Brooklyn is Booming

My dream, and the dream of a lot of other people, is being realized. Shops and restaurants are coming as are off-off Broadway venues. This is a good thing. We all recognize that there can be over-development. Nobody wants fifty families in an area where once there were three and we all recognize and appreciate that our government officials have the right and responsibility to oversee and limit development.

At issue is what is being done and how it is being done. We have competing values, we want to limit the height of buildings and maximize the building of new homes.

We have a housing shortage. For years people have been leaving NYC as soon as they’ve been economically able to. Our population level was maintained because new immigrants kept arriving. Now we have a problem. Middle class immigrants are staying and the children of those who left a generation earlier are coming back to NYC. Not only that but some of those same folks who left are retiring, not to Florida, but here in NYC where they’re within walking distance and a quick cab ride to everywhere they want to go.

The downside is that the poor and the barely surviving working class are being squeezed out of their homes and unable to find housing at an affordable price. Middle class families: teachers, university professors, architects, artists, engineers and other professionals are buying up 2, 3, and 4 family houses for the same price that would get them a 2 bedroom place in the city. They want more space for themselves and their children but, in taking over an entire building for themselves, they reduce our available housing stock and displace 1, 2 or 3 families, usually poor or struggling working class.

We could solve some of our housing shortage by preventing one family from living in a space allocated for two, three or four. Thankfully we haven’t done that. That would be a horrible mistake. But we are making other mistakes as tragic.

This zoning plan is enshrining building decisions made by developers one hundred years ago. This is Brooklyn, not Nebraska. Why are we romanticizing two-story, quickly built wood-frame buildings? We need to maximize the availability of housing units and, just as importantly maximize their size (square footage). We need more, many more large apartments to supply the demand of growing families. We need apartments so that middle class families don’t feel that their only option is to take over a three or four family row house for themselves.

The good news is that we can satisfy this need without building bigger buildings. The bad news is that we have to change our archaic zoning laws, and we all appreciate how difficult that task is.

Another reason for maximizing building is tax revenue. How many tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in tax revenue are New York City’s coffers going to lose if we continue this hastily constructed, counter-productive zoning change? That’s a lot of teachers, firemen, street cleaning crews, etc... Jersey City, for example, welcomes development. Upper-middle class and luxury condos are being built there at an amazing pace. For every New Yorker who relocates there we loose a tax payer. We want to entice the well-off to live in New York, to live in Brooklyn. Their taxes help pay for social services and their daily purchases bring businesses and help provide jobs for everyone.

Construction equals construction jobs. Maybe it was my years working construction that makes this resonate in me more than others but construction puts food in the bellies of tens of thousands of New Yorkers; allows many of them the where-with-all to go to school get college and graduate degrees and let them, in their older and greyer years, do something a little less bone-weary than swinging a beater and climbing columns. Construction is a good thing. Yes, it is noisy and disruptive, and change can be disturbing but let’s be reasonable. Let’s promote the building of 5 and 6 story buildings throughout South Brooklyn.