The BQX runs on astroturf

At Community Board 6 on January 30, when representatives from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and the Department of Transportation showed up in Red Hook to discuss the planned Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX), so many neighborhood residents stood up to register their objections that, after a while, it seemed easier to take a poll.

How many people opposed the streetcar? Nearly every hand in the room shot up. Still, the EDC visited Red Hook again only two weeks later, for a BQX “workshop” at PS 676, with snazzy posters and plenty of cheerful representatives eager to answer questions and offer information. The campaign continues. Don’t be surprised if real estate kingpin Jed Walentas of Two Trees Management enlists an army of Russian bots to push the project on social media.

For now, his Friends of the BQX, the developer-funded advocacy group that pitched the trolley to Mayor de Blasio (whose campaign nonprofit accepted $245,000 from the organization’s backers) in January 2016, is the next best thing. See, most recently, “BQX streetcar could be the great transit equalizer,” an op-ed published on February 13 in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Its authors were Darold Burgess, the resident council president at NYCHA’s Ingersoll Houses, and Christopher Torres, the new executive director of the Friends of the BQX.

Readers who’ve followed the light rail proposal closely through the years may remember an earlier, similar op-ed in Crain’s New York Business, “Why Housing Authority tenants desire a streetcar,” published back in January 2017. The byline purported that seven NYCHA resident association presidents in Brooklyn and Queens, including Frances Brown and Lillie Marshall of the Red Hook Houses East and West, had collectively authored the piece. The tenant leaders argued that the BQX would offer “safe, reliable and affordable” passage to new “employment possibilities” on the waterfront for job-starved public housing residents in outer-borough subway deserts.

Retraction needed?

If any Crain’s devotee happened to attend the BQX meeting in Red Hook on January 30, they may have experienced some surprise when Lillie Marshall – still the head of the Red Hook Houses West Tenants Association – began to rail against the project. “It cannot be brought to Columbia Street, where the Red Hook Houses are. That’s a no. No way, no how. We do not need it; we do not want it,” she insisted.

Marshall warned that Red Hook Houses tenants would protest in the street. “We will fight. I have thousands in Red Hook, and we’ll be out there,” she promised.

At Marshall’s tenants association meeting on February 11, she passed out a petition. “We strongly oppose efforts by New York City to place the extraordinary expensive taxpayer funded BQX light rail in Red Hook,” it read. The other tenants passed the sheet around, and it collected signatures.

I asked Marshall after the meeting whether her opinion of the BQX – which planners had previously considered putting on Van Brunt Street, farther from the NYCHA campus – had changed since 2017. She assured me that she had opposed the project “from day one.” Advocates had sought her support, but she had told them to “stay out of my face.” When I showed her the Crain’s article, she called it a “lie.”

I don’t know how a pro-BQX op-ed by Marshall ended up in print three years ago. By one method or another, I suppose Crain’s must have secured some kind of permission to use her name – although, if so, it seems that the magazine’s staff may not have clearly communicated the message of the obviously prewritten piece, which bears the unmistakable mark of the Friends of the BQX.

In any case, the article evidently does not reflect Marshall’s actual views. Frances Brown of the Red Hook Houses East, for what it’s worth, continues to support the project. (The Friends of the BQX have also pulled in Jill Eisenhard, the executive director of the nonprofit Red Hook Initiative, as an emblem of the group’s concern for the Red Hook Houses, giving her a board seat.)

NYCHA tenants remain vital to the BQX’s public relations campaign, which mentions them in nearly all of its promotional materials. Given the streetcar’s conceptual origin as a mechanism to boost waterfront property values in Williamsburg and Long Island City, its advocates must fight their hardest to reframe what many skeptical New Yorkers regard as a $2.7 billion giveaway to developers from the public coffers. With enough persuasion, we may come to understand that the function of the BQX is not to accessorize yuppie condos but, in fact, to serve public housing – the precise opposite. And after all that NYCHA tenants have endured, how could anyone deny them the assistance of light rail?

Another important group is small business owners, whom BQX critics are likely to regard with more warmth and sympathy than they do big-time developers. If the BQX can bring new customers to lovable mom-and-pop shops and immigrant entrepreneurs (though with higher rents to match), we may forget that other, less appealing forces will benefit even more amply.

BQX courts local restaurant

On February 7, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the BQX workshop at Borough Hall (“City makes latest push for BQX streetcar”). “Some business owners and advocates see the BQX as an opportunity to boost economic activity, produce jobs and provide a new means of transportation to neighborhoods short of subway lines, such as Red Hook,” Charlie Innis wrote.

Tellingly, however, the Eagle’s only supporting quotation from a business owner arrived “through a spokesperson for the project,” not directly from an event attendee. Specifically, the article attributed an endorsement to Dawn Skeete (albeit with a misspelled last name), the owner of Jam’it Bistro in Red Hook.

“It’s my hope that the BQX would be a major boon for us and other small businesses in our neighborhood and along the route. It’ll increase foot traffic and allow more people to get here by mass transit,” Skeete supposedly stated.

I talked to Skeete a few days after the article’s publication, and she explained her somewhat complicated history with the streetcar proposal, which began when a representative from the Friends of the BQX visited her restaurant last year.

“When I first opened, this young lady approached me and asked me if I would go to a meeting at City Hall to talk about this project. And I’m trying to figure out, what does this have to do with me? I just got here,” Skeete recounted. “I’m working with limited information.”

Skeete agreed to attend what she – a newcomer to Red Hook, who commutes to her restaurant from Westbury, Long Island, and hopes to become more immersed in the local community – understood to be a gathering for small business owners. The BQX advocate typed a statement for her to read, which Skeete revised before reciting the testimony at City Hall. She watched as another business owner in the area offered a BQX endorsement with very similar wording to the comment with which she’d been provided.

Months later, Skeete received an email from Karp Strategies, an urban planning consultancy firm that was apparently helping to coordinate the upcoming BQX workshop in Red Hook. They placed a catering order, asking Skeete to provide the food for the event.

Soon after, the representative from the Friends of the BQX suddenly returned to Jam’it Bistro. Skeete asked whether she had referred her for the catering job, but evidently the woman hadn’t known about the gig. Still, she wanted another favor from Skeete.

“About half an hour after she left, she sent me a text message: ‘Hey Dawn, I’m wondering if we could submit this quote on your behalf for an article on the BQX.’ And she sent me the quote,” Skeete recalled. “What did I get myself into?”

The woman didn’t offer any kind of bribe – Skeete wouldn’t have accepted money if it’d been on the table – but Skeete was willing to assist her as a kindness, as long as it wouldn’t require her to misrepresent her own stance on the BQX. Again, she insisted upon a revision of the proposed quotation to better reflect her true feelings about the project, adding the phrase “It’s my hope that” to the beginning of the endorsement. 

In fact, Skeete does hope that the BQX will help her restaurant if it’s built, but she’s not sure it’ll play out that way. The quotation in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle isn’t a lie – it just doesn’t fully show how skeptical Skeete remains. She’s still figuring out where she really stands.

Right now, Jam’it Bistro survives largely on its catering business. Skeete explained that, at the northern end of Red Hook, Columbia Street sees almost no foot traffic at all. The BQX, which would pass directly in front of the restaurant, would provide some “visibility,” but Skeete isn’t persuaded that riders will want to get off the trolley in Red Hook to visit her restaurant. What if, instead of turning her block into a thriving pedestrian district, the streetcar only makes it harder to get to Jam’it Bistro by car?

“I just can’t visualize it running on this street here. Where are cars going to park?” Skeete wondered. “There’s a lot of uncertainties.”

The BQX has a long list of supporters in the business community, but they’re mostly enterprises like Brooklyn Brewery and Nitehawk Cinema – more symbols of gentrification. To win hearts and minds, the Friends of the BQX also requires the support of places like the Jam’it Bistro, a modest, woman-owned eatery in a struggling part of town. It’s revealing that this support hasn’t coalesced organically.

Good transit comes from good government

Transportation projects don’t always require so much marketing and image management. In the end, all the propaganda makes the BQX feel even less like a legitimate civic undertaking.

Is it possible to separate the potential merits of the BQX from the deviousness of its publicity campaign? It’s true that, in the most basic sense, more public transit in Brooklyn and Queens would be a good thing.

At the Community Board 6 meeting in Red Hook, several residents raised thoughtful concerns about the streetcar’s design and cost, but even more of the objections related to the expected loss of parking and lanes for car traffic. Drivers make up a minority of New Yorkers, but the older, well-off people who have time to attend public meetings tend to own cars, and their voices disproportionately influence city politics. It almost made me want to speak up in the project’s defense.

But fixing transit deserts is a trickier endeavor than it might seem. When cities starve certain neighborhoods of public transportation for decades, residents of those communities shape their lifestyles around that absence by necessity. Many of them buy cars, even in low-income areas where affording a car isn’t easy, because they have no other choice. By the time the city decides to invest in a train or a trolley, it registers as an unwanted disruption to the existing pattern. Drivers would rather keep driving.

In my view, the sooner New York City realizes that it was a mistake to bring cars into urban areas in the first place, the better. But the BQX isn’t the project that’ll convince Red Hookers of the merits of public transportation. They think it’s a scam, because in fact it is.

Would the BQX help some residents of Brooklyn and Queens get around? Of course. One could argue that it doesn’t matter where the idea for the project came from – what matters is whether it would provide a popular, efficient, environmentally friendly form of transportation for people who need it. Most New Yorkers recognize that Brooklyn and Queens need better interconnectivity.

I’m not a transit expert – I don’t know how best to create that interconnectivity. What I do know is that it’s the job of government to figure it out, not the job of real estate tycoons. The BQX might incidentally benefit the public, but its intended purpose is to serve capital, and it deserves rejection on that basis alone.

Is it possible that, without outside interference, an unbiased Department of Transportation would, after studying how best to meet unfulfilled transit needs in the outer boroughs, end up designing a project exactly like the one conceived by Jed Walentas and his friends? Sure. Is it likely? No.

To increase our chances of getting the best possible results, we must demand a clean starting point for any city project. The alternative is public works that come with disinformation campaigns and a withering of public trust – not to mention, in all probability, a pretty lousy streetcar design in this case.

For me, the only good part of the whole BQX offensive so far has been Dawn Skeete’s catering. Visit Jam’it Bistro at 367 Columbia Street (on foot, by bike, or by car) for the best Jamaican food in South Brooklyn.