn Marine Terminal what it says will be a key part of the city’s food supply and marine freight network.
But many elected officials have advised the Economic Development Corporation to pump the brakes, including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Councilmember Shahana Hanif, both Democrats from Brooklyn. And they’ve held up the Atlantic Yards debacle as an example of why to be cautious.
“We’re still waiting for the promises of Atlantic Terminal 20 years later,” Williams said.
Kimball countered that, unlike with Atlantic Yards, a “local development corporation” will be in place on the marine terminal project to ensure that the city and the developers involved make good on their promises. But that may not assuage local concerns. The state reached a signed agreement with the Atlantic Yards developers and local community groups to build the affordable housing but still didn’t deliver.
Residents in Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, the Columbia Street Waterfront neighborhood and elsewhere have organized to oppose the plan. Among their concerns are hasty planning and what they see as a lack of transparency.
“So many things wrong with this process,” said James DeFilippis, an urban planning professor at Rutgers and founding member of the New York City Community Land Initiative. “The first is the speed of the process. … Good planning takes time.
Others say they worry about transportation and the project’s likely effect on truck traffic. They’ve pressed the city to increase bus and ferry service, introduce a shuttle to the closest subway stations and limit truck traffic from last-mile warehouses that now course through the area en route to the BQE.
Industrial designer Matthew Grandin said the process hasn’t given people in the community an opportunity to describe their own vision for the industrial zone.
“We want a real conversation about a modern port,” Grandin said. “To figure out what we want, we need an actual process that allows people to understand what’s going on.”