She may have succeeded in preventing nearly 1,000 new apartments from being added to her district, but Kristin Richardson Jordan isn’t giving up the fight.
The Harlem City Council member and about 60 others rallied Tuesday evening at West 145th Street and Lenox Avenue to protest the opening of a truck stop owned by developer Bruce Teitelbaum, who blames Richardson Jordan for his inability to build anything else on the land.
Addressing the crowd, Richardson Jordan cited the environmental impact of the truck lot, which Teitelbaum has said he can open on the property without City Council approval after she scuttled his plans to build a two-tower apartment complex there.
“This is a winnable fight,” Richardson Jordan said. “There should be no state licensing for an environmentally hazardous business in an environmentally protected area.”
Taking the bullhorn next, Pamela Stewart-Martinez of the Harlem-based environmental nonprofit We Act said idling trucks would harm the area’s air quality.
“This neighborhood has had one of the highest rates of asthma in our nation,” Stewart-Martinez said. “Emissions from this diesel truck company will be dangerous.”
The truck depot was once treated as an idle threat by Richardson Jordan on her personal Twitter account, which was deactivated shortly after she announced the rally near the project site.
Richardson Jordan declined to take questions from The Real Deal at the rally, and pulled several people away from a reporter who they had volunteered to speak with, criticizing the publication for not “reporting the facts.”
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Teitelbaum said he has not heard from Richardson Jordan’s office regarding her concern over the truck lot. At the rally, Richardson Jordan characterized speaking privately with Teitelbaum as a “behind-closed-doors” negotiation that she would not accept.
The developer had offered to set aside half of the proposed complex’s 917 apartments as affordable to win Richardson Jordan’s support for the project — a vital prerequisite under the City Council’s tradition of deferring to the local member on land-use issues in a given district.
That was not enough for Richardson Jordan, who argued that the units would not be sufficiently affordable for her constituents and said she would not budge unless 100 percent of the units were income-restricted.
“[Richardson Jordan] explicitly said that she actually preferred us to develop the site for parking, storage or our other as-of-right permissible uses, unless we built 100 percent of the apartments for folks earning an average of about $40,000 or less which she knew was impossible,” Teitelbaum said in a statement, going on to accuse the Council member of “trying to create a false narrative to justify her failure.”
“We never had another choice,” Teitelbaum added. “KRJ did and she chose trucks over housing.”