Still Opposing Plan to Develop Willets Point, One Business Decides to Sell (NY Times)

High Line Designs are Unveiled (NY Times)

Sweet & Lower (Architect’s Newspaper)

High Court Won’t Hear Appeal on Atlantic Yards (NY Times)

Monday’s event was a hearing on the city’s draft Scope for rezoning 27 acres of Coney Island as historically preserved public land. Department of Planning Brooklyn Director Purnima Kapur addressed the audience last night, elaborating on the city’s initiatives as they have changed since the last scoping hearing, in February; mainly, the expansion to 27-acres of amusement area, up from 9, and the movement of indoor amusements toward the southeast extending from Steeplechase Plaza.

If City Planning gets its way, developer Thor Equities, which owns much of the land, will have to scale back its plans to build condo towers on the site. Yet the city proposal still retains much of Thor’s vision, including “indoor amenities,” like big-name retail, and adding 2,700 new housing units, on what Kapur calls “vacant and sparsely utilized” land.

Scoping is a vital preliminary step in the city’s land use review process, because it sets the boundaries of what can be included in the Environmental Impact Statement and therefore what a rezoning can accomplish. The public hearings are required by law, but City Planning is under no obligation to follow through on ideas or concerns voiced by those who testify.

In the case of Monday’s hearing, it would be hard to pick one view, since so many were voiced at the hearing. It was hard to even hear Kapur amid the round of boos that erupted during her presentation, which echoed much of what was said on the steps of the auditorium, before the meeting even began.

Cultural and historical preservation were very much on the minds of demonstrators like the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, “Can I get a coney-lulah? Can I get a freak a lulah?” the Rev. Billy rallied the crowd in the auditorium. Other performance artists joined the chorus against new development, presenting posters that read “Coney Island not Condo Island.” The Queen of last Saturday’s Mermaid Parade, Savitri D, and, Coney Island Museum director Dick Zigun, also testified against the City’s plans.

This was noteworthy because until recently, Zigun served on the Coney Island Development Corporation, the Bloomberg Administration’s local partner on the redevelopment. He tendered his resignation at the hearing. “Two months ago,” testified Zigun, “the process broke down. “ City Planning, as he explained it in his resignation letter, unilaterally changed the strategic plan for the area to allow for a bigger presence of high-rise housing and retail, and fewer acres dedicated to amusements. “The city gutted our plan. I didn’t leave the CIDC. The CIDC left me.”

Others who spoke supported development in Coney Island, under certain conditions. As John Blyden of the group Coney Island CLEAR (Community Labor Empowerment Alliance for Redevelopment) said, the opposition was there to “maximize benefits for residents…and clearly define what affordable [housing] means in this redevelopment plan.” Representatives from Laborers Local 79 and ACORN voiced similar views. Several neighborhood residents also testified in support of the City plans.

The Past and Future of Sustainability (Gotham Gazette)

A Coney Island Strip Mall? (Brooklyn Paper)

Coney Island: Rides or Shopping? (NY Times)

Promised Brooklyn Community Center May Not Open (NY times)

Public Housing Residents Face Loss of Their Community Centers (NY Times)

Car-free Manhattan Boulevards on August Saturdays (Gothamist)

Upper East Side Tower Plan Significantly Scaled Back (New York Sun)

I love Brooklyn. This is my home. This is where I’ve lived my entire life. It’s where I went to school from pre-K to 12^th grade. Brooklyn is dying a slow and terrible death, where she is silenced by the tearing down of her walls and the demeaning voices of developers and gentrifies are engulfing her and the rest of us. It kills me to know how money has overpowered the integrity of my borough and my community and what’s good just seems to be falling to the wayside.

FUREE’S been working so hard to do something, anything to help the people living here, since we are the ones directly affected by this change. I don’t live in squalor. I’ve do well at school, help my community, am active in many events to help my community members and my school and yet, I’m being displaced with many other community members. Why should I struggle so hard to find a job, to get into college, to live in my community and to keep my home when others take it so easily from me and mine?

It seems that there is nothing being done to provide what’s really needed in Brooklyn, especially in Brooklyn schools. Many neighborhoods are deprived of bare necessities and education is one of them. How is it that the city and developers have millions of dollars to build condos that are still empty, yet school buildings in my neighborhood and in the surrounding neighborhoods where poor people of color live, are falling apart? Why are school books more than 10 years old? Why are there teachers teaching subjects they didn’t go to school for and aren’t qualified to teach? Why are schools throwing away massive amounts of food every day when there are shelters near with hungry people?

I love Brooklyn. It’s my home. But it’s changed and it’s not for the better. Hopefully as a student entering college, I’ll be able to make even more change in my community.

Saturday, May 17^th, was FUREE’s 5^th Annual Convention. This year was the best convention ever. We had a good turn out with nearly 300 people in attendance, and we had our politicians show up as well: Charles Barron, Hakeem Jeffries, Latisha James, Joseph Lentol, Valmanette Montgomery, and a representative from Governor Patterson’s office.

The convention is a yearly community forum where we invited elected officials and others that can help members of the community with the issues they have.

We heard testimonies about how our communities are not given enough attention by the local officials, but specifically what I liked was the youth representatives who were there.  The youth at FUREE conducted a survey over 6 weeks with more than 300 youth, from 14 different high schools, who answered questions about issues that are important to us.

Clayton, a member of FUREE’s Youth Organizing Initiative, presented the findings and youth demands, went up there and told the politicians what youth wanted:

• Job opportunities
• College preparation
• Safety in schools
• and more after-school programs

We came out to make sure that the youth demands were heard loud and clear by politicians and our community.

Clayton says: My experience at the FUREE convention was a good experience because I was able to go on stage and speak for the youth about lack of jobs, safety in schools, college preparation and police brutality. What I learned from this experience is that this battle we are in is just getting started.

We will win this war for Brooklyn. We will change Brooklyn back to the old ways and if not we will develop Brooklyn into a community that’s affordable, beautiful and meant for all the people of Brooklyn.

– Nahyshene Molina and Clayton Williams, Youth Activists

Keeping Starrett City Affordable (NY Times)

Development on the Hudson (NY Times)  

Street Improvements in the Bronx (NY Daily News)

Help Avoiding Home Foreclosures (Newsday)

Supermarkets Flee City’s High Costs (Crain’s New York Business) 

Residential Building Permits Plunge by 50% (Crain’s New York Business)

New Study Faults Plazas as Public in Name, Private in Look (New York Times)

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.

Invoiced Funders:

Corporations:

• Bank of New York: $25,000
• Commerce Bank: $25,000
• Con Edison: $25,000
• JP Morgan Chase: $25,000
• KeySpan Energy: $25,000
• Marriott Hotel: $25,000
• Sovereign Bank: $25,000

Property Owners/Developers:

• 167 Johnson Street: $25,000
• Atlantic Yards Development Corp: $25,000
• Avalon Bay: $25,000
• Bechtel Park Tower: $25,000
• BFC: $25,000
• Clarett Group: $25,000
• Cushman and Wakefield: $12,500
• HS Development Partners: $25,000
• I. Cheera & Sons: $25,000
• Massey Knakal: $12,500
• Muss Development: $25,000
• P/A Associates: $50,000
• Red Apple Group: $25,000
• SDS Procida $25,000
• Two Trees: $25,000
• United American Land: $25,000

Academic Institutions:

• Brooklyn Law School: $15,000
• LIU: $15,000
• Polytechnic Univ.: $15,000

“Projected Contributors” on the list include Verizon, Forest City Ratner, the Dermot Group and the New York City College of Technology, while “possible future members” listed, among others, Bear Stearns, John Catsimatidis, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, Macy’s, Target and Bank of America.