Redrawing the Triangle
W
ith few winners in the boom sport of shooting down real estate projects deemed to fall short of utopian social ideals, it’s nice to score one for a just cause. Segregation came part and parcel with the nine-block Broadway Triangle housing development plan as it was cooked up a decade ago by the corrupt Assembly powerbroker Vito Lopez and an organization advocating for part of the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg.
They had rigged the deal not only to put themselves in charge but also to give first dibs on half of affordable housing there to applicants from majority-white Williamsburg and Greenpoint, a privilege denied majority-black Bedford-Stuyvesant just across Flushing Ave.
Now a settlement in a lawsuit filed by local residents will better ensure that affordable housing to rise on five city-owned sites in the area will be open to people of all colors and faiths.
Mayor de Blasio’s lawyers have committed to tear up Lopez’s no-bid contract. Good riddance. Rebid the project, with a preference for proven local non-profit groups.
Scrap the earlier scheme for fewer than 200 apartments, disproportionately designed for large families — sure to be sought chiefly by Hasidic applicants — in favor of about 375 units in a range of sizes.
And, crucially, the city will give priority on half the apartments to applicants from not only Williamsburg and Greenpoint, but Bed-Stuy as well.
Nice work. Though it’s a shame the settlement commits to pay out millions to plaintiffs’ attorneys to police housing discrimination in the area.
This should be just the beginning of a painfully overdue rethink of who gets a shot at all the 120,000 new affordable apartments envisioned under de Blasio 10-year construction plan.
A separate lawsuit against the city now in federal court proposes scrapping outright the longstanding edge for affordable housing applicants living in a given project’s community board, arguing that it perpetuates segregation.
Local preferences have an important political purpose, namely to give locals and their City Council members an incentive to endorse new development. Instead of scrapping the system, the city ought to think hard and smart about how to redraw the lines of “local” to open doors, not lock out New Yorkers in need.