Progressives are stopping progress when it comes to addressing NYC’s housing shortage

New York City has a housing shortage. Most every elected official grandstands over the need to create more apartments, especially so-called affordable ones.

Yet, these same elected officials seem to do their worst to stall or kill every initiative to create new homes — affordable or not.

This is exactly what’s happening at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a mostly wasted, 122-acre slice of waterfront between Cobble Hill and Red Hook. The city’s Economic Development Corp. (EDC) sensibly wants to reconfigure it for a master plan to include 6,000 new apartments, of which 40% would be affordable, as well as for a park and other public facilities, all situated amidst a modernized but shrunken port. 

Critics of such land-reclamation proposals typically howl that they won’t have enough “affordable” units; they’ll cause “gentrification;” they’ll cost people their jobs, pollute the ground and generate intolerable traffic congestion.

The gripes over the plan include all of those as well as that it isn’t “transparent” enough — though it’s been fully before the public since the EDC presented its plan in February 2024. There are also concerns it would crimp efforts to bring back manufacturing — never mind that the ship of industry sailed more than a half-century ago. 

Two weeks ago, the various stinks cowed the city into postponing a crucial vote on the project for the fifth time.

It’s a shame, especially since the real motivation behind what media coverage has deemed “community pushback” — which really means resistance from a handful of vocal left-wing politicians and activists — is antipathy to enriching real estate developers. No specific developers would even be selected for years, but in the Big Apple’s progressive circles, just being in the development business is a form of Original Sin.

The EDC’s vision calls for a holistic waterfront community on a site that’s now near-useless for its original purpose of handling shipping, and which is off-limits to the public despite its majestic harbor setting. Its less plausible goal is to modernize the terminal to facilitate “Blue Highways,” a Department of Transportation fantasy to take trucks off the streets in favor of moving goods on waterways. We await word on how furniture and such will reach Macy’s by sea. 

Notwithstanding that pipe dream, the proposal is a no-brainer. Redesigning the terminal for human habitation requires no condemnation of private property — the city owns the land. No harbor views would be blocked because, presently, the terminal’s walls and fences already do that. No existing jobs would be lost, a reason why labor unions support it.

Yet, the latest postponement of the vote by a “task force” of public and private officials only empowered hostile “stakeholders” to punch more holes in the plan.

The lonely terminal site stretches from Atlantic Avenue on the Cobble Hill border to Pier 12 at Wolcott Street in Red Hook. A stroll along Columbia and Van Brunt streets — which are as close as I could get to the desolation behind — revealed glimpses of a wasteland shadowed by relics of a seafaring era that isn’t coming back.  

I saw exactly three workmen in a 45-minute ramble. Many of the piers are rotted and idle. So are some cranes once used to unload ships. Half of the land is used for non-maritime purposes, e.g.,  a beer warehouse, a concrete-recycling plant, a US Customs inspection facility, a lumber yard and even graveyards for  abandoned cars and boats.

The  sprawling complex handles a paltry 60,000 tons of shipped goods each year — 1.4% of all container goods that come into New York Harbor.

Even so, Council member Alexa Aviles griped that the plan was being “force-fed” on residents.  Brooklyn Borough president Antonio Reynoso complained that an initiative originally meant to improve the port for shipping and industry turned into a “largely a housing project.” But isn’t that what New Yorkers want?

Reynoso is nostalgic for the era when “New York City factories employed more than 1 million people,” as he wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle. The terminal offered “our last real opportunity to reclaim the waterfront industrial potential our city let slip away,” he continued.

Reynoso sounds as mired in the past as President Donald Trump, who believes our service-economy nation can magically recover its mid-20th Century manufacturing might. He also ignores that the   Brooklyn Navy Yard is a waterfront industrial park which the city did not “let slip away,” but successfully nurtured. 

Rep. Jerry  Nadler wants to subject the plan’s housing component to the city’s tortuous, seven-month land-use review process, an obstacle course which has felled many a worthy plan in its tracks. He fears that thousands of new housing units would adversely affect the neighborhood.  But it could only uplift the area which, despite its cutting-edge reputation for cafes and galleries, remains dominated by NYCHA’s crime-ridden Red Hook Houses complex.

The supposedly progressive obstructionists are in truth reactionaries who stand in the way of  actual progress — and housing-starved New Yorkers.