Greenpoint Hospital: A Missed Opportunity

The idea of “community planning” gets a lot of support in the abstract, but the reality is that community planning can sometimes be slow and bumpy. Local neighborhoods and city administrations don’t always agree on what’s best. But ultimately, a good process can produce a better plan with strong local support that is beneficial for both local residents and the city.

But when the goals of the City and the local community are one and the same, the Administration’s commitment to community planning should be easy to fulfill.  Unfortunately, the Administration is ignoring an opportunity to work quickly and easily with the community on the Greenpoint Hospital development site in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

A comprehensive community plan for the site, widely supported by the community and led by a responsible and high-capacity local community developer, has been unanimously approved by the local community board. The Greenpoint Hospital Community Plan would provide much needed affordable housing, senior housing, and a modern homeless facility, all on city-owned property that currently houses nothing but ruins. Because a local nonprofit developer, St. Nicks Alliance, is able to transfer air rights from their adjacent buildings, no other plan for the site would be able to build as much housing on the land. And even better, because the developers of the site would be a coalition of community-controlled nonprofits – the Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation – they will commit to keeping the housing affordable for the community long after the regulatory restrictions on the affordability expire, so the city won’t have to worry about the developer eventually cashing out and going market in this increasingly gentrifying area, as often happens with developers who are not mission-driven. (See ANHD’s 10/8 blog and latest white paper).

Affordable housing, senior housing, reducing homelessness, and permanent affordability – these are all priorities of the Administration, where the community already has a detailed and viable plan in place to make them happen.

But instead of moving forward with the community plan, the Administration made a puzzling choice to further push it back, by issuing yet another RFP. In fact, previous administrations have had numerous chances to go forward with this community plan, only to try and force through alternate developments done by for-profit businesses without community support. The result? Decades of delays.

The city first tried to move forward without community support with redeveloping this site in 1983. The Community Board wrote to Mayor Koch imploring him to “plan with the community, not for the community.” It’s a shame that 32 years later, the local community board has had to reiterate this message in its latest letter to the administration – and that there is still not one unit of affordable housing on the site.

This administration should be different. When it comes to community planning on highly-contested sites like Greenpoint Hospital, trust matters. Local community groups have that trust, which is why they are able to work hand-in-hand with local residents and move projects forward. This is real community planning – the type we need to be embracing if we are going to build local support as development moves forward. Without real community partners – from the drawing board, to development, to ownership – “community planning” is just a phrase.