Towering new residences overlooking New York Harbor. Restaurants, shops and 28 acres of fresh parks and open spaces. Thousands of affordable homes. All this surrounding a rebuilt cruise terminal and container port in a development project many times larger than Hudson Yards in Manhattan.
This sprawling reimagining of a mile-long stretch of the Brooklyn coastline is the current proposal on the table from New York City officials, who want to create a bustling new neighborhood out of a gritty, industrial zone. Supporters call the project a rare moment to build 6,000 new homes — 40 percent of them affordable housing units — amid the city’s housing crisis and upgrade a small, deteriorating port at the same time.
But the proposal has met a wall of resistance from locals and the area’s elected officials, whose opposition is threatening one of the largest neighborhood rezoning plans in the city this century. The project, they say, has been needlessly rushed and rewards developers who have long sought to build there.
“I don’t think we landed on a plan that works for our community,” said Alexa Avilés, a City Council member in Brooklyn whose district includes part of the project area. “We landed on a plan that works for developers.”
New developments in New York often face intense backlash, pitting the city’s need for new housing against residents’ concerns over traffic, noise and neighborhood character.
But locals say their opposition is different. They say it stems from how city leaders are trying to push the proposal forward in just a few months, when most deals of this scale are studied and shaped over years. They also object to the use of a special state process that limits public input and circumvents the vetting typically performed by the City Planning Commission and the City Council.
The opposition has so far forced two delays of a vote to advance the proposal by a task force of 28 members; that vote is now scheduled for the end of the month. The task force — made up of local elected officials, community group representatives and other stakeholders — has met at least 18 times in private since late September to review the plans.
At least two-thirds of the members must approve the recommendations, which would be nonbinding, for the proposal to move forward, with the details finalized in what is known as a General Project Plan.
The discussions behind closed doors, as well as in a recent Council hearing and in public meetings with community groups, have grown increasingly heated.
Since the first delay in April, officials with the city’s Economic Development Corporation, a semi-independent agency that is leading the redevelopment and also manages many of the city’s piers, has been pressuring task force members who oppose the project to change their minds. The officials are offering to make tweaks or add new initiatives to win over members’ support — and, some say, making threats.
City officials have said that no other type of development is viable on the property and that without approval, it would likely become home to more city sanitation trucks and other industrial operations.
“It’s not an empty threat,” Jennifer Sun, an executive at the Economic Development Corporation, said at a recent town-hall-style meeting in Brooklyn. “I’m just being very factual.”
At a task force meeting on Wednesday, one of its members, Hank Gutman, shared a recent exchange he had over breakfast with Nate Bliss, the executive director for economic development in the mayor’s office, according to two people in the group who heard Mr. Gutman’s remarks.
Mr. Bliss, according to Mr. Gutman, brought up a different project that Mr. Gutman has long cared about: Brooklyn Bridge Park.
A longtime board member at the park, Mr. Gutman said that Mr. Bliss had made it clear that if he did not vote “yes,” the city would be inclined to take steps that would block any future expansion of the park.
“I thought it was offensive, inappropriate and ineffective,” Mr. Gutman said in an interview.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ms. Avilés said about the threats.
Mr. Bliss did not respond to a request for comment. A City Hall spokesman, William Fowler, said that the administration had made clear to the group what it believed were the realistic outcomes for the port should the development not be approved.
“Reiterating that to members of the task force is hardly a ‘threat,’” Mr. Fowler said in a statement, “and those saying otherwise are intentionally mischaracterizing the facts to distract from the reality that a ‘no’ vote on the proposed vision for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal is a ‘no’ to housing, open space, a modernized port and more.”
Andrew Kimball, the president of the Economic Development Corporation, recently said he was confident that enough task force members favored the plan for it to move forward. He has said that the agency is moving fast because of the city’s urgent need for new housing.
“After decades of dysfunction and decay, E.D.C. and this mayor are taking action to deliver results for New Yorkers,” Mr. Kimball said at a recent City Council hearing, referring to the Economic Development Corporation. “Instead of a fenced-off, crumbling concrete lot with piers falling into the harbor, the plan has thousands of affordable homes to meet the housing crisis.”
Some members of the group have publicly expressed their support for the development, including Representative Dan Goldman, whose district includes the site, and two longtime residents of the Red Hook Houses, the largest public housing development in Brooklyn. In recent months, the plan was modified to add $200 million for improvements to the houses and for the reservation of 200 units in the new development for Red Hook’s tenants.
But many residents have expressed concern that current and future state administrations will hold nearly all the power over the development, including the ability to make wholesale changes to its scope and requirements.
Opponents have noted that the state recently decided not to hold the owners of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, another General Project Plan, accountable for missing a deadline at the end of last month to build or start construction on nearly 900 units of affordable housing. The plan had called for a $2,000 monthly fine for every missed unit.
Several task force members said that a top concern — how the development could aggravate transportation issues in an area largely cut off from mass transit — had not been adequately addressed by the city. Residents of the new buildings would be offered shuttle service to the subway.
More substantive transit upgrades have not been decided and would be finalized later, Mr. Kimball said at the recent Council hearing, pointing out that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had pledged in a letter to continue “working with us on improvements.”
The land identified for redevelopment on the Brooklyn waterfront covers 122 acres and stretches from the low-rise neighborhood of Red Hook to the southern tip of Brooklyn Bridge Park, a flood-prone area with congested, narrow streets, no subway stations and limited bus service. It is also home to the sole working waterfront in Brooklyn after the rest of the borough’s once-busy ports shuttered.
The location’s commanding views of Governors Island and Lower Manhattan have long enticed developers. They have commissioned renderings — high-rises along the shoreline, even an extension of a subway line — and lobbied elected officials on creating waterfront living.
Their interest grew as the land’s longtime owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, slowly shifted its attention and investments to the much larger terminals in New Jersey.
Then, in May of last year, the city made a swap with the Port Authority, exchanging land on Staten Island for the Red Hook property. Mayor Eric Adams described the deal as the largest real estate transaction involving city government in recent history.
Earlier this year, city leaders started to present plans to the task force to redevelop half of the 122 acres into a large mixed-use development with dozens of buildings that connects with Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Most of the properties would be residences, some as tall as 325 to 425 feet, with condominiums and apartments. Forty percent of the units would be offered at below-market rents, up from an earlier proposal of 25 percent. When fully built, the development could roughly double the area’s current population of about 16,000.
The buildings would be constructed on elevated platforms set back from the waterfront, protecting them from future floods and sea levels. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy overwhelmed the piers with several feet of water, flooding homes and businesses. There would also be flood gates and flood walls.
The other half of the property would be preserved for the container port and the cruise terminal. The port would receive a new pier, while the terminal would be rebuilt and include a 400-room hotel. When the city took over the port, it also took on the responsibility of repairing the dilapidated piers, which the city says would cost $1.75 billion to repair and upgrade. Two of the piers were recently condemned.
The port, city officials have said, cannot be repaired without constructing the larger mixed-use development.
Ms. Avilés said the city’s economic development officials had used that as a “consistent threat,” suggesting that the entire port could deteriorate and fall into the harbor unless the project moves forward.
Matthew Haag writes for The Times about the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He has been a journalist for two decades.
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