The Eminent Domain

Let’s give a deeply deserved round of applause for Mattie Burkert, who has been a driving force behind The Eminent Domain from its inception. Mattie is interning at the incredible Chicago Reporter this summer, and from there she heads into her senior year at NYU. She’ll be posting from time to time, but we’ll miss having Mattie here. Thank you!!

When we first started putting together this site last fall, Alyssa and I spent a lot of trying to figure out just who, exactly, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership was.

According to the organization’s website,

The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP) is a not-for-profit local development corporation incorporated in the summer of 2006 in an effort to coordinate economic development activities in Downtown Brooklyn and ensure implementation of public and private development projects in the area. The DBP works in close partnership with the City of New York to:

• expedite design and construction of public capital projects
• facilitate the development of commercial and residential real estate projects
• create strategies for corporate recruitment and the reuse of undercapitalized properties
• advance the development of cultural venues and public space within the BAM Cultural District
• coordinate transportation planning initiatives
• spearhead an area-wide branding and marketing campaign
• improve area business conditions and quality of life.

The DBP incorporates the functions of four existing not-for-profit organizations providing economic development services within Downtown Brooklyn (Downtown Brooklyn Council, BAM Local Development Corporation, MetroTech Business Improvement District and Fulton Mall Improvement Association) and has an annual operating budget of approximately $8 million.

The DBP has a staff of approximately 25 and is overseen by a Board of Directors comprised of leaders from Downtown Brooklyn’s corporate sector, academic institutions and cultural community.

A little vague, right? And what about that $8 million budget? Only $2 million is coming from the City, and the BID budgets don’t add up quite that high. So who are the private funders? We placed some calls, but got no answers.

Well, we’ve gotten our hands on an internal email, dated August 16, 2007, containing a complete listing of contributors (after the jump) and amounts paid. We figure it’s in the public interest to know exactly who has been financing the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s activities, and therefore has former Bloomberg administration economic development officials at their disposal to advocate for their projects.

Read the rest of this entry

A post on Brownstoner about FUREE’s upcoming annual convention has generated a wave of comments that are pretty astounding in their hostility to the people and businesses that have been in the area all along. Other posters are fighting back in defense, and the messages are worth reading. Here are some of them:

I think community organizing is important. Too often developers get away with anything they want as community boards and city planning let developers do whatever they want.

Only when community members get involved do people get what they want. So what is wrong with letting people ask for what they want.

I hope that community members fight hard for what they want. Nobody will fight for them.

****

That shopping area exists as it is, in fact, because it is profitable and ideally located in the middle of the second biggest subway hub in NYC. Of course it used to be an almost exclusively white space (not that white people ever notice when something is predominantly white) until all of your parents and grandparents fled to the suburbs. Those without that luxury or option filled the vacuum of white flight. The businesses in Fulton Mall are a reflection of that and the concomitant disinvestment by the city, as well as the lack of capital resources available to the tenants for major structural improvements.

But these days white flight is going the other way; the upper-middle class is pouring back into cities and suburbanizing them as quickly as possible, remaking them in their own image. And just like their parents couldn’t possibly understand why blacks would be angry about economic disenfranchisement, social exclusion, and segregation (yes! I am talking about 20th century BROOKLYN here), these wonderful new “Brooklynites” can’t possibly imagine why people would be angry enough to fight back, when what little space and community they have garnered for themselves is ripped away to make room for the aesthetic taste and consumer culture of the “upper class.”

***

I’m one of those white suburbanites who grew up and moved to Brooklyn, and a big reason why is because I couldn’t stand the lack or racial and economic diversity where I grew up. Downtown Brooklyn has a long history of racial cooperation, since back when those houses on Duffield Street were Underground Railroad stops and free slaves settled the neighborhoods nearby. The proposed redevelopment threatens to upset the historic balance we have and impose an unwanted homogeneity on our racially mixed neighborhood. Whether or not I shop downtown or on Smith Street is irrelevant. Smith Street already exists for me to shop on, and downtown Brooklyn exists for my neighbors. The expected cultural encroachment is greedy and unnecessary.

FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality) is having our 6th annual Convention on May 17th, at PS 67 at 51 St. Edwards Street, from noon to 5 p.m. Lunch will be served from noon to 1 p.m. At 1, we will be ushering all of the community tenants into the auditorium to hold our District leaders and elected officials accountable and have them answer all the questions the community has about the development in Downtown Brooklyn, the problems they are having in their public housing developments, and the lack of services in their community.

Some parts of our community are lacking are a supermarket, laundromat, pharmacy, restaurants, grocery store, retail store, Check Cashing, and fish market. The community also wants the renovated community center to be opened to the people currently living there and, want to be a part of planning of the programs that will be offered there as well.

The community wants the vacant apartments in the Ingersoll and Walt Whitman Houses filled. The Community also wants the condominiums that are springing up around the community to be affordable to the people of the community as well folks earning income ranging from $16,000 to $35,000.
Once the Convention program wraps up in the auditorium, the community members in attendance, FUREE and the Sarah McKinney High School Band will be marching around Downtown Brooklyn!
I had a lot of fun planning the Convention. I got the chance to speak with and invite elected officials like Congressman Ed Towns, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, State Assemblyman Hakim Jeffries, State Assemblyman Karim Camara, State Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, Council Member Letitia James, Council Member Charles Barron, Councilmember David Yassky, and Mr. Tino Hernandez (Chairman of NYCHA).

In the planning of the Convention, we had a lot of footwork ahead of us. We are putting up flyers all over the neighborhood, door knocking throughout the community and making many phone banking calls to the people in the community to get them to come out and hear their elected officials but also to have their elected officials hear them.

We plan on having at least 500 people at the Convention this year since we had 300 people last year. We are giving out drawstring bags with packets, which will have a lot of information for the people, a FUREE pin so that they can show support, a pen that says FUREE so that we’re always in their creative writing minds and more goodies, just for signing up and coming out. We also had fun making the flyers posters, and FUREE flags because we get a lot of volunteers. We sat around a large table making these and having a lot of fun learning more about each other. At the Convention we will wear our FUREE T-shirts, which come in red, black and white.

The Convention is a very powerful learning session and forum to show that the community cares and wants to be involved in the decisions made about their lives. It iis a space where the community can hold the elected official accountable for their words and actions. It’s important to be able to have these accountability sessions because none of the elected officials come knocking on the community’s doors to give them any answers about what’s going on.

FUREE’s annual Convention is where not only can these sessions can take place, but where these sessions give the community back it’s voice, it’s power to make change and the energy needed to keep on fighting for the rights on the community members.
Everyone is invited to come out and be heard.

Real Estate Slump Hits New York (Gotham Gazette)

Negotions Over CBA for Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment (Daily News)

Bronx Residents Rally Against Plans to Turn Armory Into Mall (NY1)

Delays in $4 Billion Brooklyn Development Are Challenged in Tenants’ Lawsuit (NY Times)

An Open Letter to President Bollinger (Columbia Spectator)

Residents Say Campus is Not Always Welcoming (Columbia Spectator)

As part of FUREE, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, I’ve been deep in the struggle for downtown Brooklyn’s residents and businesses while the area is turning into a construction site for luxury condos. But lately I’ve been telling people here that if they think that gentrification and development are isolated issues solely affecting Downtown Brooklyn, they’ll need to look a little deeper into the East, towards Jamaica, Queens, for a bitter dose of the reality of NYC’s new deja vu. I’m watching the area my family lives in turn into the next neighborhood under siege.

As shops close, people are displaced, schools are threatened and politicians smile in the community’s face, Brooklyn has been resilient in fighting back as best it can, knowing that it is wrong; knowing that it is actually hurting the community. On the flipside, however, in Jamaica, Queens, some folks don’t realize that what initially happened in Downtown Brooklyn has and is happening there.

One morning, in its usual nonchalant tone, NY1 announced that the MTA handed over real estate in Jamaica, Queens to “spur” development. According to NY1, some people are welcoming the development, thinking that the city will keeps its promise that the development will cater to BOTH the Long Island Railroad commuters and Jamaica residents. Little do they know that Brooklyn probably thought the same thing in the very beginning in terms of “developing” the community.

While Jamaica fights gentrification and development in its already prospering community, Sunnyside, Queens, is fighting mass evictions and rent hikes, as real estate trusts buy up apartment buildings. And while Sunnyside is protesting, Far Rockaway is being “saved” by overdevelopment. The difference in these issues is who lives in the area and where their tax brackets lie. Like Downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica and Sunnyside had low-income, people of color and struggling working class folks in common, while the “overdeveloped” part of Far Rockaway shares more in common with the new gentrifiers, not so much in what they make or do for a living, but in developers’ attitude towards the rest of us just trying to live.
PlanNYC shows the city’s startling plan for Jamaica. Much like the plan for Downtown Brooklyn with its condos and new residents, it leaves little room for the people who are already there to have a say in it even happening and to know what their fate may be in the midst of being an “airport village” for JFK. And for further viewing, NYC.gov shows the new and improved view of Jamaica.

Actually NY1 left something out: Community Board 12 reviewed the Jamaica plan, and they rejected it. But the community’s official opinion didn’t matter; the plan went forward anyway.
The question now is: What are residents going to do in Jamaica when we start looking like Downtown Brooklyn? Will they stand up and take action before it begins or welcome it, thinking that this kind of gentrification will be different from all the rest.

And here I thought this would NEVER happen in Jamaica, Queens. But the developers are running out of space in parts of Brooklyn they want to touch, they are already all over Manhattan and the Bronx and Staten Island is just to far away for anyone to want to travel, for now.

Hopefully their words will turn into actions so that all of Queens doesn’t turn into this
and become just another form of déjà vu.

Just when you thought it was over…

Less than two weeks after City Council member Inez Dickens negotiated an agreement granting her approval of the controversial 125th Street rezoning plan in exchange for more affordable housing and decreased building heights, VOTE People plans to file a lawsuit tomorrow to stop City Council from voting on the plan Wednesday.

VOTE People, which you may remember as the group that tried earlier this month to halt the rezoning process using an obscure section of the City Charter, is now contending that the City has not given area residents ample notification as required by law. More details when the full text of the suit becomes available tomorrow.

According to Director Craig Schley, VOTE People was unsuccessful in collecting the necessary signatures from 20% of property owners in the area to be rezoned. He says the group hit a roadblock when trying to determine exactly which properties were considered part of the rezoning area, and precisely how many signatures would be needed to force an approval by a three-fourths majority of the Council.

But this latest tactic, he said in a phone conversation, is part and parcel of the group’s earlier action.

“It’s all about notice, due process, and transparency,” said Schley.

VOTE People’s attempts to stop the Harlem rezoning plan from passing are especially contentious because the city has made a conspicuous effort to involve “the community” throughout the process; beginning in 2005, Community Boards, local business owners, elected officials, civic groups, and BID members were invited to participate in advisory workshops on the future of Harlem. Notes from one of these workshops, with a list of Advisory Committee members attached, are available here.

This is not to say that VOTE People are the only ones unhappy with the way the proposal turned out; Community Board 10 voted to give its Conditional Disapproval to the plan, saying that the Environmental Impact Statement underestimated the adverse effects of the rezoning on the area. The Board’s Resolution called for “Real Community Benefits,” including income-targeted housing, incentives to support local businesses, an arts bonus, environmental protections, a prohibition on the use of eminent domain, and a number of amendments to the zoning text.

That was in December. Community Boards 9 and 11, also affected by the proposed rezoning, both gave Conditional Approval, citing a number of problems with the plan as it stood. Borough President Scott Stringer joined CB10 in rejecting the plan. None of it made much difference, though; the City Planning Commission ignored all three boards’ input and approved the rezoning in March, to much public outcry. So did the City Council’s Zoning and Franchises Subcommittee. Then, two weeks ago, before the plan could go before the full Council, Inez Dickens forged a compromise promising her approval if the plan were amended to include more affordable housing and more stringent building height limits. The two other Council members representing the area — Robert Jackson and Melissa Mark-Viverito — signed on as well. Now, VOTE People hopes to prevent the City Council from hearing the proposal this Wednesday, as is currently scheduled.

So where did it all go wrong? Schley maintains that the “appointed boards to the community,” as he calls Community Boards, are not representative of the people, because members are appointed by the Borough President. But that explanation isn’t satisfying. The Boards didn’t approve of this rezoning, and neither did Stringer. No one was playing along to try to ensure reappointment. The bigger question here is why, following what by all appearances was a rigorous process of community input, are local City Council members standing with the Bloomberg administration and not with their own constitutents?

After months of waiting for the city Economic Development Corporation to select a developer for the massive Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx neighborhood of the same name, the push is on, hard, to make the project work for Bronx residents.

EDC has selected the Related Companies to turn the historic 575,000-square-foot building in Kingsbridge Heights into a mixed-use development encompassing retail stores, entertainment venues, and recreation and community facilities. The Related Companies isn’t just any developer: its $12 billion national portfolio of real estate that includes Manhattan’s Time Warner Center. The Armory is the latest in a series of City-sponsored development projects awarded to Related; others include the Bronx Terminal Market and Brooklyn’s Gateway Mall.

In an impressive show of force, yesterday dozens of members of the Kingbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance, or KARA, stood in front of City Hall to call for negotiations for a community benefits agreement for the armory project — one that will include living wage jobs, space for schools, and other badly needed resources for the neighborhood. KARA is also calling for a labor peace agreement and a project labor agreement to make sure that jobs, in construction, retail, janitorial services, and more are union positions. And its members want to see amenities the area simply doesn’t have, from a bookstore to a movie theater.

KARA is being organized by the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a venerable force that helped the area withstand the devastation of abandonment in the 1970s. It’s now making sure that as the tide turns the other way and new profit-seeking ventures arrive in the neighborhood, that the new development strengthens the neighborhood, which remains predominantly low-income, instead of pushing it aside.

Behind the scenes, the alliance has already made an important stride: Wth local elected officials it persuaded EDC to set up a task force of residents, businesses and local leaders to set standards for the armory’s redevelopment. EDC proceeded to give preference in its selection process to developers who would agree to pay living wages, create community space, and support the neighborhood in other essential ways.

There was just one problem: neither of the viable proposals, from Related and from Atlantic Development Group, included any of those things. The preferences therefore meant nothing, and Related’s winning proposal looks like any other plan to develop a shopping and recreation center (its closest kin in the New York area is probably New Roc City, in downtown New Rochelle).

Now KARA is doing something extremely gutsy: It is trying to wrest the whole concept of a community benefits agreement back from the jaws of elected officials who have perverted it beyond recognition, so much so that New Yorkers who pay attention to development simply assume that a CBA is one step removed from a shakedown. (Check out the comments on blogs and news sites if you’d like to think that’s not true.) And you can’t exactly fault that perception, given “CBAs” like the Yankee Stadium deal that basically gives Bronx officials a pile of money they can spend in any way they want, plus an ample supply of free sports equipment.

The question now is: how is KARA going to change the script here? After all, EDC has already selected Related. Here on The Eminent Domain we’ll be following the story as KARA works to get Related to the bargaining table. KARA members will be providing updates on their campaign and vision for the neighborhood.

But the situation highlights a glaring reality: New York City is suffering from its lack of a citywide framework for how economic development projects like this happen. All over the city we’re seeing citizens wage campaigns to make development more responsive to its host communities — in West Harlem, Willets Point, downtown Brooklyn, Coney Island, and those are only the big ones — but they each fight their own lonely battles, often pitted against their own elected officials.

KARA has already assembled a strong roster and — this is key — a united front between residents, businesses, labor, and elected officials. Its members already include the Retail Workers, Teachers, Service Workers and Building Trades unions, and the alliance’s vision for the armory’s redevelopment has received endorsements from the Bronx Borough President Congressman Jose Serrano, the City Comptroller and Public Advocate, and seven members of the Bronx City Council delegation. But in the absence of a mechanism through which they can exercise influence on EDC’s development process, they will have a tough road to setting a better precedent for community benefits agreements.

City Says Kingsbridge Armory Will Become a Shopping Center (NY Times)

Redevelopment Plan Hurting Willets Point (NY Daily News)

Willets Point Project Faces City Council Stonewall (Queens Gazette)

Affordable Housing Programs in New York Get Record Boost (AM New York)

Results Are Mixed for Mayor’s PlaNYC Program (NY Sun)

Downtown Brooklyn Still Hot, But “Under-Retailed” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Pols: Stop Bruce Now (Brooklyn Paper)

Macy’s Shopping for Harlem Site (The Real Deal)

O’Donnell Files FOIL Request (Columbia Spectator)

Compromise is Reached on Harlem Rezoning (NY Times)

City’s Coney Island Design Revised to Break Deadlock (NY Times)

Housing Policy: Politics as Usual (Columbia Spectator)

Harlem Fights for Victoria Theater (AM New York)

Answers About Brooklyn Architecture (City Room)

Introducting Planning for All New Yorkers: An Atlas of Community-Based Plans (Community Based Planning)