Brooklyn's Progress
February 2003

Czars no longer rule St. Petersburg, but a few of them currently live in New York City.  Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently appointed a czar of housing and a czar of brownfields, offices that presumably reflect the importance of shelter and clean land rather than a 19th century demotion of the chief aristocrat.

The new appointments were announced on December 10th, 2002 at the National Housing Conference Annual Luncheon and are part of a deal called “The New Marketplace.”  The Mayor’s hope is to set a publicly funded foundation on which future private investments can prosper. 

The first strategic element is “innovative financing,” said Mr. Bloomberg, “a process of facilitating private housing investments with creative use of public financing resources.”

Affordable housing is no small matter.  New York City has been short on housing for a decade.  Innovation is needed, but advocates are concerned about making good on the deal.  "We can build thousands of new apartments on undeveloped waterfront land in Greenpoint and Williamsburg," Council Member David Yassky said. "But the next step is to make sure that redevelopment leads to much-needed affordable housing."

Our notoriously polluted lands and waterways sometimes glow on national headlines.  Industrial sites have made places like Newtown Creek, the Gowanus Canal, Red Hook, and Coney Island Creek almost legendary.  Combine environmental clean-up with housing and you get what some are calling a new urban market.

The Bloomberg administration is projecting a five-year budget of $3 billion.  More than $1 billion will come from leveraging $500 million in Housing Development Corporation assets and redirecting $555 million in city and federal funds.  But this creative financing would mean little without the structural analysis to support distribution.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the city developed a geographic information system (GIS) to assess brownfields called the “Brownfields Assessment Demonstration Pilot.”  The system links tax records with files from the Department of City Planning that include zoning, land use, ownership, census, tax, sales, street and building data, and federal and New York State databases of listed or reported hazardous materials and spills.

The result is an admixture of economic and environmental facts suitable for decent economic development projects like the one Mr. Bloomberg has proposed.  The Mayor’s Office of Environmental Coordination is working to make this information available at various stages as research progresses.
 
Bringing 65,000 new or restored low-income housing units to a city with frightful budgetary dilemmas is particularly promising and bold.  Seen from the eyes of the over 200,000 new New Yorkers who have settled here since 1997, this initiative appears to represent a housing strategy quite different from the Giuliani years.   For developers, environmentalists, housing advocates, and those in need of a place to live, only time will tell.

Enrico Cullen is the Director of Development & Public Affairs for the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment.  The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce continues to lobby for Brownfield legislation during its annual trips to Albany and Washington, D.C.