On Tuesday, February 17^th, my group and I traveled to Cobble Hill to attend a meeting of Community Board 6’s Committee for Economic/Waterfront/Community Development & Housing. Community Board 6 (CB6) represents the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, and our personal neighborhood of interest, Red Hook. The meeting was enlightening, to be sure – it provided not only a sense of what these neighborhoods are struggling with and how they are addressing local issues, but also a sense of how community-level activism works. In this way, seeing Community Board 6 in action was an informative and rewarding experience.

We were welcomed warmly by two guest speakers who had, like us, arrived early. They were planning fellows working for CB6, and we chatted casually with them while the board members trickled in. It seemed we were the only non-board members in attendance. The board members were a diverse group consisting of many people of different ethnicities, races, ages, and occupations. Much to my delight, there were 6 women on the board. After surveying the 15 people in the room, I buckled down to hear the planning fellows discuss their projects.

First off, one of the planning fellows discussed the feasibility of creating an Industrial Business Improvement District (iBID) within the domain of CB6. According to the NYC BID Association, a BID is a, “formal organization made up of property owners and commercial tenants who are dedicated to promoting business development and improving an area’s quality of life.” They do this by cooperating to provide supplemental services – like public safety and beautification – for the area. An iBID would be particularly beneficial for CB6 because many of the jobs in the vicinity are related to manufacturing: in NYC manufacturing accounts for 10% of all jobs, and this is especially the case around CB6. The planning fellow indicated that an iBID could be an invaluable benefit to the community, as it would do a number of things to improve the local economy and wellbeing of the neighborhoods. It would promote social cohesion between manufacturers, help advocate policies to support manufacturing, encourage the improvement of infrastructure, and help spur energy efficiency projects in the neighborhoods in question. All of these things would be overwhelmingly positive for the social and economic wellbeing of CB6’s communities. According to the planning fellow, the next step towards the establishment of an iBID would be to survey local producers to gauge interest.

The next planning fellow discussed the underutilization of housing around CB6. Specifically, he focused on opportunities for additional housing as-of-right. His statistics indicated that in Gowanus, a neighborhood within CB6, 77% of residential lots are underutilized, which means they are not built to their maximum floor area ratio (FAR). Furthermore, 60% of lots have the potential for additional units. Clearly the efficient usage of this space could do a great deal to alleviate the housing crisis with regards to CB6. The next step towards maximizing utilization would be to identify clusters with the most potential, and to conduct a comprehensive neighborhood evaluation of housing creation potential.

The presentations by these two planning fellows on some of the current developmental challenges facing CB6 were informative and helpful for understanding the locale. With an increased comprehension of the issues at hand, I am confident that my group and I can create a feasible proposal to encourage CB6’s growth.

I attended a community board meeting in Sunset Park on Wednesday, February 18th. Representatives from the offices of the DA, state senator and state assemblymen attended this meeting as well. There were many issues discussed at this meeting such as truck traffic, illegal parking, housing and education. Since part of Sunset Park is located near the Gowanus Bridge, many found that the truck traffic raises noise and safety issues. Also under the bridge boats and larger vehicles park for long periods of time illegally in the nearby lot. Even though these are important issues housing and education seemed to be discussed a bit more in depth. What I found out was that some families were forced to go to the Bronx shelter assignment office because there’s a lack of housing. This surprised me because there were a few vacant houses in the area which could be utilized. Furthermore, no homeless people were visible during any of the visits to Sunset Park. However, I did also recall how many people were there, especially around the commercial area. The community stressed this as a vital issue because they want to keep families from Sunset Park in Sunset Park. The thought of sending them to a different location, especially a different borough is unpleasant and destroys their sense of unity within the community. As a result, families double up because of the limitation of space and partake in illegal partitioning (dividing one’s house to illegally rent out that space). One solution that was thought about was building a shelter in Sunset Park. However, this plan isn’t official yet, mostly due to the fact that there isn’t much land to use for this purpose. A direct effect of overpopulation in the area is that many children are attending schools with crowded classrooms or not attending at all. At the meeting, they mentioned that plans to build another public school was in effect. Even though the construction of the school was approved, there are still many obstacles to overcome such as location, land and safety. The proposed location happens to be one of the more dangerous avenues in the neighborhood therefore causing more issues to arise. But, this school would be for new grade and middle school students and contain about six hundred seats. Overall, this was a fairly successful meeting since many important crises were discussed. Unfortunately, in the end the board committee said that this meeting would not be considered official because there weren’t enough people attending that day therefore meeting minutes were not approved. This actually shocked me. Even though this was the first public meeting I ever attending, I still thought there was a sufficient amount of people (about eighteen). Nonetheless, I found this meeting to be a useful source. It served as a reliable insight on the community. Even though I visited the neighborhood, I did not realize these issues existed since I was unable to actually go into the school I saw or one’s house. This meeting gave me an in depth perception of how families live there.

I attended my community board meeting on February 12th, in a really insanely beautiful building in Crown Heights. The atmosphere was welcoming: at the back was a table full of handbills for future community-related activities and opportunities, and another table with water, fruit, and red-velvet cupcakes. The meeting started with a member of the board going to the podium and announcing that 28 days is not enough, met with jocular agreement by seemingly everyone in the room—which was a very full room, by the way:

The meeting’s first “action item” had to do, broadly, with “housing.” Mostly there was a company interested in turning one of the derelict buildings in the neighborhood into an extension for the hospital facility, adding 280 for the nursing home. This is more or less all that was talked about for the next hour: every member of the community board was concerned about the possible jobs that the facility would bring. When the company in question (whose name I really should have written down) let it be known that they would not be accepting labor contracts from people in the community, there was a veritable outrage. Three of four people stood up and shouted over how that was the problem, that work that could be offered to the community was being sold away to outside labor contractors. The company tried to defend their decision in three parts: first, they bolded that the facility would be provided 150 jobs to the community after construction—150 jobs that would be held for community member—which the head “hoped [they] would be satisfied with”; second, they underscored that, because it was a hospital facility being built, that it was a very specialized and highly regulated form of labor that only certain contracting firms were actually qualified for. The community, not letting up, demanded more, and the company tried to cede on the point of apprenticeship programs: only after the head of the company guaranteed 15 possible apprenticeships would the community let the build pass.

What shocked me about all of this was just how demanding the community board was. Just before the motion was voted on, a man stood up demanding answers about some explosion of sewage at the construction site, which the head of the board refused to take. “We have to finish this up so we can get out of here by nine.” “Can I ask the question or not?” “No. Sit down.” This sort of energy, though, is exactly what I think Crown Heights needs. As someone told me after the meeting, “A lot of people are interested in investing in this community and the old people don’t want to get shafted.” So much so, that when the brief topic of renewing food and liquor licenses was brought up, 2 or 3 people questioned why the renewal was taking place, to which the meeting head responded “because these restaurants have been here for a while.”

The feverish defense the community presents gives me some hope for their work against gentrification, though.