On 10.5.19, The Red Hook Star Review published a piece by Brett Yates arguing that instead of developing a rezoning agreement with Industry City, Councilman Carlos Menchaca and the public could instead work to change the city’s zoning laws to prevent manufacturing zones from being used for non-manufacturing work.
Yates first asked if Menchaca’s proposed Community Benefits Agreement approach would “satisfy the critics” of Industry City’s rezoning proposal.
The answer, of course, is no – at least for many of them. They want Menchaca to jam the system. They’ve stated their position loud and clear: “No rezoning, no conditions!”
Such an approach, he wrote, “exists fully outside the dominant ideological framework of our local and national politics, which take for granted that, in order to stay afloat, cities and neighborhoods must to some degree court the investments of multi-billion-dollar firms like Jamestown LP, which co-owns Industry City.”
Yates continued:
For conservatives, the benevolence of private enterprise is incontestable and warrants absolute public deference, while liberals believe that government must impose restraints to ensure that companies serve their communities in addition to generating profit.
Yates was critical of Mr. Menchaca’s assertion that if the community said no to IC’s rezoning, its core needs would not be addressed:
…Menchaca made a logical leap [during his Sep. 16th presentation], and much of the crowd declined to follow: he claimed that refusing to do any kind of rezoning also wouldn’t solve Sunset Park’s problems, and therefore, the correct course of action was to design a new rezoning on the community’s own terms. (Of course, it would still have to be attractive enough to Industry City to earn the developer’s co-sign.)
The Councilmember, Yates wrote, had “relied on an artificially narrow range of political possibility, essentially asserting that nothing good can happen in Sunset Park except through Industry City…”
Speaking broadly, Yates wrote that city governments have turned over public functions to private actors, which leads to unequal development and displacement:
Rarely does it occur to a councilmember that, if a rezoning is so unattractive to the surrounding community that it requires a host of givebacks to make the arrangement palatable, it may not deserve on its merits to take place. Unfortunately, our municipal government has come to rely on such givebacks: it is, for instance, a dispiriting fact of modern life in New York that the city hardly ever builds its own parks or schools anymore.
Who has the money for such things? Well, developers do – and when they come to the city for a land-use change in order to put up a taller skyscraper than zoning allows, the city tells them to construct a park or a school, too, in exchange for the favor. In this way, the city loses control of its own infrastructure. Instead of a central body allocating public works projects across the city according to need, local councilmen snag infrastructural upgrades for their districts by striking deals with developers, which in turn cough up acts of public charity – say, a renovated subway station – that, of course, turn out in many cases to be necessities for the future tenants of their buildings.
What happens to the areas in the which developers have no interest? They’re forgotten. And what happens to the areas in which they do have interest? They begin to change, and unsurprisingly, the changes always seem to end up taking the shape of the developer’s will, not the public’s, no matter how hard the elected officials negotiated. A “free” school sounds like a good deal, but it’s not really free; it’s paid for by dollars that the city could have already extracted through taxation and used for its own democratically determined purposes (maybe a school, maybe something else).
Toward the end of his article, Yates argued that instead of operating on the above framework, the city could instead seek to change the zoning conditions along the Sunset Park waterfront to prevent developers from using the area for non-manufacturing uses:
But if Industry City is currently zoned for manufacturing, why isn’t it required to use all of its space for manufacturing as things stand? The answer lies in New York City’s permissive 1961 Zoning Resolution.
58 years ago, planners could hardly have imagined that white-collar firms would want to locate their offices in Gowanus or that fancy food courts would pop up in Bush Terminal, crowding out industry in longtime industrial neighborhoods. In order to avoid noise complaints and environmental hazards, manufacturing zones don’t permit residential uses, but they do allow for offices and most retail uses – after all, in 1961, what was the harm, when the demand for such uses was so low in industrial areas?
Things have changed, obviously, but the Zoning Resolution hasn’t changed with them. If New York City truly wanted to preserve and expand its manufacturing, it would have to change the zoning rules to ensure that properties in manufacturing zones devote at least a significant portion of their floor area to industrial uses. UPROSE has advocated precisely for such a revision. Some cities, like San Francisco, have already written new laws of this nature (although generally they apply only in specially designated planning districts, not in all manufacturing zones).
Without Carlos Menchaca, Red Hook today might look a lot more like Williamsburg, and for his steadfastness here he deserves recognition. But if he seriously envisions Industry City as a valuable employer of working-class people and a source of stability – not disruption – for Sunset Park, he might do more for that vision by addressing the underlying problem in City Council. Instead of negotiating with the developer, pushing for a zoning code amendment could have been the bigger, braver fight that some of his constituents wanted – a refusal to give in without giving up.
— Posted by JVS on 10.6.19, backdated to 10.5.19
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