What Will Industry City Look Like in the Future?

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We're going to start today either in one Brooklyn neighborhood or in the whole New York City area. I know that's a weird way to put it, but in a way, it's what our first segment is about. It's about one Brooklyn neighborhood or the whole New York City area. The neighborhood is Sunset Park and yesterday, New York City Council held a hearing for more than nine hours on the contentious subject of a rezoning for Sunset Park to allow a massive development project in the area known as Industry City. They claim it would bring 20,000 jobs. Industry City already exists. This would be a big expansion and watch that 20,000 number. I think we're going to wind up debunking it in this segment.

The point is that city council members are divided. Some members from around the city like Ritchie Torres from the Bronx and Donovan Richards from Queens want those jobs for their constituents to apply for, but the member from the area, Carlos Menchaca, opposes the proposal for the gentrification and environmental degradation. He says it would bring to Sunset Park itself and he says most of the jobs would be bad, low paying jobs anyway.

Just looking at the press coverage in various local publications, you can see the divide from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "Sunset Park Small Business Owners Urge City Council to Approve Industry City Rezoning." From Brownstoner, "Sunset Park Residents Protest Industry City Rezoning Ahead of City Council Public Hearing." From City Limits magazine, "Asians in Sunset Park Call City Speaker to Support Industry City Rezoning." From The Brooklyn Paper, "Brooklyn Democratic Party Members Sign Letter Against Industry City Rezoning."

You see people are all over the place on this. We've asked a couple of city council members on the show to weigh in the summer. Here is Bronx council member Ritchie Torres arguing in favor.

Ritchie Torres: When you have a project like Industry City that would create 20,000 jobs, that would generate $100 million a year in revenue, that is too massive a project to leave to the discretion of one member. We are a city council of 51 members, not one member and all 51 members should have a role in carefully considering the merits of a project as massive as Amazon or the expansion of Industry City. Whatever we might decide, we all should be engaged in the deliberative process of the city council.

Brian: City council member, Ritchie Torres from the Bronx. We later played that clip for a Sunset Park council member, Carlos Menchaca and he said this.

Carlos Menchaca: I couldn't agree with him more on the engagement part. Ritchie said that they need to engage these members, Ritchie is not the only one. You have Donovan and Robert Cornegy in Brooklyn who have come out so vociferous and their support have yet to enter the district and ask me to walk them through the work that we have done. I think his entire premise is really a page out of this corporate playbook and they get to reap the benefits of campaign allocations and get to spew this-- I think it's not only disrespectful of me as a council member and their colleague, but of the community that's been doing a lot of work.

Brian: That was the prelude to yesterday's nine hours of city council testimony about rezoning Sunset Park for Industry City expansion. Depending on your point of view, we're talking about one Brooklyn neighborhood and the rights of its councilmen to speak for the neighborhood or the whole New York City area. It's the biggest story like this for our region since Amazon wanted to bring its headquarters to Long Island City and the jobs crisis and public health crisis from the pandemic add a whole layer of new pros and cons. Let's dig in. With me are Ben Adler, senior editor for the New York news site, City & State, and Karina Piser, who has written about the Industry City proposal for City & State. Ben and Karina, welcome back to WNYC.

Ben Adler: Thank you for having me.

Karina Piser: [crosstalk] thanks for having me.

Brian: I'm not sure which one of you wants to take this, but what did they talk about for nine hours yesterday at a city council hearing? [crosstalk] want to start? Go ahead either one.

Karina: Go ahead. I think that obviously yesterday was nine hours of discussion. A lot of what happened from what I felt was a rehashing of a lot of the disputes and the fracture lines that have taken place over the past several months and actually several years since this rezoning issue became contentious. I think that there was a lot of very probing questions, particularly about accountability and transparency on jobs that we can get into more details about over the course of the segment. I don't know if Ben if you have any other initial impressions from yesterday.

Ben: No, same as yours. People making the same arguments. I didn't think it was notable. There were a lot of community members including Latino community members who did speak up in favor of it. That's something that you don't see discussed as much in the coverage. Also, a lot of the folks speaking of in favor of it are people who have a business interest or work in economic development.

Brian: Listeners, we invite your opinions and your questions if you're in Sunset Park or if you're not in Sunset Park. 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. One bombshell to me from reading the coverage of yesterday's hearing in City Limits is that the developer and the media keep talking about 20,000 jobs, but the developer admitted from what I read that 8,000 of those jobs already exist at Industry City. It's really about his promise of 12,000 new jobs, not 20,000. Now, that's still a lot of jobs if the number is real, but that's still a big difference from the number he's been pushing, Karina. Did you hear that?

Karina: Oh yes, absolutely. That's something that the opponents of the project have been pointing out all along is that there isn't enough transparency about this projected job number. Even if we don't get into the question of what jobs kind of they are, how much they pay versus how much the development will change rents in the neighborhood, for example, or to whom the jobs will go.

I also think that there's an interesting contradiction with saying that now more than ever, there's a need for all of these jobs. That number is a projection that predates the economic crisis from coronavirus. It's difficult to tell whether or not the pandemic itself would actually affect or decrease the number of jobs available. A lot of them are in the office space. It doesn't seem like people are going back to offices anytime soon in New York City. That's something that I think should be highlighted given that the pandemic has such high economic stakes, but we have to consider what they actually mean for the jobs.

Brian: That 12,000 number, even that number is just a projection by the developer. It's not a promise, Karina.

Karina: Right. Yes, it's of course. Then it's also a question of who the jobs go to and the types of wages they offer.

Brian: Ben, on the larger question of what the developer is promising for the neighborhood. I see in City Limits that a big thread of conversation yesterday was around the developer saying he has met all the conditions that Councilman Menchaca and other community leaders wanted him to meet, but he won't agree to them in writing. They include no hotels in the development plan, a written commitment from the mayor to mitigate gentrification in various ways. A new technical high school for the neighborhood. A manufacturing hub, not just service and tech sector jobs and green infrastructure. Ben, how can the developers say he has met all these things if he won't put them in writing?

Ben: The truth is Community Benefits Agreements are unenforceable anyway. If you look at past Community Benefits Agreements like around the Atlantic Yards, in another part of Brooklyn, not that far away, it's similar where they agreed to, "Oh, we're going to hire people from the community. The jobs are going to pay a certain amount," and so forth. Then it's like, "Well, how do you enforce that agreement?" Someone has to find out that they didn't actually create as many jobs as they said they would or they didn't pay quite the scale that they said they would.

I'm not sure how enforceable in court a Community Benefits Agreement is but it's like, did the community activists have the wherewithal to fight that out in court for years? What's the redress? It's not a very powerful tool. It's really a tool only for public shaming if they don't live up to their side of it, mostly, it seems. I certainly understand why Menchaca would say he doesn't trust it if it's not in writing, but the truth is the community activists who oppose development such as this, typically say, "Even if there is a Community Benefits Agreement--"

There tends to be two groups of community activists. The ones who say if we get a good strong Community Benefits Agreement, it'll benefit us as a whole. Let's do it and others who say, "These agreements are unenforceable. They're BS anyway." It's an understandable concern from Menchaca's perspective, and even if it were signed-- Particularly as Karina points out also, it's about the pandemic. Economic conditions change. Often developers wriggle out of-- Again, with the Atlantic Yards if you look at that. That Community Benefits Agreement, they're predated the Great Recession.

Of course, when something comes along like the Great Recession, the developer says and maybe understandably, "I can't live up to these promises necessarily because I don't have the demand," let's say, from industrial tenants to give the manufacturing hub example.

Brian: Listeners if you're just joining us, we're talking about the nine-hour city council hearing yesterday because city council will have the final say on whether the huge Industry City rezoning in Sunset Park Brooklyn gets to take place and there are a lot of people for it and there are a lot of people against it. It's the biggest story like this since Amazon wanted to come to Long Island City in Queens. It has ripple effects for the whole area in terms of housing costs, in terms of jobs, and we're talking about this with Ben Adler and Karina Piser from the news site City & State. We're going to go to your phone calls now. Julio in Sunset Park. You're on WNYC. Good morning, Julio.

Julio: Good morning. I think one of the things I find frustrating from those who are [unintelligible 00:12:32] supporters for the application are that they don't necessarily acknowledge how damaging the application as is presented in the council could be to the Sunset Park community and recognizing the need to amend it if the council was wanting to push this through. It seems like they do against the wishes of the community because there's a lot of things wrong with this application. That's the reason why many folks don't necessarily want it. The community board voted against it, the borough president had issues with it and the council member isn't supporting it.

Brian: How would you like to see it amended? We were just talking about how the developer said he's met all the requests or demands of the community. If that's true and we were just discussing how that's not enforceable, but if he has, at least by his word, what other amendments would you like to see?

Julio: There's the limit to the retail. There's to the adding manufacturing-

Brian: Jobs.

Julio: -the users. There's the supporting local hiring and making sure that that's enforceable. There's supporting affordable housing. There's a list I can continue going on and on. The city, I think, needs to play a role in enforcing that as well.

Brian: Julio, thank you. Karina, I think Julio really hit the high points of some of what the community's concerns are. Let me ask you about one of them. He mentioned the types of jobs that would be there or wouldn't be there. They want manufacturing jobs, which doesn't sound like that's part of the original vision. They don't want a lot of new retail and they're against hotels being part of the plan. Can you explain that? Do you understand that for people who don't get that? Why would they want not retail and not hotels in their neighborhood?

Karina: Well, I think that a lot of retail jobs that would be available to a certain portion of Sunset Park residents would be fairly low paying. Then when you bring nice hotels onto the Brooklyn waterfront, it would just change the dynamics of the neighborhood. The jobs at those hotels wouldn't necessarily be ones that could turn into robust careers. They'd be minimum wage, hourly paying jobs that aren't particularly promising, especially when you think about the effects that type of development would have on housing costs. Just if I can add one thing [crosstalk]

Brian: If the jobs are low-- If housing prices are going to go up because the big development would put pressure on housing, that's logical. The jobs that are being created for people in the neighborhood are low paying jobs. That increases the effect of the gentrification, increases the imbalance between local incomes and local housing costs. Just reiterating that. Go ahead. What were you going to say next?

Karina: Yes, absolutely. Just one other thing that Julio mentioned was the question of the involvement of the city. One of the conditions that Menchaca wanted to hold Industry City to was a pledge from the mayor that in addition or that alongside this development, there would be public investment to curb whatever effects it had on housing costs [unintelligible 00:16:19] gentrification.

The mayor's office has remained pretty silent on this thing that it's a private dispute. It doesn't warrant city involvement, which is something that Menchaca's team and all local neighborhood activists really take issue with. Obviously, yes, it's a private dispute, but it will change a Brooklyn neighborhood like you said, not just this neighborhood, but New York City more broadly.

There are some things in the proposal that would draw in the public sector anyway. For example, there's a proposal for a technical high school. Obviously that would necessitate the involvement of the Department of Education. It's weird and curious that de Blasio has been quiet on this.

Brian: Yes and why do you think? Because I noticed in the coverage of yesterday that that was something that council members on both sides of Industry City rezoning were complaining about the mayor's lack of involvement as you were just describing it. He's had many opinions about other rezonings around the city. He's pushed a number of rezonings, mostly in pursuit of affordable housing, not business development that he has felt very strongly about and gotten very personally engaged in. Why not this?

Karina: Yes. I don't know. Maybe Ben has more insight. To me, it just seems easy and evasive, but you're right that it's inconsistent with other positions he's taken. Maybe Ben has a thing to add there.

Ben: I would just draw a contrast between this rezoning and neighborhood rezonings intended to meet rising housing demand. Neighborhood rezonings are undertaken by the administration at its own behest because they see rising housing prices and growing population want to accommodate that. This is a request for a rezoning of just this one plot, which is 10 blocks. It's the size of a very small neighborhood, but it's just one piece of Sunset Park at the behest of the owner of the site or the buildings on the site.

In that sense, it's a private-sector request to change the manufacturing designation to allow more retail, to allow more different uses like office space. I think maybe that's the distinction in de Blasio's mind to some extent. I do think it points to a clear failure of his administration which you saw with Amazon as well. Ritchie Torres is not a right-wing guy and knows Donovan Richards. They're mainstream Liberal Democrats. Maybe not as far left as the Democratic socialists who've been out front opposing things like Amazon.

They're not crazy to say the city-- They represent low-income districts. That the city needs jobs period. That in reality, the manufacturing economy when there were a million jobs building heavy industrial products in New York City is not coming back. Their constituents who don't even have a high school diploma, in many cases, might benefit from just more jobs like providing services in offices or hotels or whatever.

The thing is the benefits the regionwide economy are dispersed across the city which is why they think the whole city council should weigh-in, but the effect of rising housing prices are more concentrated. The change in the community-- Which some people in the community welcome. There were Latino community members yesterday saying this Industry City has been this dead zone, this underutilized manufacturing area. It'd be cool to have more retail there and stuff but there are other people who feel like it would change their community in a less welcomed way because it would increase the yuppies coming through and the housing prices. That's concentrated in the community.

Obviously the solution here if you want to give city council members the ability to reject a proposal-- Everyone's always going to reject everything in their district because no one ever wants change in their district and people can be blamed for change that happens in their district. Whether it's a homeless shelter or the opposite; a very fancy new development.

The way to buy them off though would be to provide enough affordable housing in the area that the city can get the economic development but not displace the local community. It's the same exact problem you saw in Western Queens where the farther you went from the Amazon location, the more polling showed people wanted Amazon because to them, it's like people will pay income taxes on six-figure salaries as a programmer. That's great. That's good for the city or state, but the people who live closest to it in Woodside or Sunnyside where it's already a lot like Sunset Park, immigrant neighborhoods already gentrifying, they might fear displacement.

The city should have developed a housing plan to enable the Amazon development has absolutely wanted and that's the same exact thing clearly that de Blasio could have done here if he wanted the development really to go through and he just hasn't. It's not absolutely clear why.

Brian: I guess we have a question for our Ask The Mayor segment coming up this Friday. Just as a side note, this is the second thing like this, this week because the larger business community has been asking the mayor to set city guidelines for people returning to office jobs. They feel like it's going to be harder for them to get their own employees to come back unless the city sets some kind of a template and de Blasio doesn't want to do it. I can personally see his point of view on this but he doesn't want to do it because he says, "It's not up to me if JPMorgan brings back their people," or "it's not up to me if other big office company," not to single out JPMorgan, "office-based company brings back their workers and feels that it's safe."

That's on each private business but there are a lot of businesses saying, "Hey Mr. Mayor, you need to set the template for this with what you do with city workers and bringing them back and what you do with making standards clear." There's two wishes like this that seem related that I guess we'll ask the mayor about on Friday. James in Queens. You're on WNYC. Hi, James.

James: Hi. How are you?

Brian: Good.

James: One of the things I was [inaudible 00:23:17] and I think this is linking what was just said. This idea of impact as well as economic outcome. I was curious-- I know there's been a lot of discussion of upfront promises of the developer, but one of the things that we saw on Amazon was the promise of $25 billion in future tax revenue. In this case, I think the councilman said it was $100 million annually which over 30 years is $3 billion. Perhaps part of the agreement-- I don't know if there's ever been a discussion about how that neighborhoods can capture impact dollars which is really future tax revenue generated from the project.

Brian: Anybody want to comment on that?

Ben: I think it's a very interesting idea. The short answer is historically the way the law has been set up in the city with regard to things like rezonings, it hasn't been set up to localize the costs or the benefits by which I mean, people also have interesting ideas about like, "If we're going to invest a bunch of public money in building the Second Avenue subway, we should charge the pay for it by charging the people whose property values are going to rise as a result of that public investment." This is the flip side. It's saying if the public burden is going to fall on the citywide benefit but public burden falls on the local community, can the local community capture the value?

I think that if you had a mechanism for doing that, it would similar to what I was saying about de Blasio if he had a really robust affordable housing plan for Sunset Park, would maybe buy off the local opposition to something that might be a mixed blessing at best for them but could benefit the city as a whole. It's a good creative idea. It's legally it's challenging. There's just never been a template for directing either the costs or the benefits of a rezoning to the area specifically. I think you might need enabling legislation, maybe even in Albany.

Brian: We're talking about the big Industry City Sunset Park Brooklyn rezoning proposal, very contentious. Now before a city council, people in the neighborhood are divided. The neighborhood representative is divided from representatives from other neighborhoods who has Ben Adler from publication City & State was just describing. Might benefit more than the people in Sunset Park itself. Ben Adler and Karina Piser who contributes to City & State are with us explaining this. It's going to get voted on within 50 days, I think the number is. I think it's the same exact day as Election Day. [chuckles] There'll be a few figs to cover over the next few weeks. Joseph in Sunset Park testified at the hearing yesterday. Joseph thanks for calling in. You're on WNYC.

Joseph: Hey, good morning Brian and your listeners. I just wanted to reiterate something that one of your speakers just said and that is how the voices of the locals tend to be outwitted or dismissed in this. I work in the community and I've been a resident for years now. I work with particularly the undocumented immigrant community. I waited over nine hours yesterday to give my testimony. The hearing went way more than nine hours. This is a community that does not have the luxury to access that, let alone all the promises of jobs.

Even the undocumented, none of the jobs that supposedly are being promised will be available to them. This is the community that's getting wrecked right now with many things right now with COVID and displacement doesn't need to be another thing on top of that. I think I would like to help give a voice to this particular community that doesn't have the luxury to just give a vote.

Brian: Joseph, since a lot of undocumented immigrants do get jobs, why do you think that this wouldn't provide jobs for them and would only put pressure on the housing cost?

Joseph: Undocumented immigrants generally by definition don't have documents and whatever job they're going to be offering, they're going to ask for all these documentations which these individuals tend to just try to survive under alternative motives like businesses and economy. Whatever job they're going to offer or even whatever institutions they're going to offer, are not going to be accessible to these folks. These folks are just trying to get by with whatever-- Literally just cleaning houses, doing construction jobs. These are not jobs that pay well, but they're doing the best that they can and they're paying taxes yet they don't reap any of the benefits of that.

Brian: Joseph, thank you so much for calling in. Adam in Crown Heights. You're on WNYC. Hi, Adam.

Adam: Hi, there. I think we get lost sometimes in the minutia of the job creation conversation which is obviously critically important. I think the nine-hour testimony is an example of the rigorous process that the city has put in place to ensure that every massive scale development meets certain checkpoints but I don't think we can get overview or overlook the importance of a private developer really investing in a community and a project that, as the speaker mentioned, is largely viewed by the neighborhood as derelict and forgotten. It's an area that has been abandoned for so long.

I think in a time where the city is hemorrhaging dollars and hemorrhaging citizens, people leaving the city, we should be encouraging by every stretch possible private investment, job creation, whatever it means. I understand the nuances of hotels versus retail versus high paying versus low paying jobs. The alternative is to squash it and push them out just like we did to Amazon. We cannot in this climate send that message to the business and investment community that spend all this time pursuing a development and we're just going to shut you down based off those important conversations but ones that are really, as I view, the nuances about what's going to happen down the line regardless.

Brian: I'm going to leave it there for time and I appreciate you weighing in. We hear on our phones, Ben and Karina as we start to run out of time, how people are divided on this, around the city, and even in the neighborhood. The local newspaper headlines that I read at the top of the segment from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "Sunset Park Small Business Owners Urge City Council To Approve Industry City Rezoning." From Brownstoner, "Sunset Park Residents Protest Industry City Rezoning Ahead of City Council Public Hearing." There's a petition against with 4,000 signatures, they say. From City Limits, "Asians in Sunset Park Call on Speaker to Support Industry City Rezoning."

Is there any way-- I guess it shouldn't be majority rule, like if there's 51% then the other 49% just has to live with it, but I guess these are some of the lines within the neighborhood that are creating differences of opinion. Karina, is it possible to say that ultimately when you come down to it, a large proportion of the neighborhood itself is on one side or another? I'll add that I'm a little surprised about the small business owners. I guess there would be spin-off businesses from a large development, but sometimes small business owners are concerned when big business comes in because they'll eat them alive.

Karina: Yes, I think it's hard to say in terms of what the overall neighborhood opinion is. Obviously there's a lot of diversity in opinion and people have different experiences and different demands and visions of what they want the neighborhood to look like. It wouldn't make sense. Industry City clearly draws people from outside the neighborhood to Sunset Park because it has a food court; because it has a bunch of fun things that people like to do. I can imagine from the perspective of a small business owner, that would be more foot traffic in the area, but on the flip side from the perspective of a local who doesn't want to see the neighborhood become more gentrified, they don't want-- People can see the same thing and have different reactions to it based on their own individual experience.

Brian: Ben Adler, last question then, is this all on one man right now, city council Speaker Corey Johnson? Because usually, for people who don't know this background, city council speakers simply defer to the local member on development proposals. Traditionally, if Carlos Menchaca representing Sunset Park, thinks this is bad for his district, the speaker goes along and the proposal dies, but so far, Speaker Johnson isn't following the tradition and he hasn't decided whether he will let this come to a vote or not, or let his council members weigh in individually. Is this all on him now?

Ben: Historically, prior to this administration, the deference to the local council member wasn't as strong. Under the Bloomberg administration, city council members couldn't always stop anything that was planned for their district necessarily, and there was more horse-trading involved. The reason that under this current speaker and his predecessor, Melissa Mark-Viverito, the deference to the individual member has become strong is in part because maybe they were weaker speakers than Christine Quinn, and they didn't have the single-handed control to get something through, and they needed to keep support from all the different members by appeasing them in that way.

It's not clear to me what Johnson could do here. Legally, he could, yes. Legally, the council could decide to approve it despite Menchaca's opposition, but whether that is actually up to Johnson or up to his read on the support that it has and that he has in the council is more-- It's harder to say from the outside.

Brian: Oh, that's an interesting take on that. It really means that-- what I call the tradition of deferring to the local city council member doesn't go back that far. It doesn't even go back to the Bloomberg administration, that's interesting. We will leave it there on Sunset Park rezoning today with Ben Adler, senior editor, and Karina Piser, contributor to the news site City & State. Thank you both so much.

 

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