Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, is sweating through a June heat wave on a Gowanus street corner, gesturing at two huge sewage tanks under construction behind us. The city’s combined sewer system is not exactly sexy — perhaps the very opposite — but diving into the granular details of infrastructure is where Lander, a proud policy wonk, shines. He’s telling me why, in the Gowanus rezoning, he pushed so hard to require all new development in the neighborhood to capture the runoff from storms. With each new building taking care of its own runoff, and these two huge tanks behind us picking up the slack, the Gowanus Canal would be spared the putrid mix of sewage, rainwater, and gutter swill that pours into it whenever the city’s combined sewer system is overwhelmed. It’s a big improvement for the low-lying neighborhood, but he neglects to mention the sole hint of glamour in the whole situation: that the treatment facility and the pocket park next to it are being designed by Annabelle Selldorf, the architect who just redid the Frick.
It’s the day after the first mayoral debate, an event that seemingly did nothing to alter the standing of the candidates, including Lander, who remains a distant third behind state assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic neophyte running to his left, and front-runner Andrew Cuomo, who spent much of his time as governor fighting city leaders before resigning over sexual-harassment allegations. Voters thus far seem to be unmoved by the candidates’ record of achievements, failures, and New York experience or lack thereof, but Lander was eager to show me around the neighborhood where, as a city councilmember, he’d shepherded his most significant accomplishment: a 2021 rezoning that will bring 8,500 new housing units — 3,000 of them affordable — to a gentrifying neighborhood along a Superfund site.
These days, Gowanus looks very much like an area in transition — noisy construction sites brushing up against pristine towers with lobbies so recently completed they still smell new. The streets are a hodgepodge of old industrial buildings, natural-wine bars, empty lots, boutique gyms, and wobbly-looking houses in the midst of being either fixed up or torn down. And the Gowanus Canal, after nearly five years of cleanup, is no longer emitting a rank odor. By the mid-aughts, when Lander was the local councilmember, it was already clear the neighborhood would, like so many others in Brooklyn, be transformed by the wealth coursing through the borough, even if the toxic canal held off that change a little bit longer than elsewhere. The challenge for Lander was to channel it in a way that would bring benefits to the people living there, not just the ones moving in.
Construction along the Gowanus Canal, looking north.
Photo: Kim Velsey
On what is ostensibly a campaign tour, he is only too happy to pass the mic — a habit he surely picked up in a career spent among community organizers and housing advocates. At the offices of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nonprofit developer and community organization where he worked from 1993 to 2003, he has arranged to meet executive director Michelle de la Uz and NYCHA tenant leaders from the Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens. One of them, Karen Blondel, had just seen a documentary about the decade-long rezoning process. “Brad, you were so young!” she says, and everyone has a laugh. De la Uz and Lander explain why it took so long: They’d first approached the Bloomberg administration, which didn’t want to require affordable housing, then the de Blasio administration, which was only interested in affordable housing. Neither was interested in including benefits the community leaders considered nonnegotiable: NYCHA repairs, stormwater-management regulations, measures to keep neighborhood artists there. The de Blasio administration eventually agreed to pursue a rezoning, but first the community had to wait for the city to rezone East New York, which, according to Lander, was seen as an easier get compared to the middle-class, majority-white neighborhood Gowanus had become.
Then they had to fight for all those community provisions. Lander and the public-housing leaders are especially proud of winning money for NYCHA repairs. “It seemed so simple — you can’t have this gleaming new housing here and then these crazy old units there,” he says. But the de Blasio administration was adamant: “We don’t connect rezonings with public housing.” Eventually, the city agreed to create a $200 million fund to repair 1,500 NYCHA units and to keep NYCHA fully public. That’s in contrast to what is now the primary avenue to pay for NYCHA repairs: public-private partnerships. “I think we should be the model,” says Blondel, who explains that it took years to get tenants onboard with the plan. And during those years, Lander wasn’t just a figurehead who showed up for the ribbon cuttings and press conferences. “I was sitting with Brad and two other tenant leaders looking over the physical-needs assessments, and you could tell he was listening,” she says.
We pass a number of construction sites for the many new developments that have broken ground since then, like the 354-unit Nevins Landing project on Third Avenue, which will be 25 percent affordable. In fact, all of the new towers have that minimum built in, with the exception of Gowanus Green, a 955-unit development rising on the long-vacant site of a manufactured-gas plant, which will be 100 percent affordable. At 420 Carroll, a new rental development that opened in the fall, we meet an artist painting benches for the public esplanade that will one day stretch over 18 acres along the canal before heading in. Inside are six almost-finished affordable artist studios that will rent for the astonishingly low price of $275 to $331 a month, the first of 100 that will be built as part of the rezoning. It didn’t take much arm twisting to get developers to create art studios in exchange for more development rights, Lander says, though getting them to be affordable was a little harder, he adds. Shelby Jackson, an Arts Gowanus fellow, is there to see her studio for the first time, her school-age son in tow. Now, she says, she’ll finally have the space for what she wants to do instead of trying to make it work in her apartment: “I had a lot of ideas that I never really had a chance to make before.”
The neighborhood is currently a hodgepodge of construction sites, gleaming new developments, low-lying older buildings, garages, and boutique gyms.
Photo: Kim Velsey
Our final stop, the Third Street Bridge, takes us past the Old American Can Factory, across the street from the Coignet building and Whole Foods, where longstanding artist studios are still in place. That’s another small win, Lander explains. The building, which is zoned commercial, could easily have swapped those studios for an Apple store or a shopping complex like Empire Stores in Dumbo. Instead, they got the right to develop housing on the site in exchange for keeping the arts spaces. And then, he adds, we “lucked out that this billionaire decided to create a nonprofit for arts” during the rezoning: Powerhouse Arts, a fabrication studio and arts space in an old transit power station with a massive Herzog & de Meuron addition.
It’s nearing 3:30 in the afternoon and the temperature is in the high 80s, but Lander is still looking energetic in a blue button-down shirt, slacks, and dress shoes. An aide passes him a napkin to wipe his forehead. Across the road on the Third Street Bridge, Andrea Parker of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy spots us and jogs over in her Blundstones to say “hello,” looking genuinely delighted to bump into Lander while showing a group of ConEd representatives around. Several other friendly greetings on the street lend the afternoon a Sesame Street vibe with characters popping out all over the place. It’s clear Lander is something of a celebrity in the neighborhood. As our walk winds down, I ask Lander what he’s most proud of in Gowanus. “The affordable housing,” he says. Also, that “it was a partnership people in the community were genuinely excited for.” That is, because the plan included so much of what they wanted and they were a real part of getting it. (This being a massive neighborhood transformation, there was, of course, some local opposition to the influx of luxury rentals and potential environmental problems.) He still regrets that they hadn’t been able to negotiate a subway elevator at a development on Union and Fourth or find a way for a local landmark, the Kentile Floors sign, to stay up. A few misgivings aside, this Gowanus tour is clearly a victory lap of sorts, albeit maybe the only one Lander will get to take this year.
If he were elected mayor, I ask, what would he rezone next? Lander brightens. He has thoughts. And details, of course. This is in his housing plan, he tells me, and he ticks off the sites: Long Island City, the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, four of the 12 city-owned golf courses. “You could do a real 20th-century Mitchell Lama vision there,” he says.
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