BHB: You’re known for your opposition to the Atlantic Yards project—as a founding member of Brooklyn Speaks—and an advocate for affordable housing. Yet, we are now far into the life of this project and no affordable housing has yet been delivered. How might voters interpret this?
JS: Let me tell you about Atlantic Yards. This [project] was first floated long before I was a district leader. I had been a grassroots, on the ground community leader on issues large and small throughout the district and beyond. When Atlantic Yards was first proposed, one of the things I realized early on is that we were likely to get an arena and parking lots and now we’ve got an arena and a hole in the ground. But the community was shut our completely and entirely. There were various efforts to get the community to have a voice in this [project] which were blocked at every circumstance.
Brooklyn Speaks came about because other efforts were not working. [For] Those of us engaged at a broader level—many in neighborhood associations, for example—you have to work with everybody in your neighborhood. It’s not just an issue group. You have to listen to people and you have to work with them respectfully because you have to work with them on other things as well. So you try and find common ground.
We’re on our fourth governor since Atlantic Yards [began]: Pataki, Spitzer, Patterson and Cuomo. We knew that when push came to shove, the politicians would come and go but the community was going to be there and living with this. And the community knew more about what needed to [actually] happen. We wanted a design that was actually going to connect communities, and respect and integrate those neighborhoods. We wanted a transportation plan that worked. Affordable housing that actually met the needs of the community and that was accountable to the public. None of these things were present in [the original] plan.
So we worked for years. We first came out with a governance proposal: we wanted to set up an entity within the state that would be a public benefits corporation to monitor what was going on. It would have [our] people at the table, because our elected officials had nothing to say about this.
This is the only project [in New York State] that the EDC [Economic Development Corporation] does not have an oversight body for. [And] one of the largest. There’s no reason for that except favoritism for this developer [Forest City Ratner].
We had a pilot governance plan, we had several bills to do that. We kept getting stuck in the state senate and the governor was never going to sign this. We did get a lot of elected officials on-board—even Marty Markowitz came on board with [our] governance [plan]. As this evolved we sued because they changed the project plan. They pushed out the development to 2035. They did it illegally. We sued. We won. We won in the appellate division and the court of appeals turned it down. But you had to wait for a certain point to demonstrate that [and we did].
A [subsequent] suit was successful and we got a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, but the state took two years to get an SEIS out. They took over a year to issue a scoping statement. In the meantime they [Forest City Ratner] decided to sell 70% [of the project] to the Chinese government. But the delays—they did not build anything. Brooklyn Speaks had nothing to do with them building anything. We were trying to get them to build stuff.
I’m not crazy about this plan—never was. It was a bad plan, badly designed, it has every failed urban planning idea known to man. But we had no power. We’re not even incorporated. It’s just people working together, putting their shoulders to the wheel, moving this forward and continuing to stick together.
It was clear to us that the delay was enhancing the displacement [of long-time residents], particularly African Americans. There’s a lot of public money in this project and there were supposed to be preferences in Community Boards 2, 3, 6 and 8. The preferences were supposed to go to people who were in danger of displacement and needed affordable housing. They displace people, they knock down their buildings, and then [there are] other pressures: landlords have been raising their rents like crazy, and pushing people out—the very people who were meant to benefit.
We got studies done and were able to prove that this was having a huge disproportionate impact on the African-American community. We [filed] a race claim about the delay in affordable housing. What we were able to achieve is to say to them: “We’re about to file suit. We’re going to win this case.”
The developer realized that they were going to be in a world of hurt, they knew we could prove our case and [so] we were able to accelerate the affordable housing. The next two buildings will be 100% affordable. Greenland Holdings, the Chinese government-owned holding company, does not like the modular housing. Part of the modular was supposed to be quicker but it’s taken much longer. They’ve pushed it out another year again. There are timetables for performance and there are penalties for not performing, unlike some of the other community benefits agreements that were reached. This is an agreement we’ve made with the state and the developer. The other community benefits were not made in a way that could be enforced.
These are specific timetables, the money will go to a housing trust fund that will help people who are being displaced and there are steps along the way for non-performance. We’re not waiting until the end for that. We were able to accelerate that affordability [Editor’s Note: questions have been raised regarding the affordability in these new units as nearly two-thirds will go to households making more than $100,000]. Instead of being built by 2035 it will be built by 2025. That’s an enormous difference. Does it make everybody happy? Of course not. But the state is creating a governance entity to monitor this. That’s enormous! They fought us on this every step of the way for the last nine years.
BHB: Do you have any comments about posturing in the press about who is the “authentic” candidate when it comes to saving LICH?
I let others make their accusations about pandering and whether or not it was just political. I know where I was, when I was, and I was there before the cameras arrived and after [they] left.
JS: If you look at authenticity, you talk about people who have been involved since day one. I was involved when LICH was coming out to the community about bloodless medicine, which they pioneered because of so many Jehovah’s Witnesses in the area.
There was this effort to close the maternity and pediatrics wards—I think that’s [what] one of my opponents is talking about—he was criticizing Stanley Brezenoff. I was at [that] meeting, we ALL criticized Stanley Brezenoff. It was a huge criticism of Stanley Brezenoff meeting! The community was up in arms, and kept pressing that issue. I was there, I was involved at that time. My opponent [Peter Sikora] was not….
This was an effort that brought a lot of people together to call attention to this. Many of us want a full service hospital in the community. There’s a larger issue here. This is about healthcare delivery writ large and it’s not lost on anybody that this was a bigger issue.
I let others make their accusations about pandering and whether or not it was just political. I know where I was, when I was, and I was there before the cameras arrived and after [they] left.
