Development Fatigue

The sausage-making of public policy was on full display for those who managed to squeeze in to Brooklyn’s Community Board 1 (CB1) Land Use committee meeting this past Monday to assess the River Street Waterfront Master Plan, the latest mega-project proposed by developer Two Trees on Williamsburg’s already crowded waterfront.

As an overflow crowd crammed into the midcentury splendour of the CB1 Meeting room, Two Trees CEO Jed Walentas faced an at-times unruly community to present his plans for two soaring towers at the terminus of Metropolitan Avenue at the East River.

The latest in an onslaught of waterfront development in North Brooklyn, Mr. Walentas’ development will add to Two Trees' growing portfolio of Williamsburg properties, which include the Wythe Hotel to the North, and the Domino Sugar megadevelopment just to the South. The River Street site, purchased this past year for a rumored $150 million, is currently zoned for light manufacturing. Mr. Walentas’ plans would require a contentious change of zoning to accommodate his residential towers.

In what has become a stock-in-trade move for waterfront development, Two Trees proposed anchoring these towers around the carrot of a purpose-built waterfront park, replete with beach access, boat launch facilities, and a host of other aqueous amenities keenly desired by the community. And while the developer earns legitimate praise for its engagement of and sensitivity to the community it proposes to colonize (“Our part of your world,” as Walentas says), the project as presented offers a stark and often frustrating illustration of the vulgar realities of asymmetrical speculative development in an age of hyper-privatization.

PARKLAND AS INDUCEMENT
The self-proclaimed keystone in a unified waterfront stretching from Newtown Creek to the Williamsburg Bridge, River Street Waterfront as proposed is a masterstroke of pseudo-public park design. Self-consciously building on the success of Domino Park, Two Trees now offers the community something different, and frankly desirable. As envisioned by James Corner Field Operations— whose contributions to the North Brooklyn waterfront include both the beloved Domino Park and the reviled Blue Slip bulkhead — River Street Waterfront evidences a clear and energetic embrace of several articles of faith put forth by the community: direct connection to the water, a generous beach area, an enticing waterborne nature-walk, boat-launches, bird-blinds, and tidal pools.

The problem in the development stems not from what is being offered, then, but how it is being proposed. As a notably casual Walentas (Does he ever shave?) walked the assembled crowd through a technocratic PowerPoint presentation, complete with blue-sky renderings of happy phantoms enjoying an expertly curated, sexy new experience, a palpable sense of development fatigue seemed to grip the room. Walentas' recitation of the benefits and concessions of his park managed to come off as at once self-congratulatory and myopic, soft-selling as it did the reality of his two towers, with 1000 new units reaching to 65 floors.

Ending his presentation with a stark image as comfortable in a Star Wars storyboard as a Community Board, Walentas then turned to the room.

The audience questioned such inevitabilities as further crowding on the L train, affordable housing income limits, and rent-driven neighborhood transience, with Mr. Walentas offering measured and clear responses, even when met with some notably antagonistic assaults.

And yet, as unfocused and sometimes knee-jerk as the response to Two Trees’ plan was, it yet managed to get under Mr. Walentas’ skin. His reaction to the increasingly impassioned tone of the community revealed as much about his real intentions as his PowerPoint presentation and promotional literature obscured.

“IF YOU WANNA KNOW THE TRUTH..”
As thoughtful and exciting as River Street Park seems to be, in the end it emerges as the sugar coating on a bitter pill. This is because, all glitz aside, the towers, as designed by the pompous, desperate Bjarke Ingels Group, are monstrous. Fecal brown and twisting, like two arms hoarding their treasure of an ersatz park (with Value Enhancing™ properties!), they are self-conscious and arrogant. At over 600 feet, they dwarf every other building on the waterfront. And as such they belie, better than any PowerPoint presentation could, the true nature of this development.

And then there was Mr. Walentas’ smug, and palpably false, assertion that he is only doing this because he wants to give the community a park.

“If you wanna know the truth..the truth is, I don’t need any more money in my life, Okay?,” he told the room, oblivious to the vulgarity of the statement. “The reason [Two Trees] bought the site was because building Domino Park was the single greatest professional experience of my life and I wanna build another park, okay?”

When an audience member asked why he didn’t just build a park, then, he demurred.
“I'm not gonna do that, okay?”

THE RUB
And herein it lies. After all, Mr. Walentas is not doing anything he isn’t supposed to do, as a developer. Indeed, he has historically shown himself to be a good developer, far far better than some of the slap-dash gamblers taking a turn at the North Brooklyn table further up the waterfront.

But it all seems a bit much, considering the lack of public space in North Brooklyn in general; the simple fact of these towering towers; the cockiness of taking a second whack at the rezoning piñata. Considering the scant attention to public infrastructure overstrain offered by the plan; the literal shadows that this development will cast over other promised-but-not-yet-delivered public parks; and Mr. Walentas’ hollow-sounding assertion that, “the economics of building rental housing in this city is terrible,” even as he rakes in 30 year tax abatements from the city... Considering all these factors, one can’t help but come to the conclusion that in these 3.5 scant acres, what is being built is not a public park, but a real-estate gimmick, right down its kayak-rental kiosks and it’s Apple®-did-it-first Great Circle. As our promised public parks and public schools languish, and our rents spiral ever higher, we are asked to consider yet another request to harvest value from the unequal conditions of our neighborhood, our city, and our society.

But it’s hardly Two Tree’s fault. The problem goes much deeper than that, and concerns a basic shrinking of our civic space as we hand it off to private entities. After all, public parks for the use of a growing population used to be the sole provenance of the municipality; it was only under the recent, developer-friendly, pro-privatization reign of Bloomberg that that concession, along with a similar one for new public schools in North Brooklyn, was handed over to developers.

So if we now find it disturbing to hear billionaire developers casually state, “we’ll spend $100 million dollars and build you a park that the government won’t build you,” (or more tone-deaf still, assert “I am building the community a school!”) without hearing the tragic irony in those statements...well, isn’t that in part our own damn fault.

...and oughtn’t we to do something about it?

There will be a repeat presentation by Mr. Walentas to the Land Use Committee of CB1 to consider the River Street Waterfront Master Plan this coming Wednesday, January 15, 6:30pm at the Swinging ‘60s Senior Center on Ainslie Street. All are welcome.

A full recording of the January 6 Meeting can be found here.