At Community Board 8, CM Hudson anticipates (wishfully?) a city response on neighborhood plan before Tuesday votes on pending developments

See collected coverage of M-CROWN rezonings: click here.

It’s one of 35th District Council Member Crystal Hudson’s knottiest challenges: what to do about two pending rezonings, 870-888 Atlantic Ave. and 1034-1042 Atlantic Ave., which would bring 17-story (or maybe 15-story) buildings to a zone of Atlantic Avenue (and below) subject to a spate of piecemeal developments.

Hudson, along with 36th District Council Member Chi Ossé and neighborhood allies, in March asked the Department of City Planning and other agencies to pursue a neighborhood rezoning, which could ultimately deliver more comprehensive infrastructure, affordable housing, and services for what’s known as the M-CROWN district.

At a meeting Thursday 4/7/22 of the Community Board 8 Land Use Committee, Hudson said she didn’t have any significant updates on the two pending projects. 

But she said she hoped for a response to the letter before the Council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises and the Land Use Committee takes up the projects on Tuesday, at 10 am and 2 pm respectively. 

(Here's the calendar for both; at this point, as shown in the screenshot at right, the Subcommittee, at least as of now, invites testimony only on other agenda items.)

“We're hopeful that we'll have something from them you know, hopefully by tomorrow,” Hudson said. “The options before us are to move forward… if the administration is willing to commit to a rezoning and a comprehensive plan for the entirety of the Atlantic Avenue corridor within the 35th District and a sliver of the 36th.”

“So in an ideal scenario, we'll get a commitment from the administration on that rezoning and then we can start a community-led plan for a rezoning,” she said. (I asked her office yesterday to update me if they did have any news, but didn’t hear back.) 

It's unclear whether that the Department of City Planning has the budget, bandwidth, and commitment for a neighborhood rezoning.

Original 1034-1042 Atlantic/Archimaera

Hudson didn't say how she'd vote on the two projects, whatever the scenario. Under the informal policy of member deference, the Council nearly always--but not every time--follows the lead of the local council member.

A pointed response

Hudson soon got a pointed reminder from influential CB 8 member Gib Veconi, who’s led the M-CROWN rezoning discussion and the private negotiations with developers. 

CB 8 in these two cases got commitments for more deeply affordable housing and job-creating space, plus a cut in height to 15 stories, but not bulk.

(Those commitments, I'd note, came in exchange for higher density--valuable bulk--than anticipated in CB 8's proposed M-CROWN rezoning, aimed to cross-subsidize affordable housing and job-creating space.) 

Veconi told Hudson: “It was the Community Board's recommendation that, if it is not possible to get a neighborhood rezoning, that the applications with the conditions listed in the Community Board’s resolution be supported.”

1034-1042 Atlantic recommendation

“I'm aware of the recommendation that the Community Board has made,” Hudson replied coolly.

Sussing out the logic

Hudson’s less-than-enthused tone, I speculate, could have multiple sources.

Perhaps she recognizes that the Community Board’s list of preferences was a compromise narrowly approved at the Land Use Committee, after previous highly contested votes. 

After a call for a neighborhood rezoning, the list of preferences starts not with the conditions cited by Veconi (see 2.a. in screenshot) but the original contours of the board's M-CROWN rezoning proposal (see 1.), offering less bulk.

Hudson likely wants to establish her stamp on the neighborhood, rather than let applications formulated during the term of her predecessor (and former boss), Council Member Laurie Cumbo, move ahead.

A city commitment to a neighborhood plan would give her an easier path to voting against the two pending applications. After publicly opposing them in January, she more recently said she was undecided.

Division over support

Original 870-888 Atlantic Ave./Archimaera

If Hudson doesn’t get that commitment, she faces a question: would a ‘no’ vote be quixotic, since she doesn’t have a ready alternative?

Moreover, any vote against pending projects would subject her to a volley of criticism from the real-estate press and YIMBY (yes-in-my-backyard) advocates who prioritize construction above all.

Even if Hudson does get a commitment to a neighborhood plan, some CB 8 leaders say the two projects are worth pursuing in the interim, while others disagree—a source of significant tension during the Land Use Committee meeting.

Notably, those behind a petition calling for a neighborhood rezoning while rejecting the two pending plans clashed with Veconi and, to a lesser extent, Land Use Chair Sharon Wedderburn, who support the rezoning and also the compromise that would get the two pending projects built. (I’ll write more about that in a separate article.)

Yesterday, Patch published Neighbors Brace For Council Vote On Controversial Atlantic Ave Towers, focusing on those behind the petition. 

"We're definitely giving [Hudson] a chance to prove that she is really on our side," Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU) member Esteban Giron told Patch. The article summarized CB 8's complex posture as having "voted against the buildings late last year but included a list of desired changes."

Stemming displacement

Later in the meeting, Hudson said that her advocacy stemmed from recognition that 20% of the Black population in the 35th Council District—not just in Community District 8—had been lost in the last 10 years.

“And so the reason why I have been supportive of a comprehensive plan is because I don't believe that the way things have been done to date have been have been productive,” she said. “We can't continue to approve projects one by one and expect a different result from what we've seen in the past ten years.”

Hudson cited a total of some 7,000 apartments on the way, with some 5,000 from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, plus the other projects approved east of Vanderbilt Avenue in the M-CROWN area.

Map by Kaja Kühl; rezonings in light blue are pending; apartment counts are from
 Environmental Assessment Statements and include areas beyond the parcels owned by applicants;
 the 1050 Pacific project would now have 234 units and 1010 Pacific would have 175 units

“And nobody has taken a moment to stop and say, well, what about the totality of the community and what about, you know, the negative impacts of the luxury development that's gone up?” the Council Member said.

"So we've got to take a minute and think about who we're building for, unless we're building for the people, you know, with the greatest needs,” she said, “and we can expect that they will continue to leave… I think one thing it seems that everybody has agreed on so far is the need for a comprehensive plan.”

Then again, Veconi pointed out that the two pending projects, unlike previous ones approved in the area, could deliver 20% (about 40 units each) deeply affordable housing. 

That can be achieved if the developers sign a separate agreement with CB 8, but cannot at this point be mandated in a rezoning, since the deeply affordable Option 3 can only be added to one of the two basic options, as seen in the screenshot below.

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing options.
From HPD, using 2016 income levels

(I wrote that the upside for the developers from additional bulk is such that they readily agree to the deeply affordable option, Option 3 under the city's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing.)

Then again, Sarah Lazur of the CHTU said the group opposed the two approvals “because we don't believe that the affordable housing that is created by these individual applications is sufficient to counteract the affect that these rezonings have on the price of all of the other apartments.”

That stance too is contested. A 2018 paper from NYU's Furman Center, Supply Skepticism, argues that "from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes"--even without affordable units--"moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families." Still, the empirical evidence does not assess the record in the CHTU's catchment area. (Lazur has also noted that spot rezonings can't deliver, for example, an anti-displacement plan.)

Enhancing community engagement

Hudson said, regarding the potential neighborhood plan, that her office “is working on a community engagement plan that we hope to launch soon,” in conjunction with Borough President Antonio Reynoso and others.

“While it's wonderful to have” an engaged group on the Community Board and Land Use Committee, she said, it was “a very small privileged group of people” who know how neighborhood issues are aired.

Given the number of people who don’t even know about the Community Board, or the resources that the city can provide, “those are the people that we're actually trying to reach… through this comprehensive plan,” Hudson said.

The Council Member said it was important to find common ground. “The more divided we are," she said, referencing a point made by Veconi, "then the developers win, and they've been winning.”

The rest of the meeting, however, exposed some of those divisions, as I'll write.