The Great Recession and the Social Venture

2001
American Airlines 11 crashes into the north face of 1 WTC

The Inequities of Rezonings
in Post-9/11 NYC

After 9/11, Michael Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor arguably had the biggest impact on New York City’s fabric. Decades worth of progress towards community development and planning in New York dissipated under his mayoralty. His tenure in office was marked by an empowered City Planning department with a mandate for redevelopment, and the growing usage of public development corporations to push for economic revitalization. Over 40% of the city was rezoned under his mayoralty in a subtle way to kill community planning. One such plan involved the highly contested rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in North Brooklyn. The process all but ignored community input, rezoning the waterfront for luxury high-rises and causing mass displacement.¹

These rezonings generally focused on areas where land was considered undervalued, and the market could sustain new development. Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue is an ideal example of a place where low-income tenants and homeowners were in the planner’s crosshairs but the middle class brownstoners got to stay and reap the rewards of the rezoning. The 2003 Park Slope rezoning faced considerable protest from local community development and housing activists, who feared the changes would keep housing out of the reach of low- and middle-income residents.

Brad Lander, then executive director of Fifth Avenue Committee, said in the New York Times: “It’s not that we’re opposed to additional density on Fourth Avenue, but obviously here’s an area that has experienced extraordinary gentrification, and market-rate rents are beyond the means of many people in the neighborhood.” According to “Zoning & Racialized Displacement in NYC,” a 2018 report issued by Churches United for Fair Housing, Park Slope experienced a racialized displacement in the ten-year period after its rezoning: a decrease of 5,000 Black and Latino households compared to area’s growth of more than 6,000 households. These rezonings only served to underscore the need for community development and planning in New York’s neighborhoods to balance the city’s focus on property values and increased density.

Design as Mediation in Communities

According to academics Donovan Finn and Jason Brody, inherent in community design is the expectation that it is a social venture. Entities that formed in the early 2000s like Center for Urban Pedagogy, Hester Street Collaborative, and Konkuey don’t fit in the traditional mold of a ‘community design center’ but they fulfill a similar purpose and moral philosophy in the services they provide. Today, these organizations aim to advance racial and economic justice through their projects and are staffed by young professionals motivated by post-recession inequalities.²

Collaboration and Coalition Building between Development Groups

Community design, development, and organizing groups have often encountered existential challenges to their organizational strength and longevity. Over time, they have experienced changes in leadership and staffing, changing business climates, and increased competition. Time has also exposed a dependency on individuals for organizational resiliency. 

When groups scale down or cease operations, other organizations often need to step in and fill gaps. For example, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation came together in the early 2000s to meet a shortage in capacity for children’s daycare, producing United Providers. Even though neither organization provided this service, they had to form a partnership to respond to a service gap being experienced by the community. This is reflective of a critical need in organizational flexibility to respond to a neighborhood’s needs often filled by community development groups.^{3 4}