NIMBY Forever
New housing’s biggest enemies: NY’s richest
NOT in my backyard — NIMBY — never dies. More than that, it doesn’t even change its tune. Opponents of a rezoning that is needed to allow a big new residential development called River Street, on the Williamsburg waterfront, are making some of the exact same arguments used by foes of a 2005 rezoning in the same Brooklyn neighborhood.
The 2005 rezoning didn’t lead to the mass displacement and congestion that opponents feared and warned about. Instead, it led to the creation of more than 12,000 new homes, including 3,000 for lower-income families, in an area where housing supply is painfully tight.
And ironically, many current Williamsburg riverfront residents who fiercely oppose the proposed new River Street project are the area’s original gentrifiers, having themselves benefited from the earlier rezoning.
Leading the resistance are wealthy residents of Northside Piers, a luxury condo complex just north of the proposed development site that was only made possible by Bloomberg-era rezoning.
Development firm Two Trees Management wants to build two rental apartment towers of 600 and 650 feet tall each as well as a new YMCA, a 2.9-acre public park, a sandy beach and a breakwater-protected cove on the East River, all between Grand and North Third streets. Onequarter of the planned 1,000 apartments would be priced at “affordable” levels.
World-renowned architect Bjarke Ingels designed the buildings, while the park is the work of James Corner Field Operations, which landscaped the High Line Park.
Two Trees needs a zoning change because the site — a former Con Ed oil-storage facility the developer bought last year for $150 million — is currently earmarked for industrial use. Brooklyn Community Board 1 will hold a public session Wednesday night, where Two Trees executives will make their case to skeptics.
But why are opponents raising such a stink?
Any large proposal that must pass through the city’s publicreview process, as River Street would need to do, deserves fair public scrutiny. City Hall just yanked a rezoning proposal in Bushwick, where locals feared gentrification would cause uprooting of longtime residents.
But far from such a grassroot movement, the Williamsburg uproar is led by some very rich New Yorkers.
Keith Berger, a high executive of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is the condo-board president of one of the Northside Piers towers. In a memo to other Northside residents this month, Berger warned that River Street “would have a dramatic impact [on] the waterfront” area.
“The increase in population just from the housing units would quickly overrun the park and create more traffic, noise and trash” in the area, wrote Berger, who in 2016 complained to DNA Info of “horrible” conditions, including “broken bottles, people drinking all night,” following a waterfront murder.
Keeping the site commercial would “not tax our neighborhood on weekends and [not] further obstruct views to the water from the rest of Williamsburg,” Berger wrote.
Also active in the resistance are two prominent residential real-estate-sales brokers who, like Berger, live at Northside Piers. Ralph Modica, a team leader of brokerage Compass, denied that losing views was a factor — “I live on the north side” of his building, he e-mailed me, meaning his windows don’t face the River Street site.
“It’s about the fact that there is so much residential coming in Domino [a different nearby location where Two Trees is also building] alone, and there’s only one subway. I don’t think the infrastructure can handle the amount of people that’s yet to come.”
Corcoran’s Cory Kantin, who also lives at Northside and has brokered $62 million in apartment sales there, according to her Web site, cited “myriad” reasons to oppose River Street, including lack of infrastructure and already-overcrowded Williamsburg sidewalks. She claimed that the project would increase, not decrease, “the value of the condos that I sell and rent.”
Fair scrutiny and community input are fair. But while rezonings are rightly drawing longer and harder looks than in the past, it is worth keeping in mind where the harshest looks are coming from. At River Street, they aren’t from the poor. As in many other contexts, too often NIMBY-ism is all about the boutique preferences of the wellheeled and comfortably entrenched.