Downtown Brooklyn rezoning done wrong

Pratt Center for Community Development revisited the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning to see if it realized its intended effects or caused more problems after its implementation 4 years ago.

From Pratt Center for Community Development:

There are several types of negative impacts on small businesses and residences in the face of the Downtown Brooklyn Plan’s implementation. As landowners clear out sites and prepare them to be redeveloped, many of the businesses and households that were there for many decades are being left out in the cold. As renters, these interests were not considered to be long-term stakeholders in the context of the Downtown Brooklyn Plan. As such, many small businesses and families are being displaced to make way for other development projects. This not only creates obvious hardships by eliminating the source of livelihoods for business owners and their employees, but it threatens to change the character of Downtown Brooklyn as a shopping destination for low and moderate-income households. In addition, while it causes serious hardship for affected households, residential displacement in many cases also reduces the City’s stock of affordable housing units. Finally, the shift from what was largely expected to be an office-centric redevelopment scheme to one that is largely residential in nature has several implications, including a significant reduction in the amount of jobs that new office development was
supposed to create.