Brooklyn Rezoning Debated

Again, nothing can ever get done in this city. I bet in the current environment we couldn't hope to get an Empire State or Rockefeller Center built anymore.

I thought one of the saddest parts of the Lopate book was his description of the missed opportunity to have the Feds pick up the bill for submerging the westside highway and turning the waterfront into public park land. Yes, there were arguments for and against, but this was a case of overwhelming public and private sector support being thwarted by an anti-development minority that found salvation in the plight of the striped bass--the striped bass being a subject of paramount importance to so many NYers.

NYC may be the bluest of the blue regions in the country, but at heart it is incredibly conservative, i.e. resistant to any and all change no matter what the benefits could be. I have no doubt that if Olmstead and Vaux had attempted to design Central Park today it would have been derailed for the destruction of habitat of the urban titmouse.

This is ironic because NYC has historically been a very dynamic city development-wise. Fashionable districts migrating uptown, abandoning downtown for industrial uses. Abandoned industrial areas downtown being revitalized 100 years later as fashionable districts. The urge of some NYers to try to freeze the city in some imagined halcyon configuration goes against everything NYC actually ever was. Neighborhoods change; the city constantly changes. The West Village used to be the domain of bohemians (latter day hipsters) where adventurous wealthy people came to slum with "artists." The slaughterhouses and tanneries on the East River waterfront eventually evolved into Turtle Bay.

I have nothing against historical preservation; I think the people who tore down Penn Station should be shot--or if dead already: dug up, shot, and then re-buried--but the knee-jerk anti-development impulses of many NYers is historically anomalous and would confound the people that made this city what it is today. And the perfect can be the enemy of the good. Holding out for just-right proposals means that many potentially benificial changes will never occur at all, even if they would make the city a better place.

Please excuse my screed. I just had to get that off my chest.

Have any of you actually even looked at the plans, and what the community is asking for instead? The community is not against rezoning; they were the ones who initiated it in the first place. The devil is in the details.

The towers proposed are much too tall.

The amount of open space the City's plan would create wouldn't create a net gain per capita, given the addition of tens of thousands of people to be created by the new development (and the area is already among the worst-served in the entire city in terms of park and open space).

There is no planned mass transit to deal with the masses of new residents. None!

It's likely that the City's plan will result in zero housing that is affordable to the current residents of the area. The cheapest units would be affordable only to people who earn at least %50,000/yr more than the average local.

The waterfront esplanade would be built piecemeal over maybe 10 or more years, at a timetable dictated by developers' needs and whims. That means that the public would not have access to said esplanade for a long, long time. And even then, the private owners will restrict use and, if they're typical, hire rent-a-cops to keep the public out (as similar developments do along the NJ shore across the Hudson).

Finally, there is no protection whatsoever under the new inland zoning designation proposal for existing businesses which require M zoning: bakeries, woodworkers, glassblowers, art packers and shippers, historical restorers, you name it. Most of them rent their spaces and when their leases come up -- poof! They'll be outta there so their landlords can build more luxury condos!

In other words, the neighborhood will change from the unique NYC place it is, to another boring bedroom community. It's not a striped bass, it's an entire neighborhood. There's good change and bad change, and this would be the latter.

Some comments to this article just amaze me. To me, knowing that DCP's proposed amount of aopen space isn't enough is as simple as what we learned in grammer school.
Trees give off oxygen. People need that. The more people that breath the air, the more trees you need! What's so hard to comprehend?
Now, combine that with our already depleted tree canopy cover from the Asian Long Horned Beetle, , the many waste transfer stations, the ( larger than Exxon/Valdez ) oil spill, the expected emissions of chloroform and acrolein ... upon the completion of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Pollution Control Plant ...
and the question becomes, "Where is the proper amount of parkland to filter all these emissions? If the Plant is in Greenpoint, how will the Olympic Park in Williamsburg help filter the air? Common sense!!