Gowanus neighbors try to slow down inevitable construction onslaught

When the city unleashes a rezoning and its accompanying host of contentious public review meetings on a neighborhood, seldom does anything stop it. A coalition of local grassroots organizations led by Voice of Gowanus managed to do so temporarily by suing the city and preventing it from triggering the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), a seven-month path leading to approval in the City Council. The temporary restraining order was issued by a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge on January 15. At a subsequent hearing on February 4, another judge, Justice Katherine Levine, unsuccessfully tried to get the city to add an in-person component to the Gowanus ULURP meetings, which will be held virtually due to the pandemic. The city contended that participants would be able to dial in by phone, making up for any inequities caused by the need for wifi. Justice Levine tabled the hearing, announcing that she would come to a decision the second week of February.

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In the claims brought by Voice of Gowanus, it argues that the city has not acted transparently and did not abide by protocols laid out in the City Charter, such as providing proper notice before certifying the rezoning proposal. The lawsuit also says holding ULURP meetings virtually, which the city started doing for other rezonings in September, has led to a lack of public participation. Even in the absence of a global pandemic, community activism is not something everyone has the time or resources to do; organizers say that a virtual ULURP would exclude Gowanus residents from a process specifically designed to give them a say.

Fool me once

Then again, even if community members expend the time and energy to attend ULURP meetings, their efforts are unlikely to be reflected in the rezoning proposal. The city’s past attempts at community planning in Gowanus foreshadow this outcome, said Katia Kelly, who signed her name on the lawsuit and has lived in the neighborhood for 36 years. From 2013 to 2015, Councilman Brad Lander presided over Bridging Gowanus, a series of public meetings meant to assuage residents’ misgivings about the rezoning by offering them a chance to shape the agenda. Yet, when Lander presented the neighborhood plan at the final meeting, Kelly said that none of the community’s long-discussed recommendations were in it. Locals had been particularly adamant about limiting the height of residential buildings along the Gowanus Canal, which was declared a Superfund site in 2010. However, the Bridging Gowanus plan foresaw buildings over 20 stories tall.

Kelly, who attended the meetings, often got the impression the city was trying to persuade residents that acceding to more density was their best bet at securing new infrastructure or much-needed capital repairs. “It was a farce.” Another Voice of Gowanus member, Brad Vogel, said many in the group resent the air of inevitability surrounding the rezoning, which he says developers and city officials present to the community as a fait accompli. “You can have as many meetings as you want, but if people’s input is never reflected in a meaningful way, they will resort to things like going to court, which is what is happening here.”

There are also cautionary tales from rezonings past. In Flushing, a coalition of local organizations collaborated with Queens College in 2015 to produce a white paper that outlined community-sourced recommendations for the rezoning of the waterfront there. Daniel Hong, communications coordinator for the MinKwon Center for Community Action, which led the coalition, said none of this feedback made it into the rezoning approved by City Council in December. “It acknowledged none of the contributions the community provided.” Hong can also attest to the exclusionary nature of virtual ULURP. When the city took things online in September, it became difficult to recruit and mobilize community members to join the hearings, which were sometimes announced only hours before they took place, he said. Many who could attend did not know how to operate Zoom, the video conferencing platform used to host the hearings. Technical difficulties abounded—people would get dropped from meetings or their mics would be cut off—and participants got less time to speak than the developers presenting the plan. The whole experience was isolating and disempowering, said Hong. “The virtual hearings were not public. They just simply were not.”

For Nora Almeida, who is also part of Voice of Gowanus and has lived in Gowanus for nearly a decade, it’s an equity issue. She frequently interacts with low-income students in her job as a librarian at New York City College of Technology and is mindful of the fact that a lot of them don’t have wifi access at home. Holding ULURP virtually could exclude many people at the Warren, Wyckoff, and Gowanus Houses complexes, home to the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents, and would be at odds with the city’s promotion of the rezoning as a way to create affordable housing, she said. The Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice, which includes public housing residents, issued a statement urging the city to “improve and expand the virtual engagement process.” The coalition also put forward a list of recommendations for the city to achieve this, including organizing small, in-person hearings outdoors and broadcasting the virtual hearings on public-access television.

Not NIMBY

Residents who oppose the current rezoning proposal are often written off by their critics as NIMBYs (short for Not In My Backyard) that would deny the city a chance at economic development and new affordable housing. Vogel said nobody in the group is against affordable housing, and that these accusations get in the way of having a nuanced discussion about the neighborhood’s future.

Some longtime residents like Martin Bisi, also a Voice of Gowanus member, fear being priced out of that future altogether. Bisi runs a recording studio, which he rents, and has lived in Gowanus for 41 years. He said small businesses like his have already been pushed out by rezoning-fueled speculation and he worries he might be next. “My building is in danger of being sold. Along with luxury housing comes luxury and high-end retail. I’m vulnerable to Gucci or Urban Outfitters.”

Although the Voice of Gowanus lawsuit prevented the city from starting the clock on ULURP, shelving the rezoning is organizers’ ultimate goal. They’ve made common cause with 14 other grassroots organizations from across the city to form the Citywide People’s Land Use Alliance. The nascent alliance circulated a statement in support of the lawsuit, in which it called for “true democracy” and an inclusive public review process. Members are particularly concerned about mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH), a rule requiring that at least 20% of floor area in a new building constructed within a rezoning be set aside for housing that is below market rate. Vogel describes MIH as a “Trojan horse,” a seemingly benign mechanism that developers and the city use to portray rezonings as generators of affordable housing, belying that they mostly create luxury apartments.

As part of the Gowanus rezoning, the city would like developers to build a 950-unit complex on Public Place, a six-acre lot of intractably contaminated land along the canal. While the city has touted its proposed complex, called Gowanus Green, as “100% affordable” and environmentally conscious, locals have repeatedly expressed concerns over placing a low-income residential building on a site where toxic coal tar reaches depths of over 150 feet.

The problem with Public Place

City officials and developers had assured Community Board 6 in a November 19 meeting that the site’s remediation, which is being carried out by utility company National Grid, would guarantee the safety of future residents. These assurances were unexpectedly rebuffed by the EPA engineer leading the Gowanus Canal Superfund cleanup, Christos Tsiamis, during a discussion with the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group on December 2. Tsiamis told group members that National Grid’s remediation would not stop the toxic compounds that evaporate from buried coal tar from accumulating in structures built on the site.

To remediate up to a safe standard, National Grid would have to seal the coal tar in the soil, Tsiamis said. That would require additional stabilizing techniques similar to those the EPA is using to clean up the Gowanus Canal. Developers would also have to build extraction wells along the waterfront to collect the tar that continually oozes from beneath Public Place towards the canal. If built, these wells would be pumping for a long time to come. “Certainly for our lifetimes.” However, Gowanus Green developers intend for a park and public school to be located where Tsiamis said the sludge-collecting vats would have to go.

No backsies

National Grid’s remediation plan originally called for infrastructure that would more effectively contain the coal tar and keep it from reaching the Gowanus Canal, such as impermeable barriers to cover all three of Public Place’s canal-facing sides. But in August, Tsiamis’s office quietly approved changes to the plan that removed these features while he was on vacation. This was done after National Grid’s remediation works came under the supervision of New York State under its Brownfield Cleanup Program. The new plan also changed the depth to which National Grid had to dig out and replace contaminated soil—two feet instead of eight.

Tsiamis’s comments confirmed fears among members of the advisory group that the new, state-sanctioned remediation risked recontaminating the canal and posed a health threat to future residents. But to a representative of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) who suddenly chimed in, Tsiamis was overstepping. In a tense exchange, the representative told attendees to redirect any questions about Public Place to the department’s project manager for the site, John Miller. “I have a depth of knowledge in the project that, with all due respect, other people present at DEC don’t have,” Tsiamis replied. “I can inform the public by stating facts that are not known to others, including Miller of the state.”

The advisory group had already addressed its questions about Public Place to Miller in late July, when he presented the original remediation plan. Members of the advisory group were alarmed when Miller admitted during the course of his presentation that he had not visited Public Place in months due to the pandemic. They worried he wasn’t properly familiarized with conditions on the ground, said Kelly, who described Miller as wishy-washy. “He got a little bit upset at our questions, but we really put him through the wringer!” The advisory group passed a resolution at the December 2 meeting requesting the EPA weigh in on the state’s new strategy.

Little house on the floodplain

Gowanus has more sites that could potentially be remediated by developers under the state’s brownfields program. This isn’t a winning formula, opined Almeida. “You’re going to cut as many corners as you can if you’re a developer because your interest is an economic one.” There are other environmental woes to consider, too. The neighborhood is a floodplain, and it was underwater in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit. That could happen again.

The much-anticipated Environmental Impact Statement might provide some answers as to how the rezoning will affect the neighborhood’s overtaxed sewers and other infrastructure, but the city has yet to release it. In the meantime, locals opposed to the proposed rezoning continue to see a grave disconnect between the city’s vision for Gowanus and crucial realities: the area’s polluted state, the worsening effects of climate change, and the pandemic’s aftermath. People with the means to leave the city have been doing so by the tens of thousands since the shutdowns began; it’s unclear if those who come back will want to live in packed luxury towers bordering a Superfund site.