LETTERS:

To the editor:

I can assure your readers that just about all the development now under
discussion for Downtown Brooklyn and the vicinity will be built. The only
question is whether it will be built in Downtown Brooklyn and the vicinity
— accessible by mass transit to tens of thousands of working people
in need of employment, with any tax revenues going to New York City’s
schools and other services — or on a greenfield site on the suburban
fringe.

Suburban sprawl, and suburban exclusionary zoning, is the real suburban
nightmare for people who are less affluent than the Brooklyn Papers readers
worried about style [“Ratner’s
suburban nightmare,” Vince DiMiceli, Feb. 7]. Those concerned
that, even in Downtown Brooklyn, some people will drive (as they do) and
compete for their parking spaces are living in the wrong place.

I see the re-development of Downtown, in addition to the slow turnaround
of many residential neighborhoods, as restoring Brooklyn, not destroying
it. When Brooklyn’s private employment rises to the level it was
in 1969 (it is well below, especially when government-financed social
services are discounted), when its per capita income rises to the national
average (it is far lower now but was average in 1969), when its poverty
rate falls to the national average, when the percent of its adults with
a job rises to the national average, when the percentage of its teenagers
with a job rises to the national average, then I will start worrying about
over-development.

And what about developments whose style I don’t appreciate? Well,
I just don’t go there, but I’m not offended that other people
do, and do not feel the right to dictate to them.

—Lawrence D. Littlefield, Windsor Terrace