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Q&A
Empowering community planning to address development and displacement
1:56:54
·
148 sec
Commissioner Diane Savino asks Alicia Boyd how to balance preserving neighborhood affordability with the need for new development in desirable areas like Crown Heights. Boyd advocates for empowering communities through their own planning processes, arguing that community-led plans, if respected by the city, would lead to more appropriate development and affordability.
- Boyd argues communities know their neighborhoods best and can create suitable plans.
- She criticizes the Department of City Planning for ignoring community plans in the past.
- She believes enforcing community-generated plans and upholding community deference is key to managing development appropriately.
Diane Savino
1:56:54
I was.
1:56:55
But I know we're we're short on time, but I just you you, you know, you described a problem that exists in neighborhoods that have become desirable.
1:57:01
You know?
1:57:02
So I I the first hearing I talked about, I grew up in Astoria.
1:57:06
I went up in Staten Island because I got priced out of Astoria, and now we're running out of space on Staten Island.
1:57:11
So part of the problem is neighborhoods like Crown Heights, which thirty years ago, no one wanted to no one wanted to move to.
1:57:17
Now everyone wants to move there, and it's driving up the cost, and then you couple that with the development.
1:57:22
How do we deal with that?
Yvonne Roman
1:57:23
I mean, how do we
Diane Savino
1:57:24
how do we keep the the afford the affordable rents and or homeownership opportunities that were always there and allow for development at the same time?
1:57:33
Because we know we need to grow this city, and we know we we need to build more housing.
1:57:37
Because even if you're able to stay there, you have kids and grandkids who aren't gonna be able to stay in the neighborhood that they grew up in or buy a house there or rent an apartment because those opportunities have disappeared.
1:57:48
So how do we tackle that?
1:57:49
And you you don't know I don't know the answer, and I've been in this business a long time.
1:57:54
I'm just, like, how how
Alicia Boyd
1:57:55
do we get at that problem?
1:57:56
Well, one of the things you can do is when a community sits down and actually does a community plan, and there have been community plans, enforce that community plan too often.
1:58:06
And even borough president Reynoso himself created a community plan, and then the Department of City Planning refused to pass it.
1:58:13
And so he used his community deference, and he said no to that plan.
1:58:20
So why aren't you allowing the community to actually create these plans?
1:58:24
Because we know our neighborhood the best.
1:58:26
We know where we can truly have housing.
1:58:31
The heights, the affordability, we know that.
1:58:34
But every time we create a plan, we give it to the Department of City Planning.
1:58:38
They drop it in the garbage, and they replace it with their own plan.
1:58:42
And then you have the community outrage that there is a plan now sitting in place that's being passed that the community did not support.
1:58:49
So what the city charter should start to do is start to empower community boards to create these plans and demand that they be put in place because we know our communities best.
1:59:00
And if we actually had that power, more communities would engage in that.
1:59:06
But right now, there's not a community in New York City that will want to engage with a district wide rezoning plan with the Department of City Planning because of its history.
1:59:15
Thank you.
1:59:16
So I think that should be what you should do.
1:59:18
Empower the community boards, not take our voices away.
Richard R. Buery Jr.
1:59:21
Thank you so much.