In the 35th, Hudson and Hollingsworth face off, amid questions about development (inc. Prospect Heights) and the future of member deference
The Democratic primary race to succeed City Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo, finishing her second term in the 35th District, involves seven candidates, six of whom have received some matching funds, but boils down to a contest between the two with the most endorsements and full matching funds.
They are Michael Hollingsworth, a graphic designer and tenant organizer via the Crown Heights Tenants Union, and Crystal Hudson, a sports marketer, staffer in City Council and the Public Advocate’s office, and founder of Greater Prospect Heights Mutual Aid.
Hudson is clearly the “establishment” candidate, with backing from more unions (1199, 32BJ, District Council 37), elected officials (Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette Clarke), and the Citizens Union, as she pledges “an unapologetically pro-Black, pro-queer, pro-justice, pro-accountability, people-powered campaign.”
That makes Hollingsworth the insurgent, citing the Brooklyn Democratic Party’s failure to “protect neighbors from predatory landlords and our neighborhoods from colonization from developers,” with endorsements from TenantsPac, New York Communities for Change, and Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, including state Senator Jabari Brisport and Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest.
Defunding the NYPD a flashpoint?
One area of relative consonance: Hudson supports “defunding the NYPD and shifting at least $1 billion,” while Hollingsworth supports “cut[ing] the NYPD budget as much as possible.”
That positions Hudson closer to progressive mayoral candidate Maya Wiley—they just
cross-endorsed—while Hollingsworth, who hasn’t publicly supported a mayoral candidate, might be closer on this issue to the farthest-left candidate, Dianne Morales.
Still, why might the political action committee Common Sense NYC, in independent attack ads, pick sides, charging that Hollingsworth “threatens our safety” by cutting the police budget by 50% or by $3 billion? (Though he didn’t pledge that percentage and his platform doesn’t say $3 billion, Hollingsworth did say, in response to one questionnaire, that the sum was “both a heavy lift and also absolutely doable.”)
Unlike in 2013, when Cumbo was slow to criticize real-estate business-funded independent expenditures attacking her rivals, Hudson quickly responded, “Racist republican billionaires do not get to decide the future of New York City elected leadership. Period.” (Hollingsworth’s response: Wealthy real-estate interests are scared because they know what's at stake.”)
And why has rival Curtis Harris derided Hudson as “Laurie Cumbo 2.0,” especially since Cumbo opposed cutting $1 billion from the police budget and supports more centrist Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the mayoral primary?
Looking at real estate
The issue is at least in part real estate. (Common Sense NYC said targeted candidates were “ all socialist-related.”) And while the the rivals' land-use platforms sound similar, there’s some shading of difference.
Hudson’s Housing, Homelessness & Land Use platform states:
One point of difference: the proposed rezoning in SoHo, which Hudson supports and Hollingsworth opposes, as noted in The Independent. Another involves Cumbo’s track record on the redevelopment of the Bedford-Union Armory, which Hollingsworth long fought and which Hudson—who served as Cumbo’s part-time campaign treasurer at the time—has since criticized, as reported by The City.
Hollingsworth’s platform calls for “a moratorium on all City- and developer-initiated rezonings, with exceptions for justice-centered, community-produced plans.”
“I don’t think eliminating all rezonings is helpful,” said Hudson, who’s backed by some unions surely interested in construction, including the District Council of Carpenters and Iron Workers District Council. Hollingworth is backed by LiUNA-NY a collaboration of the New York State Laborers' PAC & the Mason Tenders’ District Council PAC.
The future of the district
Hudson’s support for the SoHo rezoning was embedded in this campaign paragraph:
“I have a lot of supporters I’ve never met,” Hudson told me. “Everybody is welcome at my table… that doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on 100% of issues 100% of the time.” She wants to use rezonings to build affordable housing while also respecting neighborhood character. How square the circle? A “communally established list of priorities” that development should meet.
Regarding community engagement, Hudson—formerly the First Deputy Public Advocate for Community Engagement—said she aimed “to have a series of community conversations or town halls, and I don’t just mean the people who know how to get to the Council Member’s office.”
(Note: I spoke with Hudson in a phone interview, and got responses from Hollingsworth by email.)
Some projects at issue
The proposed 840 Atlantic Avenue project, with a tower planned at the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue largely occupied by a drive-through McDonald’s is going through ULURP, with Community Board 8 recommending against the proposal, saying it doesn’t conform to the M-CROWN rezoning the board proposed, without approval by the City Planning Commission. (Cumbo has said she'll follow CB 8.)
Hudson said “folks have spent a lot of time researching and studying and developing a plan for the M-CROWN district, so I think we need to honor that… I think we need to work with DCP [Department of City Planning] and whoever the new mayor is to ensure that we can come to an agreement that reflects what the community has laid out… There are so few communities that come to the city saying we are OK with being upzoned, but asking for a few concessions.”
Hollingsworth called it a “a bad project” and stated the “neighborhood gets zero in infrastructure improvements because it’s a private application, and the closest thing we’ve got to a community plan is pushed off indefinitely by DCP, which prefers to let private developers handle their responsibility to actually plan the city. I’m not opposed to density itself, but I am opposed to it being used as a pointless giveaway to developers.”
Currently pending are some major development projects, like 960 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights. “I think they need to go back to the drawing board and create a process that engages the community in a meaningful way,” said Hudson.
“I think that the best way to get the affordable growth that we actually do want is to make the only available path creating comprehensive planning goals through community planning,” stated Hollingsworth, who highlighted that project in his recent Gotham Gazette op-ed, Racist Rezonings Made Housing the #1 Issue in Central Brooklyn.
Both candidates have pledged not to accept real-estate money, which means Hudson has had to return more, including a contribution from the lawyer Richard Lobel, who represents two pending projects along Atlantic Avenue in Prospect Heights/Crown Heights, and Tucker Reed of Totem, who’s playing some role in the 840 Atlantic project.
About Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park
The issue of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park has not come up in the debates—mostly forums, actually, with relatively few tough questions—over the 35th. So I posed a few questions.
Both Hudson and Hollingsworth similarly opposed extending the May 2025 deadline to deliver the remaining 876 units of affordable housing before a $2,000/month fine for each missing unit kicks in. That said, the deadline was imposed by New York State, not the city.
Similarly, the two both opposed extending extra subsidies so the remaining units could be made more affordable, saying the project had already been given so much. That’s an understandable position, but the problem—for them and for affordable housing advocates—is that the project’s Development Agreement does not specify income levels.
So, barring a future opportunity for leverage—and there may be one, given pending plans for development at Site 5 or even that deadline extension—or a new set of affordable housing subsidy programs from the next mayor, it’s unclear whether and how the project could come closer to the original promises.
Member deference
Though it has hardly been discussed publicly, the issue of member deference--in which the City Council typically defers to the local Council Member--may prove crucial to future development projects.
An update
Hudson is clearly the “establishment” candidate, with backing from more unions (1199, 32BJ, District Council 37), elected officials (Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette Clarke), and the Citizens Union, as she pledges “an unapologetically pro-Black, pro-queer, pro-justice, pro-accountability, people-powered campaign.”
That makes Hollingsworth the insurgent, citing the Brooklyn Democratic Party’s failure to “protect neighbors from predatory landlords and our neighborhoods from colonization from developers,” with endorsements from TenantsPac, New York Communities for Change, and Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, including state Senator Jabari Brisport and Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest.
 |
| Mashup via Gotham Gazette |
From some angles, their differences may not mean much. Both have taken the pledge to support progressive values listed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Courage to Change PAC and Gothamist suggests that “on individual issues, [they] disagree on little.”
StreetsPac ranked Hudson first but called Hollingsworth a “strong second choice.” Gotham Gazette suggested the race “splits city’s left.” The Indypendent dubbed it “liberals vs. leftists” in the battle for a district ranging from Crown Heights to Clinton Hill, including Prospect Heights and Fort Greene.
However, as I discuss below, their positions—actual and perceived—on past and pending real estate development in a rapidly changing district have generated attention, and passion, with Hudson perceived, if not as friendly to developers and development as Cumbo, less unfriendly than Hollingsworth.
StreetsPac ranked Hudson first but called Hollingsworth a “strong second choice.” Gotham Gazette suggested the race “splits city’s left.” The Indypendent dubbed it “liberals vs. leftists” in the battle for a district ranging from Crown Heights to Clinton Hill, including Prospect Heights and Fort Greene.
However, as I discuss below, their positions—actual and perceived—on past and pending real estate development in a rapidly changing district have generated attention, and passion, with Hudson perceived, if not as friendly to developers and development as Cumbo, less unfriendly than Hollingsworth.
Less discussed: their opposition—Hudson more emphatically than Hollingsworth—to the longstanding practice of member deference sets up potential disarmament, depending on the configuration of the City Council and its relationship with the mayor.
Whatever their position on local development controversies—and on pending ones near the Atlantic Yards site they’re similarly critical—it might not hold sway unless the next Council Member can muster a coalition on the Council and/or achieve an ambitious, challenging revision of city land-use practices.
(Updated June 20: I should add the other candidates: Renee Collymore, Curtis Harris, Regina Kinsey, Deirdre Levy, Hector Robertson, and Sharon Wedderburn. The second column involves public funds.)
(Updated June 20: I should add the other candidates: Renee Collymore, Curtis Harris, Regina Kinsey, Deirdre Levy, Hector Robertson, and Sharon Wedderburn. The second column involves public funds.)
Defunding the NYPD a flashpoint?
One area of relative consonance: Hudson supports “defunding the NYPD and shifting at least $1 billion,” while Hollingsworth supports “cut[ing] the NYPD budget as much as possible.”
That positions Hudson closer to progressive mayoral candidate Maya Wiley—they just
 |
| A pro-Hudson mailer from the Hotel Workers union |
Still, why might the political action committee Common Sense NYC, in independent attack ads, pick sides, charging that Hollingsworth “threatens our safety” by cutting the police budget by 50% or by $3 billion? (Though he didn’t pledge that percentage and his platform doesn’t say $3 billion, Hollingsworth did say, in response to one questionnaire, that the sum was “both a heavy lift and also absolutely doable.”)
Unlike in 2013, when Cumbo was slow to criticize real-estate business-funded independent expenditures attacking her rivals, Hudson quickly responded, “Racist republican billionaires do not get to decide the future of New York City elected leadership. Period.” (Hollingsworth’s response: Wealthy real-estate interests are scared because they know what's at stake.”)
And why has rival Curtis Harris derided Hudson as “Laurie Cumbo 2.0,” especially since Cumbo opposed cutting $1 billion from the police budget and supports more centrist Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the mayoral primary?
Looking at real estate
The issue is at least in part real estate. (Common Sense NYC said targeted candidates were “ all socialist-related.”) And while the the rivals' land-use platforms sound similar, there’s some shading of difference.
Hudson’s Housing, Homelessness & Land Use platform states:
The entire land use review process - in particular neighborhood rezonings - needs to be overhauled, and the city must dramatically increase its investment in social housing. The city must also strengthen tenant protections by preventing evictions, eliminating the ability of landlords to pass on capital improvement costs to tenants, and actually enforcing laws already on the books to protect tenants - at all costs.Hollingsworth’s Housing & Land Use platform states:
I will fight to strengthen tenant rights, to end all evictions, protect and fund NYCHA, to expand social housing, to end homelessness, and to empower Black and brown working-class communities to shape our own futures.
Hollingsworth’s platform calls for “a moratorium on all City- and developer-initiated rezonings, with exceptions for justice-centered, community-produced plans.”
“I don’t think eliminating all rezonings is helpful,” said Hudson, who’s backed by some unions surely interested in construction, including the District Council of Carpenters and Iron Workers District Council. Hollingworth is backed by LiUNA-NY a collaboration of the New York State Laborers' PAC & the Mason Tenders’ District Council PAC.
The future of the district
Hudson’s support for the SoHo rezoning was embedded in this campaign paragraph:
Prioritize rezonings in wealthier neighborhoods to increase deeply affordable housing stock. Rezonings in our city have decimated communities across the boroughs and have ignored meaningful input from local residents. Development projects, like Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park right here in District 35, have pushed longtime residents out and created chaos, endless construction, broken promises, and little accountability for those of us who remain. We must shift our focus on neighborhood rezonings from communities that are predominantly of color and instead increase the housing supply in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods. These neighborhoods can absorb the cost of building deeply affordable housing [a New York Times editorial] with premium market-rate rents, while low-income communities of color cannot. Crystal will work with other council members and the new administration to identify as many as 12 of these neighborhoods and advocate for their rezonings to provide housing and community infrastructure for lower-income residents and residents experiencing homelessness.That implies Hudson does not consider the 35th among those districts that should absorb more housing, though some supporters of Hudson, members of the pro-development group Open New York, have backed development projects in Prospect Heights based on the same logic.
“I have a lot of supporters I’ve never met,” Hudson told me. “Everybody is welcome at my table… that doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on 100% of issues 100% of the time.” She wants to use rezonings to build affordable housing while also respecting neighborhood character. How square the circle? A “communally established list of priorities” that development should meet.
Regarding community engagement, Hudson—formerly the First Deputy Public Advocate for Community Engagement—said she aimed “to have a series of community conversations or town halls, and I don’t just mean the people who know how to get to the Council Member’s office.”
(Note: I spoke with Hudson in a phone interview, and got responses from Hollingsworth by email.)
Some projects at issue
Hudson said “folks have spent a lot of time researching and studying and developing a plan for the M-CROWN district, so I think we need to honor that… I think we need to work with DCP [Department of City Planning] and whoever the new mayor is to ensure that we can come to an agreement that reflects what the community has laid out… There are so few communities that come to the city saying we are OK with being upzoned, but asking for a few concessions.”
Hollingsworth called it a “a bad project” and stated the “neighborhood gets zero in infrastructure improvements because it’s a private application, and the closest thing we’ve got to a community plan is pushed off indefinitely by DCP, which prefers to let private developers handle their responsibility to actually plan the city. I’m not opposed to density itself, but I am opposed to it being used as a pointless giveaway to developers.”
Currently pending are some major development projects, like 960 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights. “I think they need to go back to the drawing board and create a process that engages the community in a meaningful way,” said Hudson.
“I think that the best way to get the affordable growth that we actually do want is to make the only available path creating comprehensive planning goals through community planning,” stated Hollingsworth, who highlighted that project in his recent Gotham Gazette op-ed, Racist Rezonings Made Housing the #1 Issue in Central Brooklyn.
Both candidates have pledged not to accept real-estate money, which means Hudson has had to return more, including a contribution from the lawyer Richard Lobel, who represents two pending projects along Atlantic Avenue in Prospect Heights/Crown Heights, and Tucker Reed of Totem, who’s playing some role in the 840 Atlantic project.
About Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park
The issue of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park has not come up in the debates—mostly forums, actually, with relatively few tough questions—over the 35th. So I posed a few questions.
Both Hudson and Hollingsworth similarly opposed extending the May 2025 deadline to deliver the remaining 876 units of affordable housing before a $2,000/month fine for each missing unit kicks in. That said, the deadline was imposed by New York State, not the city.
Similarly, the two both opposed extending extra subsidies so the remaining units could be made more affordable, saying the project had already been given so much. That’s an understandable position, but the problem—for them and for affordable housing advocates—is that the project’s Development Agreement does not specify income levels.
So, barring a future opportunity for leverage—and there may be one, given pending plans for development at Site 5 or even that deadline extension—or a new set of affordable housing subsidy programs from the next mayor, it’s unclear whether and how the project could come closer to the original promises.
Member deference
Though it has hardly been discussed publicly, the issue of member deference--in which the City Council typically defers to the local Council Member--may prove crucial to future development projects.
In response to one questionnaire, Hudson said:
In response to one questionnaire, Hollingsworth said:
Both candidates have ambitious goals that depend on new funding, and more consensus on planning. How would Hudson get make workable a “right to long-term, permanent housing”?
“We haven’t taxed the rich yet,” Hudson responded. “With the creation of new revenue streams, the possibility that we haven’t had before might be presented to us.”
To build new social housing, Hollingsworth’s platform calls for supporting state efforts—like the Invest In Our New York Act, which includes taxes on income, capital gains, Wall Street transactions, and wealth—and new city bonds.
Note: a distorted, and suspiciously unbylined article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle started off by making the case for 840 Atlantic, raising questions about how both Hudson and Hollingsworth would pay for their priorities, and contending that that “DSA’s top down, purity-test politics leaves little room for melding to hyper-local circumstances and concerns.”
A recent article in the Commercial Observer suggested a possible progressive wave on the Council was making developers nervous, but quoted political consultant George Arzt as suggesting member deference “will no longer exist,” thus diminishing “NIMBYism.”
While the article acknowledged real estate industry concern about Hollingsworth, it suggested his and Hudson’s housing platforms overlap, given “the repeal of tax breaks for developers, the creation of a universal right to counsel in eviction proceedings, and the expansion of community land trusts,” though they depart regarding SoHo and similar rezonings.
Meanwhile, one real-estate developer, speaking anonymously to the publication, said of Hollingsworth, “He’s made comments to people we know that he wouldn’t be anti-development… I think there are people who are going to back Crystal, because they think she’ll be more pragmatic, but I don’t know if that’s right or not.”
For now, what’s clear is that each candidate pledges a greater amount of community responsiveness than the incumbent. The challenge will be to harmonize concerns when communities are divided, and the Council Member must reflect local preferences while recognizing larger priorities.
The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) needs to be radically transformed so that communities are driving land use and zoning needs - not private developers. Local Council Members must be unapologetically committed to ensuring that communities can set forth binding commitments for land use. I look forward to my office launching comprehensive, participatory planning processes so communities can determine their own needs, not developers. I am also staunchly opposed to member deference, and think it is short-sighted to believe that a rezoning in one borough will not have a direct impact on the other boroughs.“I’ve seen broken government from inside and outside, that’s what makes my candidacy unique,” said Hudson, suggesting that a project opposed by an entire community can pass if the Council Member is for it. “A number of things have to change in the way Council Members carry out their duties,” she said, including a collaborative process and a comprehensive plan for the city.
In response to one questionnaire, Hollingsworth said:
The local member's role is to bring the community's voice to the rest of the council. When there is consensus for or against a project by a community board and tenants, homeowners, small businesses and other residents, neither the local councilmember nor the council as a whole should be making unilateral decisions that contradict the will of local residents. Member deference is a smokescreen. It is not mandatory, merely a courtesy enforced through peer pressure.In response to my query, he was more nuanced:
I’ve certainly struggled with the issue of member deference, because it’s like a non-aggression pact between very different council members… and who also have very different relationships with the real estate industry…. For the last seven years, deference to a council member who was backed by big real estate is what put the target on our backs, but deference to the new council member could be crucial to turn the tide…. I’m hopeful that I can build alliances with like-minded council members to get comprehensive planning principles in place so that member deference won’t be necessary.Towards progress, or utopia?
Both candidates have ambitious goals that depend on new funding, and more consensus on planning. How would Hudson get make workable a “right to long-term, permanent housing”?
“We haven’t taxed the rich yet,” Hudson responded. “With the creation of new revenue streams, the possibility that we haven’t had before might be presented to us.”
To build new social housing, Hollingsworth’s platform calls for supporting state efforts—like the Invest In Our New York Act, which includes taxes on income, capital gains, Wall Street transactions, and wealth—and new city bonds.
Note: a distorted, and suspiciously unbylined article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle started off by making the case for 840 Atlantic, raising questions about how both Hudson and Hollingsworth would pay for their priorities, and contending that that “DSA’s top down, purity-test politics leaves little room for melding to hyper-local circumstances and concerns.”
 |
| From the print Commercial Observer |
A recent article in the Commercial Observer suggested a possible progressive wave on the Council was making developers nervous, but quoted political consultant George Arzt as suggesting member deference “will no longer exist,” thus diminishing “NIMBYism.”
While the article acknowledged real estate industry concern about Hollingsworth, it suggested his and Hudson’s housing platforms overlap, given “the repeal of tax breaks for developers, the creation of a universal right to counsel in eviction proceedings, and the expansion of community land trusts,” though they depart regarding SoHo and similar rezonings.
Meanwhile, one real-estate developer, speaking anonymously to the publication, said of Hollingsworth, “He’s made comments to people we know that he wouldn’t be anti-development… I think there are people who are going to back Crystal, because they think she’ll be more pragmatic, but I don’t know if that’s right or not.”
For now, what’s clear is that each candidate pledges a greater amount of community responsiveness than the incumbent. The challenge will be to harmonize concerns when communities are divided, and the Council Member must reflect local preferences while recognizing larger priorities.
That will require a lot of work, and surely be influenced by the configuration of the Council, as well as the policies of the next mayor.
More on 35th in The City https://t.co/JU4oj7Ksh2
— Norman Oder (@AYReport) June 18, 2021
Hudson gets big labor $
Ed Ott: "With the real estate industry & workers who build things...There’s a symbiotic relationship... [but] They want to build it as cheap as they can, & we want 2make a really decent wage with benefits” https://t.co/jh6lPIjLY3
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