NYC Needs Industry City

If the City Council goes ahead with business as usual, it will soon kill the Industry City rezoning in Brooklyn — and so sacrifice 20,000 new jobs at a time when the city desperately needs every employment hope it can get.

Thousands of now-unemployed Sunset Park residents have their own city councilman to thank for the loss of this hope: Carlos Menchaca has been crusading against the project for years, fanning bogus fears that the plan ensures gentrification that will push people out of the neighborhood.

In this, he’s been supported by longtime anti-development Reps. Jerry Nadler and Nydia Velazquez. Now a full 10 Brooklyn lawmakers, including Reps. Yvette Clarke and Hakeem Jeffries, have written Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Corey Johnson in opposition to the plan.

Reality check: A similarly controversial rezoning in Williamsburg more than a decade ago spurred a reversal of the long decline in the area’s manufacturing jobs — the kind of jobs that attracted previous generations of Puerto Ricans and others. Indeed, despite gentrification, the Census shows an increase in Williamsburg’s Hispanic population.

City Council tradition would let Menchaca effectively veto the rezoning. But it’s past time for that tradition to die: In times of economic crisis, political leaders need to put development and job opportunities for distressed communities ahead of their usual back-scratching.

Killing this rezoning would be even more short-sighted than the assassination of the Amazon deal in Queens: At least then, the politicians had some excuse for thinking the city could do without all those new jobs.

Not now. With New York facing a truly existential economic crisis, guaranteed to lose countless office jobs, Johnson and de Blasio have a duty to muscle Industry City through.

Say “no” to decline and political cronyism, and “yes” to growth.