For the past few
years, it has become all too easy for Brooklynites to reject out of hand
new real-estate development. There’s a good reason: some projects
in Brooklyn are so massive, ugly and misplaced that they have made many
residents cynical about the entire notion of building in the borough.
Yet build we must, because Brooklyn is where people want to live and work.
After all, the alternative, experienced during a period of urban decline
in the 1960s and ’70s, is far worse for everyone.
The good news is that not all development is improperly located or otherwise
misguided. As our Ariella Cohen reports
in this issue, a developer has bought the Jewish Press building, an eyesore
along Third Avenue, with hopes of turning it and adjacent properties he
already owns into a village of mid-sized buildings and an esplanade along
the still-filthy Gowanus Canal.
This is actually an area where residential development should be encouraged.
One block to the east is Fourth Avenue — the celebrated gateway to
Park Slope — which is being transformed from a row of ugly car-repair
shops and taxi parking lots into a real neighborhood.
“Gowanus Village” development should be applauded if only because
it will jumpstart long-failed city efforts to clean up the putrid corpse
of water. Community activists and environmentalists will, in the future,
fight City Hall with a powerful ally alongside them: the developer and
the people who have invested in his apartments.
This is not to say that the developer, Shaya Boymelgreen, should be given
a free pass. The Brooklyn Papers has certainly quibbled with Boymelgreen
before, and he will need to answer plenty of hard questions before being
awarded a zoning variance to build housing on his newly acquired properties.
But with proper public review, his vision of a canal zone that bridges
Park Slope and Carroll Gardens could be a good one.
The downside of the kind of frenetic real estate activity we’ve been
witnessing is that people who have formed the texture of our communities
are sometimes priced out. Creative efforts, including subsidies for affordable
housing, must be made so that Park Slope’s prized diversity, even
quirkiness, is maintained. If Boymelgreen participates in this effort,
his Gowanus Village will be a project Brooklyn can cheer.