The gentrification of a rec center

THE CITY 

 The City Council member who backed plans to convert a Crown Heights armory into a recreation center charged Thursday the developers betrayed the community on discount access.

“I hope that when it opens, it closes,” Councilmember Laurie Cumbo (D-Brooklyn) told THE CITY as the Major R. Owens Health and Wellness Community Center gets set to make its grand debut Oct. 27. “And it’s the biggest failure New York City’s ever experienced.”

The facility, she declared, was “designed for the third wave of gentrifiers who are coming into the community.”

Cumbo tinged her strong words at times with sarcasm, coupled with frustration at questions about her role in approving the deal. At one point she snapped: “The armory doesn’t even exist…. The whole armory is an illusion. You win. You found it out.”

She spoke after THE CITY called to ask about newly released details about long-anticipated local discounts revealed by the developer of the soon-to-open rec center at the city-owned former Bedford Union Armory.

The developer, BFC Partners, said 250 discount memberships will be available for as little as $10 a month and $8 for children. The area served by the new rec center has 45,000 low-income residents, according to census estimates.

BFC vows at least $1.3 million in annual “community benefits” from operators of the center’s pool, basketball courts and turf field, also including $10 swim and soccer lessons for local residents.

THE CITY reported in September that swim lessons for kids were being advertised at a steep $50 a half hour. Regular rec center memberships will start at $30 a month, BFC Partners announced this week.

But Cumbo, whose approval in 2017 cleared the way for the swimming pool, sports gym and nonprofit space inside the historic former drill hall in Crown Heights — along with hundreds of apartments to come — declared the outcome a disaster.

“It’s not going to be accessible to anyone in the neighborhood or anyone in the community. No one, no one’s going to have access,” she said. 

 “There are no affordable memberships for the community. There’s no accessibility. It was never designed for accessibility,” she added.

Current mayor and Senate Majority Leader attend impromptu West Indian Day parade for NYC's ruling class, then go to Woodside to survey flood damages to homes later on

NY Post
 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave Mayor Bill de Blasio a pass for failing to warn New Yorkers about the fatal storm that lashed the city last week — preferring to pin the blame on climate change — but her Queens constituents slammed Hizzoner and other city officials for their lack of preparedness.

“I don’t blame climate change, I blame the mayor,” Danette Rivera, 47, told The Post outside her Woodside home Monday morning after de Blasio, AOC, Sen. Charles Schumer and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell toured her block.

“There was absolutely no warning. I wasn’t expecting water from my own drain to be the one that’s going to kill me,” Rivera said, her voice shaking with emotion.

Rivera’s arms and stomach were still bruised from when her son had to yank her out through a basement window as it filled with water that bubbled up from her drains Wednesday night.

“This is a nightmare. A disaster,” Rivera said, noting that her home also flooded in 2008. She said city officials told her at the time that they’d make sure it never happened again.

“Fix the sewer system,” fumed Rivera’s neighbor, Julia Nieves, 77.

“The catch basins don’t get cleaned often enough. The last time I saw them cleaned was five years ago,” Nieves, a retired Off Track Betting clerk, told The Post from her Woodside basement where the paneling had been ripped off to reveal spots of black mold. 

 NY Post  

Mayor Bill de Blasio and a slew of local politicians marched in a scaled down, discreetly organized version of the West Indian Day Parade Monday — infuriating locals who thought the annual Labor Day blowout was scrapped entirely following Hizzoner’s announcement last week.

The parade kicked off at 9 a.m. in Crown Heights and lasted about an hour — featuring two floats with DJs pumping out music, dozens of dignitaries and more than 500 flag-toting marchers and colorfully dressed revelers.

Some parade perennials — like Terry Owens — were outraged that a smaller celebration of West Indian culture took place even after de Blasio nixed the parade altogether for the second straight year due to COVID-19 concerns.

“I am disappointed because I brought my family up here that wanted to see it. They came all the way from Alabama,” Owens, 59, griped, adding that he just happened upon the parade while out for a walk.

“It makes me angry, too, because they could have been out here. They are home sleeping,” Owens continued. “I come every year. I was talking about it and I wanted them to come see it. I said, ‘You all need to come,’ so I was looking forward to coming. I kept asking, I kept hearing, ‘No, it’s canceled, it’s canceled,’ so I am doing my morning walk and I saw it and I said, ‘Wow, it’s here.’”

 

BDB can't take the heat

From the Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio tangled with callers to his weekly radio segment Friday, pushing back on criticism of his plans for new homeless shelters and to jack up the price of smoking.

Hizzoner treated callers to Brian Lehrer’s show on WNYC a bit like reporters — they were limited to the topic of public health and safety, and he repeatedly challenged the premises of their queries.

The most heated exchange was with a caller who identified herself as Fior, a Crown Heights resident opposed to the building of a homeless shelter who said her area has 1,700 beds already, while the mayor’s Park Slope has just 330.

“I myself have sons and I want the same opportunities that his son Dante had,” the caller said. “And I’m sure the mayor wouldn’t have raised his son around 15 to 19 shelters.”

De Blasio noted there’s a shelter about four blocks from his family home, and that his old neighborhood would get new homeless beds under his plan to house homeless people within their own community board districts.

But communities like Crown Heights have argued they’re already overburdened with social service facilities, and Lehrer asked whether the plan puts more burden on low-income communities with more homelessness.

“If they’re unwanted,” de Blasio said of the shelters, “then that’s a moral question. How can people feel that their very own neighbors and people who grew up and have lived in that community for a long time are quote-unquote unwanted? I reject that.”

The caller argued she’d not seen any data proving the people who’d live in the shelter were from Crown Heights — prompting de Blasio to say she “doesn’t know her facts” and calling the argument, used elsewhere in the city, “a smokescreen.”