New York City has a housing shortage. Most every elected official grandstands over the need to create more apartments, especially so-called affordable ones.<\/p>\n
Yet, these same elected officials seem to do their worst to stall or kill every initiative to create new homes \u2014 affordable or not.<\/p>\n
This is exactly what\u2019s happening at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a mostly wasted, 122-acre slice of waterfront between Cobble Hill and Red Hook. The city\u2019s Economic Development Corp. (EDC) sensibly wants to reconfigure it for a master plan to include 6,000 new apartments, of which 40% would be affordable, as well as for a park and other public facilities, all situated amidst a modernized but shrunken port.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s Economic Development Corp. (EDC) wants to reconfigure the Brooklyn Marine Terminal for a master plan to include 6,000 new apartments. Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams announced plans for it in early 2024, but critics have stalled progress. Paul Martinka<\/p>\n
Critics of such land-reclamation proposals typically howl that\u00a0they won\u2019t have enough \u201caffordable\u201d units;\u00a0they\u2019ll cause \u201cgentrification;\u201d they\u2019ll cost people their jobs, pollute the ground and generate intolerable traffic congestion. <\/p>\n
The gripes over the plan include all of those as well as that it isn\u2019t \u201ctransparent\u201d enough \u2014 though it\u2019s been fully before the public since the EDC presented its plan in February 2024. There are also concerns it would crimp efforts to bring back manufacturing \u2014 never mind that the ship of industry\u00a0sailed more than a half-century ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago, the various stinks cowed the city into postponing a crucial vote on the project for the fifth time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a shame, especially since the real motivation behind what media coverage has deemed \u201ccommunity pushback\u201d \u2014 which really means resistance from a handful of vocal left-wing politicians and activists \u2014 is antipathy to enriching real estate developers. No specific developers would even be selected for years, but in\u00a0the Big Apple\u2019s progressive circles, just being in the development business is a form of Original Sin.<\/p>\n
The EDC\u2019s vision calls for a holistic waterfront community on a\u00a0site that\u2019s now near-useless for its original purpose of handling shipping, and which is off-limits to the public despite its majestic harbor setting. Its less plausible goal is to modernize the terminal to facilitate \u201cBlue Highways,\u201d a Department of Transportation fantasy to take trucks off the streets in favor of moving goods on waterways.\u00a0We await word on how furniture and such will reach Macy\u2019s by sea.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Brooklyn Marine Terminal is a mostly wasted, 122-acre slice of waterfront between Cobble Hill and Red Hook. Getty Images<\/p>\n
Notwithstanding that pipe dream, the proposal is a no-brainer. Redesigning\u00a0the terminal for human habitation requires no condemnation of private property \u2014 the\u00a0city owns the land. No harbor views would be blocked because, presently, the terminal\u2019s walls and fences already do that. No existing jobs would be lost, a reason why labor unions support it.<\/p>\n
Yet, the latest postponement of the vote\u00a0by a \u201ctask force\u201d of public and private officials only empowered hostile \u201cstakeholders\u201d to punch more holes in the plan.<\/p>\n
The lonely terminal site stretches\u00a0from Atlantic Avenue on the Cobble Hill border to Pier 12 at Wolcott Street in Red Hook. A stroll along Columbia and Van Brunt streets \u2014 which are as close as I could get to the desolation behind \u2014 revealed glimpses of a wasteland shadowed by relics of a seafaring\u00a0era that isn\u2019t coming back. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Developing the waterfront would be a clear win for the city. NYCEDC<\/p>\n
I saw exactly three workmen in a 45-minute ramble. Many of the\u00a0piers are rotted and idle. So are some cranes once used to unload ships. Half of the land is used for non-maritime purposes, e.g., \u00a0a beer warehouse, a concrete-recycling plant, a US Customs inspection facility, a lumber yard and even graveyards for \u00a0abandoned cars and boats.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0 sprawling\u00a0complex\u00a0handles a paltry 60,000 tons of shipped goods each year \u2014 1.4% of all container goods that come into New York Harbor.<\/p>\n
In addition to thousands of apartment, there would be ample green space for New Yorkers to enjoy. NYCEDC<\/p>\n
Even so, Council member Alexa Aviles griped that the plan was being \u201cforce-fed\u201d on residents.\u00a0 Brooklyn Borough president Antonio Reynoso complained that an initiative originally meant to improve the port for shipping and industry turned into a \u201clargely\u00a0a housing project.\u201d But isn\u2019t that what New Yorkers want?<\/p>\n
Reynoso is nostalgic for the era when \u201cNew York City factories employed more than 1 million people,\u201d as he wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle. The terminal offered \u201cour last real opportunity to reclaim the waterfront industrial potential our city let slip away,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
Brooklyn Borough president Antonio Reynoso has complained that the development would be \u201clargely a housing project.\u201d Gabriella Bass<\/p>\n
Reynoso sounds as mired in the past as President Donald Trump, who believes our service-economy nation can magically recover its mid-20th Century manufacturing might. He also\u00a0ignores that the \u00a0 Brooklyn Navy Yard is a waterfront industrial park which the city did not \u201clet slip away,\u201d but successfully nurtured.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rep. Jerry \u00a0Nadler wants to subject the plan\u2019s housing component to the city\u2019s tortuous, seven-month land-use review process, an obstacle course which has felled many a worthy plan in its tracks. He fears that thousands of new housing units would adversely affect the neighborhood. \u00a0But\u00a0it could only uplift the area which, despite its cutting-edge reputation for cafes and galleries, remains dominated by NYCHA\u2019s\u00a0crime-ridden Red Hook Houses complex.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0supposedly progressive obstructionists are in truth reactionaries who stand in the way of \u00a0actual progress \u2014 and housing-starved New Yorkers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City has a housing shortage. Most every elected official grandstands over the need to create more…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":134308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,15845,1121,7065,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,32681,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-134307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-antonio-reynoso","10":"tag-brooklyn","11":"tag-housing","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-opinion","19":"tag-postscript","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-of-america","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115004438225800436","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}