Menchaca’s finest hour didn’t go well, by Brett Yates

After an hour or more of picketing and soapboxing outside, a raucous, emotional crowd filled the auditorium of Sunset Park High School to capacity on September 16. Following a six-month delay for a comprehensive evaluation, Councilmember Carlos Menchaca had, apparently, reached a verdict on the Industry City rezoning and had invited the community to hear it. By the end of the night – before he could conclude his presentation – the angry audience had shouted him out of the room.

Some Sunset Park residents support the Industry City plan because it would create new jobs, and others, fearing gentrification, vehemently oppose it. Both sides showed up for Menchaca’s event, and in the end, his gesture toward compromise likely satisfied neither. But the resisters – including community groups like UPROSE and Protect Sunset Park and leftist activists from the South Brooklyn DSA – bore a superior fury, and their unconditional stance against the rezoning shut down Menchaca’s night. After he left, they took the microphone and, in an energetic display of popular democracy, continued to occupy the room, even after security tried to turn off the lights.

How had Menchaca – a darling of the left since his election in 2013, celebrated for prioritizing the voices of community members over those of business leaders – managed to alienate so many of his former allies? It had taken a degree of political courage for him to refuse to rubber-stamp the Industry City proposal right off the bat – publications like Crain’s and The Real Deal erupted in outrage at a legislative misstep so severe, in their eyes, that it warranted a major procedural change in City Council to take away the traditional right of councilmembers to determine individually the fates of ULURPs in their own districts.

There’s little doubt that if fellow progressive Brad Lander, Gowanus’s councilman, presided over Sunset Park, Industry City would have been a done deal ages ago. But, then, Gowanus isn’t politically organized to the same degree as Sunset Park. For his constituents, Menchaca’s principled hesitation wasn’t enough.

Two plans

Industry City’s owners had asked for the right to build – in addition to the property’s existing capacities (except for its warehouse space, which would see a reduction) – two hotels, 700,000 square feet of retail, 1.3 million square feet of offices, and 600,000 square feet of classrooms on their 35 acres, zoned for manufacturing. At Sunset Park High School, Menchaca declared that he absolutely would not allow such a rezoning to take place. But he also announced that he would consider an alternative plan that would exclude hotels and cut the bonus on retail space.

In order to earn a rezoning, Industry City would now have to build a vocational high school and adult job training center and pay into a local fund for affordable housing and tenant organizing, with supplementary investments from the Mayor’s Office. An agreement would mandate that a nonprofit manage a portion of the complex for the purpose of recruiting manufacturers to relocate to Industry City, and PV panels would cover the rooftops as an expansion of an existing community solar project developed in part by UPROSE.

Menchaca insisted that he had not yet made a commitment to Industry City – the new rezoning was still in the works, and it might not happen at all – but his opponents, suspecting a backroom deal, assumed the revised plan was a fait accompli, for which they booed him off the stage. More recent reports suggest that the future of the complex may indeed still be up in the air, as Menchaca has demanded that Industry City consent to a second postponement, during which they must negotiate a legally binding community benefits agreement with neighborhood leaders. The process is now set to begin.

Will this, finally, satisfy the critics? The answer, of course, is no – at least for many of them. They want Menchaca to jam the system. They’ve stated their position loud and clear: “No rezoning, no conditions!”

Anti-capitalism on the neighborhood level

Is this an inherently unreasonable stance? To most, it may seem so. It exists fully outside the dominant ideological framework of our local and national politics, which take for granted that, in order to stay afloat, cities and neighborhoods must to some degree court the investments of multi-billion-dollar firms like Jamestown LP, which co-owns Industry City. For conservatives, the benevolence of private enterprise is incontestable and warrants absolute public deference, while liberals believe that government must impose restraints to ensure that companies serve their communities in addition to generating profit.

Many of the activists in Sunset Park, however, displayed outright hostility to Industry City – they believed that their neighborhood would be better off without it, in its ULURPed form or its current one. They know we live in a capitalist country, and no one can prevent entities like Jamestown LP from owning property, but the least we can do, in their eyes, is refuse to alter our land-use rules to empower them further as they cannibalize vulnerable communities.

Menchaca began to lose control of the room when he referred to the real estate consortium behind Industry City as “our neighbors.” A spectator yelled back, “Industry City is not our neighbors!” When he mentioned that, under his plan, Industry City would contribute funding for tenant organizing in Sunset Park, tenant organizers in the audience declared that they didn’t want Industry City’s money.

It didn’t help that, for observers on both ends of the spectrum, Menchaca’s speech bore a taste of equivocation and bad faith. In fact, he didn’t really give a proper speech at all – instead, he walked the audience like a kindergarten class through a set of PowerPoint slides, which began by noting the challenges faced by Sunset Park (rising rents, deteriorating housing stock, crowded schools) and subsequently acknowledged that the proposed Industry City rezoning wouldn’t help solve those problems.

But from there, Menchaca made a logical leap, and much of the crowd declined to follow: he claimed that refusing to do any kind of rezoning also wouldn’t solve Sunset Park’s problems, and therefore, the correct course of action was to design a new rezoning on the community’s own terms. (Of course, it would still have to be attractive enough to Industry City to earn the developer’s co-sign.)

Menchaca’s facile logic technically contained a degree of truth – without any density bonuses or special zoning exemptions, Industry City would continue (within limits) to attract new office and retail tenants, accelerating the gentrification of the surrounding area – but it relied on an artificially narrow range of political possibility, essentially asserting that nothing good can happen in Sunset Park except through Industry City.

How things get done

By any normal standard, Menchaca is playing hardball with Industry City, but lately the standard for political progressivism in the United States has shifted, and left flank of City Council risks falling behind, especially amid the increased popularity of democratic socialism. For today’s radicals (a term that shouldn’t imply disparagement), the councilman’s task is not to attempt vigorously to persuade the developer to use its money and power to fix the troubles for which the developer itself appears to be a major cause – this may simply be an incoherent mission. Rather, his job is to find other mechanisms to serve the neighborhood’s needs – that is, to use his own power as a representative of the people.

Rarely does it occur to a councilmember that, if a rezoning is so unattractive to the surrounding community that it requires a host of givebacks to make the arrangement palatable, it may not deserve on its merits to take place. Unfortunately, our municipal government has come to rely on such givebacks: it is, for instance, a dispiriting fact of modern life in New York that the city hardly ever builds its own parks or schools anymore.

Who has the money for such things? Well, developers do – and when they come to the city for a land-use change in order to put up a taller skyscraper than zoning allows, the city tells them to construct a park or a school, too, in exchange for the favor. In this way, the city loses control of its own infrastructure. Instead of a central body allocating public works projects across the city according to need, local councilmen snag infrastructural upgrades for their districts by striking deals with developers, which in turn cough up acts of public charity – say, a renovated subway station – that, of course, turn out in many cases to be necessities for the future tenants of their buildings.

What happens to the areas in the which developers have no interest? They’re forgotten. And what happens to the areas in which they do have interest? They begin to change, and unsurprisingly, the changes always seem to end up taking the shape of the developer’s will, not the public’s, no matter how hard the elected officials negotiated. A “free” school sounds like a good deal, but it’s not really free; it’s paid for by dollars that the city could have already extracted through taxation and used for its own democratically determined purposes (maybe a school, maybe something else).

What the loudest members of the crowd in Sunset Park wanted on September 16 was for Carlos Menchaca to reject, categorically, the dominant model of development in New York City. By doing so, he would’ve scandalized some, who take a commonsense view on planning, and would’ve inspired others, who believe there can be power in saying no even when the costs are clearer than the alternate path forward. Instead, he found a middle ground.

Understandably, Menchaca would like to avoid earning a reputation as a sellout without gaining one as an obstructionist – it’s a fine line he’s trying to walk, and right now it doesn’t look like he’s doing it very successfully (people are calling him a sellout and an obstructionist simultaneously). But despite the grim realism of his presentation at Sunset Park High School, refusing a rezoning at Industry City wouldn’t have to mean political inaction.

A different idea

Sunset Park residents distrusted the Industry City proposal in large part because they doubted the value of increased retail development on their historically industrial waterfront: new shops and restaurants at Industry City would drive up rents nearby by making the neighborhood attractive to yuppies and tourists, but it wouldn’t provide high-paying union jobs. What residents wanted was manufacturing work.

Menchaca’s plan would force the developer to commit a small portion of Industry City to manufacturing in exchange for a moderate retail bonus. Without a rezoning, the developer could add retail (though not as much of it) without adding any manufacturing unless it wanted to. But if Industry City is currently zoned for manufacturing, why isn’t it required to use all of its space for manufacturing as things stand? The answer lies in New York City’s permissive 1961 Zoning Resolution.

58 years ago, planners could hardly have imagined that white-collar firms would want to locate their offices in Gowanus or that fancy food courts would pop up in Bush Terminal, crowding out industry in longtime industrial neighborhoods. In order to avoid noise complaints and environmental hazards, manufacturing zones don’t permit residential uses, but they do allow for offices and most retail uses – after all, in 1961, what was the harm, when the demand for such uses was so low in industrial areas?

Things have changed, obviously, but the Zoning Resolution hasn’t changed with them. If New York City truly wanted to preserve and expand its manufacturing, it would have to change the zoning rules to ensure that properties in manufacturing zones devote at least a significant portion of their floor area to industrial uses. UPROSE has advocated precisely for such a revision. Some cities, like San Francisco, have already written new laws of this nature (although generally they apply only in specially designated planning districts, not in all manufacturing zones).

Without Carlos Menchaca, Red Hook today might look a lot more like Williamsburg, and for his steadfastness here he deserves recognition. But if he seriously envisions Industry City as a valuable employer of working-class people and a source of stability – not disruption – for Sunset Park, he might do more for that vision by addressing the underlying problem in City Council. Instead of negotiating with the developer, pushing for a zoning code amendment could have been the bigger, braver fight that some of his constituents wanted – a refusal to give in without giving up.