Column: Beware of real estate developers bearing gifts, by George Fiala

An idea when I started this paper in 2010 was that the people who lived here and who made it such a unique community should be aware of threatening exogenous forces.

Exogenous and endogenous are terms used in different fields, but they’re basically fancy words for outside and inside. The point here is that changes in Red Hook should be determined by the people that make up Red Hook — not outsiders.

Property rights in the US allow owners to do anything they want with their land, as long as they conform to zoning and other laws. When it comes to real estate developers, that means extracting maximum profits by building things that maximize their return on investment. When they want to do something more than what zoning will allow, they try to get the zoning changed. It’s easier for the local council member who basically decides, if there is little community opposition.

This applies both to for-profit and not-for-profit real estate developers. The Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC) is a not-for-profit developer.

FAC has six projects currently in development. One of them, on Flatbush Avenue, is an 850-unit building in downtown Brooklyn where they are “co-developer and co-owner of 200 affordable rental apartments” in the building, as the committee says on its website. “The affordable units will be under a separate condominium ownership structure, with FAC as 50% owner.

“They will be developed under NYC HPD’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Program (MIH), and they will be permanently affordable at an average of 60% of Area Median Income.”

That’s a huge building where they will be managing the mandated “affordable housing” component. Affordable housing rents are often over $2000 a month.

A project like this shows that FAC is not that different from any real estate developer seeking growth. When they started, their mission was to rehabilitate abandoned buildings (yes, back in the 1970’s even Park Slope had abandoned buildings). When the supply of abandoned buildings ran out, they needed different opportunities. One of those opportunities was to manage MIH apartments. MIH became a law in 2016, and requires developers who benefit from zoning changes to offer a certain percentage of new apartments for people who aren’t yet millionaires.

Another FAC project is Gowanus Green. This project, which they hoped to begin in 2008, places six buildings in the fenced off property near Smith and Ninth Streets. The reason for the fence is to protect the rest of the neighborhood from the highly toxic soil – a remnant of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company’s long ago presence.

This project depends on the Gowanus rezoning, which was delayed when the Gowanus Canal was declared a Superfund site in 2009. By 2012, FAC’s former Executive Director, Brad Lander, now the council member, began working the community to pass a new rezoning, which among everything else, would allow Gowanus Green to proceed.

Karen Blondel, a respected Red Hook community leader, began working for FAC in 2016. Her LinkedIn page describes her duties there as “organizing community stakeholders around environmental issues and climate adaptation and preparedness.”

Her role, as I saw it from my vantage point, was to turn the public housing residents into supporters of the rezoning. Most feared the gentrification the rezoning would bring, but a $200 million promise from NYC taxpayers to renovate their apartments, a promise engineered by FAC and their former Executive Director Brad Lander, changed their mind.

The rezoning passed the City Council in November 2021. Karen left FAC in March 2021. She began popping up at meetings of local academic-turned-real estate developer Alexandros Washburn who was seeking support for a project he called the Model Block over on Conover Street.

The centerpiece of the Model Block was to be a 15-story residential building featuring harbor views.

Red Hookers got to know Washburn after Hurricane Sandy when he started holding resiliency meetings in his Van Brunt Street office. That is most likely where Karen met Washburn, who hired her to promote his project in the Red Hook Houses. He needed community support because he was seeking an approval from the Board of Standards and Appeals.

I can relay a personal experience from that time. My feeling was that there were people in Red Hook who did not think a 15 story residential tower was a good idea, especially next to the huge vacant lot along the coastal property that UPS created. I thought it important to get a lawyer to represent those people, which included me, in order to make sure that the Washburn lobbying machine would not go unchallenged at the BSA hearing. I held a meeting in Coffey Park, and among the people who showed up was Karen. It became impossible to hold the meeting, as Blondel disrupted it, making it unpleasant for anyone to stay, and so it quickly broke up without any action taken.

I asked around afterwards what would make Karen such a big supporter of a luxury residential tower in the middle of low-rise Red Hook, and a few people I spoke with said  in addition to salary they believed that in exchange Washburn helped her get a Harvard fellowship. I have no proof of any of this, but Washburn is a Harvard graduate.

None of this would have ever made the pages of this newspaper except for the the awarding of a “David Prize,” a $200,000 “award” given by a foundation set up by David Walentas, billionaire developer of Dumbo and Williamsburg. They are the exogenous force that I believe Red Hook might have to fear someday.

I know that this column and the accompanying article on page five will make some readers uneasy and others furious. Nobody likes their idols criticized. I understand that. But I have nothing against Karen Blondel, or anyone who takes advantage of situations to improve their lives.

The real evil is how the monied use their power to take advantage of the vulnerable in their unending quest for more money.