NY Times October 30, 2013 On Council, de Blasio Blended Idealism With Push for Power By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, KATE TAYLOR and DAVID W. CHEN
The Brooklyn Democrats had always been a sleepy, collegial group on the City Council. Until Bill de Blasio made his first big play for power. On a bright December afternoon in 2003, nine of them were abruptly summoned to the office of Mr. de Blasio, a newly re-elected Park Slope councilman with high-minded liberal notions about open government, and more than a little ambition of his own. A piece of paper awaited them: a blank signature sheet declaring support for Mr. de Blasio’s bid to wrest the chairmanship of the borough’s Council delegation away from Lewis A. Fidler, a forceful Sheepshead Bay Democrat with deep roots in the party organization. Mr. de Blasio, who is now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, had wooed his colleagues with idealistic promises: to galvanize the Brooklyn delegation into a cohesive legislative bloc, to democratize an appropriations process that Mr. Fidler had run autocratically and to share the chairmanship with a trailblazing black councilman. But Mr. de Blasio, an experienced political operative, was leaving nothing to chance. He needed nine votes, a majority of the 17-member delegation. When he was confident he had nine supporters, he immediately asked them to declare their support in writing, all at the same time in the same room. “It was like locking people in, almost literally,” recalled one of those who milled about awkwardly in the room until the deed, finally, was done. The person, fearing recriminations if Mr. de Blasio is elected mayor, spoke on the condition of anonymity. (snip) Mr. de Blasio was an ardent proponent of affordable housing and argued that one way to create more of it was to squeeze developers to include it in their projects. But again and again, civic advocates say, projects supported by Mr. de Blasio in the name of building homes for working- and middle-class New Yorkers failed to deliver as promised. “The moment you talk to him about development, he says affordable housing,” said Katia Kelly, a Carroll Gardens civic advocate and author of a popular neighborhood blog. “I wish somebody would ask him how many units of affordable housing have actually been built in the district during his time as a councilman.” (The answer: 530, according to city officials. Some districts in Brooklyn had thousands.) Mr. de Blasio’s first major battle over affordable housing came in 2003, in one of the Bloomberg administration’s first land-use overhauls: the rezoning of Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue to permit tall buildings, while capping heights much lower in the adjacent residential blocks. Mr. de Blasio pressed to require developers to include apartments for low- and moderate-income residents. The Bloomberg administration resisted, however, and Mr. de Blasio relented. Instead, the city included $6 million in subsidies to encourage developers to build affordable units, but the money sat unused while expensive, bulky apartment towers rose. (The city eventually embraced Mr. de Blasio’s idea.) Later in his tenure, Mr. de Blasio opposed making the fetid Gowanus Canal a federal Superfund site, saying the city could do a better job of cleaning it up. But his opposition raised eyebrows because Mr. de Blasio was also supporting a proposed luxury condominium project along the canal that he said would include affordable units; when the canal was made a Superfund site, the developer walked away. But it was the Atlantic Yards project, a gigantic housing and arena development at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, that cemented the image of Mr. de Blasio in some critics’ minds as a too-willing partner for developers. Eric McClure, a founder of the civic group Park Slope Neighbors, met with Mr. de Blasio, hoping that 2,200 signatures he had gathered on a petition would be enough to turn the councilman into a critic of the project. He did not succeed; Mr. de Blasio argued that development was needed to create affordable housing. “He was insistent,” Mr. McClure recalled. “We had an affordable housing crisis, sometimes you have to do certain things to get that affordable housing built that might rub people the wrong way, but that was the ultimate goal, and for that reason he was for the project.” Mr. de Blasio, according to Mr. McClure, acknowledged that Fourth Avenue “had not turned out the way he hoped.” But he argued that Atlantic Yards would be different, because Acorn, a community organizing group with which he had a long association, had joined the developer, Forest City Ratner, to see that the affordable housing was built. The Barclays Center arena opened in 2012, but the first affordable apartments are still at least a year away. Critics say that Mr. de Blasio was too close to the developer, Bruce Ratner, who hosted a birthday fund-raiser for him, and did not push the firm, Forest City Ratner, to deliver the promised housing. On Monday Mr. de Blasio blamed some “objective reasons” for the delay, but said “it’s clearly behind schedule,” and allowed that “there were missteps by everyone involved.” He said the next mayor needed to hold Forest City Ratner and state officials accountable. “On my watch, it will happen,” he vowed. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
