HOUSING PLAN MORTGAGES NY’S FUTURE
IS de Blasio’s New York making life better for future generations — or worse?
If the city lets the Brooklyn Heights library sell public land to raise money for repairs, it won’t be the end of the world. But it will be part of a steady erosion in safeguarding the civic trust we hold for our children.
To make a long story short: We’ll be exchanging something that lasts forever for something that won’t.
The Brooklyn Public Library’s plan sounds reasonable, if you don’t look at the big picture. The library has $300 million in repair needs across the borough — and city money to make these repairs isn’t coming anytime soon. Plus, the library’s Brooklyn Heights branch sits on valuable real estate.
The library proposes that the city sell that real estate to a developer, who’ll build 139 condos on the site. The library will own a condo at the bottom, to serve as a branch.
The library then could use the $40 million left over to make repairs at other branches across Brooklyn. The developer has agreed to build 114 “affordable housing” apartments elsewhere in Brooklyn, too.
The city’s Planning Commission has to vote on this deal as early as next week, and then it goes to the City Council.
Lots of the critics’ complaints are the sameold, sameold: People don’t want rich neighbors. They don’t want a tallish tower. They want everything that’s built in the city to be housing for poor people, and they want to pay construction workers a lot of money.
Beyond that silliness, though, are real concerns.
For the past 401 years, the smart people have been buying land in New York City, not selling it. Yes, it’s fine for government agencies to sell off land they don’t need. But the library does need this space.
The library folk are putting the best spin they can on the new branch space, which will be nicer — but so what: The unvarnished fact is that the new branch will also be smaller. That, in a borough that gained 117,000 new people in the past halfdecade.
We have no idea if Brooklyn will keep growing. But it’s certainly unwise to preclude future expansion in Brooklyn Heights.
The bigger trouble with this deal, though, is that land lasts forever — and the investments the library will make with this money won’t. “We get $15 million . . . a year from the city to handle our renovations and our capi tal problems,” Linda Johnson, the Brooklyn library system’s chief, told the Planning Commission last month. “We only take care of emergencies.”
The $40 million will go to “decades of deferred maintenance,” said Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future, which has studied the library’s capital needs. “The Brooklyn Public Library’s branches are in especially bad shape . . . They’re facing a maintenance crisis.” (Bowles supports the plan.)
But that means the $40 million the library will get will be spent up quickly — and it won’t go to vastly better libraries, but to fixing air conditioners and roofs. Those improvements may last years, even decades. But an air conditioner won’t last as long as land. The Brooklyn Heights library that would be demolished under this proposal had an extensive renovation two decades ago.
And there’s another question: Why should the library subsidize affordable housing?
The lowincome apartments the developer will build as part of this deal come right out of the price the developer is paying. That’s a loss of millions of dollars. Yes, the developer can build more condos because of the af fordablehousing part — but the city could let the developer do that anyway, and give the library the extra money.
People can have honest disagreements about how much housing city taxpayers should subsidize. But why should a cashstrapped library with crisis capital needs be subsidizing de Blasio’s reelection?
Everyone can go to the library, while only 114 lucky families will get to live in the cheaper housing the developer builds.
It would be one thing, too, if the library were in position of strength. But the library is in a position of weakness as it sells off the one thing New York isn’t making any more of.
And that’s because the city, with its $75 billion annual budget, hasn’t done one of its core jobs: maintaining its libraries. Does anyone expect that to change? This deal buys time, but not much of it.
As Anna Levin, a city Planning Commission member, noted at the hearing that this is “a oneshot deal . . . That opportunity will never come along again.”
Don’t blame the library, though. Blame the city — for putting the library in this position.