The deeper story about preservation and neighborhoods in Baltimore is about managing vacancy, abandonment, and demolition, as we have seen. It is mostly a top-down story about citywide officials and nonprofits. In central Brooklyn, the deeper story is entirely different. Working to preserve the historic physical and architectural texture of neighborhoods in Brooklyn is the only strategy available to locals who want to maintain the social texture against the onrushing tide of development in an expensive city with a steadily intensifying shortage of affordable housing (thus bottom-up). The pressure on the historic neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Crown Heights North and South, and Bedford-Stuyvesant comes not from radical population decline and the bulldozer but from increasing population pressure and the sometimes devious mechanisms of speculative development.
Community preservationists working in neighborhoods throughout central Brooklyn demonstrate the opportunity that landmarking offers for local residents to resist neighborhood change in the face of intense development pressure. In particular, landmarking provides a process through which development decisions are exposed to public consideration in ways that can bring communities together to address issues beyond the preservation of structures. By and large, in these struggles, local residents’ dominant interest is to maintain existing residents in place.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, where rapid gentrification is underway, neighborhood activists strive to apply preservation regulation to mitigate change but frequently encounter its significant limitations in the face of aggressive development pressures. The Community Board 3 Landmarks Committee1 is where the intricate business of managing a historically designated neighborhood begins. It is where locals bring violations to the attention of the community and homeowners and where developers request permission for alterations to buildings that contribute to landmark districts. The landmark committees of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC) and the Crown Heights North Association (CHNA) play the same role. The alterations proposed range from new doors and windows to wholesale remodels that add elevators and rooftop hot tubs. Local boards wield significant power over design decisions, but their power to prevent gentrification is limited. They can insist that speculators maintain the original roofline of a Bed-Stuy brownstone, but they cannot prevent them from renting renovated townhouses for $7,495 to $15,585 per month.2
The dynamics are similar in Crown Heights South, where the struggle to designate a neighborhood as historic leads to frustrations as real estate prices skyrocket, longtime residents sell, and renters are displaced. Evelyn Tully Costa, a white homeowner with training in design and preservation, has been working for years to landmark Crown Heights South, but she has been unable to persuade enough of her neighbors of the benefits to gain the attention of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). Her efforts have also faced resistance from Lubavitcher Hasidic Jewish households nearby that want to be able to expand historic houses to accommodate large families. So she confronts the further challenge of designing a district that does not include this part of the neighborhood. At the same time, the city and state have initiated redevelopment of the historic Bedford Union Armory, which she fears will be undertaken in ways that accelerate gentrification of the neighborhood and undermine a key element of its historic fabric.
The stories in this chapter illustrate how the larger struggle over housing and profit in an expensive city with a shortage of affordable housing often play out at the local level of city government. The frictions inherent in these local processes and the complicated (frequently personality-driven) relationships between individuals and organizations underlie this process. A single individual sometimes effectively constitutes the voice and motive force of an organization, which comes with a particular set of limitations. Community organizations are forced to rely on the social, economic, political, and professional capital of their often volunteer members, and this, too, has risks. Finally, these stories are about specific historic neighborhoods with specific built environments that constrain and inflect the efforts themselves.
I begin by framing these complex neighborhood processes through interviews with two active community-level preservationists, Rob Witherwax and Ethel Tyus. Witherwax is a practicing attorney specializing in real estate transactions, chair of the PHNDC, vice chair of Community Board 8 (Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and Weeksville), and a Prospect Heights resident since 2000.3 He is a middle-aged white man. Our wide-ranging conversation highlights how development pressure interacts with the landmarking process from the perspective of someone involved as both an active community member and a professional. It also exemplified who makes up community organizations and how landmarking can function as a source of community organization.
Witherwax lives in a historic brownstone in the Prospect Heights landmark district, but when he originally moved to the neighborhood, he lived in a large apartment building on Eastern Parkway, at the edge of Prospect Heights. In our conversation, he returned repeatedly to his efforts to create a new landmark district for that strip of multifamily buildings, revealing the contrast between the landmarking process and its success or frustration in two physically different parts of the larger neighborhood.
Witherwax began by arguing that “landmarking, among its other salutary values in New York City, is a bulwark against wrong—you know—noncontextual development, out of scale development.” Later he insisted that landmarking does not contribute directly to displacement. Indeed, he went so far as to declare, “I think, if anything, it has the opposite effect because it disincentivizes the type of rapacious development that is nakedly about displacement.”
Witherwax understands landmarking as a tool for maintaining the integrity of the neighborhood built environment but also for maintaining communities, or at least populations in place. Witherwax conceded that land use zoning regulation4 can accomplish this too, at least the built environment piece, but said that compared to historic preservation,
zoning is such a blunt instrument…. Where are the mixed use zoning code provisions? Point them [out] to me, because I can’t find them. Where are the commercial/manufacturing/ residential overlays? I don’t see them anywhere. It’s too blunt and city planning is the greater villain in that narrative than LPC ever could be.5
The most interesting emphasis in our conversation was Witherwax’s sense of the importance of the public process to landmarking, which exposes development decisions to public consideration. He expanded on this, pointing to how this process can restrain speculative development and increase community power:
A landmark regime [creates] a way to say to the private property owner, “Whoa, stop. We’ve got a public process and we’re not saying, ‘no, you can’t do this,’ we’re just going to say ‘put your cards on the table.’ If the rationale [for the proposed changes] is aesthetic [that’s fine, but if] your end game is really that you just want to monetize this property … and kick everybody out and throw the old ladies out of the old ladies’ home and move in the hedge fund millionaires, then maybe we’re going to have something negative to say about that.” … So that’s why I think landmarking is a net positive.
Buying into a historic neighborhood is confirmation of the importance of that neighborhood’s integrity and implies a commitment to maintain it.
Witherwax admitted that there can be a downside to this process: “Now it bothers me when people come in and try to redesign other people’s windows … you gotta watch out, it gives people a little too much interest in other people’s business, maybe.” That said, he does not believe that the standard complaint—that historic preservation regulations increase the cost of maintaining buildings—goes much beyond the level of inconvenience. He pointed out that landmarking has no impact on many aspects of maintenance. In regard to the large, multifamily buildings at the edge of Prospect Heights, a new frontier for landmarking in Brooklyn, Witherwax argued that there are economies of scale when purchasing materials and the costs are divided among more households. “It’s a perception,” he said, about increased costs, “that may not be backed up by reality.”
Finally, Witherwax addressed the question of who participates in this community process, who joins community organizations like PHNDC and attends meetings of the community board, and how they overlap. Although he rejected the idea that it is only “cranks,” he emphasized that the group is “self-selecting”:
It’s not the cranks…. It’s not the rose colored glasses people…. It’s not even the nostalgists. There’s a certain passion for this, which is really hard to understand, because it tends to be repetitive and monotonous…. So you have to have that … almost masochistic quality to want to put up with that too. You know, by and large it’s just a bunch of people who have a good head on their shoulders and who like to work together, and the people who don’t play well in the sandbox don’t tend to stick around.
Those who select in have developed an amateur interest in historic architectural detail that is entangled with their commitment to and, most commonly, ownership stake in the neighborhood. But they also have to be willing to review the same kinds of applications again and again with consistent attention to detail and a willingness to work toward consensus with their neighbors. Witherwax also explained that formal community board appointments are opaque and a kind of confirmation of the self-selection process because “people who submit their applications seem to kind of get appointed.”
Demographically, Witherwax characterized those “who show up and put in the effort” as longtime neighborhood residents of retirement age, often car owners, predominantly women, and, in central Brooklyn, predominantly African American. He noted that, as is true of himself, there are increasing numbers of “new people”—meaning predominantly white—who have been in the neighborhood for twenty years or more and are starting to get involved and that this is changing the complexion of these groups.
My conversation with Ethel Tyus, chair of the Community Board 8 Land Use Committee and founding member of the CHNA, highlighted similar themes.6 This was not surprising because Witherwax had recommended I speak with her as a longer-time advocate for their larger part of Brooklyn. Tyus reflects the involved neighborhood resident that Witherwax suggests dominates local organizations: somewhat older, African American, and a longtime central Brooklyn resident. She went further than Witherwax in clarifying the specific sources and mechanisms of development pressure and their effects on historic neighborhoods.
Like Witherwax, Tyus immediately connected her work to preserve Crown Heights to the larger development forces in Brooklyn. She sees gentrification in Brooklyn proceeding from skyrocketing rents in Manhattan, a kind of spillover. In the face of this, many longtime homeowners are tempted to sell. Tyus answered the question, “Why do they sell?”
They don’t have the reservoir of maintenance dollars to maintain the property. They’re old and tired, tired of the painting and the sweeping the leaves, and all the other entropic changes that happen to older houses that have to be attended to. Every year you have got to do something to keep that house in one piece. So … what we see is these older folks, whose kids have moved away, not having the intestinal fortitude to continue to do the property maintenance on the older buildings. And they don’t have the legal advice to do a trust or to figure out another way to maintain the property to continue to live there and still get the building taken care of. So they’ll sell and they’ll go into a nursing home.
In other words, the nature of central Brooklyn’s preservation problem stems from the “entropic changes” and the disjunction between the dwindling resources of many longtime Black homeowners, many of whose children have moved away, and the current value of these constantly deteriorating properties.
Tyus explained that New York State historic tax credits particularly benefit neighborhoods that are identified by the U.S. Census as “distressed,” a factor that has been important in funding the maintenance of historic houses in central Brooklyn. She is concerned, though, that the 2020 census will show sufficient demographic and economic change in central Brooklyn that the area will no longer qualify as distressed, eliminating that source of support, a perverse consequence of neighborhood change. Indeed, the demographic data I provided in chapter 3 indicate a trajectory of population shift that reinforces Tyus’s concern—a decline in Black residents and an increase in educational attainment.
In sum, community preservationists working in neighborhoods where landmarking is well established clarify landmarking’s role in resisting neighborhood change in the face of intense development pressure. In particular, landmarking establishes a process through which development decisions are exposed to public consideration, and it can bring together community organizations that address issues beyond the preservation of structures, extending to maintaining populations in place.
Community Board 3 Ad Hoc Landmarks Committee
The struggle over development decisions in historic neighborhoods in central Brooklyn plays out at the neighborhood level before just the kind of self-selecting groups of passionate and committed locals that Witherwax described. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Community Board 3 (CB3) has appointed an ad hoc landmarks committee to supervise the landmarking process. The volunteers on the committee have the authority to review applications and make recommendations to the larger board, which will ultimately vote on those recommendations and forward them to LPC. In 2016, the ad hoc committee included Morgan Muncey, a local realtor and resident, who brought me to the May 9, 2019, meeting of the committee.7
The Landmarks Committee gathered in the community board’s offices in Restoration Plaza on Fulton Street, a big commercial strip in Bed-Stuy. Restoration Plaza was “rehabilitated in 1972 from its former life as the Sheffield Farms Milk Bottling Plant” by the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, “the nation’s first Community Development organization.”8 It combines a historic, brick industrial building with modern glass and steel elements closer to the street. The community board’s office was low ceilinged, fluorescent-lit, and cluttered with information in multiple printed forms to be distributed to constituents. Approximately fifteen men and women, evenly Black and white, squeezed around a large table in mismatched chairs to listen to presentations from local homeowners and their representatives. The meeting was led by two CB3 members, and the attendees were actively involved neighborhood homeowners interested in historic preservation. My arrival with Muncey was apparently enough to certify my presence.
A range of petitions was considered at the May meeting. Among the most revealing of the committee’s attitude was a local homeowner’s testimony about the activities of Brookland, a developer active in the area.9 Brookland was building on the site of some historic stables.10 The homeowner complained that she had to stop workers from tearing up the cobblestone street and then stop them again when they came back to pour concrete over the cobblestones. She explained to the committee that her block had come out strongly in opposition to Brookland’s project and would call out any violation, but she expressed the concern that developers had the money to simply pay fines and move on. The committee listened to this report with disquiet, clearly on the same side.
Next the committee reviewed the petition of a developer, Dixon, who I am told owns fifty-six properties in the neighborhood, mostly brownstone row houses that rent for $7,000 to $10,000 per month.11 Dixon is owned by an Australian financial services firm, a striking example of the role of international capital in the process of gentrification, one to which many of gentrification’s critics ascribe great importance.12 Their petition involved alterations to a historic brownstone in the process of conversion to a luxury, single-family, rental property. One neighbor, in attendance to testify against the proposed changes, argued that “these are family homes, they are not for Jacuzzis.”13 The committee considered the petition with skepticism, but the June interaction is more revealing of the committee’s dynamic.
In June 2016, I returned for the monthly meeting.14 My prior attendance was facilitated by my arrival with Muncey, but there was some skepticism this time about the appropriateness of my presence, despite the fact this was a public meeting posted on the community board’s calendar. Why would a neighborhood outsider be interested in the activities of a committee that normally only attracted homeowners making changes, developers, and their architects? After some discussion, a compromise was reached, and I was allowed to stay for the public part of the meeting. But I was asked to leave after the first hour when the committee went into “executive session,” a part of the meeting I had observed in May.
The public portion of the June CB3 landmarks committee meeting best reveals the grassroots, local, idiosyncratic, and personality-driven quality of preservation regulation. The group of committed amateur preservationists is racially diverse, but the majority on the committee are Black and female. Much of the conversation about proposed changes turned on committee members’ individual experiences with their own houses, although they also argued from an apparently deep knowledge of the neighborhood’s architectural history, repeatedly citing the need for a historically coherent district. Their comments, in the aggregate, gave a clear impression that they were trying to slow local development using landmarking regulations.
Among the topics for the night were variance requests in relation to inexpensive, sometimes poorly accomplished repairs that predated the landmark district and are “grandfathered in.” Under the law, homeowners are not required to replace them despite the fact that they violate historic integrity. If they do replace them, however, the replacements are required to meet the historic standards. Arguments emerged about whether the way this is currently playing out makes sense. In many cases before the board, homeowners are innocently attempting to improve the look and performance of their houses by replacing these cheap materials and unaesthetic details—metal doors, vinyl windows—without first getting permission. But homeowners are running into the LPC’s historic orthodoxy and requirements of specific designs and expensive custom work.
The committee was quite sympathetic to these supplicants coming to them for help dealing with LPC and were critical of LPC, alleging inexperience in balancing preservation with the economic realities facing many homeowners in Bed-Stuy. A middle-aged, white, male resident of Macon Street had replaced his “worn out” modern door without LPC permission. He explained there was “so much going on” on his street, a reference to extensive redevelopment in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, that he did not think anyone would notice, but he has received a warning letter from LPC. The new door is solid wood (thus quite expensive) and stained “golden oak.” LPC requires it to be a darker shade and for him to remove the spokes in the fanlight above so it is a single, undivided pane. Clearly irritated, the homeowner arrived with plans to make these changes and was consulting with the committee to confirm that they were adequate. The committee seemed positively disposed to the homeowner, recommended he consult the 1940 tax photo of the property, and ultimately agreed that his planned changes should satisfy the landmark district’s standards.
The June meeting also involved the petition of a multiunit building owner, also on Macon Street. He came to the committee for help “legalizing” his new wood windows. The owner reported having spent $12,000 on windows and $4,000 for their installation before being told by LPC that the rectangular windows, which replaced rectangular vinyl windows put in by a previous owner, should, in fact, be arched at the top to fit the brick arch above the window. He explained that arched windows would have added an additional $12,000 to his costs.
It came out over the course of a respectful back and forth with the committee that the building in question consists of single-room occupancy rental units (known as SROs).15 The petitioner buys and renovates SROs in Bed-Stuy, but keeps the current tenants in place while improving the building, sometimes even training the residents in building trades. One of the committee chairs admiringly called this “real low-income housing.”
Eventually a member of the committee offered that brick arches are common above windows because late-nineteenth-century builders did not use stone lintels to support the weight of the wall above, but that the original windows would, by his observation, likely have been rectangular. The committee is clearly favorably disposed toward the building owner because of the progressivism of his broader project and promises a letter, in a tone of some outrage, recommending legalization after the fact to LPC. The committee’s responses to both of these petitioners reflect balancing historical integrity in design with the practical realities and financial constraints of building ownership.
The committee’s attitude to the real estate developers and their representatives who appeared before them was distinctly less friendly. Dixon was on the agenda again. What was most notable about Dixon’s presentation was the tone of condescension, control, and only grudging cooperation. The project manager presented the proposed changes to a brownstone on Decatur Street as a fait accompli and used phrases such as “what additions and small changes we are making to the property,” “we would be willing to consider,” and “we are trying to listen to your comments and will try to accommodate [you].” The project manager was neither deferential nor sympathetic to the committee’s concerns. For their part, the committee was skeptical of the necessity of adding an elevator and roof deck to the building but framed their criticisms in terms of their assumption that the property was a speculative luxury rental, not being designed for a particular household. A similar attitude toward developers was evident at the May meeting.
The activities of the ad hoc landmarks committee of CB3 in Bed-Stuy reflect the local activism of historically minded residents working to accommodate everyday life within a landmark district and to resist speculative development that speeds an already rapid process of gentrification. Outside forces, embodied by developers, appear to be responsible for this process. The locals experience this as being imposed upon them, which creates a tension I did not observe elsewhere. Among the neighborhoods I explored for my research, Bed-Stuy was the only one in which I was ever threatened, the only one in which my conspicuous middle-class Whiteness seemed to present a challenge or a risk.
The development pressure in Crown Heights South is similar to that in Bed-Stuy, but the neighborhood does not have a history of landmarking, from which both Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights North benefit, nor the degree of community cohesion that could underpin a new landmark districting process. Evelyn Tully Costa, founder and president of the Crown Heights South Association described gentrification in the neighborhood as “on steroids” or like “a feeding frenzy.”16 The local, personality-driven process of the practice of historic preservation remains the same in Crown Heights South but reveals some of the weaknesses of this situation.
Tully Costa, president of the CHSA, explained that she is energetically seeking landmark designation for the core of the neighborhood. She has mastered the architectural history of the neighborhood and has begun to identify the contributing buildings to a potential landmark district, but she emphasizes that she repeatedly confronts problems of organization. Her professional experience makes her comfortable in front of a crowd and happy to discuss the details of the landmarking project, but she struggles to find others with whom to share the burden.
Like Ethel Tyus, Tully Costa laments seeing longtime residents, overwhelmingly Black, “cashing out and moving South.” Although emphasizing that she could not begrudge them the opportunity, she bemoaned the disappearance of committed community members. She also complained that sixty to seventy people show up for community meetings but the same ten to fifteen are left to do the work. In a later conversation, she described her frustration trying to get others involved in the work of the CHSA:17
I said, “You know what? Don’t tell me you’re too busy, because the developers are not. They’re busy destroying our neighborhood. So either you do the landmarking or you shut up about it, because there’s a tool in our arsenal that’s been employed by dozens of neighborhood groups around the city to stop this.”
Like Spellen, with whom she works, Tully Costa18 says that “nearby catastrophes help spur locals,” meaning that radical changes to historic buildings the community has come to take for granted often draw their attention to the threat of development and the potential protective power of preservation regulation.
Tully Costa stressed the necessity of landmarking in the face of constant and increasing development pressure in Crown Heights South: “The city hasn’t done anything except encourage luxury housing. And no, not all boats—what is it? ‘All boats rise with the tide?’ Does not work. That’s trickledown bullshit.” Moreover, she uses this as a rallying cry with which to engage others, “either you do the landmarking or you shut up about it.” It is not just homeowners, whose properties are potentially affected by the regulations, that should care. Tully Costa believes it is “people in rent stabilized buildings who should want landmarking even more. There’s this huge pressure to get them out and, you know, tear down those ratty old buildings and put up something shiny, new, and cheap, which none of them will be able to afford to live in.”
Tully Costa argued that the essence of a “stable neighborhood” is that speculative sales and development have been discouraged. Landmarking, she realizes, can only go so far to stabilize Crown Heights (my Prospect Heights interviewees made a similar point). As property prices increase, so do property taxes, which sometimes push the costs of continuing to own out of reach of low- and middle- income homeowners. The pressure associated with increasing costs is compounded by what Tully Costa describes as harassment at the hands of “predatory real estate scammers,” who call, leaflet, and visit homes in the hopes of persuading homeowners to sell, so they can, in turn, flip or redevelop the property. Landmarking, unfortunately from Tully Costa’s perspective, does not affect the ability to buy and sell. It does, however, constrain redevelopment and can make available new resources to help low- and middle- income homeowners maintain their properties.
Landmarking does prevent one specific hazard for renters. Tully Costa explained a phenomenon associated with changing prices and development pressure that she calls “demolition eviction.” A landlord can evict even rent-stabilized tenants if they have an alternative plan for the building site, demonstrate funding for the new plan, and have agreed to pay relocation expenses for tenants. But then, Tully Costa explained, “there’s no penalty for not doing the building.” There are no consequences for failing to carry out the plans that were the rationale for the evictions. The landlord can find new tenants who pay higher rents. This would only be worth the trouble in a neighborhood where rents were increasing rapidly. Landmarking would eliminate this strategy because demolishing contributing buildings in landmark districts is prohibited.
Tully Costa offered all of these reasons to explain why she has been seeking landmark designation for the core of Crown Heights South. She firmly believes landmarking is a powerful tool, claiming that it preserves “not just the buildings, but the people too.” Slowing development reduces financial pressure on the neighborhood and discourages the kind of speculative development most closely associated with displacement.
Tully Costa has connected to and is drawing upon the experience of the Crown Heights North Association to guide her efforts, and she anticipates a lengthy process. But Tully Costa is acutely aware that part of the difference in the landmarking processes in Crown Heights North (successful, multiple phases) and South (as yet not designated) is attributable to the built environment of the respective neighborhoods. Crown Heights North “was developed, starting in the eighteen forties, as practically a playground for the rich…. So they have a much more elegant upscale building stock.” She connects both the neighborhood’s gentrification and organization to this elegant stock. Most of Crown Heights South, in contrast, was developed between 1900 and 1930, for middle and upper-middle class professionals, “a car neighborhood for people who could afford a car.” Its built environment is less aesthetically distinct and is less likely to facilitate the kind of casual sociability that builds community.
Advocating for a landmark district in Crown Heights South requires community organizing, according to Tully Costa.
First, we have to go around and get the support and explain this process to people. And then, LPC, when they’re starting to do this project, they want to show up to meetings and hear neighbors say, “yes.” If we’ve done our job of educating people ahead of all this, landmarks will get a positive response. So our job is to educate our neighbors: “If you don’t do this, that’s what you get [referring to new development and displacement]. And if you do this, you get a stable neighborhood.”
She seems optimistic on this front, remarking that landmarking’s importance is increasingly recognized. A key reason is the knowledge that other neighborhoods that “could do it, have done it.”
Tully Costa was careful to delineate the various technical steps, such as drawing district boundaries, doing a building survey, and producing a report. These are substantially community processes as well because the labor of a building survey needs to be shared. Moreover, district boundaries must include both historically appropriate buildings and cooperative property owners. The Crown Heights South landmarking effort contends with a number of issues particular to it.
Foremost, the broader neighborhood includes a significant community of Lubavitcher Jews or Chabad Hasidim, who often build significant additions to their houses to accommodate large families and, accordingly, resist landmarking restrictions. Any district boundary for Crown Heights South must be drawn in a way that does not include the homes of the neighborhood’s substantial Lubavitcher population. This is essential for the process of organizing community support. Toward this end, Tully Costa has drawn the boundaries of the initial proposed landmark district to avoid the Lubavitchers’ part of the neighborhood.19 Second, the Bedford Union Armory, a large historic structure that could potentially anchor a landmark district, is caught up in a debate about its future use. Tully Costa and landmarking advocates are arguing for a community center, but the city’s preferred plans include more changes to the structure and extensive affordable housing, which Tully Costa calls (like Bankoff) a “Trojan horse.”20
Finally, my interviews with Tully Costa, like my interview with Tyus, point to the critical role of particular individuals in community organizations and how they constitute organizational capacity, at least in the early stages. Community organizations are founded on the excitement and energy of individuals, and they frequently develop according to the personal and professional capacities of those people. The personal impulse of organization can prove to be a limitation as well because those organizations frequently rely entirely on those same people and the idiosyncrasies of their lives. In this regard, biography proves critical to understanding both progress and stagnation in the landmarking process.
The trajectory of landmarking in Crown Heights South is illustrative. By the second time I spoke with Tully Costa, she had significantly reduced her role in CHSA because of health issues, which compromised the organization’s progress. Tully Costa lamented that
the logjam we’re hitting is, unfortunately, my health. I basically said to my board about a month or two ago … I need to step back a little and you guys need to fill in some blanks and do more of the work. So we’re in the process now of hopefully getting some people trained up to do the [landmark district] presentations and just get out there and meet community members. They’re all a little shy…. Because I happen to come from a preservation background, I’m not shy about speaking to people. So I’ve been doing it, but I haven’t really been effective because I’m, like, sick half the time.
Her comments point to a key weakness of a personality-driven process: different members, even when equally committed, may have different levels of skill. Tully Costa’s professional formation, as well as her extroverted personality, have meant that she is effective as the face of the organization, facilitating outreach and spreading the message—she is almost individually responsible for much of the organization’s impact to date. At the same time, her chronic illness limits her ability to fulfill this role, and no one in the organization is capable of or willing to assume her responsibilities.
Moreover, although Tully Costa has dedicated her time to the organization, some of the people with whom she has attempted to share the workload are not as available (or possibly as dedicated): “We’re supposed to be doing … a building survey [to prepare for the landmarking application]. But the woman that said she could do it got a full-time job, so I haven’t heard from her in three months.” In addition to personality and professional formation, community organizing requires time, which in turn requires resources.
The Bedford Union Armory
Redevelopment of the Bedford Union Armory offers another illustration of the functions and processes of historic preservation in Central Brooklyn, and it vividly illuminates the aggressive development (or redevelopment) pressures faced by communities there. My research into the recent history of the redevelopment of the Bedford Union Armory was archival in nature.21 I point out important aspects of the redevelopment process, highlighting the roles of local politicians and their relationship to community groups and their susceptibility to pressure. Most important, the Bedford Union Armory story is one of failure. Landmark preservation fails to win the day, forced into the background by the tension between for-profit development and the creation of affordable housing that dominates the New York City landscape.
The Bedford Union Armory in Crown Heights South was built in 1903. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation describes the site as “undeveloped before 1903, was used as an armory from about 1904 until sometime before 2013, when control of the property was relinquished to the city.” “The property was also occasionally used for film productions between 1991 and 2012.”22 The Bedford Union Armory’s closure is significant because the site is now city-owned, in the middle of a rapidly redeveloping area, is large for central Brooklyn, and includes a structure that could easily be repurposed as a recreation center, but also has space for other facilities.
In late 2013, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), announced a request for proposals to “reactivate” the armory. NYCEDC is a nonprofit corporation with a board appointed by the mayor and borough presidents that promotes business in New York City under contract with the city government. Initially, it was not clear what reactivating the armory would mean for the surrounding neighborhoods, but in December 2015, NYCEDC announced, in cooperation with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and City Council Member Laurie Cumbo, that the armory would be sold as a “500,000 Square Foot Mixed-Use Development.”23 Initial reaction to the plan by local residents was positive. Evelyn Tully Costa told me, “This is the place that our community needs to come together. Those kids should have the same things that I had growing up in Fairfield, Connecticut.”24 Tully Costa anticipated, and suggested this was a widespread expectation, that the project would include a recreation center to serve the neighborhood, but she also hoped the project could proceed without damaging the historic details of the building itself.
The devil has proved to be in other details. Over the nearly eleven-month period following the announcement, resistance gathered in the neighborhood to the plans that emerged. Unfortunately, the details of the action on the ground and the discussions that must have taken place went uncovered by local media. By October 2016, NYCEDC’s intentions for the proposed redevelopment were becoming clear. The project was described in The Guardian in the following terms:25
Currently, the developer selected by the EDC, BFC Partners, plans to redevelop the site with a 13-story building with 300 rental apartments and 24 condominiums, along with a state-of-the-art recreational center that will be open to the community in some capacity. Of the 300 apartments, 18 will be reserved for households earning no more than 40 percent of average median income (AMI), which is defined by the city as just over $36,000 for a family of four; another 49 will be set aside for households making no more than 50 percent of AMI ($45,000 for a family of four). The developer will reserve 99 units for households making no more than 110 percent of AMI (about $100,000 for a family of four), and the remaining 164 units will go at market rates to those with the minimum income to qualify.
The neighborhood’s expectation that a city-owned property would be redeveloped to benefit the community was undermined by the large number of market rate rental units and what were described elsewhere as luxury condominiums incorporated in the plan. The prominent inclusion of these units intensified already-present fears of gentrification.
This time, presumably in response to community dissatisfaction, local elected officials weighed in against the project. As reported in The Guardian,
US congresswoman Yvette Clarke, state senator Jesse Hamilton, state assemblyman Walter Mosley and state assemblywoman Diana Richardson released a letter they had written to the president and CEO of the New York City economic development corporation (EDC) asking that “the community’s voice is both heard and acted upon” as the project progresses.
Among other things, U.S. Congresswoman Clarke emphasized, “At a time when gentrification threatens many longtime residents with displacement, we need a comprehensive approach that significantly and substantially addresses all of the community’s needs.” What this framing—affordability vs. profit, community vs. development—misses is the historic nature of the building. This fits with Bankoff’s argument that historic preservation and affordability so often wind up falsely opposed in New York City (see chapter 3).
This begins a lengthy period of reconsideration of the project in which the resistance of both local politicians and local residents becomes more visible. Within weeks, the same group of four elected officials (all of them representing the neighborhood, but none of them responsible for decisions about the armory’s future) took a public stance that would define the terms of the debate about the redevelopment of the armory going forward: that a project redeveloped on city-owned land should include 100 percent affordable housing. They followed this with a Freedom of Information Act request for the project’s financials in an effort to expose the revenue and expense calculations the developer claimed required the presence of substantial market rate housing to support the recreation center.
In a measure of significant political division, Smith writes about this request:26
Notably absent from the letter are the two local officials who have approval power over the project, Councilmember Laurie Cumbo and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who will review the plans as part of the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, set to begin this spring.
Tully Costa told me she thought Cumbo was “under a lot of pressure to reconsider the deal.”27
By March of 2017, community opposition was growing in magnitude and visibility. In late February Tully Costa told me that “the good news is there’s huge community opposition to this thing.” In the month that followed, two local media sources, Gothamist and Curbed, reported vocal community opposition in community meetings, clarifying that the primary concern remains housing affordability: “Throughout the course of the meeting, attendees challenged the developer’s narrative of affordability, pointing out that only the 18 units targeted at the lowest income bracket would be affordable for the average family in Crown Heights.”28
In late March, arguments about affordability came to incorporate concerns about a racial transition. Curbed publicized a new report by New York Communities for Change, a housing affordability advocacy group, suggesting that “Bedford-Union Armory redevelopment won’t benefit residents of color.” “Rather, the Bedford Courts development will accelerate the whitening of Crown Heights, with fewer affordable apartments available for residents of color who earn lower incomes, and more apartments geared toward whiter, wealthier newcomers to the neighborhood.” It also notes support for the project from one of the nonprofit organizations that will benefit from the affordable office space the armory will provide, West Indian American Day Carnival Association.29
A month later, the armory developers announced that they would use union labor and provide training programs for local residents,30 presumably hoping to appease the community. City Council Member Laurie Cumbo announced that this was not enough and finally took a formal stand on the project, coming out against it in May 2017. Her decision built on statements over several months indicating that “Cumbo … wasn’t satisfied by the amount of affordable housing being offered in the project.” According to Politico, those statements and her ultimate position were a response to community opposition and the fear of a primary challenge, using the armory development project as a key issue:
Cumbo has been the target of community protests over the plan, including demonstrations outside her district office. Sources said the external pressure had contributed to her earlier reluctance to publicly embrace the plan, even as she expressed a desire for some type of development at the site…. Crown Heights residents and others opposed to the project are planning to protest Cumbo at her State of the District Thursday, citing Cumbo’s lack of clarity over a community plan which was presented to her as part of an effort to include more affordable housing than what is currently proposed in the project. Cumbo, a first-term Council member, is not only facing community opposition but also a primary challenger running for her seat. Former City Council staffer Ede Fox is challenging Cumbo and is making the armory issue a central part of her campaign.31
Curbed reported her new position under the title, “Controversial Bedford-Union Armory Redevelopment Loses Cumbo’s Support,” shortly before her State of the District speech.
“I stand here today with my colleagues in government to demand Mayor de Blasio go back to the drawing board and produce a plan that meets the needs of my Brooklyn neighbors,” Cumbo said in a statement. “It’s important that we have a developer that helps enhance our community, meets with the trade unions, commits to hiring locally, and builds this project with the highest safety standards available.”32
This news was followed in relatively quick succession by the unanimous rejection of the armory redevelopment project by the Community Board 9 Land-Use Subcommittee and the entire Community Board 9 (the local, appointed citizen advisory board).33 The relative lack of affordable housing in the plan for the armory appears to have been critical in both of these votes.
These votes posed significant obstacles to the project because the first step in planning and permitting development requires city council approval. City council members, however, generally accept the guidance of their community boards on local issues, and the council as a whole follows the lead of the member representing the area in which a project is proposed.
The armory project continued to face significant resistance over the summer and into the early fall. A hearing in July 2017, led by Brooklyn Deputy Borough President Diana Reyna as part of the land use review process, was called off after “protestors came out en masse.”34 Then in early September, “after hearing from ‘thousands of community voices’ on the redevelopment of the Bedford-Union Armory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams” declared that the “Bedford-Union Armory redevelopment should not have condos.”35 Later in September, the developers and representatives from the city agencies supporting the development faced tough questions from the city planning commission. They also confronted opposition testimony from New York State Assembly Representative Diana Richardson, and a representative of New York Communities for Change—the source of the report on the risk of racial transition or racial preferences built into the plans for affordability—testified to concerns that the city planning commissioners had not pushed hard enough on the affordability question.36
Up to this point, the conversation about the armory seemed to suggest that it would not proceed without a major reassessment, that community resistance, channeled through local appointed and elected officials from multiple advisory and legislative bodies, constituted an immovable obstacle. Reinforcing this view, another Politico article suggested that three of Mayor de Blasio’s attempted neighborhood rezonings were frustrated by the city council in response to local opposition (Cobble Hill, Inwood, and Sunnyside).37
Readers familiar with New York City development politics will not be surprised to learn that this was not the end of the story. Despite community friction and official opposition, the city planning commission approved the armory proposal in late October. Curbed reported, “Despite protestors disrupting the meeting, the City Planning Commission approved the embattled conversion of the Bedford-Union Armory at a meeting on Monday.” Based on promises from the developers that they would continue to work with Council Member Laurie Cumbo and “other stakeholders to ensure this project serves the Crown Heights community,” the plan passed eleven to one.38
Cumbo subsequently negotiated changes to the plan that eliminated the luxury condominiums and secured additional low-income housing units. On November 21, 2017, Cumbo explained the new plan and her decision to support it to the city council land use committee and planning subcommittee. Brooklyn Reader covered Cumbo’s statements about the revised plan at length.
“Today, I am proud to announce my support for a dramatically revised Bedford Union Armory project, which will provide the greatest level of low-income and affordable housing that the Crown Heights community has seen in decades,” said Cumbo. “I fought to remove 48 luxury condominiums, deepened the bands of affordability by securing approximately 250 housing units for low-income and formerly homeless families—quadrupling the affordable housing that was proposed in the original plan, with at least $1.25 million annually in programmatic engagement at the Armory.”39
The subsequent subcommittee vote was unanimous in its support of the project. A little more than a week later, the city council approved the plan. The Brooklyn Paper similarly attributes Cumbo’s “change of heart” to these concessions:
The city and developer also agreed to expand the project’s so-called affordable housing component from 166 to 250 units, and reduced the prices of those apartments—which originally ran as high as around $2,300 per month—to between approximately $640 and $1,280 per month. But BFC Partners will still be allowed to build 149 market-rate rentals on the site as part of the revised proposal.40
But Cumbo’s deal did not satisfy everyone, and enough local opposition to the plan remained that the city council vote was interrupted by protesters shouting “The city is not for sale! Kill the deal!” and “Laurie lies!” as security escorted them out of the chamber. Still, Gotham Gazette reflects that “by all accounts, the pressure moved the needle significantly…. BFC cut out the condos as the city promised $50 million to subsidize more affordable—and more deeply affordable—rental housing on the site.”41
Community dissenters, despite their political loss, had one final hope for delaying, if not overturning, the project. The day before the city council approved the new deal, the Legal Aid Society filed suit against the city alleging that the city’s environmental review process failed to project the impact of new, market rate housing on local rent-regulated tenants. The fact that it had made such projections for market rate tenants likely to be affected, the suit argued, was insufficient.42 Jennifer Levy, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society, explained that “they don’t measure indirect displacement in the way that they should…. We know from looking all around us that large-scale projects that introduce higher income people into the community does, in fact, have a displacement effect on rent-regulated units.” She also questioned the legitimacy of the armory project’s proposed community advisory board (another of the developers’ concessions to Cumbo), maintaining it would be a “closed oversight mechanism,” appointed by the developers.43
The suit would come up short when it was finally decided in July 2018. In the decision, “state Supreme Court Justice Carmen Victoria St. George ruled that the city’s review guidelines provide an adequate perspective on the environmental impact of developments—even when community members disagree with the outcome.” The article quoted the judge’s decision:
“The court is sympathetic to petitioners, who aim to protect those who are not members of community boards, are not elected officials, and often do not express their positions at public hearings.” St. George wrote. “The goal of the city, and of the projects at hand, is to balance the interests of communities … this court’s role, in turn, is not to question the way in which the city, entrusted with these projects, draws the balance.”44
Months before the case was settled, in mid-March 2018, BFC filed a permit application for a fifteen-story building on the site.45 In the rendering, the building is shown where the garage and parking were previously. As proposed, it is intended to include “355 units, 190 of which will be affordable and 165 market rate.” According to a spokesperson for the developer, it will also have “below ground parking for 201 cars and 178 bicycles.” The application also included a second eight-story building for low-income housing.46
Brooklyn Paper reported that the eight-story “building’s 60 apartments will be among the complex’s total 250 below-market-rate rentals, which will be offered to families and individuals making 30 to 60 percent of the area’s medium income, and include 25 units reserved for formerly homeless people.”47 The project will be called “Bedford Courts” and “the plans list Marvel Architects as the applicant of record, and the city’s Economic Development Corporation as the owner.”48
The Armory’s “head house” (which previously contained sleeping quarters, showers, artillery ranges, stables, and kitchen and laundry areas) was maintained in roughly its original state (new purpose as yet unclear), and the drill hall had become the recreation center. The architectural details of both apartment buildings were revised going forward, primarily in terms of superficial detail, although also in the massing of the smaller building.
This application, however, was rejected without prejudice in May 2018, shortly before the court’s decision.49 The fifteen-story building has yet to be resubmitted for permitting approval, although none of the articles covering steps toward the armory’s development mention any further resistance beyond the Legal Aid suit that was decided in July of 2018.
In September 2018, Curbed covered an announcement that the State of New York would contribute $15 million to the armory’s planned community center and name it in honor of Carey Gabay, one of Governor Cuomo’s aides “who was killed by a stray bullet during the J’ouvert celebrations in 2015.” In addition to sports facilities, “the community center will also be home to seven community-based organizations, with a social services-based organization anchoring this group. Finally, the community center will also house the Carey Gabay Foundation, which is run by his wife, Trenelle Gabay.”50 Most recently, on April 15, 2019, City Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo announced, in cooperation with the developers, the establishment of the Bedford Union Armory advisory committee.
The committee will serve as a liaison between the community and EDC/BFC, guiding the Armory’s management to develop programs that will best serve the welfare of the neighborhood’s youth and families. The committee will be comprised of 15 members, including the Chair, with local elected officials, community groups and BFC appointing eight of the members, while the remaining 7 will come from a pool of local stakeholders and be open to the public.51
The actual composition of the committee and its impact on the project remain to be seen.
Redevelopment of the Bedford Union Armory is one more story about the various ways local communities attempt to use the preservation of historic resources to stem the tide of aggressive development and gentrification. This time, however, we see the significant role played by community organizations and elected politicians as well as the complex structures of decision making within city government. In the context of intense development pressure in central Brooklyn, it is another story about the importance of individual players in the political process, the development process, and where they intersect. Here, Laurie Cumbo managed to position herself so that requests to shape the project, both from above (the developer and city) and below (Crown Heights community groups and affordable housing advocates), had to go through her—she mediated them, connected them, moderated their conflicts and overlaps, and, ultimately, determined the outcome almost unilaterally. That outcome, although not satisfactory to some local residents, does add to the supply of low- and middle-income housing in Crown Heights, potentially preserving the local community in the face of increasing property prices. It will also provide much needed recreational amenities, which can either serve a long underserved community or draw new higher-income people into the neighborhood, or both.
The levers that proved effective in shifting the position of Cumbo and other elected politicians were related to affordable housing finance. Community demands for affordable housing were met with resistance from both the developer and the city and were articulated through market logic. When the community itself asks for affordable housing, it is difficult for politicians to refuse, but the necessity to pay for such services is real. At the same time, the original inclusion of luxury condos was tone-deaf, given pressing issues of affordability throughout the city that seem particularly salient in neighborhoods in transition like Crown Heights South. Thus the state’s willingness to contribute to the cost of redevelopment made the compromise possible but likely to please no one. It made inclusion of the demanded affordable housing possible, kicking the question of the precise definition of affordability down the road, and it also addressed the developer’s concerns about covering costs.
Obscured in all of this back and forth, but central to Evelyn Tully Costa’s concerns, is that the armory is a historic landmark, informally, central to the history of the neighborhood and integral to its historic fabric. As a large, city-owned property, affordable housing advocates see the armory as a rare opportunity to undertake a project with tremendous community benefits without having to first secure the land. Truly affordable housing would avoid the displacement effects that development seems to inflict upon the neighborhood, but redevelopment risks eliminating the armory’s historic integrity. The best outcome, from Tully Costa’s perspective, would be to accomplish both goals—serving community needs and preserving the structure in its historic state. So far preservation has been ignored in the process, which has been framed in the most conventional terms for New York City as a conflict between affordability and market rate development. If the redevelopment of the armory is undertaken with no sensitivity to its historic design, that might undermine future claims for a landmark district in the neighborhood.
In central Brooklyn, landmarking is a strategy to preserve community in the face of intense development pressure. It has had mixed results but remains one of the few tools available to concerned local residents struggling to stay put in a bullish real estate market. As both Witherwax and Tyus attest, landmarking efforts often serve as the basis of broader community outreach, enabling groups to support longtime residents and businesses in ways they might not otherwise. But, as Tully Costa reports, the struggle to get over the organizational hump with a landmarking effort, like the one in Crown Heights South in which she has been involved, is often compounded by the reputation of historic preservation as elitist and aesthetic, whatever the precise truth of the matter. This reputation puts preservation into conflict with discourses on housing affordability. Claims about increased maintenance costs are the obvious example, but this conflict also emerged in connection with the armory. Locals asserted that the primary purpose to which a historic resource should be put is affordable housing and recreation, pushing preservation concerns into the background.
The stories of these central Brooklyn neighborhoods demonstrate how broader economic struggles over the tension between housing development to address shortages and housing affordability to prevent displacement play out at the local level of city government. They illustrate, moreover, the degree to which these local processes are shaped by the individuals involved—individuals who play complex roles in organizing, preservation, and development processes. Their influence on the process, in turn, is dependent on the kinds of professional and personal capital they can bring to bear. Both Witherwax and Tyus are trained as attorneys. This proved central to their roles in PHNDC and CHNA, respectively. Tully Costa’s design and preservation training facilitates her ability to present to large groups, but her role as a White in-mover compromised aspects of her organizing ability, whereas Tyus’s position as a longtime Brooklynite Black woman enhanced hers. Cumbo’s election is too complex to pursue here, but she convinced her constituency that her personal characteristics put her in the right position to represent them. The role of individual personalities and skills is similarly evident in my observation of the CB3 landmarks committee and my reconstruction of the armory redevelopment timeline.
It would be a mistake, however, to overlook how these individuals and their particular accumulations of social capital function within organizational structures. Strong organizations can elevate the organizational above the individual. This is most evident in Cumbo’s case—as a pivot point between citywide powers and community efforts, anyone in her position would wield a comparable ability to determine outcomes like that of the armory project. But the organizations are also complicatedly connected by individuals who play roles within many of them, their organizational autonomy perhaps undermined by their reliance on the engaged minority. Witherwax, because of his willingness to serve in multiple roles (PHNDC and CB8), jokes that “pretty soon I’m going to be asking myself for permission for things.”52
In central Brooklyn, I have looked at landmarking as an embodied social process that takes place at the local level. Landmarking is a complex process through which neighborhood residents sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to influence the changes to their built environment. Rather than diminishing the importance of landmarking, this observation reinforces it. Unlike land use zoning, another process capable of shaping the urban built environment, the landmarking process is consistently initiated from below and is therefore likely to produce outcomes more closely reflective of broader community interests and preferences.