N.Y. / REGION

Obstacle to Mayor de Blasio’s Affordable Housing Plan: Neighborhood Resistance

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Atlantic Avenue in East New York, an area zoned for growth under Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan. Residents of the neighborhood are resisting proposals to build taller on streets lined with rowhouses and small apartment buildings.Benjamin Norman for The New York Times 
Every month, city planners come to East New York to explain how the city wants to help this corner of Brooklyn, scarred by decades of poverty and violent crime, grow. They will invite developers to build up local streets in exchange for more units of affordable housing. They will invest in new trees and sidewalks. Better services and shops will follow, they say.
And every month, the grumbling ensues.
“We see what’s going on around in the city,” said Joyce Scott-Brayboy, 58, a local community board member and retired city worker. “No to that in East New York. No. No.”
Hers is the first neighborhood Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has chosen to focus on under his affordable housing strategy, one of his chief policy initiatives, which he made the centerpiece of his State of the City address on Tuesday.
Ms. Scott-Brayboy is hardly alone in challenging his vision. Around New York, people who have watched luxury buildings and wealthy newcomers remake their streets are balking at the growth Mr. de Blasio envisions, saying the influx of market-rate apartments called for in the city’s plans could gut neighborhoods, not preserve them.
In his speech, the mayor pressed for the urgency to build and preserve the next generation of affordable housing. “If we do not act, and act boldly, New York risks taking on the qualities of a gated community,” he said. “A place defined by exclusivity, rather than opportunity. And we cannot let that happen.”
Mr. de Blasio pledged that his effort would help, not hurt, the people already living in the neighborhoods his administration wants to develop.
“As we invest in more affordable housing, we will also work with communities to preserve the fabric of our neighborhoods and invest in things that great neighborhoods need,” the mayor said, listing parks, schools, shops and restaurants as amenities the city would help bring to growing areas.
But nowhere is the distrust of his strategy deeper than in Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio’s home borough, where it can seem as if it is only a matter of time before development transforms even the poorest neighborhoods beyond recognition, straining the subways, packing schools and pushing longtime residents out.

Brooklyn: Gentrifying, and More Expensive for the Poor 

In northern Brooklyn, higher-income people are moving in. Rents for poor people are increasing across the borough, most rapidly in Bushwick, Bay Ridge and Bedford-Stuyvesant. 
Greenpoint
Greenpoint
Bushwick
Bushwick
Brooklyn
Heights
Brooklyn
Heights
Crown
Heights
Crown
Heights
East
New York
East
New York
Prospect
Lefferts Gardens
Prospect
Lefferts Gardens
Sunset
Park
Sunset
Park
Canarsie
Canarsie
Borough
Park
Flatbush
Borough
Park
Flatbush
Bay
Ridge
Bay
Ridge
Sheepshead
Bay
Sheepshead
Bay
Coney Island
Coney Island
–50%
–25
–0
+25
+$150
+200
+250
+300
Where neighborhoods are gentrifying

Where rents for poor people are going up fastest

Average change in gross rent for those making less than 80 percent of the poverty rate, since 2000, 
inflation-adjusted
Change in population earning more than double the poverty rate, by community district, since 2000
Source: American Community Survey; U.S. Census 
The hostility simmering in East New York and beyond, coming from many of the very people who voted Mr. de Blasio into office on a platform of reducing inequality, is not just a challenge to the mayor’s efforts to add thousands of units for lower-income residents. It has also raised legitimate questions, housing advocates say, about whether the city can build without further gentrifying large areas.
In Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, residents have turned sedate discussions about how to responsibly rezone a local thoroughfare into screaming matches over whether to halt all development. In yet another Brooklyn neighborhood, Sunset Park, people have denounced what would seem an easy sell — an all-affordable building that would also expand the local library — partly because, as one opponent put it, it “smells like gentrification.”
And in East New York, not far from neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick that have seen striking changes in just a few years, many residents are resisting plans to build tall buildings on streets currently lined with rowhouses and small apartment buildings.
Demand for affordable housing is as urgent as ever; those speaking loudest at community forums are not necessarily representative of the majority. But many New Yorkers feel that projects from the era of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg like Pacific Park, a multibuilding complex around the Barclays Center formerly called Atlantic Yards, did not deliver on their promises of affordable housing quickly or comprehensively enough.
Now Mr. de Blasio’s administration is planning a new crop of developments, which typically include up to four times as many market-rate units as affordable ones. On Tuesday, he called for building 160,000 new market-rate units over the next decade.
Joyce Scott-Brayboy listened to a presentation at a housing forum at Blessed Sacrament School in East New York. Richard Perry/The New York Times 
“Basically, the public is driving a harder bargain now,” said Michelle de la Uz, the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, the nonprofit organization seeking to build the all-affordable building in Sunset Park.
Mr. de Blasio, at a groundbreaking ceremony in December for an all-affordable building at Pacific Park, acknowledged the “balance that has to be struck.” But he said he expected communities to accept new construction.
In his speech on Tuesday, he once again nodded to those concerns about density and height. “We are not embarking on a mission to build towering skyscrapers where they don’t belong,” her said. “We have a duty to protect and preserve the culture and character of our neighborhoods, and we will do so.”
Administration officials are also exploring new mixed-income development in an area cutting through Highbridge, Mount Hope and other neighborhoods along Jerome Avenue west of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and in areas in Long Island City and along Flushing Creek in Queens. In his address on Tuesday, the mayor announced the two most recent additions to his rezoning strategy: East Harlem in Manhattan and along Bay Street on the northern shore of Staten Island.
Planners are still studying how many of the 80,000 new apartments in the mayor’s 10-year housing proposal city officials believe individual areas can absorb, or private developers will want to build.
A section of Atlantic Avenue in East New York, the first neighborhood the mayor has chosen to grow under his affordable housing strategy. Benjamin Norman for The New York Times 
The plans have advanced furthest in East New York, where officials have proposed new zoning rules to allow for significantly taller buildings on several main arteries. As part of the plan, more grocery stores, restaurants and services, as well as sidewalks, traffic signals and other streetscape amenities, would follow.
The mayor announced on Tuesday that the city would also invest $36 million in legal services for tenants in newly rezoned neighborhoods to help them fight landlord harassment.
Susanna Blankley, a housing organizer for Community Action for Safe Apartments in the Bronx, said any major development in still-affordable areas of the city, like the South Bronx and East New York, must be accompanied by stronger, neighborhood-specific policies to protect existing tenants like the auto-body shops in Cromwell-Jerome.
“If we don’t do this right, we stand to lose any semblance of affordability in the city,” Ms. Blankley said.
Residents are warmer to growth in Queens, where one neighborhood to be studied, called Flushing West by city planners, is mostly industrial, said Peter Koo, the local city councilman.
Mr. de Blasio breaking ground on an affordable housing apartment complex, called Pacific Park, near Downtown Brooklyn in December. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times 
But in Brooklyn, the uproar has been so nasty that it has taken even some veterans of development fights by surprise. Preliminary rezoning plans, though they may never translate into construction, are drawing intense opposition.
The protests have reached a boiling point in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, on the southeast side of Prospect Park, where about a dozen luxury towers are set to rise in the next few years. In April, the community board asked the city’s Planning Department for a zoning study of Empire Boulevard, a stretch of warehouses, auto-body shops and storage units, seeking to have a say — and ensure affordable housing — in the area’s inevitable development.
Within months, a group of incensed residents began disrupting discussions with demands that the board embrace a no-development policy instead of the rezoning proposal. The group, Movement to Protect the People, wants Empire Boulevard to stay low-rise and has called on the city to preserve, not build, affordable units in the area. It has threatened to sue the community board over its vote on the proposal, and it accused elected officials of conspiring with developers.
“Everybody’s not paying attention to the 80 percent luxury units that actually decreases affordability,” Alicia Boyd, the group’s leader, said of new buildings in which 80 percent of the units are market-rate, subsidizing the 20 percent that are affordable. “Yet somehow, this image of affordable housing keeps being pushed at us.”
Another common concern is that the financing deals to build affordable units do not serve those who need them most: extremely low-income residents making 30 percent or less of the area’s median income, or less than $26,000 a year for a family of four in the city’s five boroughs and Westchester County. Most new affordable units are now open to households in the range of 60 percent of the area's median income.
A young man walking his bike along the median on Atlantic Avenue. In East New York, many residents are resisting plans to build high-rises on streets currently lined with small  buildings.Benjamin Norman for The New York Times 
To community leaders like Valerie Fleming, a block association president in Crown Heights, mentioning “affordable housing” prompts a question: “Affordable for who?”
In East New York, the city’s first test, city planners have tried to bring residents on board through community forums for about three years, beginning under Mayor Bloomberg.
Though wary, some residents welcome the higher-income arrivals and improved services that are likely to follow upzoning. Manuel Burgos, 49, a construction and development consultant who serves on the community board, said he could use higher-quality groceries and a place for a good cup of coffee. “I’m looking for some quality of life,” he said.
But the questions about how high is too high and how dense is too dense have other residents bristling.
High-rises are unsightly, they say. What high-rises might do to longtime residents is worse.
“The people who’ve lived here all their lives,” asked Robert Quiles, 68, who has lived in the neighborhood for five decades, “are they going to be the ones to enjoy the benefits or the improvements coming to East New York?”