Councilman Brad Lander Talks Trump, The Subways, Kensington Stables And More

CITY HALL, MANHATTAN — City Councilman Brad Lander was elected to the council in 2009 and has represented the neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Gowanus, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington there ever since.

More recently, Lander has played a large role in organizing opposition to President Trump in Brooklyn since the election, helping start Get Organized Brooklyn, which has drawn large crowds to rallies and meetings.

Patch sat down with Lander at his office across the street from City Hall in Manhattan to talk about that organizing and other neighborhood issues. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

You’ve been very involved since the presidential election with organizing and rallying. How much change can you really affect being a city councilman?

I think the most encouraging thing has been people’s collective desire to get out and organize. And that’s what people in the community have been doing in ways bigger than I’ve ever seen. I’m lucky to represent and live in a neighborhood full of people with a real passion for some of the basic values of democracy.

Sometimes the wins are concrete. Sometimes you get a night like we had on the Muslim ban when both the organizing — everybody’s going to the airport, going to Camden Plaza — and the legal work all came together to win a very concrete victory that protected people and strengthened the core values of our country.

And sometimes it’s a little harder. We’re organizing on Trumpcare. Hopefully we’ll have an impact on preventing the Senate from doing that. But you’ve got to organize.

What have you learned doing this over the last few months that you’d share with someone else looking to do the same, maybe in an area that’s not so blue as your district?

People are organizing all over the country, regardless of whether they’re in redder or bluer places. I think what everyone has found is, there’s solidarity in doing this together. It is valuable to find other people, both to be strategic but also to feel a sense of shared project together.

There are a lot of good national online tools. It has been encouraging to see Indivisible and Swing Left and Flippable and MoveOn providing some connections nationally that make room for grassroots organizing. There’s a temptation — you want it to be strategic, which sometimes takes a guiding vision, but also for something like this, it’s got to be horizontal, people have to feel like they’re part of it.

More locally, the subways. You’ve talked about the city taking a more active role in that issue. Where does that stand and what are you seeing on that front?

Well, it’s a crisis. Our subways are the critical lifeblood of our city. They’re fundamental to people’s individual daily lives. It doesn’t work to go to work or school every day without knowing how long it’s going to take you to get there. It doesn’t work to have a commute that is supposed to take a half hour that ends up taking an hour or an hour and a half.

And at a systemic level, the city doesn’t function as a place for all of us to do business, to live, without a functioning subway system.

This new move by the governor to muddy the waters by saying that he needs more control is just deflection. The MTA is controlled by the governor. This is a responsibility that the governor has to lead on. And we are going to have to work together to light a fire to make him do that.

I wish he were out in front already. I wish the leadership he took on the Second Avenue expansion, he was taking on addressing this crisis. Unfortunately, he’s not yet doing that.

We have to be loud and organized. There’s a gubernatorial election next year. I think it needs to be, at least in New York City, treated as a referendum on the governor’s plan to fix the subway system that’ll involve clarity about where he revenue will come from.

It’s not going to be done without additional resources. So we need the resources, serious leadership and a serious plan. Today we have none of those things in place.

Do you think the mayor should ride the subway to your district every morning?

[Laughing] I’m not going to opine on the mayor’s choices. I think all elected officials have — look, it is definitely true that there is a mismatch. And I’m not going to be self-righteous here, my wife and my son take the F train every day. And my daughter, when she starts high school in the fall, she’s going to walk to school.

Most elected officials drive a lot of the time, and I’m included as well. You know, once you get that parking placard... Mostly because you have events all over the place, it is hard to get home, to MS 442, to here. So it creates a disconnect between the experience of people’s elected representatives and people themselves. Is there value in elected officials riding regularly to see what it’s like — both to see it with your own eyes and to show that you’re connected to people’s experiences — of course it’s valuable.

And though I drive more than I would like to, I take the subway some times. Mostly, honestly, out of necessity. But partly out of a sense of shared responsibility. So it’s good for everyone to do. But what matters is building the political strength to win a real plan. What I don’t want is for the fight about the subways to become posturing, visibility, who’s getting credit for complaining. What we need is a plan to raise the revenue and fix the system and I want to be a part of making that happen.

One more on the subway. F express was floated and then kind of disappeared. Any more word on that?

I think the community made itself heard loud and clear. And I represent people at Seventh Avenue and Church Avenue. If F express was actually adding F express service, not just taking away local trains, that would be great. There’s no one that doesn’t want to see more service. And F express makes it sounds like you’re getting some new, fast trains, but when you look and see all it is, it’s not adding one ounce of new service, it’s just eliminating half the trains at the local stations. Even people at those express stations are like, that’s not really right.

Ironically, the problems on the F line have made it impossible with moving the proposal forward. So I haven’t heard much from them about it. It seems like they’ve delayed consideration. My constituents at the local stops would breathe easier if they would say we’re not considering it at this time.

Any news on Kensington Stables?

There’s not yet news. But I am feeling hopeful is what I would say. Dialogue continues between the city and Walker and the folks who own it currently about the possibility of a city acquisition. And I am a strong supporter of that.

Most of the money that the city has to purchase it is money that my office has allocated. We were able to make clear that there was not support for rezoning.

There's very strong community support for preservation of a stables there and I think Walker wants to help make that happen. That doesn’t guarantee anything, and until it’s done, it’s not done.

We've managed to preserve a supermarket and movie theater and so if we were able to add a stable to that list... Those are the things that make a neighborhood.

You have a community forum coming up on homeless shelters. What are you looking to get out of that?

Everybody knows it’s easy to make fun of Park Slope. That was true before we had a mayor from Park Slope. But I do think that we have a community that recognizes we have to do our fair share, we have a role to play.

And obviously we’re working on longer term affordable and supportive housing that means people don’t have to be in shelters. But, we know, given the nature of the homeless crisis, and the right to shelter, which I support, we have to build more shelters in the city. Hotels are not the right way to have people housed.

So what’s the best way to do that? The way it’s typically been done, the city, either because a landlord approaches the city or the city goes and finds a site, ties down a site and then comes to the community and very quickly tries to move it through. You understand why the city does that — the city believes people are going to oppose it — and so rather than have a lengthy public process, they identify a site and just ram it through.

But communities would appreciate it more if they had the opportunity to be consulted in the process of siting. So that’s what we’re trying to do in Community Board 6. Rather than wait for the city to find a site and then just drop it on the neighborhood, we invited the Department of Homeless Services to come out, present their plan and we’re going to try and have some dialogue about what makes a good site.

And in the ideal world, we’ll be able to do it in a collaborative way in a way that involves some community engagement and planning. And hopefully that means we get a good site, can get a good operator, can stop using the hotels.

There’s no guarantee, but it’s the right process to try.

And finally, in Gowanus, you keep pushing for new feedback on the Plan Gowanus site. What kind of feedback are you looking for and what do you want to see from the community about Gowanus?

We’re trying to provide opportunities for people to participate in many ways. There are obviously some big public meetings, so people can come to the public meetings. And the city has some new online tools that mean people who don’t have the time to come to meetings can pitch in what they think.

I think it’s been fascinating to see what people put. Some very predictable things. Some people are concerned about the loss of mix of uses, about density, flooding, school seats.

But then there’s stuff that comes through, and I highlighted this in the email we sent out, about the person who likes to sit on the benches at the Lowe’s esplanade and watch the scrap metal operation that uses a barge on the other side of the canal. To me, that really captures something. On one end, you think it’s kind of funny and think, who really goes to Lowe’s and sits on the esplanade? But on the other hand, it is a piece of what people like about the canal.

So, we’re getting a lot of good feedback. I would invite people to keep giving feedback online. There will be some more public meetings in the fall.

I think by the end of the year, city planning will have a framework to bring us that I hope and believe will represent all this feedback. There are some things everybody agrees on. And there are some things around which there are some significant disagreement. But those things are being aired in a very public way.

Image courtesy Brad Lander's office