A vote on a controversial plan to massively reshape a 122-acre section of Brooklyn's industrial waterfront has been delayed for a fifth time, after months of protests by local residents and politicians.
The delay is a blow to the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the project next to Governor Kathy Hochul last spring, and a victory for the local politicians and residents who wanted to send the project back to the drawing board.
According to the city's Economic Development Corporation (EDC), the City task force of elected officials, business and nonprofit leaders, and public housing tenants charged with approving the plan will not vote as scheduled to determine how the City should redevelop the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which runs south of Pier 6 all the way down to Sullivan Street along the waterfront.
Instead, the task force will kick the can down the road yet again. The vote, which was supposed to take place Thursday at 3:30 p.m., has been moved to a yet-to-be-scheduled date, to give the task force "sufficient time to consult further with the various neighboring communities" to figure out "a viable path forward," according to a joint statement from Congressmember Dan Goldman, who chairs the task force, and cochairs State Senator Andrew Gounardes and Councilmember Alexa Avilés.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who criticized the project for failing to prioritize port space in the hours before the vote, said the delay was "the best course of action to enable task force members and the community to build a shared vision that maximizes the economic potential for Brooklyn's last working waterfront," in a statement to Hell Gate.
The delay gives the 28-person task force more time to grapple with the future of Brooklyn's Columbia Waterfront District, a neighborhood that would see thousands of new apartments, à la Gowanus; a new park on Pier 7; a school; 400-room hotel; 225,000 square feet of industrial space; and a brand new maritime port under the City Economic Development Corporation's (EDC) proposed plan.
"A ton of work has been done, but even more foundational questions remain unanswered," said Avilés. "The EDC has tried to ram this process into an obscenely short time frame."
Back in May of last year, the City's quasi-public economic growth engine, the EDC, took control of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by trading it, Pokemon-card style, in exchange for Staten Island's Howland Hook Marine Terminal. The EDC then convened a task force made up of local politicos like Avilés and big-name elected officials like Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. That task force was charged with tweaking and approving recommendations for the site, which, if given the green light, will then become the basis of a General Project Plan, overseen by (yet another!) EDC-established task force.
That more final General Project Plan would then need to go through an environmental review, and secure approvals from an alphabet soup of agencies—including the Public Authorities Control Board, and the Army Corps of Engineers and the State Department of Environmental Conservation for the waterfront developments—before construction could begin on most of the site. (The EDC has already gotten started on plans to repair aging piers and damaged cranes.)
But for any of that to happen, the task force first has to approve their recommendations with a vote that's been delayed and rescheduled four times since it was initially supposed to take place in April, angering residents and elected officials already upset by what they say is an obscure and rushed process.
"The bottom line is: These meetings have taken place behind closed doors," said Columbia Waterfront District resident Leah Carroll. "It's been completely opaque to us. They have excluded community members."
If the vote fails, the site will keep chugging along as a port, with a few EDC improvements, and a future mayoral administration will likely be forced to deal with its piers, which are quite literally crumbling into the ocean, according to EDC head Andrew Kimball.
Affordable housing… and a working waterfront?
The vision plan for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal would massively transform the stretch of land along the waterfront from Pier 7 to Pier 12, in an effort to get its rusting piers in ship-shape and build thousands of apartments in the neighborhood.
New York City has already started fixing up the port, spending $15 million on a new electric crane and another $1 million to demolish and remove four out-of-service cranes. Under the proposed changes, a new pier running horizontal to the shoreline would replace Piers 8, 9A, and 9B. (The latter two piers are already out of commission.)
According to the EDC, the new pier and refurbished, all-electric port would be better equipped to handle imported food cargo and other perishables. Jeff Holmes, NYCEDC Spokesperson, called it "the largest investment in our maritime and industrial community in generations."
The rest of the space would become home to a 400-room hotel on the south side, a public school on the north side, industrial space, 28 acres of public open space, and lots and lots of housing.
The plan calls for 6,000 new units of housing, about 40 percent of which would be reserved for lower-income New Yorkers. At least 10 percent of those apartments would be set aside for New Yorkers who earn no more than 40 percent of the area median income per year, or $51,840 for two people living together.
But all of those renovations, parks and apartments don't come cheap. Building out the port alone would cost an estimated $1.75 billion, and the total price tag for the entire project sits somewhere around $3.5 billion, according to the EDC. The port repairs will be supplemented by at least $368 million in City, state, and federal funds that have already been earmarked for the project. To generate the rest of the cash that's needed, the EDC would let private developers build on the publicly owned land.
A local development corporation that would be created to oversee the project (because nothing in this world can be simple) would be allowed to lease out the land and collect payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to fund these upgrades. The draft plan estimates these PILOTs could amount to roughly $1 billion over 40 years. But details on how that local development corporation would generate the rest of the money are hazy. The vision plan says the corporation could seek additional grants and "explore a range of alternative financing models." (A task force meeting in February included more specific financials that were shared with Community Board 6, but the project currently projects hundreds of fewer housing units now.)
Some elected officials are already on board with the EDC's proposal, arguing the larger development is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
"We can make this a vibrant working waterfront that maintains the character of Brooklyn and of the neighborhood" while at the same time "addressing the severe housing supply issues by adding 6,000 desperately needed new units," Goldman told Hell Gate. "We're threading a needle, but this plan ultimately, I think, achieves all of those goals."
Maritime workers unions, and the tenant associations for two New York City Housing Authority developments, Red Hook Houses East and Red Hook Houses West, also threw their support behind the project. The vision plan agrees to set aside around $200 million of the money generated by allowing private developers to build on the land for long-overdue repairs at the NYCHA units. And 200 of the affordable apartments will be reserved for NYCHA residents.
"NYCHA houses need a lot of repairs," said Frances Brown, the president of Red Hook East's residents association. "But I'm not just thinking about the NYCHA campus. I'm thinking about the whole community. Everybody is going to profit off this."
Opponents unite against a common enemy: traffic
But not everyone is pleased with the EDC's plans. A group of residents mobilized to protest the vote and the development, and notably, they're being backed by local, ostensibly pro-housing elected officials who argue that the task force's recommendations don't address the neighborhood's lack of public transit and dense traffic—problems that would only grow worse with an influx of new residents.
Councilmembers Avilés and Shahana Hanif and Reynoso, who serve on the Brooklyn Marine Terminal task force alongside Goldman, have all come out against the task force's final vision plan.
The two councilmembers said that the plan doesn't address the Columbia Waterfront District's truck traffic from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, does not adequately protect the neighborhood from worsening floods and storms, and fails to expand the area's public transit (which is pretty much just the B61 bus south of Atlantic Avenue) in order to meet the needs of future residents.
"Adding 16,000 new people means cars and bringing in new businesses means commercial vehicles to service those businesses," Avilés said. "And both Red Hook and the Columbia Waterfront communities are currently eyeballs deep in traffic."
The final vision plan calls for a $25 million shuttle service to connect the area and the subway (though the exact routes have not been determined), more frequent ferry service, and a promise to work with the City's Department of Transportation to address traffic from the BQE (lol). It also includes a plan for a floodwall along the coastline, and a plan to study a future floodwall to cover more of south Red Hook.
But that hasn't been enough to allay residents' concerns.
Trust the government? This government?
In public meetings, critics have offered up a wide variety of complaints about the plan— some said they don't want housing, or that they want any housing to be more affordable, or that they want to preserve the port in all of its 122-acre glory, or that the whole process just "doesn't smell right," as one resident put it at a June 12 meeting. But mostly, they express a deep distrust in the EDC's process and its ability to keep its promises.
At a public meeting in June, Reynoso likened the Brooklyn Marine Terminal project to the stalled 2003 plan to build thousands of affordable apartments at Atlantic Yards by the Barclays Center. (The state has so far declined to fine the developer of that project for not building the remaining 876 affordable apartments.) He also brought up how the City abandoned its plan to build housing on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden after pro-garden activists defeated a decades-old effort to use the site for low-income and homeless seniors.
Hanif and Avilés both blamed the mistrust on the EDC's speedy public hearing process, and voting delays certainly haven't helped. The EDC kicked off its campaign for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal project in August last year and held more than 20 meetings and workshops for different community groups.
"Rushing to meet arbitrary deadlines has only deepened community mistrust," Hanif said in a statement to Hell Gate.
Avilés theorized that the EDC may be rushing to deliver a much-needed win for embattled Mayor Eric Adams, who faces a Sisyphean battle for reelection this fall.
"I think what has truly driven the time frame is the desire for an affirmative press release that Eric Adams brokered a deal, as half-baked as this deal might be."
But the EDC, Goldman, and other supporters argue that the city needs to move quickly to repair the piers.
The port is "about to fall in the river," Goldman said. Waiting also opens up the opportunity for the Trump administration to try to claw back some or all of the $164 million in federal funding already secured for the project.
"There's real urgency right here. Unlike many other rezonings or redevelopments, where the land will still be there in five or 10 years, if the project does not go forward, in this case, the port will be very unlikely to be working and active in five years," Goldman said. "The port urgently needs to be refurbished and renovated, and we simply do not have time to wait."
"We cannot make perfect the enemy of the good," Goldman added. "If we are to address the affordability problems facing New Yorkers, this project is a great way to move forward in that goal."
Now what?
After all the handwringing, protest, and accusations of threats, the fate of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal remains unsettled.
At the next vote, whenever it may be, the task force will (once again) attempt to actually decide what to do with this massive stretch of the waterfront. If they vote to approve the recommendations, they would finally kick off another months-long planning process to get a GPP and environmental review together for further state approvals. If they vote no, they'll send the EDC back to the drawing board.
"Approval by the Task Force would not mean shovels in the ground next month, but abandoning this process would severely delay both the port modernization and the construction of much-needed affordable housing, possibly for years," Gounardes wrote in a Brooklyn Paper op-ed last week.