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Good Bloomy, bad Bloomy

The Brooklyn Paper

The two faces of Mayor Bloomberg are again on display. One day, the mayor is one of the nation’s leading advocates of environmentally sound, community-sensitive, sensible development. The next day, he’s a backroom crony greasing the wheels for a developer who ignored the community.

Let’s start with “Good Bloomy.”

On Sunday, the mayor gave a great Earth Day speech that laid out an intelligent, cohesive vision for how the city will accommodate an expected influx of one million more residents, yet do so in an environmentally sensitive way.

He spoke of decking over highways and rail yards for new housing — and listening to community concerns about what that housing should look like and whom it should benefit.

Good Bloomy was still on display on Monday, when the mayor’s office announced that it had selected a developer for the site of a former brig near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

This plan for 484-units of housing — 77 percent of which would be below-market-rate — is the very essence of good public planning, a development that is being built by one of the city’s most-respected housing advocacy groups (the Pratt Area Community Council) and one of our best architecture firms (FXFowle).

The result, we believe, will benefit the community and add hundreds of units of affordable housing, yet not overburden the surrounding area.

So where was Good Bloomy when his administration ignored community concerns and rubberstamped Bruce Ratner’s plan to deck over a state railyard and build the densest census tract in the country?

Brooklyn Bridge Realty

Indeed, Good Bloomy’s speech on Sunday suggested that the process that created Atlantic Yards is exactly what he doesn’t want to happen again.

“As our search for land becomes more pressing in the coming decades, we must be prepared to work with communities to explore the potential of these sites,” the mayor’s PlaNYC proposal says.

Whether you support Atlantic Yards or not, the fact remains that the state and the city willfully ignored the very community planning process Good Bloomy is now promoting. Before the state handed over the Vanderbilt rail yards to Bruce Ratner, a coalition of elected officials, residents and planners in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene put forth a blueprint for a development that was exactly the kind of project Good Bloomy is now championing.

Yet Bad Bloomy is still defending Atlantic Yards — though now that Good Bloomy is hawking PlaNYC, his Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff is at least sounding a bit more conciliatory.

“I think [Atlantic Yards] is an extreme case,” he said on WNYC this week. “We don’t do anything, anymore, really, without consulting the community.”

Let’s hope he’s right. If so, the city will see more of Good Bloomy and less of Bad Bloomy.

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