Building Power and a Livable New York
New Look Planned for Pier at South Street Seaport (NY Times)
Still Opposing Plan to Develop Willets Point, One Business Decides to Sell (NY Times)
High Line Designs are Unveiled (NY Times)
Sweet & Lower (Architect’s Newspaper)
On Monday night, mermaids and freaks ranked among the demonstrators urging the Department of City Planning to preserve Coney Island more or less the way it is. But while tattooed performers and the Rev. Billy got plenty of attention, they were part of a much broader spectrum of views voiced at Lincoln High School about the fate of New York’s ocean playground.
Monday’s event was a hearing on the city’s draft Scope for rezoning 27 acres of Coney Island as historically preserved public land. Department of Planning Brooklyn Director Purnima Kapur addressed the audience last night, elaborating on the city’s initiatives as they have changed since the last scoping hearing, in February; mainly, the expansion to 27-acres of amusement area, up from 9, and the movement of indoor amusements toward the southeast extending from Steeplechase Plaza.
If City Planning gets its way, developer Thor Equities, which owns much of the land, will have to scale back its plans to build condo towers on the site. Yet the city proposal still retains much of Thor’s vision, including “indoor amenities,” like big-name retail, and adding 2,700 new housing units, on what Kapur calls “vacant and sparsely utilized” land.
Board 3 Unanimously Approves Rezoning for East Village/ Lower East Side (The Villager)
The Past and Future of Sustainability (Gotham Gazette)
A Coney Island Strip Mall? (Brooklyn Paper)
Coney Island: Rides or Shopping? (NY Times)
Promised Brooklyn Community Center May Not Open (NY times)
Public Housing Residents Face Loss of Their Community Centers (NY Times)
Car-free Manhattan Boulevards on August Saturdays (Gothamist)
Upper East Side Tower Plan Significantly Scaled Back (New York Sun)
Brooklyn has changed tremendously over the last few years. With the building of condos and the closing down of stores that have been around for years, it’s no wonder that the folks who were here before are different from who is moving in.
I love Brooklyn. This is my home. This is where I’ve lived my entire life. It’s where I went to school from pre-K to 12th grade. Brooklyn is dying a slow and terrible death, where she is silenced by the tearing down of her walls and the demeaning voices of developers and gentrifies are engulfing her and the rest of us. It kills me to know how money has overpowered the integrity of my borough and my community and what’s good just seems to be falling to the wayside.
FUREE’S been working so hard to do something, anything to help the people living here, since we are the ones directly affected by this change. I don’t live in squalor. I’ve do well at school, help my community, am active in many events to help my community members and my school and yet, I’m being displaced with many other community members. Why should I struggle so hard to find a job, to get into college, to live in my community and to keep my home when others take it so easily from me and mine?
It seems that there is nothing being done to provide what’s really needed in Brooklyn, especially in Brooklyn schools. Many neighborhoods are deprived of bare necessities and education is one of them. How is it that the city and developers have millions of dollars to build condos that are still empty, yet school buildings in my neighborhood and in the surrounding neighborhoods where poor people of color live, are falling apart? Why are school books more than 10 years old? Why are there teachers teaching subjects they didn’t go to school for and aren’t qualified to teach? Why are schools throwing away massive amounts of food every day when there are shelters near with hungry people?
I love Brooklyn. It’s my home. But it’s changed and it’s not for the better. Hopefully as a student entering college, I’ll be able to make even more change in my community.
Saturday, May 17th, was FUREE’s 5th Annual Convention. This year was the best convention ever. We had a good turn out with nearly 300 people in attendance, and we had our politicians show up as well: Charles Barron, Hakeem Jeffries, Latisha James, Joseph Lentol, Valmanette Montgomery, and a representative from Governor Patterson’s office.
The convention is a yearly community forum where we invited elected officials and others that can help members of the community with the issues they have.
We heard testimonies about how our communities are not given enough attention by the local officials, but specifically what I liked was the youth representatives who were there. The youth at FUREE conducted a survey over 6 weeks with more than 300 youth, from 14 different high schools, who answered questions about issues that are important to us.
Clayton, a member of FUREE’s Youth Organizing Initiative, presented the findings and youth demands, went up there and told the politicians what youth wanted:
We came out to make sure that the youth demands were heard loud and clear by politicians and our community.
Clayton says: My experience at the FUREE convention was a good experience because I was able to go on stage and speak for the youth about lack of jobs, safety in schools, college preparation and police brutality. What I learned from this experience is that this battle we are in is just getting started.
We will win this war for Brooklyn. We will change Brooklyn back to the old ways and if not we will develop Brooklyn into a community that’s affordable, beautiful and meant for all the people of Brooklyn.
– Nahyshene Molina and Clayton Williams, Youth Activists
I just had the pleasure of discovering Amy Lavine’s valuable blog on Community Benefits Agreements across the nation. She’s been covering New York’s highs (the Kingsbridge Armory campaign) and lows (Yankee stadium), along with a comprehensive array of noteworthy developer-community deals from coast to coast.
Public Library Demolished for Hotel Development (NY Times)
Keeping Starrett City Affordable (NY Times)
Development on the Hudson (NY Times)
Street Improvements in the Bronx (NY Daily News)
Help Avoiding Home Foreclosures (Newsday)
Brownstoner in the News (New York Magazine)
Supermarkets Flee City’s High Costs (Crain’s New York Business)
Residential Building Permits Plunge by 50% (Crain’s New York Business)
New Study Faults Plazas as Public in Name, Private in Look (New York Times)
Let’s give a deeply deserved round of applause for Mattie Burkert, who has been a driving force behind The Eminent Domain from its inception. Mattie is interning at the incredible Chicago Reporter this summer, and from there she heads into her senior year at NYU. She’ll be posting from time to time, but we’ll miss having Mattie here. Thank you!!
When we first started putting together this site last fall, Alyssa and I spent a lot of trying to figure out just who, exactly, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership was.
According to the organization’s website,
The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP) is a not-for-profit local development corporation incorporated in the summer of 2006 in an effort to coordinate economic development activities in Downtown Brooklyn and ensure implementation of public and private development projects in the area. The DBP works in close partnership with the City of New York to:
- expedite design and construction of public capital projects
- facilitate the development of commercial and residential real estate projects
- create strategies for corporate recruitment and the reuse of undercapitalized properties
- advance the development of cultural venues and public space within the BAM Cultural District
- coordinate transportation planning initiatives
- spearhead an area-wide branding and marketing campaign
- improve area business conditions and quality of life.
The DBP incorporates the functions of four existing not-for-profit organizations providing economic development services within Downtown Brooklyn (Downtown Brooklyn Council, BAM Local Development Corporation, MetroTech Business Improvement District and Fulton Mall Improvement Association) and has an annual operating budget of approximately $8 million.
The DBP has a staff of approximately 25 and is overseen by a Board of Directors comprised of leaders from Downtown Brooklyn’s corporate sector, academic institutions and cultural community.
A little vague, right? And what about that $8 million budget? Only $2 million is coming from the City, and the BID budgets don’t add up quite that high. So who are the private funders? We placed some calls, but got no answers.
Well, we’ve gotten our hands on an internal email, dated August 16, 2007, containing a complete listing of contributors (after the jump) and amounts paid. We figure it’s in the public interest to know exactly who has been financing the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s activities, and therefore has former Bloomberg administration economic development officials at their disposal to advocate for their projects.
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