Does Brooklyn Need a New Waterfront Neighborhood?

New York|Does Brooklyn Need a New Waterfront Neighborhood?

For artists seduced by dilapidated industrial shorelines, the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, spanning 122 acres along New York Harbor, has long been a source of romantic inspiration. Only real estate developers have looked toward the landscape with a more ardent sense of creative opportunity. For years now, in a city where most of the waterfront has already been repurposed in the name of views-first living, they have fantasized about turning the docks into a creative-class Oz.

One proposal that emerged more than a decade ago imagined extending the No. 1 train from the southern tip of Manhattan, under the East River, to the terminal site with a stop on Governors Island. None of these ideas gained traction until last year, when ownership of the land transferred from the state to the city, and the vision-boarding took off with a momentum not generally observed in municipal governing.

If you believe that the housing crisis is the most urgent problem the city is facing — as the many voters who made Zohran Mamdani the Democratic mayoral nominee clearly seem to — then the logic of what the city is advancing might strike you as irrefutable. The “city,” in this instance, is the Economic Development Corporation, the agency charged with transforming a largely desolate property distinguished by underused cranes, containers and a noxious concrete recycling facility. In its place would be an entirely new, economically diverse neighborhood that would stretch from the brownstones of Cobble Hill to Red Hook, where roughly half of the neighborhood’s 11,000 residents live in public housing.

Last month, the city came forward with a plan that would seem to have addressed nearly every contingency and conceivable point of grievance. It calls for 6,000 homes to be built, with 40 percent of them — 2,400 rental apartments — set to be affordable in perpetuity. This is a significantly higher share of affordable units than most new developments provide. And they would serve people at lower income thresholds than these projects ordinarily deliver. Even opponents of the overall concept admit that the configuration is impressive.

In an effort to acknowledge the historically neglected Red Hook Houses, devastated during Hurricane Sandy, 200 of the affordable units would be reserved for people who live there and $200 million earmarked for building repairs in the public housing complex. Among the 28 committee members tasked with studying the plan and approving or vetoing it — a group made up of local politicians, community board members, union leaders and others — is the head of a tenants’ association at the Red Hook Houses; she has voiced her support.

The plan includes other commitments suggesting a similarly broad civic spirit: 28 acres of parkland and public space, various resiliency strategies to protect against storm surges, 225,000 square feet of industrial space at discounted rents, more ferry service, more bus service (by way of priority lanes), more micromobility, a free shuttle bus to subway stations and an expanded and revitalized port that would supply a crucial node in what urban planners call the “blue highway,” a means of transporting goods around the city via waterways to reduce dependence on trucks.