Community board blocks 200 affordable units, cites concerns about the affordable units
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Board Finds Numerous Objections to Solving Its Own Problem
BROOKLYN — A Community Board 6 vote last week rejected a proposal to build 200 affordable housing units on a vacant lot in Carroll Gardens, with board members citing concerns including building height, parking displacement, shadow impact on an adjacent garden, increased foot traffic, the developer’s record in other neighbourhoods, the design’s relationship to the streetscape, the income levels of the proposed tenants relative to the neighbourhood median, and one objection described in the minutes as ‘the general direction of change,’ which the board’s legal counsel noted is not a planning category but acknowledged captures something.
The proposal, submitted by a nonprofit developer with a twenty-year track record of building affordable housing in the city, would have housed approximately 400 people at rents between thirty and sixty percent of area median income, in a neighbourhood where the median asking rent for a two-bedroom is $4,200 per month and the waiting list for existing affordable units is eleven years. The board voted 18 to 4 against the proposal. Several members said they support affordable housing in principle. In practice they preferred a different location, which they declined to specify, because specifying the location would make it someone else’s opposition meeting.
The NIMBY Literature Grows
Planning researchers have documented the Carroll Gardens vote alongside hundreds of similar outcomes in a study published by the Urban Institute examining the relationship between community board composition and affordable housing development rates. The study found that community boards in high-income New York neighbourhoods reject affordable housing proposals at three times the rate of boards in lower-income neighbourhoods, and that the most common objection categories, height, parking, and shadow, correlate strongly with property value concerns and weakly with actual measurements of height, parking availability, and shadow. The study describes this as ‘a pattern,’ which is the Urban Institute being polite, and which the board described as ‘irrelevant to local context,’ which is the board being specific about what kind of polite it wants to be.
The Developer Considers Next Steps
The nonprofit developer, whose name was mentioned once during the board meeting and four hundred times in a Facebook group opposing the project, issued a statement saying it respects the community process and will review its options. The options include appealing to the city’s Department of City Planning, applying for a different variance on a modified design, identifying an alternative site in the neighbourhood, or abandoning the site and building the units somewhere that wants them, which, the developer noted, also has a waiting list, and also has a community board, and also has residents who support affordable housing in principle and in a different location.
Mayor Mamdani’s housing plan, released last month, includes a proposal to reduce community board veto power over affordable housing in high-opportunity neighbourhoods, a provision that produced the most intense opposition of any item in the plan, including the rent freeze, including the grocery stores, including the proposal to tax landlords who hold vacant units, all of which generated significant pushback from specific interest groups. The community board provision generated pushback from community boards, which are not interest groups but are also not not interest groups, and which have, in the forty years since they received their advisory authority over land use, developed institutional interests as robust as any lobbying organisation, with the advantage of being elected by nobody and accountable to everyone in the way that things are accountable to everyone when there are no consequences.
The Vacant Lot Continues to Be Vacant
The lot, which has been vacant since 2009, is owned by an LLC registered in Delaware whose principals the NYC Housing Preservation and Development Department was unable to identify within the standard lookup window. The LLC pays property taxes on the vacant lot at the current assessed rate. The lot generates no housing, no shadow, no foot traffic, and no design relationship with the streetscape. It is, by all the criteria cited in the opposition, ideal. The board has not proposed any alternative use for it. The lot will remain vacant until someone proposes something, at which point the process will repeat, with new objections, and the same result, and eleven more years on the waiting list for the 400 people the proposal would have housed, who are somewhere in the city tonight, in apartments they cannot afford or shelters or relatives’ living rooms, and who did not attend the community board meeting because it was a Tuesday evening and they were working.
Cooling as Policy
The mayor’s office released a heat resilience plan this week that includes, alongside the cooling centres and subway capital asks, a proposal to open every public school with functioning air conditioning as a cooling resource on days when the heat index exceeds ninety-five degrees, an idea that required no czar, no task force, and no state approval, and that the school chancellor confirmed could be implemented by next summer, which made it the fastest implementation timeline on any Mamdani proposal to date, and which the mayor celebrated on the subway platform at Ditmars, where it was ninety-one degrees at eight in the morning, and where a woman next to him said she thought the school cooling thing was good because her kids are home in summer and her apartment faces west and she has one fan, and the mayor said he was glad and that they were working on it, and she nodded in the way that New Yorkers nod at things that are being worked on, which contains a full history of things that were worked on and the pace at which the working proceeded, but also a willingness, every summer, to hear that this year might be different, because the alternative to that willingness is the alternative to staying, and most people, in New York, are staying, which is the whole argument, and always has been.
More civic absurdity at https://www.duffelblog.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism