A legal wrecking ball

Tenants hungry for lower rent should be livid at advocates who last week filed suit to block hundreds of new apartments at a Crown Heights armory, 60% of them affordable to the poor and working class. An adjoining bargain-rate rec center area residents have been demanding for years? The pool would get thrown out with the bathwater.

This is Brooklyn, 2017, where those on edge to see gentrification lurking around every corner paranoidly mistake the solution for the problem, which writ large is that demand for housing in a lately trendy neighborhood overwhelms supply built a century ago, back when the borough was mostly farmland.

In its new lawsuit, Legal Aid demands that the city stall the nearly 400 apartments, gym and nonprofit office space planned for Bedford-Union Armory for potentially years in hopes of . . . it’s not even clear.

The City Council and Mayor de Blasio’s Economic Development Corp. sweated to reach a deal the Council would accept for Bedford-Union Armory, overwhelmingly approved in a Thursday vote.

To get to yes, the city already made more concessions than it should have, committing to pour in $50 million to fuel a project originally designed to pay for itself via the sale of 56 condominiums. With the “c” word rendered profane in the anti-gentrification gospel, local and Council politics compelled Councilwoman Laurie Cumbo to demand taxpayer cash in its place. Not enough. It’s never enough. If somehow Legal Aid’s NIMBY nuisance case manages to win in court, it could roll back the clock by years — not only in Crown Heights, but far beyond.

That’s because lawyers claim city planners improperly measured just how many neighbors of the armory its development would drive out of Crown Heights in a ripple effect of neighborhood change.

True enough, the city’s usual methods notoriously underestimate just how many people will get shoved aside by big city planning changes that usher in upscale development, as on the Williamsburg waterfront a decade ago.

Except the majority-affordable Bedford-Union Armory development is nothing of the sort. Its housing is cheap. Really cheap. The City Council ponied up millions in taxpayer dollars to make sure of that.

Worse, if the plaintiffs prevail, not only could the city have to redo the epic public review of the armory development; the very steps the city has followed for decades to OK major real estate projects might have to go through an excruciating revamp.

You think the naysayers have too much sway now? Just wait.