Election 2021: Spotlight on Erik Frankel, by Brian Abate

Erik Frankel is a fourth generation family business owner in Sunset Park. While he has spent much of his life in Sunset Park, Frankel has also spent 15 years living in Vietnam.

Frankel does not have a political background but is frustrated with the direction Red Hook and Sunset Park have gone. He is unhappy about some of the big companies that are moving into Red Hook, including Amazon and UPS. He wants to see small businesses thrive and believes he has ideas that will make that possible if he is elected as city councilman for Red Hook/Sunset Park

We spoke to Frankel for an hour, here are some excerpts:

Could you start off by telling a little bit about yourself.
My family emigrated to Sunset Park in the 1800’s. We were here before the Norwegians. My son came to Brooklyn from Vietnam one year ago at the start of the lock down. I can take the experience of a fourth generation New Yorker combined with the father of someone who emigrated here. That’s why I am the perfect candidate.

You’re from Sunset Park, right?
Yes, well years ago, 1890, we opened up a clothing store. We supplied most of the piers, the longshoremen, the dock builders, the construction workers in Brooklyn. In the 1970’s the piers closed down, a lot of them moved to Jersey, a lot of the business moved to Jersey, but we stayed here.

I’m the fourth generation retailer and my father was the third, and they say the third generation is usually the one that messes up, so I’m good (laughing.)

And then you lived in Vietnam for a while. Could you talk about that?
I did work in Vietnam for 20 years teaching people how to create sustainable businesses through e-commerce.

What are some of your goals?
What we need is public safety for our undocumented workers, for our undocumented residents. We need safety for everyone. And they’re not getting it right now. I want to feel safer than this, I mean, even the biker gangs who live in Brooklyn say they don’t feel safe right now.

What are some of the other issues you plan to focus on?
You know, the idea of defunding the police is an issue that everyone talks about. And now I know it seems like in Sunset Park, in Red Hook, you don’t get votes by saying it’s dangerous to defund the police. But I think Sunset Park is a dangerous neighborhood. It’s incredibly dangerous. We need to be better. We need we need safety. One thing we can do is open more charter schools. I’m for charter schools. If our public schools did a better job, we wouldn’t have young people crying out for socialism in our public schools. We need alternatives. Opposition is good. My choices are good. So I want to enable a further a system. My goal is to further a system that encourages diversity and more choices in education as well as in the community.

I’m not a shareholder but I do like eBay. I think they should teach eBay, Etsy, the online sales in our curriculum so people can learn to create sustainable businesses. We must focus on the positive and ways for people to lift themselves out of their economic situation. I think we spend too much time on trivial matters rather than the important ones. And that’s because people are afraid to talk about it, because they’re afraid to turn away voters.

What message would you like to give to our readers?
Do not believe the politicians except for me! No, no (laughing.) My message is that, you know, people have more similarities than we have differences. We have to stop electing people who focus on our differences and try to unite our communities because we work when we are united.

And now that every every year it seems like we keep on electing these wonderful people, we check all the boxes as politicians. Yet Sunset Park and Red Hook remain two of the most economically depressed, depreciated areas in Brooklyn. If we’re OK with that, it’s crazy. My goal is to address home ownership.

Anything else?
I find that New Yorkers are the most loving people in the world because they’re willing to take the time to tell you what they don’t like about you. That is a backwards way of saying we’re all equal. No one’s above being insulted. I can’t tell you how many names I’ve been called throughout the years by various ethnic groups. And I smile. I say I respect that because I respect the right for them to insult me. As long as it’s not physical, it’s OK.

How do you lift up a community that’s been denied education and home ownership? There’s no easy way to put it but I have a plan. I want to defund the New York Economic Development Corporation, take all the land, sell it to developers and use that money to knock down the BQE and build affordable houses for people. That’s going to piss off a lot of people, but it’s a solution.

I think it’s tragic that the same people who are against Amazon are also against rezoning.

Right where I live on Third Avenue in the industrial section, I have pawnshops on my block. A lot of people are dead. There’s drug abuse that’s rampant. They say they want to keep it industrial but when you keep it industrial, this is what happens.

I feel like if you don’t want houses, if you elect politicians who are against rezoning and building homes and I say for homes, not just for the wealthy but affordable homes, which that term is… it’s only applied when renting, but not with ownership. We need to build affordable homes for people to own. So when you deny rezoning, you are encouraging the Amazons, the Teslas, the UPS’ so they won’t live in your district, but they will own the companies in your district and then they will own you!

Brian Abate