Narrator:
Hey BK with Ofer Cohen.
Brad Lander:
This is hard for young people who were not here, like I don't know why they would believe us. It was true, but if you lived through the seventies and the 80s in New York city, the mindset you approach neighborhoods and real estate and development and urban planning questions with was our city was abandoned, that almost killed it. What are we going to do to make sure it comes back to life and isn't killed like that again?
Ofer Cohen:
That's Brad Lander, the New York city councilman representing parts of Brooklyn, including the very established Park Slope and the ones industrial area known as the Gowanus. Lander a I sat down in the Hey BK studio and talked about his journey as an urban planner, a progressive politician, his upcoming run for city controller and his lifelong mission as an advocate for affordable housing. Brad Lander, our favorite councilman from the 39th district. Thank you for being here.
Brad Lander:
Very nice to be here.
Ofer Cohen:
I was telling you earlier that I'm really interested in your personal journey. So I know you went to school in Chicago. I don't know where you grew up.
Brad Lander:
It's funny, you know, there's a lot of politicians these days who, you know, like tell their story. That's kind of a thing. And I'll confess, I don't usually tell my story. I grew up in suburban St Louis. My folks lived in the first ring suburb where all the Jews of their generation lived, University city near Washington university. They moved out. We moved out when I was five to a second ring suburb called Creve Coeur, a lovely suburban upbringing, nice public school, you know, that did participate in the St Louis voluntary desegregation program, but mostly was a pretty white suburb. And so I grew up with those sort of liberal Jewish values. We want a more equal, more compassionate place but in a place where if you kind of started to dig deeper, you could see we were not delivering it especially well and those things it became especially clear to me when I went to school at university of Chicago, which is on the South side of Chicago and surrounded, you know, one side by Lake Michigan, but on the other three sides, at the time when I went to school there in 1987, almost all African American and poor, and at that time very disinvested with gentrification. You couldn't see it from where it was at the time. And so that for me, both was okay, those values I grew up with of a more equal, inclusive, integrated liberal place. Like something is wrong. They are not being delivered on. And that made me mad. You know, it's like, here's the story I've been told about who we are as Americans, who we are as Jews, what our cities are about and the actuality doesn't, we're not delivering on those values. So that was sort of part one and then, you know, but going from the suburbs into the city was just fascinating to me and you know, to be a suburban kid who moves to the city, you know, at that age for college. You know, my kids grew up in Brooklyn, so they're, they're city kids. And I think it's hard if you're a city kid to kind of understand that energy that comes, if you've been in a suburb, you know, you get to ride your bike or whatever, but you don't have a locally owned store as you can't walk to all these things. You don't have public realm and community in the same way. So that kind of dual move for me in Chicago, like something is wrong in the values, but something is right in the energy of cities.
Ofer Cohen:
Lander says his fascination with cities set the course of his life like Barack Obama. He became involved in community organizing in Chicago after spending a year of grad school in London, Lander decided to dedicate his career to improving life in cities for all of its residents. He became an urban planner with a degree from Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. It was the early days of the neighborhoods gentrification and changes in zoning rules that allowed new development along fourth Avenue. He would later go on to lead the Pratt center for community development. But in the early nineties, when Lander was young and inexperienced, he landed the job as the executive director of the fifth Avenue committee, the non-for-profit housing organization that aims to hold on to affordable housing in Park Slope.
Brad Lander:
I did not know anything, you know, anything. It wasn't like I didn't know real estate development. I didn't know how to use Excel. You know, I had to do like spreadsheets for dummies on the subway, on the subway ride, you know, from home to work. But it was a great time. So, you know, that was the early 1990s. Yeah. And very early in this pocket, absolutely. Look parks, it's hard to remember that Park Slope had seen real abandonment. There were in the neighborhood, even of the lower part of Park Slope. Not so much right up by the park, but between fourth, fifth, sixth Avenue, you know, a hundred vacant buildings and 150 vacant lots and neighbors had organized together to try to start bringing them back. So you had some of that abandonment, not at the scale of many other neighborhoods and the kind of leading edge of redevelopment and gentrification was there and, and people could pretty early on see both its benefits and its risks. And so fifth Avenue committee was formed to try to make it work more inclusively.
Ofer Cohen:
But hold on one second. So you're like, wow, this is, I think this is what I want to do with my life. Like I want to focus on how can we make cities better? Would, you know, how can we find a balance? Right. And, and making cities better, right? And then you fall into this executive director job, which sounds to me like an amazing opportunity.
Brad Lander:
It was sort of what I was looking for. I was not, I was not qualified or ready to be executive director, but it was the kind of organization I was looking for.
Ofer Cohen:
So you must've been thrilled.
Brad Lander:
Oh great. I felt so lucky. It was a great staff team, very diverse and really like the perfect mix. It was, you know, folks who had lived in those buildings, grassroots tenant organizers, neighborhood leaders, who knew we wanted to be able to take over those buildings and renovate them and have families in there who wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise and bring small businesses into the storefronts. And at the same time as we were doing, you know, small scale affordable housing development, we knew already that the neighborhood would be gentrifying around us. Most of the stock was not city owned, abandoned property where you could make affordable housing. And so we started doing tenant organizing as well, that, that had been going on already. I didn't, didn't start when I got there. And you know, what, what combination of thoughtful, inclusive development, but also a community organizing tenant protection policies? You know, we started fighting to strengthen the rent laws. They had started in the 1980s recognizing that without some stronger rent regulation closing of some of those loopholes, lots of families were going to get pushed out. And that did happen like Park Slope gentrified, the aim we had at the fifth Avenue committee in the late eighties and early nineties of holding an inclusive brotherhood. We did not do it. You know, like that's just honest. The vast majority of families who lived in you know, a brownstone neighborhoods, it doesn't have a lot of big multifamily housing. There were a lot more working class and low income families in the old law tenement, walk-ups and in people's garden apartments because that's what the rents were at the time.
Ofer Cohen:
Yeah. But over the course of 20 years, , I don't think you guys are failed at the fifth Avenue community. If fifth avenue committee would have grown into a Brooklyn wide organization. I mean, it would have been very successful, the mandate within the context of these avenues. It's very limited.
Brad Lander:
But in some ways that was, we could see even then like my work in Gowanus began when I was at fifth Avenue committee. We, for some of these very reasons we could see, at the very end, I spent 10 years as executive director there. And, it was only at the very end that the park slope and fourth Avenue rezoning happened and inclusionary zoning was not yet really a thing. We pushed for it. You know, we would like to Canary in the coal mine. We lost that fight, but it helped when something later. And we also at that same time started looking to Gowanus as a place where maybe, something could be built that was more inclusive than we knew we would be able to keep the slope.
Ofer Cohen:
Did you know what the your path would be?
Brad Lander:
No, interestingly, and maybe I was just in denial, but people would ask, when I was at fifth Avenue committee,are you going to run for office? And I really meant it when I said like, politics is gross, you know, everybody's on the take. I didn't see politics as a vehicle for building kind of meaningful grassroots democracy. But, as I was going from the fifth Avenue committee to the Pratt center, part of what I realized, and it's kind of funny to look back on this, cause it was still early enough in the real estate cycle, the city council, which should have had policies that were about inclusionary zoning and affordable housing that were more about tenant protections and stopping harassment that were more about building livable, streets and transforming communities to be livable and sustainable was not focused on any of those things. There were no planners in there, but it wasn't yet what people were even thinking about. It's hard to remember that this city was, its politics or not.
Ofer Cohen:
The low hanging fruits were, and things to deal with were different.
Brad Lander:
Abandonment was still the political mindset in relationship to the city. Like this is hard for young people who were not here. Like I don't know why they would believe us it was true. But if you lived through the seventies and the 80s in New York city, the mindset you approached neighborhoods and real estate and development and urban planning questions with was our city was abandoned, that almost killed it. What are we going to do to make sure it comes back to life and isn't killed like that again. And like that's how you thought on whether that was about crime and policing, whether that was about development, whether that was about schools, that was how people approached those questions. And this idea that the challenges of growth and inclusion, would be, and sustainability would be primary just was not on people's radar screens. So because we could see that from where we sat at, you know, that kind of first edge of gentrification in this neighborhood that still had enough diversity, politically progressive, but had gone through this. I wanted to see things done differently and I was like frustrated with what had happened on Fourth Avenue. I knew some new policies were needed. So as I was moving to Pratt from fifth, even though I really met like gross about politics as I was moving from fifth Avenue committee. I got bit by a bug, who's going to do it, we can do better. And then at Pratt had the chance to go around the city and work with grassroots community groups. I saw they needed, some tools, they needed some allies on the inside. So that's what led me to run and in 2009 I ran for council, really largely on these issues what is a livable, affordable neighborhood look like? What are policies that would support it? Now, ironically, at the very same time, Atlantic Yards, you know, it was starting to happen right across the street. And I had done a lot of work with acorn, the grassroots community organization that struck the deal with Bruce Ratner to do affordable housing.
Ofer Cohen:
In 2009. I mean, we were, I was here and it was rough right in the middle of a recession.
Brad Lander:
So, but yeah, so then I got elected and was lucky, you know, I had a term with the Bloomberg administration when in many ways I was still very much the like voice of we're not doing anywhere near enough. You know, I have a lot of respect for mayor Bloomberg and deputy mayor Doctoroff. But I did not think they were taking, and they started to take the sustainability issues more seriously in that last term. But I did not think they started to take the equity and inclusion.
Ofer Cohen:
But don't you think it's out of a continuation. So initially you dealt with abandonment and then the beginning of gentrification, how can you develop? And then very quickly it was, Oh, okay, is this overdeveloping?
Brad Lander:
Yes, absolutely.
Ofer Cohen:
You know, but if you look at this fixed to that fourth Avenue rezoning, for example, all the fixes, you know, it wasn't necessarily a political thing. It was just like people didn't realize that they're going to rezone Downtown Brooklyn and they're going to enable commercial development, but also maybe also some residential that only residential would be built. Your market is responding.
Brad Lander:
The Downtown Brooklyn zoning, I was the lone wolf really crying, well more for inclusionary. So I thought it was unconscionable. By then we were fighting the inclusionary housing battle. It was coming in Downtown Brooklyn and it just seemed unconscionable to me that it would be rezoned without a significant affordable housing requirement. And yes, what people said is, well it's mostly a commercial rezoning. And I said, well you know, a lot of it allows residential, how could we not? And in a funny way, like we were just so right because if you had done inclusionary one, you would have gotten some affordable housing, but also you would have balanced the scales a little in commercial development would have been more attractive and whether you had gotten inclusionary residential or commercial, look, good things are happening in Downtown Brooklyn. I don't want to take away from them, but a little better mix of some more affordable units and some additional commercial rather than residential development would have been better. And all we needed to do was apply policies more like the ones we now have. And I'll just on fourth Avenue, cause I think it's useful story. You know, we fought forever as you with inclusionary. We didn't win it. Five years later, new buildings had gone up and had hideous ground floors and the Bloomberg administration came back and applied an active ground floor use requirement, which was good. And I'm glad it got and we said again, okay, but so now we have to do inclusionary. And they still said no. So I wonder what would have happened. You know, and this is true on the rent laws and this is true on that if we had been able to prevail on the Bloomberg administration and deputy mayor Doctoroff, to see that there was a need to attend more in a more focused way on issues of displacement and affordable housing and inclusivity earlier. Who knows, it's hard to, hindsight's 20/20, but we didn't get to them fast enough. And that's part of the backlash we have today. The reason why people don't want rezonings and development in their neighborhood that people insisted on such a dramatic, a set of changes to the rent laws are that this, the last decade of development did not pay attention to working class families to low income communities. And so of course there is a backlash.
Ofer Cohen:
Now there's a chance to implement some of these lessons and create a comprehensive plan that is thoughtful about different uses, including a major component of affordable housing in the Gowanus. From personal journey perspective the Gowanus is your opportunity to implement all the lessons that we have learned.
Brad Lander:
As many of them as we can, Yes, absolutely. 100%. I live close by. Well look, the Gowanus, has its own story that's different from my story. You know, the dissolved oxygen content in the Gowanus canal hit zero in 1905. So you know, you got the Gowanus. As you know, it gets industrialized, gets polluted so badly, so early. Then gets, you know, largely abandoned, while it's sitting in between Park Slope and Carroll gardens, you know, that go through this period of abandonment but then come back in this beautiful form. So here you got this place that both from a sustainability point of view, you know, and then floods during hurricane Sandy becomes one of the most polluted, you know, industrial waterways. And from an equity point of view in neighborhoods that have been redlined, you know, with public housing now next to, you know, multimillion dollar brownstones is an opportunity, to do something different, to learn the lessons of sustainability, to learn the lessons of equity and inclusion, to learn the lessons of a mix of uses, a vibrant mix of uses instead of kind of just separating things and you know, luckily for me, yes that intersects with some of the things I've been doing in the meantime. So I like the intersections between, you know, my story and the Gowanus story. Lots of other people obviously play in. And I will say if it were not for the fifth Avenue committee, if it were not for the Gowanus canal Conservancy and active community stakeholders, I think I love about this process we've been on in Gowanus. I think it will, whatever we get right or wrong, I'm pretty sure it will win the title of like most engaged community planning processes for a neighborhood.
Ofer Cohen:
I mean at the end of the day we're from where we're sitting right now. You know, a lot of people have been complaining as you know,about, Oh, it took so long. In a way, when I'm listening to you right now, it actually feels like it was good for Gowanus that it took the time.
Brad Lander:
If it had been rezoned in 2008, it would not have had meaningful inclusionary housing, mandatory inclusionary housing did not exist. It was pre Sandy. We would not have done it with the thoughtfulness toward the issues of resilience and sustainable
Ofer Cohen:
In a way. There's more than that. I mean, you wouldn't have the overdevelopment and or hyper gentrification would not have been, would not have to be at the stage where would need to be balanced.
Brad Lander:
Correct.
Ofer Cohen:
And also amazing uses that came only in the last decade.
Brad Lander:
So yeah. So, you know, we, you can imagine what it would have been if we had done it 10 years ago and I think there's a reason for optimism that we have a lot better chance of building a much more inclusive, much more sustainable, more mixed use and just more thoughtfully planned neighborhood as a result.
Ofer Cohen:
I think you made it almost your personal goal to make sure that this gets done and this gets done and that it gets done right before you leave this office, which I believe you're termed out.
Brad Lander:
Yes my come to the end of my term in 2021. I went in, I will say everything useful that I think elected officials do is done in partnership with community organizations and stakeholders and groups who are organizing. And I feel, you know, maybe as proud as anything else about Gowanus that we've just had so much engagement and that doesn't mean every single person is happy on the like, gee, it's too much development side or on the, we need more side. There'll be, there'll be voices that don't, aren't happy in the end, but we're lucky to be in a neighborhood that's got so much engagement and organizing, you know, I don't take for granted that you have a Gowanus Canal Conservancy and you know, we started this and we did a round of community engagement work on, Gowanus in my term before, in the Bloomberg administration before de Blasio came in. So we were ready with sort of a community vision and actually on like the second day of the de Blasio administration was a big snow storm. I trudged into city hall for a meeting with Alicia Glen, who was then the deputy mayor and said, Gowanus is a place to do so many of the things we want to do. And they were not ready for that task cause Gowanus is complex. The Superfund makes it complex. The mix of uses makes it complex. You know, so the idea in between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, neighborhoods that have almost no private sector affordable housing, that you could have a neighborhood that's about a third affordable it's pretty compelling. It's pretty exciting.
Ofer Cohen:20:59As the Gowanus heads into redevelopment. Brad Lander is part of a larger group of progressive politicians who have announced they will not accept contributions from real estate developers.
Brad Lander:21:08This one seems so obvious to me you know in hindsight, when you know, after Alexandria Ocasio Cortez got elected and some other folks started to raise this issue, I thought, you know what? This is important not only for my political future, like this is not only how's it going to play in my future political campaigns. I'm running for New York city comptroller. I don't want to be above reproach, but in the short term, it's just really important for doing Gowanus right. This is going to be complex. Balancing all these interests is not easy. Of course there's a set of people who don't want to see any development and of course those people are going to say, you know, Lander's just to sell out to real estate developers. That's why he's pushing for this Gowanus rezoning. And on the one hand most people who had paid any attention, you know, they don't have to know my whole personal story would say, you know, this actually involves a lot of thinking about how to balance the goals and interests we have. But still the way it plays out would be very easy for people to say, look, that's what this is. And the easiest way for me to give integrity to the decision making process in the Gowanus rezoning is to say I'm not going to take those contributions.
Ofer Cohen:
100% so I think one thing that's interesting is when you talk about the backlash, right? I mean the backlash is not just locally, it's on every level. It's in every council district. It's on the state level, all over the country. And so we are in an era, at least from where I sit, the backlash has dramatic consequences the rent regulation law is one of those, which I think that as a whole, the real estate community did not see coming down so hard. But I would also say that it was a complete contrast to the kind of process that you're trying to run on the Gowanus rezoning. There was actually no dialogue and there was actually no parties at the table. If you represent real estate interest, we don't have a conversation.
Brad Lander:
Look, partly Albany has changed very fast, you know, you know, part of what happened is a year ago is still a year ago today, Republicans were in control of the state Senate. And you know, I will say to folks in the real estate community, you know, if you had woken up earlier to the harm that was being done by rampant displacement, including just like, obviously most people are good people and don't, you know, engage in predatory practices. But everybody knew that a set of people were engaging in predatory eviction practices, were buying rent stabilized properties and moving hyper aggressively to take advantage of every loophole in the rent laws and throw out people who had lived there all their lives, in pretty heartless ways, in some cases, illegal ways, in some cases, things that really barely skirted the law. And then at the same time, when tenant organizations would come around and say, let's close the most egregious loopholes, would keep contributing to Republican state senators who weren't even mostly from New York City. And, and not only preserving the laws without closing the loopholes, but in many years kind of expanding the loopholes in a kinda game. And so that went on for so long and I don't think people could see or did see the anger that was building and, and if that had gotten changed earlier, I think you would add something different then obviously once that kind of flood gates opened and you know, the election, obviously, so many things matter here. Obviously the, you wouldn't have had such a strong swing of so many progressive Democrats coming in to the state Senate if it hadn't been for Trump. So look, yes, that all happened. That brought a big wave of change and there was you know, it went along with when the rent laws were expiring, like just a lot of things lined up. Look, even then though, I will say there might have been an opportunity earlier on to try to fashion some compromise. I think the industry counted on the governor to be a political backstop against all these new, the emergent left in the Senate.
Ofer Cohen:
There's one thing I want to try to really understand. Why did you pick the compcontroller role as your next job?
Brad Lander:
So this is actually, you've given me a perfect transition to it in thinking about how farsightedness and looking to the longterm is a critical part of what's hard but important in democracy. You know, democracy unfortunately becomes a system in which people are focused on short term gains. Like that's just kinda how it works. Like, what's going to be in the headlines tomorrow? What's going to be on Twitter? How am I going to do at the polls next? Looking to the longterm, like sometimes I think people think of that as just like kind of, prudishness or some kind of like you're a fiscal scold. But really, that's a form of social generosity and solidarity in all kinds of ways to our kids and our grandkids to our future selves. Like we're going to get older and we need a stable and sustainable and not drowning and not unequal city. The compcontroller is the job that has the responsibility to look to the longterm of the city. Sometimes I try to say it's like the prefrontal cortex of democracy the part that helps us do the right thing when it's the harder thing to do.
Ofer Cohen:
So if you listened, which you haven't, but you will, to some my shows, I usually end with a personal question, which is tell us something about yourself that nobody else knows about you.
Brad Lander:
Let's see, one thing is that the form of exercise I've been engaged in since the 2016 election is kickboxing. I don't think I look like or read like a kickboxer, but most mornings I go at six am and a kick and hit a bag. And that has been very good for me in this era of our history. So that's, that's maybe the most countered type of the of the things I do.
Ofer Cohen:
That's a great one. That's a great one, councilman Brad Lander, a kickboxer, and a longtime resident of Park Slope. Thank you so much.
Brad Lander:
This was really nice. Thank you so much for the invitation.