The Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN) in solidarity with our member organization Mi Casa No Es Su Casa opposes the current plan to rezone the neighborhood of Bushwick as endorsed by Brooklyn Community Board 4 with Council Members Antonio Reynoso and Rafael Espinal. We know all too well that the process of rezoning, the change of land use initiated under the guise of community preservation and additional affordable housing, far too often becomes a hostage situation where communities bargain for crumbs with the city or risk getting nothing. The general public should understand  that rezoning is an opportunity for real estate interests to raise real estate prices and their subsequent abilities to make profits under our feet, and that no level of additional services or amenities that our neighborhoods already deserve should be used to justify this fact.

When Mayor De Blasio was first elected mayor in 2013, his answer to the city’s housing crisis was a plan that called for the construction and preservation of 200,000 affordable units across the city. The majority of this goal would be through saving units from falling out of the state’s rent stabilization program but 80,000 of that number would be newly built in fifteen communities chosen to be rezoned for increased density to accommodate that new construction. In addition, the city passed a new housing policy, known as Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, to encourage more affordable units across the city, but only mandatory after a neighborhood is rezoned. This policy was the supposed solution to counteract the a wave of market rate development coming not only to the targeted communities of the rezonings but citywide.

But what happens when affordable housing isn’t affordable enough for the community already there? During the Bloomberg administration, dozens of neighborhoods were rezoned in ways that changed the rental landscape of the city, often subsidized by programs such as the 421a tax abatement and with very few demands of developers for affordable housing and no protections for current tenants. One of the worst examples was the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront rezoning, where in exchange for an upzoning that would allow 20 and 30 story towers, promises were made but not kept and new developments have led to the displacement of tens of thousands of former rent stabilized tenants and small businesses within the rezoned and adjacent areas.

Fast forward a dozen years and the failures of that process have shown up on the steps of Bushwick, which has seen some of the highest rent increases over the past 10 years and has been found to be the neighborhood most likely to have housing code violations in the city. In 2014, Brooklyn Community Board 4 with Council Members Antonio Reynoso and Rafael Espinal created a process they have called the “Bushwick Community Plan”, which now consists of a Steering Committee for mostly staff of nonprofits that stand to potentially gain through improved relationships with council members based on their support of the process and may have disproportionate power over which parts of the community are represented in these conversations and which are not. Truly, the Bushwick Community Plan has been anything but community focused, as was best exemplified by Brooklyn Department of City Planning director Winston Von Engel when he said at a February community meeting about the plan that “our intention is to preserve the character and the buildings, not the people in them.”

We as the residents of this city must recognize this Freudian slip for the truth it holds of this process. The goal of the dozens of small meetings behind closed doors has never been to address the needs of Bushwick residents for better enforcement of tenant law against landlords, seek to use land available for the creation of affordable housing or for additional municipal services – school seats, public transportation, garbage removal, etc – that many local residents have advocated for in good faith. What has actually happened is an illusion of democracy that is being calibrated to both meet the mayor’s intended quota for the neighborhood and minimize potential community backlash. The Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network demands no more rezonings as a tool to allow record real-estate profits in the name of community preservation and for the Bushwick Plan Steering Committee to end this process before irreparable harm is done to the neighborhood.

For more info contact : 646-820-6039| info@BANgentrification.org