Gotham’s Bushwick Project Pits Liberal Pol Against Mamdani

What happens when a liberal plays chicken with a socialist?

Brooklyn Council member Lincoln Restler and Mayor Zohran Mamdani are about to answer that question — and shed light on how the revised City Charter affects rezoning battles.

The progressive Restler has taken a hostage — the Gotham Organization’s massive Monitor Point project — to gain leverage in his quest for Bushwick park funding from the democratic socialist Mamdani.

Restler’s leverage, however, is weakened by a new Charter revision that allows Gotham to appeal a City Council rejection to a three-member panel of the mayor, Council speaker and borough president.

Restler has two demands. One is for Mamdani to complete Bushwick Inlet Park, which Restler calls the Bloomberg administration’s central promise to north Brooklyn of the 2005 Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning. The city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars for the park, but it’s not finished.

His second demand is that half of Monitor Point’s 1,150 apartments be affordable. Gotham has promised 40 percent will be permanently affordable to households earning 60 percent of the area median income. I don’t think anyone has done better.

I asked Restler how he expects 50 percent affordability to pencil out. Restler would only say he’s proposed several ways to Gotham and the city. He wouldn’t share them with me. Clearly they require a subsidy.

The city prefers to use its finite housing subsidies on projects that can’t happen without them. Public money for Monitor Point, where Gotham has promised 460 low-income units, would come at the expense of affordable housing somewhere else.

Other than to burnish Restler’s image, there is no reason for taxpayers to subsidize Monitor Point. Making 575 of the apartments affordable would mean replacing 115 market-rate households — and the roughly $4 million a year they’d pay in city and state income taxes — with low-income units that would otherwise be built elsewhere.

Restler says 50 percent affordability is justified because the project uses public land. Perhaps he wants the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to subsidize housing with the rent it would get for leasing the project site to Gotham. Would that even be legal? MTA money is for trains and buses, not apartments.

Gotham’s project is laden with public benefits including green space, shoreline access, climate infrastructure, a museum and $300,000 a year for Bushwick Inlet Park. It would replace two aging, badly located MTA facilities with a new one in an East Williamsburg industrial zone, permitting a full build-out of another green space, Box Street Park.

Logic says there is too much for everyone to gain for Mamdani, Restler and Gotham — led by Joel and David Picket — not to come to terms.

But a lot could still go wrong, as we saw when a Council member’s affordability demands canceled a 1,000-unit project in East Harlem and local opposition delayed four Lower Manhattan residential towers, which have yet to be built.

Similarly, NIMBYs are fighting Monitor Point. When they mobbed a community meeting in February, Restler said, “I want to just say plainly where I’m at on this project to all of you, which is precisely what I’ve said to Gotham and the MTA: I’m a no on this project.”

The Brooklyn Downtown Star reported, “A raucous applause broke out before he’d even finished the sentence. Some audience members were on their feet in standing ovation.”

When I spoke to Restler last week, he clarified, “I am a no on the current version of this project.”

This is where the Charter revision’s new appeals panel comes in.

Although Restler expressed confidence that the Affordable Housing Appeals Board would support a rejection of the project by the Council, which will vote next month, Mamdani could override him by securing one vote from either Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso or Council Speaker Julie Menin. No doubt Gov. Kathy Hochul, who oversees the MTA and wants more housing built, would lean on them as well. That possibility pressures Restler to get to yes.

Menin is pro-housing and is married to a developer, but I think the borough president is an even better bet to back Monitor Point. Reynoso did recommend approval on the condition of 50 percent affordability, but intimated that he would take a fresh look if the appeals board gets the final say.

Having positioned himself as pro-housing, Reynoso would be chased out of the YIMBY movement if he killed the project. He also called for full funding of Bushwick Inlet Park, but not as a condition of approval.

Most importantly, Reynoso devoted an entire page of his 23-page opinion to the ugly consequences of a “no-action scenario.” The borough president obviously views that as unacceptable.

If the project is rejected, there simply is no Plan B, as Scott Short, the former CEO of the nonprofit affordable housing provider RiseBoro Community Partnership, pointed out in an op-ed.

Restler countered that Short works for the nonprofit St. Nicks Alliance, whose annual gala receives a donation from Gotham. But the only Plan B the Council member could come up with was to wait for Mamdani to leave office, then lobby the next administration to fund the completion of Bushwick Inlet Park.

That would be an absurd position even if Restler could keep his seat for another eight years, which he cannot.

For all of these reasons, I expect Restler to come to terms with Gotham and Mamdani. But drawing lines in the sand and making unrealistic threats is not the way to do it.