Change doesn’t always come easily in Brooklyn’s liberal strongholds.
But New York’s push to build more housing in every corner of the city — even in places that have sometimes been skeptical of new development — is set to clear a significant hurdle on Wednesday, when a key City Council committee is expected to approve a zoning change that will clear the way for new apartment towers on the border between Park Slope and Windsor Terrace.
Two 10-story buildings are planned for the site of an industrial laundry business, Arrow Linen. Forty percent of the 250 units will rent below market rate.
The so-called Arrow Linen proposal had all the makings of the sort of fight that has become familiar in middle-class parts of the city with enough political influence to alter or defeat unpopular projects. It was subject to more than a year of contentious debate.
Yet the conclusion demonstrates just how much the politics around development have started to morph as the housing crunch has become one of the city’s most pressing crises.
That dynamic is playing out beyond New York, too, as leaders in liberal communities across the country are confronting housing shortages so profound that some of their once-reliable voters have begun to drift rightward, expressing skepticism about Democrats’ ability to tackle affordability issues.
Progressive politicians who are often sharply critical of real estate developers when running for office have become increasingly supportive of new construction once they are elected.
New development, even when many of the apartments are rented at market rate, is considered by many experts to be a key tool in lowering the cost of housing.
Following months of negotiations to increase the project’s affordability, the Arrow Linen rezoning was endorsed by Shahana Hanif, a Democratic councilwoman who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that has often been keenly suspicious of real estate developers.
On major housing proposals, the full Council almost always defers to the vote of the member who represents the district where the project sits, and that tradition, known as member deference, is expected to hold in this case.
An earlier proposal for the site called for taller buildings — 13 stories apiece — with only a quarter of the units set aside to rent at below market rate. Ms. Hanif negotiated to increase the percentage of affordable units after her office was flooded with calls demanding such a change. Opponents also objected to the height of the towers, which they said would be out of character in a neighborhood of low-rise buildings.
The project will also include a child care facility and an anti-domestic violence center on the ground floor.
Though it took about 18 months for the project to be approved after the rezoning application was first submitted, the fact that it is moving forward at all may help buoy Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to build “a little more housing in every neighborhood,” the slogan of “City of Yes,” his administration’s recently passed plan aimed at building 80,000 new homes.
The Arrow Linen project is the first rezoning to be approved after that legislation passed.
“Progressives right now, we don’t want displacement, we don’t want people to leave our city,” Ms. Hanif, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, said in an interview.
“For me, being a progressive means tackling those issues and tackling those issues means getting to a solution, and one of the solutions is to get more housing built.”
Ms. Hanif is facing what could be a tough re-election fight this year, largely because of her criticism of Israel, but some residents opposed to the development told the council woman at a recent public hearing that her vote on the project would determine whether they voted for her.
Arrow Linen sits among blocks of low-rise apartment buildings and modest rowhouses that are more affordable than homes in the northern part of Park Slope, where brownstones can sell for $5 million or more.
But the area has become more expensive in recent years, and it has lagged behind much of the rest of the city in building new affordable housing.
Soon after the rezoning was first proposed in 2023, local residents formed a group, Housing Not Highrises, to oppose the plan.
Hundreds of people waited hours to testify against the proposal at public meetings, and the local community board voted to oppose the rezoning, just months after it voted to support the City of Yes legislation.
Still, Housing Not Highrises has been careful to demonstrate its general support for new housing, even as it opposed the Arrow Linen project. Its leaders advocated for at least 40 percent affordable units in shorter buildings at the site, at seven to nine stories.
“To my neighbors who are for this development, we want the same thing,” Ford Harris, who lives near the site, said at a City Council hearing last month, speaking against the project. “We want affordable housing units built.”
Several speakers said they were concerned that the new buildings would eventually drive up rents for longtime residents, a demonstration of how much the affordability crisis has come to affect even middle and upper-middle-class New Yorkers.
“Yes to housing, but housing for whom, precisely?” asked Laura Hulbert, a longtime Windsor Terrace resident.
Some pro-housing advocates have argued that opposing a development for not having more affordable units still amounts to rejecting new housing that could accommodate hundreds of families, some of them low-income.
“The bottom line is that we need as many units as we can get,” said Matthew Wagman, who grew up in Windsor Terrace and spoke in favor of the rezoning at the hearing, saying he was worried he would not be able to afford to stay in the neighborhood.
“At some point, you either get no building or a mixed-income building,” said Annemarie Gray, who runs Open New York, a pro-housing organization which helped organize residents in favor of the development to testify at public hearings.
New York will not be able to make a dent in its housing crisis, Ms. Gray said, if the city gets mired in drawn-out battles on each individual development.
Elected officials, including Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, and Ms. Hanif pushed the Arrow Linen developers to build more affordable units.
But some residents’ concerns about height remained.
“As you can tell, people are in favor of affordable housing,” Scott Newman, who has lived a block away from the development site for almost 30 years, said at the Council hearing in January. But, he added, “there’s no reason why this thing has to be this high.”
Many residents see tall, glassy condos as a specter of higher rents and displacement, a reality that real estate developers and the city government will have to contend with as they plan to build more across the city.
But supporters of the Arrow Linen project so far see an opportunity for the opposite: more affordable apartments sited in taller buildings.
“The main opposition seems to be directed at height, but height is what will give us more affordable housing,” said Rachel Fee, a Windsor Terrace resident and director of the New York Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy group, at the Council hearing, noting that she was not testifying on behalf of her organization.
“I understand the desire to keep the neighborhood as it is, because it’s charming,” Ms. Fee added. “But this is a chance to add significant housing that is desperately needed by our neighbors and our city.”
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