By Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso
I remember how much our life changed when my mother — a Dominican immigrant who didn’t have a college degree or speak the best English — got a job in a Brooklyn factory. We felt like we had made it big. For the first time, she wasn’t making minimum wage. Section 8 housing and SNAP weren’t the only reasons we had a roof over our heads or food on the table, and we could finally see a path to the middle class unfolding before us.
I also remember when she lost that job — when the factory shut down to make way for market-rate housing, and my mother had to go back to making almost nothing as a home health aide.
My story isn’t unique. It’s a Brooklyn story, and Brooklyn’s story, like New York’s, is one of industry.
At our peak, New York City factories employed over one million people. Imports and manufactured goods traveled up and down our waterways, filled our warehouses and were sent out across the United States. Our waterfront was known as the world’s port. A ship arrived or departed every ten minutes, and over 70,000 New Yorkers worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard alone.
For centuries, the New York Harbor represented the promise of America. But somewhere along the way, just as our country seems to have abandoned that promise, our city abandoned its great harbor.
Today, decades of disinvestment and neglect have left Red Hook as Brooklyn’s last working waterfront. The 122 acres of manufacturing land at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal are our last real opportunity to reclaim the waterfront industrial potential our city let slip away.
Unfortunately, instead of doubling down on what makes the Brooklyn Marine Terminal one of a kind, the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) is determined to double down on past mistakes. After announcing plans to redevelop the site back in May of last year, EDC has led a rushed, sloppy and opaque process that shut out Brooklynites and presented Task Force members like myself with a false choice: either sacrifice coveted manufacturing and maritime opportunity to market-rate housing or see no investment at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal at all.
I reject this premise, and I will not allow for a generational project to be relegated to mediocrity because of arbitrary deadlines and the bad-faith behavior of an agency intended to promote economic development that seems insistent on prioritizing housing instead.
Enough of my fellow Task Force members clearly agree. Today, EDC once again decided to delay the Task Force’s vote on the proposal. It should be good news — they did it because they recognize they don’t have the support. But a few more weeks is not enough time to meaningfully alter a plan that insists on misunderstanding the opportunity in front of us. In fact, such a short extension would simply be a concession that EDC would prefer to play politics rather than work together to put forward a real plan for Brooklyn’s future of waterborne freight and waterfront manufacturing.
The Brooklyn Marine Terminal is a public good that we cannot lose. Generations of New Yorkers, especially those without college degrees or with limited English language proficiency, have relied on our manufacturing districts for well-paying, quality jobs that provide a path to the middle class. And the opportunity to transform our last working waterfront into a world-class hub of innovation, commerce and freight is once in a lifetime.
So today, I would have voted no on EDC’s proposal for a simple reason: I believe in the Brooklyn Marine Terminal.
I believe in a New York City where well-paying industrial jobs are abundant and accessible, where our local production power can offset the whims of a tariff-crazed tyrant, where we can manufacture our own way toward a green energy grid and where our waterfront, warehouses and industrial businesses remain proud gateways for immigrants and hardworking New Yorkers who still believe in the promise of New York City.
The great irony here is that I could be EDC’s easiest yes. My goal is still and has always been to get to a yes. My problem is that EDC approached this project as a housing project first and a port project second, when really, any conversation we had on housing should have been centered first and foremost on the reconstruction and sustainability of port operations.
It’s unfortunate that we — the members of the Task Force and the community — were never given a real chance to get on board with EDC’s vision for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. We deserve better. We deserve a process that is patient, thoughtful and honest. We deserve a plan anchored in possibility, opportunity and respect for the power of New York City’s industrial past, present and future. And we deserve to be proud when we finally say “yes” to a port-first plan for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal.