You know, it’s interesting to watch public relations at work. Our NYC government has spent almost a year trying to convince us to welcome the addition of many huge luxury towers to the shores of our low rise industrial neighborhood.
They began by telling us over and over again how we will finally get a world class shipping terminal to replace the existing one that the Port Authority failed to maintain. A Master Plan would be created under the watchful eyes of a “task-force” made up of local stakeholders representing us. While the task force was hand picked by the EDC, it did include a lot of worthy locals and our political representatives. The Task Force meetings were closed to the public, but there were a number of committees whose meetings were recorded and available even now on the BMT website.
In addition, they held a number of public meetings which we were allowed to attend and report on.
We found those meetings to be a little gimmicky. Many were led by WXY studios, a private company that does city planning work. This is how our reporter Katherine Rivard described one of those meeting back in October:
“In the center of the room, giant maps of the project site were laid out on tables so that residents could place mini-posts with their ideas for specific parts of the site. What did the community want?
New parks, dog parks, and maybe even some indoor pools. But in addition to ideas, the map contained many notes focused on what was not wanted, primarily housing or more traffic.”
All through the process the community tried to explain that a New Dumbo was not what we wanted.
All through the first six months of that process, the community was told that “some” housing was necessary to pay for the pier upgrades. I myself thought that “some” was ok, like maybe two large buildings on each end of the property. That’s a total of four.
But the Task Force was shocked when the EDC demands were finally revealed at a December 18 meeting: possibly as many as ten 30 story high rises, doubling or tripling the density of the neighborhood. I wrote in these pages that such a thing would be the death of Red Hook. We would become Dumbo.
The Master Plan was originally meant to be voted on by the Task Force in January, but yielding a bit to local pressure they moved it to April 11.
Looking to ensure they had enough votes, they gave the NY Daily News a two page op-ed, published under the name of Dan Goldman, painting a rosy picture of the EDC plan. This was surely meant to create political cover for task force members who might be hesitating on their vote. I asked everyone I know on the task force whether they knew in advance that this would appear. Many were pretty pissed about it.
Included in the op-ed were claims made for the first time — like money for NYCHA and a bit more affordable units. That’s probably why I started hearing about 40 story buildings – private developers won’t build affordable units without a certain amount of market rate. Meaning higher buildings to make their number.
The $200 million promised in that op-ed to the Red Hook Houses is exactly the same amount of money given by NYC taxpayers to help push through the Gowanus rezoning. That money was shepherded through by the Fifth Avenue Committee, a non profit real estate developer who has a financial stake in that rezoning.
That same Fifth Avenue Committee (whose office is pretty far away from here) was put on our task force.
The March 30 op-ed that ran in the News was polite and informative, stating the EDC case and looking for support using respectable language such as this: “We need our community and elected leaders to find a way to get to “yes,” rather than too often catering to legitimate but parochial reasons to get to “no.”…As with any redevelopment, there is no perfect plan that satisfies everyone’s wishes….The resulting plan has been designed with a modern container terminal at its center while also accounting for the community’s stated wishes to maintain Red Hook’s identity as an industrial hub for Brooklyn.”
Evidently that didn’t pull the Task Force votes they needed, so a few days ago they got the NY Post to run a nasty editorial that included this:
“Red Hook won’t get the 2,000 new affordable units, or any of the benefits of the Marine Terminal face-lift, without the market-rate units, but the progs will throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yet again, progressives pretend to advocate for New Yorkers while in fact always making their lives worse.”
You can help!!
I know that a lot of media types and other movers and shakers read this paper. We need our side of the story heard – please get this issue to the right people at the Times and the New Yorker and anybody else so we can throw out this plan and save the baby.
Also – a local group called Voices of the Waterfront has sprung up. Among their achievements already has been the highly effective protest last week that the Post railed about in that editorial. If we end up in court over this, they will be an important player.
https://www.voicesofthewaterfront.com/
Author
George Fiala has worked in radio, newspapers and direct marketing his whole life, except for when he was a vendor at Shea Stadium, pizza and cheesesteak maker in Lancaster, PA, and an occasional comic book dealer. He studied English and drinking in college, international relations at the New School, and in his spare time plays drums and fixes pinball machines.
