On a beautiful late summer evening in Windsor Terrace some two hundred people jammed into the Holy Name auditorium just off Prospect Avenue to air their grievances. The sounding board on this occasion was Community Board 7, mandated by the New York City Charter to solicit comments from residents about the proposed upzoning of a large oddly-shaped section of land a block west, occupied since 1978 by the Arrow Linen Supply Company.
In 2003 Arrow signed a 25 year property tax reduction deal worth $895,000 with the City’s Economic Development Corp and employed an average of 200 sorters, washers, pressers, and drivers there. But at last count, there’s very few left since Arrow moved its business to a new Garden City plant in 2014, leaving Prospect Avenue to serve mainly as a depot for its trucks. Anyway, there are likely very few tears being shed by Arrow employees over the exodus to Nassau County, given that a dozen of them sued the owners, the brothers John and Sal Magliocco, in Brooklyn federal court for failure to pay overtime and minimum hourly wages.
No matter. For the past three years, Arrow has been frying much bigger fish, meeting with all sorts of City officials seeking support for a grand rezoning plan that would enable it to sell its property at a maximum profit. Of course, they could’ve sold it already for eight figures to some developer happy to build a bunch of three story apartment buildings, joining all the others on the block, because that’s exactly what the present zoning allows as of right. But by spending a million dollars on lobbyists, attorneys, consultants, architects, developers and what-have-you’s to push for rezoning, they’re hoping to reach that nine figure nirvana sales price. Why settle for 10 or 20 million bucks when you can screw everybody and make 100 million? DUH. This is New York, bub, wake up.
Arrow has found a receptive climate among office holders for its plan to build two 13 story towers – which will probably grow to 19 stories if the City of Yes Magila gets passed this Fall. They’ve engaged a developer with no pertinent experience (charter schools are their niche) and as a departing shock to the rest of the block, their bizarre property footprint required the 11 neighboring three story buildings to be included in its upzoning proposal as well. Here’s a tip: be sure to attend Community Board meetings to find out if your building or block is being upzoned this month.
Upzoning is really cool nowadays. Given the appetite to build-build-build, you can upzone damn near anything if your City Council Member agrees. All you need is an effective PR machine to babble constantly about affordable housing, drape every new realty initiative to City Planning as a way to combat the housing crisis, feed the downtrodden youth with progressive academic treatises, and dismiss as old, rich, entitled NIMBY namby-pambies all those who want to lower the temperature and slow things down a little to preserve the essential ingredient that makes Brooklyn such a great place to live: our wonderfully unique neighborhoods.
Which brings us back to Holy Name. Early arrivals for the 6:30 pm confab noticed rows of 30-somethings up near the front bearing drab green signs reading, “I Support Building Homes.” They were outnumbered by 50-to-60-somethings displaying glossy “Housing Not Highrises” handouts. It took a half hour for the Community Board to set up a projector (“we hired an audio visual guy but he didn’t show up”); fix the mic (“we can’t hear you!”); and take the roll call (“16 out of 30, we have a quorum”), so I wandered around the SRO crowd, hearing tidbits here and there about the Arrow family’s mob history (open source confirms the CEO and President are the son and grandson of a Colombo Family captain, Ambrogio Magliocco, who himself was the brother of “Fat Joe” Giuseppe Magliocco, former head of the Profaci Family). “More than laundry gets laundered there,” someone snickered, followed by a reply of “Did they make the electeds an offer they can’t refuse?”
“Quiet, please!” The Board’s Chair made an announcement (“the Catholic Charities proposal to build two 8 story towers of 100% affordable housing was rejected by the owners”), and then the owner’s attorney showed slides of the beauteous 13 story towers (75% unaffordable) flanking the 11 doomed row houses and their rent-stabilized tenants, with a beauteous garden pathway in the rear connecting the hundreds of residents who will be traipsing back and forth behind those 11 houses. But only until their owners yield to hedge fund offers and perhaps even larger beauteous towers will emerge, although by then, there won’t be anyone left to bamboozle and they can just build the usual ugly aluminum & glass hulks.
Then the ultimate power broker here, Council Member Shahana Hanif, stepped to the podium to announce she couldn’t reveal her true feelings about the proposal yet but by golly, 16 stories would be a story too tall! And Assemblyman Bobby Carroll got a rousing ovation as the only elected who felt “the character of a neighborhood still mattered,” offering 9 story all-affordable solutions, a proposal subsequent advocates scoffed at for not “penciling out,” if I may borrow a phrase from the realty journals I subscribe to now for early warnings about possible nightclubs slated to open on my neighbor’s roof.
At 7:30 pm the parade of speakers started and it went something like this: For every two opponents (“This will displace the tenants in the row houses!” and “These luxury apartments will drive up the prices in neighboring areas!”), there was a member of the fat-cat-developer-funded lobbying group, Open New York for Housing, complaining: “I can’t afford to live here, so let’s build more unaffordable housing and maybe I’ll win the 400-1 lottery for one of the affordable scraps thrown in!” And “I’m sick of being priced out of this community, so let’s build towers of unaffordable apartments in the hope that the price of real estate will eventually go down!” A couple of folks denied any affiliation and started addressing the crowd as “You people!” – probably recent graduates from the Open New York Finishing School needing more training.
Is there a limit?
One has to wonder at what height will a residential tower be considered ridiculous by housing advocates? Hanif said 15 is her limit, but that’s on a block consisting of 3 story houses. What about blocks with 8 story apartments houses? Would that make erection of 100 story buildings next door fine and dandy because everybody’s drunk on the development industry Kool-Aid (Brand Name: “Knock It All Down and Build-Baby-Build!”).
Well, a week later Arrow Linen lost the first round when Community Board 7 voted 30 to 6 to reject the rezoning for now, requiring Arrow to “do further community engagement with Windsor Terrace residents.” Apparently the Board’s Land Use Committee was (GASP!) shocked, SHOCKED I say, to learn that the Arrow team had been doing some private outreach and hard lobbying of individual Board members and electeds. So look for new proposals to top their towers out…18 if City of Yes passes and 12 if it doesn’t? 17 and 11?? How about 9 and call it a day, Arrow? Or Arrow could just say screw all this and erect as of right 3 story buildings with a combined max of 94 units, all market rate. Quite a comedown from 250 to 300 units. Stay tuned.
New York has the densest population in America. Yet, 70,000 apartments sit vacant, most warehoused by landlords awaiting gravy train developments, while the enormous stock of NYCHA apartments are under-served and under-maintained. Thousands of luxury and market-rate apartments sit empty year-round as money laundering parking spots for the elites. And we think more market-rate developments in prime neighborhoods will somehow reduce rents? Here’s an idea: if we don’t preserve our neighborhoods, nobody will want to live here anymore. Then we can become the East Coast version of Detroit and in the years to come, the academicians can explain how it was all because of old, entitled rich white folks who didn’t care enough to save what was truly irreplaceable.
