What if You Want to Actually Stay in Your Neighborhood?

In Defense of the "NIMBYs"

June 16, 2024

I have lived in New York City all my life.  Over the course of fifty plus years, I have become deeply acquainted with much of it, dozens of neighborhoods where I’ve lived, worked, gone to school, visited friends and family, socialized, attended church, watched ballgames.  If you’ve been here long enough, you notice a constant theme across all neighborhoods—over time, they change.  And they tend to change faster than you might think, or expect, or want.

There are lots of people who love this about the city.  It’s dynamic, they say.  It’s vibrant.  Many of these same people pop in during their young professional years and then pop out to the suburbs to raise their families. They didn’t grow up here.  They don’t plan to grow old here.  The city they experienced, the neighborhood they briefly called home, might look completely different five years after they left, as it might have looked completely different five years before they got here.         

There are a number of challenges inherent to living in New York.  You need to have thick skin. Big cities are not for everyone.  Yet people still come in droves because they believe the opportunities and other benefits outweigh those challenges. The inevitability and rate of change, however, is a feature of New York City that can be unsettling, even disheartening. 

Here’s an instructive example. I attended high school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.  When I graduated in the early 90s, it was a middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood. The young filmmaker Spike Lee had his office two blocks away from the school.  Sure, it didn’t feel quite as safe as my hometown in Queens (the 80s were not a spectacular time for many places in the city), but it was still an authentic and all-around great neighborhood, filled with tree-lined streets, brownstones, parks, restaurants, and a stone’s-throw away from every major subway line, not to mention the lower Manhattan skyline. 

Years later, when I worked at my first real job, a colleague of mine, a lawyer from somewhere in middle America, told me that he was going to buy a brownstone in Brooklyn in a neighborhood called Fort Greene.  I thought he was insane, but it turns out he was actually just a little early. Today, the neighborhood is comprised predominantly of white, urban professionals, and word is he recently sold his house for well over $4 million and moved away.  This might seem like a feel-good story, but it’s not.  To me, it’s sad.  He’s now gone, and I’m sure many of the people who lived in Fort Greene when I went to school there would have preferred for it to stay like it was.  At some point, a community becomes so different than what it used to be, that it becomes time to leave.     

Fort Greene, Brooklyn

I’m not sure what exactly changed in Fort Greene to displace and replace the majority of a community over the course of one generation.  The best I can do is speculate that there is a constant throng of people who want to live in New York City, and the nicer the neighborhood, the greater the demand.  If your neighborhood is nice, it’s just a matter of time before those forces outweigh those trying to keep things the way they are.   

On that point, I believe that my neighborhood, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, fits squarely into the “nice” category. I made my first drive across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway almost 35 years ago and immediately knew it was a gem. When I got married to my wife, a Bay Ridge denizen, there was no question that we were going to make our roots and raise our family here.  Sure, the neighborhood has experienced its share of changes during that time.  Like many New York City communities, the dynamic in Bay Ridge has been driven largely by the inflow and outflow of immigrant populations.  When you live in New York, these are precisely the types of neighborhood changes that you would expect.  In fact, it’s a story as old as New York City.       

Bay Ridge Parkway (75th Street)

In the larger context, changes like that are organic and are to be expected.  They happen naturally, or at least as a consequence of the myriad and countless forces that motivate human decision-making. They might fairly be regarded as part of the natural order of things. 

But what if this community change was imposed on the people of that community by the city itself, not by the natural order of things?  What if they were engineered from the top down?

Welcome to the special meeting of Community Board 10, held last week at Fort Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. 

The setup:  Representatives from the Mayor’s Office of City Planning were on-hand to pitch their proposed amendments to current zoning laws—branded by some marketing arm as the “City of Yes” initiatives—to gather feedback from various affected communities. 

The proposals: To eliminate a number of restrictions which currently apply across the district in order to allow for greater development.  “Up-zoning,” as they like to say. If you are unfamiliar with how zoning laws work, which includes most people who are not real estate developers or have never tried to renovate a house, these laws are the thing that prevents your neighbors from tearing down their house and building the Chrysler Building next door.

Whether they knew it or not, these representatives from the Mayor’s Office were walking into a buzz saw. 

As one more bit of background, Bay Ridge (and its neighboring community, Dyker Heights) is one of these neighborhoods that you encounter in the city from time to time where you can reliably see the sun from most places on the ground.  At some point in your life, you might have emerged from the R subway line and walked a block or two in any direction and been struck by this.  The buildings are low.  They are pretty and logically-placed and well-maintained.  There are trees.  There are parks.  There are churches.  There are schools.  It’s right next to the sublime Verrazzano Bridge, which sits atop the Narrows, where New York Harbor empties out into the Atlantic Ocean. There are families, including my own.  Hi! 

And here we were last week, along with about 700 incited residents, to listen to city planners—who are clearly not from around here—explain why the community should accept new zoning regulations that would allow for the free and unfettered development of things such as: five-story apartment buildings where there might currently exist a two-story one-family house on a corner lot; larger and wider and taller homes; and my favorite, Accessory Dwelling Units (“ADUs”), which allow homeowners to build things like—I swear to God they said this—“backyard cottages,” and other dwellings in places not meant for dwellings.     

(“Backyard cottages?”  Is this Little House on the Prairie?  Raise your hand of you believe that the current residents of Brooklyn should be out in their backyards building sheds on their 20-foot-wide lots so as to allow other families to live there?  Are you going to throw them chicken bones at night after dinner?) 

The nominal purpose behind all of these proposed measures is to “urgently” address what has been described as a city-wide housing crisis.  Rents are high and there are an increasing number of homeless people, and many people believe there is a high correlation between these things.  The tools they have devised to solve this problem are initiatives designed to encourage the building of new housing that, in the aggregate city-wide, will—god-willing, hopefully, maybe—lead to lower rents. Despite the fact that rents in Bay Ridge have largely remained stable in recent years, the implication behind the proposal is that this particular community needs to start shouldering its burden to accommodate the broader demand for more housing. 

Having failed to identify any compelling benefit to the people who actually live here, the bulk of the presentation was dedicated towards explaining why these proposals won’t be quite as shitty as they seem.

Go on.  You’ve got our attention.  We’re listening…

My reflexive response was the same as 698 of the 700 people in that room: are you kidding me?        

The mood in the room was rowdy, ruckus, and at many times disrespectful to the presenters, which was unfortunate, but still kind of funny.  It felt like the House of Representatives before the Civil War, although no one was caned to death.  Our local City Council representative, who is generally regarded as an effective public servant in many respects, was dutifully in attendance. However, being of the same political party as the Mayor, he was mercilessly booed all night. 

Hey, you’re the ones who asked for feedback.

Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? 

Nope.

The hearing was an interesting example of the good and bad of local politics in this day and age.  It was good that the hearing was well-attended, and that the community was able to deliver an unambiguous and virtually unanimous opinion to the elected officials and administrators, who could choose to ignore it at their peril.  It was bad because the heated emotions underlying the reaction might lead those same decision-makers to ignore or miss the compelling argument underlying the message.

Here’s what I mean.  In connection with any political issue, national or local, there is a tendency to suspect the motives of those on the other side.  The immediate reaction is often to assume that the other side is operating in bad faith—on the left, to assume the other side is interminably racist, regressive, or on the wrong side of history; on the right, to assume that the other side has a nefarious agenda, a motivation different or broader than the issue at hand, whether ideological, personal, or otherwise. 

One thing I’ve learned is that most people subjectively believe that their motives are pure.  Therefore, if the person proposing the thing is the one you have to convince, and your main argument against something is that that person is operating in bad faith, in their heads they will immediately refute that accusation and you will have ended up persuading no one.  It didn’t help when one of the people in the audience screamed “Trump!” at the City Council member.  What does Trump have to do with backyard cottages?     

No, the deeper message to the public officials is more straightforward, and it should go something like this:  We acknowledge that you believe these proposals will lead to positive change—here, lower rents.  But we know our community very well, and we believe that these proposals will very likely make this lovely community less lovely—possibly by a lot—and will probably do little to nothing to address the problems they are intended to solve.  I suspect that these land use experts have some basis or studies in other contexts to support the notion that allowing for “ADUs” may lead to more affordable housing, or that building more apartment buildings near subway stations may lead to lower rents in the aggregate, and that lowering rents incrementally may lead to a decline in the homeless population.  I am by no means an expert on these things, but to me it seems as if the number of steps necessary for all of these changes to deliver the intended results makes them sound more like prayers than policies. Consider us skeptical.

First, by allowing things to be built that could not be built before, you will probably—ironically—increase property values, which seems nice, but not when the goal is for property owners to charge less in rent. Second, it can never be assumed that the buyers of properties now facing fewer restrictions—like developers—will exercise any restraint whatsoever.  In fact, in my experience, assume the complete opposite.  For example, in defending the proposal to eliminate the requirement for developers to build parking for new apartment buildings, these words were actually spoken in public (I wrote them down, because they seemed so hopelessly naive):

“We anticipate that developers will respond to market needs and continue to provide parking in areas where there is high demand, like southern Brooklyn.”

Newsflash: they won’t.  If you just bought a corner lot and want to knock down the home to build a five-story apartment building, what makes more economic sense: to utilize a good portion of the lot for parking, or build more apartments and make the rest of the community shoulder the burden of the additional cars?

Most importantly, when you play with zoning rules, you’re playing with fire.  These city planners are like toddlers wielding Glocks. You should not use zoning law changes to conduct social or economic experiments, because even though you might be able to change the laws in the future if they don’t work out, once something is built, it’s built forever. 

And once someone moves away, they don’t move back.

Unlike Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, I want to stay in Bay Ridge.

I myself would like to stay here in Bay Ridge.  I would like my children to continue living here as adults.  Even though Bay Ridge might feel like a small town, it’s still situated in the middle of a city where lots of people would like to live.  There are always barbarians at the gate.  If the norm and expectation is that people eventually move away, where is the opportunity to build anything durable?  Where is the incentive to keep things the way they are?  

The calculus of the city planners does not assign any metric or take into consideration the priceless value of families getting together and building something sustainable that lasts not one, but multiple generations. They, especially the younger generation, do not seem to understand this unquantifiable factor.  The irony is that many of the same technocrats who don’t seem to care whether the current residents stay or move out will live their lives confused as to why they are unable to find a firm footing in life.  They may end up wondering why their values and belief systems were not conducive to moral development, or deep meaning. They may one day feel betrayed. Or, like most people they will eventually figure it out.  And when they do, they will be the ones standing up in their local high school auditorium heckling the next generation of well-meaning but utterly clueless bureaucrats. 

For now, we’re still living here.  Go ahead, New York City: convince us that this will be good for us.  Convince us that the cooperation of this community is pivotal to the success of this initiative, which has been thoroughly studied, validated, confirmed, such that if this community participates, the greater city will undoubtedly be benefited, which will in turn benefit all of us.  We’re listening…

Because right now all we hear is the sound of crickets, reverberating against the walls of an endless sea of soon-to-be-built backyard cottages.