The process to envision a new Gowanus neighborhood has been ongoing for over seven years. During this time, it has served as a model of an engaged and participatory planning process, with a comprehensive community vision, years in the making, serving as the basis for the City’s proposed plan. This plan now needs to take the next step without delay and enter the official land-use process. Unfortunately, a last minute legal action, aimed not at improving the plan but delaying and ultimately derailing it, threatens years of community process for a better neighborhood.
Nobody expected to have to change our public engagement process because of a worldwide pandemic, but we have adapted. The idea that we should have to choose between halting public engagement and conducting it in an unhealthy and unsafe way is a false choice. Both in-person and virtual meetings can be done in a way which encourages citizen participation and respects their time and abilities, or serves to shut them out. Neither is a guarantee of good community engagement in and of itself. In-person meetings offer challenges of physical accessibility, childcare and travel. Virtual meetings must be done with care in a way which allows for language translation and access for those without robust internet.
It is telling that the plaintiffs have not asked for or suggested improvements to either the virtual or in-person engagement process, but instead have asked only for a delay until we can return to the previous flawed status quo.
The Gowanus rezoning would be a noted improvement to the neighborhood and our city, adding open space, a cleaner environment and significant amounts of affordable housing to an area in which affordable housing opportunities are scarce and growing scarcer. The way to determine if it would be in the public interest, is to have it enter our certification process, where it can be improved or voted down if our elected representatives believe it is not. Freezing the process for an undetermined amount of time due to a last-minute lawsuit is not the way to go.
