Republican insider and political power broker Herman Badillo has submitted a bid to turn Brooklyn’s last working port into a 1,500-unit housing development and a campus for charter schools and a college.
The former Bronx borough president, congressman and four-time mayoral candidate has paired with the Carroll Gardens Association to advance a redevelopment scheme for the Columbia Street Waterfront District, between DeGraw Street and Hamilton Avenue.
Badillo’s still-vague idea poses a challenge to city, state and local planners now working on their own plan for the waterfront — stretching from Atlantic Avenue along Columbia Street and into Red Hook — that includes a working cargo port surrounded by maritime-themed shops, a 250-room hotel, art galleries and a park.
“There are many obstacles ahead,” said Badillo. “We have a good idea, but it’s too early to know how the city will hear it.”
The city Economic Development Corporation’s plan for includes far less housing than Badillo’s, whose development would include affordable units.
One proposal favored by EDC planners includes 350 units of mixed-income housing on the western side of Columbia Street between Degraw Street and Atlantic Avenue as well as a Brooklyn Brewery facility and beer garden on a pier at the foot of Hamilton Avenue now occupied by the container port, which would be moved.
Brooklyn Brewery President Steve Hindy dismissed Badillo’s plan as “unnecessary.”
“There is plenty of housing going up all around the waterfront,” Hindy said this week. “The real need now is for jobs.”
Matt Yates, director of operations for American Stevedoring, the company that runs the container port, echoed Hindy’s concern.
“Badillo’s plan is crazy because we are actually adding jobs here,” Yates said, claiming that ASI is about to ink a new deal with an international shipping line to add 100 full-time jobs at the port.
He argued that proposals like both Badillo’s and the city’s are driving away potential business from the working waterfront.
City Councilman David Yassky (D–Brooklyn Heights) said the new housing would be a strain on the existing residential population and endanger a greenway planned along Columbia Street.
“This area [is] reserved for parkland,” said Milton Puryear, a spokesman for the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. “If housing goes there, people will have to cross a busy bike trail to get to their houses. To put housing there shows [the EDC] has no understanding what [the community wants].”
A fifth grader present at a Community Board 6 hearing this week echoed Puryear with a high-pitched proclamation.
“There are lots of kids and dogs in the neighborhood who need a place to run around,” said the boy, Ari Anderson.
