Three weeks ago Binyamin Appelbaum’s opinion piece, “I Want a City, Not a Museum”, appeared in the New York Times. Mr. Appelbaum blamed the city’s lack of affordable housing on its “preserving the corporeal city of bricks and steel at the expense of its residents and of those who might live here.” He noted that two of his great-great grandparents lived in a still standing townhouse on Willow Street. He called Brooklyn Heights “a New York version of Colonial Williamsburg” and concluded his essay with this:
I hope someday I’ll be walking with my children on the Lower East Side or the Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights. We’ll pass one of the places where my ancestors lived, and the building will be gone. In its place will stand an apartment building, housing a new generation of New Yorkers.
Yesterday the Times published three letters responding to Mr. Appelbaum. The first, by Daniel Dolgicer, noted that Mr. Appelbaum described Brooklyn Heights as “fossilized” and asked, “Would he say that Paris has been ‘fossilized’ because its city leaders preserve its buildings?” The second, by Sarah C. Bronin, chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, cited another Times guest essay, “”How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers”, by Vishaan Chakrabarti, that proposes solutions to the housing availability and affordability crisis that do not involve eliminating existing historic districts. The third letter, by Nathan Landau, a “former New Yorker and city planner,” also cites Mr.Chakrabarti’s piece, and notes that nearby suburbs “well served by rail and bus transit” have much capacity for new housing and that “[l]ow-rise and mid-rise housing could be built in these communities while respecting their character.”
In a post here in 2017 I considered this same issue in conversation with Sandy Ikeda, an economics professor and Heights resident who, although he said he enjoyed living here, objected to the historic district designation on libertarian grounds.
