Eric Adams shady PAC fund raising reveals connections to Schnepps Media and Brooklyn developers that once rallied behind de Blasio

Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park report

So the New York Times today has a deep dive on Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams's relationship with donors, How Eric Adams, Mayoral Candidate, Mixed Money and Political Ambition, which sounds a lot like a deep dive the Times did on his predecessor, Marty Markowitz. 10/24/11, From Brooklyn Office, Mixing Clout and Charity.

It's unfortunate that such investigations--which rely not only on significant reporting chops but access to documents that are not simply online--come so late in their administrations. (As noted below, The City and Politico previously published their own investigations.)

After all, this comes after numerous institutional endorsements of Adams, which can of course be transactional, as well as a full-throated New York Post endorsement of him, and a second-place nod from the New York Daily News. While the latter did cite his "entanglements" with those doing business, both should have had to reckon more with his record.

And it's confounding that Adams--who refused to be interviewed, a not atypical tactic for him, instead issuing a statement--claimed that "Black candidates for office are often held to a higher, unfair standard — especially those from lower-income backgrounds such as myself."

It's confounding because Markowitz got similar treatment. And it's disturbing because it wouldn't be the first time that Adams had invoked race to court supporters and resist hard questions, such as his defense of scofflaw nightclubs.

The Times details how his "fund-raising has repeatedly pushed the boundaries of campaign-finance and ethics laws," such as a fund-raiser from real estate developer David Schwartz, whose Slate Property Group, just happened to get Adams to endorse a zoning change for a project in Downtown Brooklyn.

Those advisory opinions can be strategic--Adams sometimes supports with conditions, asking for concessions (which may well be baked into proposals) rather than oppose projects, such as with the 80 Flatbush project.

But the key here is that Adams's campaign didn't properly disclose Schwartz as an in-kind contributor or an intermediary and nor did his advisory opinion "disclose his fund-raising relationship with Mr. Schwartz." The City Council later approved Slate’s rezoning.

The Slate executive was one of at least three donors receiving the borough president’s endorsement for zoning changes against the wishes of community boards. The others were also later approved by the City Council.

The Times notes that two lobbyists who influence him "sit on his nonprofit’s board, and a third was recently hired as a campaign consultant." 

And it finds his defense of his role in an Aqueduct racino contract dubious, since newly disclosed document show that bidders were invited to a fund-raiser.

Adams's One Brooklyn makes him the only one of the city’s current borough presidents with a nonprofit that raises private money, mixing of course with politics.

And while it must certify that it spends no more than 10% of funding on communications boosting Adams, he found a workaround: using the money to publicize One Brooklyn’s events and thus himself. See cover at right.

Note that that One Brooklyn publication is published by Schneps Media, which controls the lion's share of neighborhood media in Brooklyn (Brooklyn Paper, Brownstoner, Courier-Life, Caribbean Life) and the Metro/amNY, as well as other publications. Let's not expect a lot of investigative reporting from them.

And though One Brooklyn claims that it can't solicit or accept donations from anyone with a “particular matter” pending before them, "the nonprofit appears to have done so," the Times reports.

 

 As with Markowitz, the nonprofit allows donors to offer far more support than they could via campaign finance:

Jed Walentas, who runs the development firm Two Trees Management, is limited to $400 in campaign contributions per election cycle, because he is on the list of people doing business with the city. But Mr. Walentas’s family foundation has given One Brooklyn $50,000, records show. (Mr. Adams’s campaign has also received at least $24,000 from other donors solicited by or connected to Mr. Walentas.)

For his part, Mr. Adams championed a $2.7 billion streetcar plan that Mr. Walentas has promoted through a group he founded, Friends of Brooklyn Queens Connector Inc. The streetcar, Mr. Adams tweeted in 2018, “has real potential to be one of those solutions for our disconnected waterfront.” The project stalled, and Mr. Adams has recently distanced himself from it in the glare of the mayoral race.

The borough president is also in line to issue an opinion on a rezoning request for Two Trees’ next big project, River Ring, a pair of apartment and commercial towers with a waterfront park in Williamsburg

Mr. Adams, in a recent interview, said he was already “extremely impressed” with the way the Two Trees plan had taken account of rising sea levels. “This is how we need to start thinking,” he added. Mr. Walentas declined to comment.

Hmm. That reminds me somehow of what he said in 2013 about affordable housing: "We need to look at what Bruce Ratner is doing, with his great, really cutting-edge, trying to build up using pre-fab housing, can we do this throughout in the borough of Brooklyn, and can we encourage others to do that as well."

 

de Blasio's real estate overlord donors are ready to get their affordable luxury public housing towers approved

  

6 SQ FT

  First unveiled by Two Trees in late 2019, the project originally called for two towers, one at 650 feet and the other at 600, with 1,000 units of housing. The revised plan calls for a taller 710-foot tower on the southern side and a slightly shorter tower north tower at 560 feet. The proposed number of apartments increased to 1,050 units.

According to a newly launched website for the project, the affordable housing proposed for the project includes 263 permanently affordable rentals designated for those earning 60 percent of the area median income (AMI) and 27 units for those earning 40 percent of the AMI, which would mean $1,366/month and $854/month two-bedroom apartments for those households, respectively.

Two Trees, which created Domino Park as part of its redevelopment of the former Domino Sugar Factory, acquired the three vacant sites for a total of $150 million. The site had been home to Con Edison since 1984, with the steel fuel tanks removed from the site in 2011.

Because a zoning change is required, the so-called River Ring Waterfront Master Plan must go through ULURP, in addition to securing a permit from the Department of Environment Conservation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Two Trees previously told reporters that the land use review process could take at least two years to complete, with the construction of the entire project lasting at least five years. The park would be completed alongside the first building, Two Trees principal Jed Walentas had said.

The developers held meetings with the community at the beginning of last year, but the coronavirus pandemic put those sessions on hold. Following an environmental impact review, the developer aims to complete the ULURP by the end of 2021, as a spokesperson for Two Trees told Brooklyn Paper.

Literally a sandbox for hipsters. 

 

 

Streetcar a developer's fantasy

From Patch:

City officials held a public “visioning session” on the proposed Brooklyn Queens Connector (BQX) streetcar in Astoria Monday night — the first of what they promised would be many outreach efforts to gather feedback on the $2.5 billion proposal.

Bus lanes might be cheaper to implement, the head of the EDC said, but a streetcar could carry twice as many passengers — a critical perk for a system that would transport an estimated 50,000 riders on weekdays.

Torres-Spring also argued a rail system would increase property values along its route. This, she said, would allow the city to fund the BQX using a cut of rising property values along the rail line.

[AHA! I think we're on to something here.]

Also present at the meeting was Ya-Ting Liu, recently named executive director of Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector. Liu's organization was behind the project’s first feasibility study, and is currently advocating for its construction.

While developers like Two Trees are well-represented in the Friends group, Liu noted that many non-developers are also members — including Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, and Thomas Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association think tank.

[Oh, you mean reps of groups funded by developers?]

Contractor uses forklift to move car

From the NY Post:

Here’s the shocking moment a construction crew hoisted a Williamsburg family’s SUV off the street to make room for work on a luxury building site.

Contractors for Two Trees Management used a forklift to uproot the 2004 Infiniti while working on the $2 billion redevelopment of the former Domino Sugar Refinery.

The family, which has lived one block east of the historic Domino site for more than 30 years, found the SUV deposited on the curb Friday afternoon.

Henry’s father, Thomas Nahrwold, 61, had legally parked it in front of 27 South Third Street that morning.

A local auto repairman estimated it would cost at least $2,600 to fix the damages, which included a disfigured bumper, smashed undercarriage and impaired steering alignment.

The family learned who was responsible only because a neighbor recorded the act on a cellphone.

He's doing it for his donors

From the NY Post:

Hundreds of businesses that own land near the proposed Brooklyn-Queens trolley line stand to benefit from the project, but at least 10 have something else in common — they all contributed to a nonprofit promoting Mayor de Blasio’s “progressive” agenda.

The estimated $2.5 billion rail project, which would connect Astoria to Sunset Park and promises to send property values along its route soaring, is being pushed by the Friends of Brooklyn Queens Connector.

Developers such as Two Trees Management, Forest City Ratner and the Durst Organization all have representatives in the group and have either directed money to de Blasio’s re-election campaign or to the Campaign for One New York, which critics have derided as a mayoral slush fund.

Did they use Common Core math?

From Crains:

In a contentious hearing, City Council members pressed the developers of the Domino Sugar factory project on the Williamsburg waterfront to explain how many market-rate and affordable-rental units it was planning to build.

Two Trees Management developer Jed Walentas acknowledged that the numbers were not yet final, but that the project is likely to include up to 2,300 market-rate apartments, with as many as 700 affordable units. He said that 537,000 square feet of the 2.2 million square feet of residential space would be devoted to below market-rate apartments.

But Brooklyn Councilman Steve Levin said that based on an analysis the developer's other housing projects, the total number could be as high as 3,000 total units of housing, which he argued would bring added stress on the neighborhood's over-taxed infrastructure, as well as call into question whether a sufficient portion of the project was affordable.

During Tuesday's hearing of the Council's zoning subcommittee, Mr. Walentas was asked to justify his estimates of the total number of rental units that he plans to build. Mr. Levin argued that after examining similar projects built by Two Trees, and based on the total amount of space allotted for residential development, a larger number of apartments could ultimately be built.

"By my calculations, Two Trees could build in their market-rate component somewhere between 2,100 and 2,300 market rate units," he said. "You add to that the 660 or 700 affordable units, and it's closer to 3,000 units that could be developed in the project. And that's a major source of concern for me."

He continued, "Because you're unwilling to commit to a unit-size breakdown of your market rate, and you're unwilling to cap it at 2,300 units, I'm concerned that the opportunity is there, and the math bears it out, for a development that is much closer to 3,000 units than 2,000 units, and that's a major source of concern for me."

It's ok, Steve! Under DeBlasio, developers can build as big as they want if they even mention "affordable housing". Go with the "progressive" flow!

A pyrrhic victory?

From Crains:

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced late Monday a deal under which Two Trees Management Co. would add more affordable housing at its 2.9 million-square-foot Domino Sugar refinery project on the Williamsburg Waterfront. In exchange, the city will grant the necessary permits to allow the re-imagined development to move forward.

"We set out from day one to get the best possible value for the public. This partnership delivers on that commitment," said Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor for Housing and Economic Development, in a statement. She added that the agreement is "a win for all sides, and it shows that we can ensure the public's needs are met, while also being responsive to the private sector's objectives."

The agreement sets in stone a requirement that 537,000 square feet of the project, which will translate to roughly 700 out of the total 2,300 units, be set aside for affordable housing for various income levels, according to the city.

Mr. de Blasio touted the agreement as adding 110,000 square feet of affordable housing beyond the developer's current application, under which just 427,000 square feet of such housing would have been built. And while that is true, Two Trees had already agreed throughout the project's public review process to build roughly 70,000 additional square feet if the city would chip in extra subsidy, though this agreement was non-binding.

Wow, so the developer agreed to 40 more units of affordable housing? That's not like putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound or anything. Either stipulate that the majority of new units need to be affordable, or don't make any affordable. A little here and a little there, when most people living in the city need "affordable housing", is pretty lame, even though it will be trumpeted as a victory.

All this soul-selling to preserve the Domino building, which will be dwarfed by other buildings after this project is complete. If the City Council passes it, which is still a question mark.

Domino plan has affordable units off-site

From The Brooklyn Paper:

The developer of the Domino Sugar Factory plans to put nearly a third of the below-market-rate housing for a massive Williamsburg luxury complex on a site across the street and uphill from the rest of the waterfront development, which some neighbors say would be a good thing if it means the cheaper apartments are available faster.

“To have both market-rent tenants and low-income tenants living together is the way all housing should be built, but more importantly, to have 250 affordable housing units available in the immediate future for a population so desperately in need is a must,” said Debra Medina, a spokeswoman for the community group Los Sures, at a Department of Housing Preservation and Development hearing about the proposal on Friday.

The developer Two Trees Management Co. went before the agency to argue that all of the parcels that are part of the development should be seen as one big parcel in order to allow putting more than one fifth of the project’s so-called affordable housing in the first high-rise, which is planned for the Havermeyer Park plot on Kent Avenue between S. Third and S. Fourth streets, rather than spreading the budget units evenly throughout the towers, the remaining five of which sits along the East River and will be built later. The move would make 200 of the first skyscraper’s 400 units below-market-rate.

Not everyone is on board with the plan, though. Some say the Two Trees proposal could mean big money in the long-term for the developer while below-market-rate tenants end up cut off from amenities.

“It could allow the shifting of all the affordable housing to the inland site to maximize the profit for the developer and allow the sale of individual parcels, presumably on the waterfront, without requiring any affordable housing on these sites,” said neighbor and Domino opponent Stephanie Eisenberg.

Other nearby riverside developments, including Greenpoint Landing and the Edge, have come under fire for what critics describe as a separate-but-equal approach to so-called affordable housing for arrangements that place cheaper units on lower floors and make low-income tenants use separate entrances, but Two Trees wants to distance itself from all that.

Coming soon: skyscrapers with holes in them

From the NY Observer:

When Two Trees Management bought the old Domino Sugar site from CPC Resources and a reluctant Katan Group, a local developer told The Observer that Jed Walentas would be “crazy to go back to ULURP” for a rezoning of the site, which had already been approved for thousands of high-rise apartments.

But going back to to everyone’s favorite acronym (to pronounce, at least) is exactly what Mr. Walentas intends to do. He and SHoP, the New York-based architecture firm that Bruce Ratner tapped to design the Barclays Center and Atlantic Yards after Frank Gehry proved too expensive, called a group of reporters to SHoP’s offices near City Hall on Friday to show off their plans for the site.

The first thing Mr. Walentas spoke about was Two Trees’ desire to expand the amount of parkland included in the project—adding two new acres—and to make it more accessible to the public.

He criticized the open space in the old site plan as something that “felt very much like a privatized front lawn for people who lived there,” and spoke about his desire to pull the buildings back inland to make more space for the quarter-mile-long waterfront park, as well as add a new public street between his buildings and the waterfront.

But the extra park space comes at a price: the towers will have to rise higher to make up for the smaller footprints. The tallest tower on the site would rise to 598 feet, or about 60 stories—much taller than the 340-foot maximum height in the currently approved plan.

City subsidies for a boutique hotel?

From the Wall Street Journal:

City officials and community advocates are raising concerns over government-backed financing for a proposed boutique hotel in Williamsburg, questioning the economic benefit it would bring to the neighborhood.

Brooklyn developer Two Trees Management Co. is applying for $15 million in federal tax-exempt financing to build the hotel on an 11,105-square-foot parcel of land on Wythe Avenue in an industrial area of Williamsburg.

The New York City Capital Resource Corp., a local development corporation controlled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is holding a hearing on the project Thursday and will vote whether to approve the Williamsburg hotel for financing next Tuesday.

"I'm not sure subsidizing a boutique hotel in Williamsburg is the best use of resources right now," said Bettina Damiani, project director at Good Jobs New York, a nonprofit that scrutinizes the city's economic development projects.

Ms. Damiani said the hotel's proposed location is in an area that the city has designated for the preservation of manufacturing and industrial jobs. There are also concerns about the quality of jobs the hotel would produce, she said.

According to Two Trees Management's application, the Williamsburg project would create 75 construction jobs and 195 full-time equivalent permanent jobs. But an analysis conducted by the New York City Capital Resource concluded that the project would only produce 53 new construction jobs and 33 permanent jobs.

"They had a vastly overstated claim of job creation," said City Comptroller John Liu. "We need to end that practice."

Interesting analysis over at the NY Observer

Civic group charges that city colluded with Brooklyn developer

From The Brooklyn Paper:

Opponents of a planned high-rise near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO sued to stop the project this week on the grounds that the city colluded with the developer and allowed him to expand the perimeter of his project site to take advantage of zoning perks.

The suit by the nascent DUMBO Neighborhood Foundation names the Department of City Planning, the City Planning Commission, the City Council, the Department of Education, and the School Construction Authority as guilty of improperly allowing the development company Two Trees Management to win a zoning change that paves the way for a planned 17-story project that includes a public middle school as a sweetener to seal the deal.

“There was a concerted effort to advance this project at any cost,” said Gus Sheha, a plaintiff in the case. “When you connect the dots, it’s apparent that people didn’t do their due diligence for a reason: they wanted to pass this.”