Elijah Blumov– Community Board 1 Response

The “Community Board One State of District and Community Needs” is a curious document. This is partly due to its unexamined grammatical errors and questionable diction, yet mainly because it attempts an awkward form of lyric poetry and sustained metaphor regarding the 2009 tsunami, the effects of which, along with other sinister “waves” apparently continue to cripple and plague the communities of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Indeed, this natural event seems to be the locus of the entire document, and is blamed by the author for the problems of  abandoned housing and business, community flight, and an inflated rent market. The twin villain to this marine menace is the influx of luxury development and gentry to the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area, which displaces the majority demographic of the neighborhoods, poor, working class people, to be replaced by urbane, market-price paying hipsters. This pressure “from above” to develop the area leads not only to a usurpation of territory, but a stress on municipal services, who, as the author insists, are already “overtaxed.”
To ameliorate these and many other problems, the author presents a list of demands, including an insistence that the affordable housing process in the area be restructured to better reflect the means of its constituents, as well a requirement that a reasonable proportion of new residential development include affordable housing units. By doing so, lower class flight may be forestalled in the area, and the existing community may be able to entertain a traditional sense of identity as they gradually fade into history.