I’ve been trying to calculate how many new apartment buildings are needed to accommodate the 7,000 to 9,000 housing units the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) wants to add to our neighborhood to help pay for the redevelopment of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, the 122-acre strip of waterfront extending from our neighborhood, through the Columbia Waterfront District, to Atlantic Avenue. Fifty new buildings? Seventy? A hundred? I can’t believe the EDC is serious. Can you imagine a hundred new high-rises suddenly springing up along our waterfront while we go about our business? I have heard from community residents who have kept abreast of this issue that the EDC, which has been coy about its plans, shocked a room full of people at a December community meeting with its revelation about its stated intention to add these thousands of housing units to our waterfront to help finance its redevelopment. This sounds crazy to me, and my concerns seem to be shared by everyone in the neighborhood, probably including you.
I decided to attend a community meeting on February 3 at Patrick Daly School to discuss ways to stop the madness. The organizers of the meeting did a great job informing the more than 100 attendees about the EDC wanting to turn Red Hook into another Williamsburg or Gowanus or Long Island City. But I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that the attendees were almost all white. This is not a criticism of the organizers of the meeting; anyone savvy about community organizing knows that it can be challenging to get culturally and ethnically different people to collaborate on tough neighborhood issues.
In order to get some contrasting points of view, I decided to devote this month’s column to my friends and neighbors in my own building, which is just a couple blocks from the waterfront and will be very much affected by what happens there. I thought this was a good idea because the residents of my building are not white (with the exception of me but I am more of a tan Jew). What I learned is that most of my neighbors think installing thousands of units of luxury housing on our waterfront is insane.
Jackie Thornton: I don’t like the idea of the people of Red Hook that have been living in this neighborhood for this whole long time having to live near a lot of luxury housing. I don’t like that idea at all. For one thing the rent in this neighborhood is already too high. A lot of people don’t have a place to live because they can’t afford the rents! We need affordable housing in this neighborhood, not luxury buildings. These people in the city are only thinking about the upper classes, like they always do, and don’t seem to care about the lower income people. If they put all this luxury housing along the waterfront, all the prices in the neighborhood will go way, up, even higher than they are now. If this continues, we might even have to move!
Yasmine Thornton (Jackie’s daughter): This is really throwing me off. You’ve got the projects down the block and then you’d have housing for high income families over here. How do you go from the projects to luxury housing a few blocks away? It’s not correlating. It’s just gentrification all over again. All the costs will go way up. They’ll be even higher. And then how is that going to make us feel? We can barely afford the prices of everything now!
Mona Allford: Building all these new buildings is not a good idea. It will hike up the prices of everything around here. The small businesses either won’t survive or they’re going to have to raise their prices. It won’t be fair to those of us that have been here for so many years to be subjected to that. Also, all that housing might be too much for the waterfront to handle. We have had floods. We have problems with our sewer system. If you put up that many buildings, it could create more problems with flooding and sewage. Red Hook is just not big enough for that many people.
Sylvia Dobles: Red Hook to me feels like a small town. When I first moved here, there was hardly anybody in the neighborhood! I’ve been here for, like – let’s see how old is my daughter? I’ve been here for 38 or 39 years. I used to live near where Ikea is. And now I find that with all these people moving in, it doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels more crowded. And if they build all this new housing, it will feel even more crowded. We’ve got a lot of cars here. Imagine the parking if that happens. Imagine the lines in the supermarket!
Deborah “Love Bug” Brown: If they do build new housing it should be a mixture of housing, not just for people that have money, you know what I’m saying? Any new housing for high income people should be mixed with just as much housing for low income and middle-income people. They should not build housing just for people who have a lot of money, because that would not be fair to the people who have been living in this neighborhood for years. The only way it would be fair to build all this new housing is if the people who are already here have the opportunity to live there.
Joycelyn Brown (no photo) – I don’t see how they would approve this kind of plan. We’re already below sea level. We already have problems with flooding.
Well, developers often get their way. What if they figure out how to get approval for this project? What if they make repairs to the waterfront that they say will prevent the buildings from collapsing?
They are going to collapse! There’s flooding any time we have a bad storm. How are they going to keep putting new buildings on a waterfront in a city that’s already sinking? People say eventually Manhattan is going to be under water! And they keep building buildings all along the waterfront. It doesn’t make any sense.
Nita: If they build new buildings over here, how much of it would be affordable housing?
That’s one of the questions everyone is asking. We already have a shortage of affordable housing in this community. But the main issue is that the Economic Development Corporation says they need between 7,000 and 9,000 additional units of housing in order to finance the redevelopment of the waterfront.
That many? Oh, no. That’s too much. We’ll be living in a lot of clutter. It won’t be anything like what it is now. There would be no parking. Our transportation would be worse with all these new people over here! We already have a hard time trying to get to work with the traffic the way it is. Red Hook is too small to add that many people to the community! I was thinking it was maybe one or two additional buildings. But seven thousand to nine thousand new buildings? That’s just crazy! That’s way too many people to add to the community. We won’t have our quiet little sanctuary anymore.
Carmen Nieves: Putting all those new buildings on the waterfront is way too much. It would be chaos. Now it’s kind of calm here. It’s quiet. But when those buildings go up, nothing will be the same. It’s going to be overcrowded here. There will be way more traffic. The prices will go way up! The prices in Food Bazaar are already extremely high. All these people are already moving into the neighborhood, and the businesses are raising their prices.
Catering to the higher-income people.
Exactly. I can’t even imagine seven to nine thousand more units of housing here. It would be horrible!
Crystal Ha: Environmentally, that seems like such a bad idea. Red Hook is already small. We’re dealing with the smog. We’re dealing with the cruise ships. We’re dealing with Amazon. And now you want to add 9,000 units of housing to our small neighborhood? So I’m concerned! When they were doing all that building in the projects, remember all the rats that were coming out? These big building projects affect all of us. If this really does happen, but hopefully it won’t, will they provide parking for those people? Because there won’t be enough parking on the streets. And will there be any affordable housing? When I say “affordable” I don’t mean like, you make 150 thousand affordable. I mean actually affordable, for median-income people. For those of us who already live in the area.
Kathine Poche (no photo) – Within the past ten years that I’ve been here, this neighborhood has already grown so much. You know that house that they built down the block from the school? That house sold for 2.4 million dollars! These houses that they’re making on Dikeman are going for three million dollars! These houses are not affordable at all! So these buildings that they’re planning to build on the waterfront are going to do nothing for us, except to get us out of here! And that’s the point. That’s what they want to do.
Author
