Missing One Thing

That’s a picture of demolition in progress at a 140-year-old house – a mansion, really – in Brooklyn. The bulk of the building will be demolished and/or altered into an apartment house that will look quite different.

There is a need for more apartments in the city as construction of new units, particularly at the affordable end of the spectrum, has lagged behind the city’s rapid population growth of the last 25 years. That said, there are a lot of sites that make more sense than this, if we look at the issue from a bird’s-eye view. For starters, there are vacant lots (even now), parking lots, and one-story nondescript tax-payers, any of which could be demolished or altered with less of a loss to the city’s history and appearance than the current plan. But, of course, that’s not how development works in the U.S., now or ever.

Developers look for available properties on which to build their current projects. In this case, the mansion was for sale because the church that formerly occupied it moved elsewhere. That meant that this site was available and the apartment project was placed here. I’m not interested in discussing whether or not the building should have been landmarked – even if that was a possibility at this site, it isn’t at every similar site, and I’m talking about the question of development not preservation.

A potential development has theoretical value based on what it brings to the neighborhood (in this case, a bunch of needed apartments) and how it appears from or fits into the street (in this case, badly). That theoretical value is the same if you move the project a few blocks one way or the other. The pre-development use of the site has a similar value, but real rather than theoretical. In this case, the building was empty (valueless) but had a an interesting appearance and history. A solution that looked at all of these issues might place a smaller number of apartments in a restored mansion and look to also develop one of the one-story buildings along Fulton Avenue, a block away. That solution would be more expensive and, because it would involve more than one site, more difficult to implement.

Once, when I was working for a tenants’ group trying to save the apartment house that they lived in, I pointed out to a member of the city’s Department of Buildings that the building in question had some problems but was easily fixable. His response was that of course that was true, but who was going to pay for it and who was going to make it happen? In our society, he was correct, in that he was correctly stating the obstacles to saving that building. Those obstacles eventually proved to be insurmountable. It is, however, possible to think of better solutions for the people affected and for the city as a whole. Those better solutions require that goals other than profit maximization come into play.