Brooklyn Borough President On City Of Yes vs. NIMBYs, Developer 'Scare' Tactics

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso isn’t afraid to call out the real estate industry on playing politics amid New York City’s worst housing crisis in decades. But he doesn’t think that should stop them from building in his backyard.

Reynoso has given impassioned speeches advocating for zoning reforms that would facilitate housing development across NYC. But he’s also been just as candid in calling out developers and brokers for their role in the city’s housing crisis.

“Rents are as high as they've ever been in the City of New York,” he told Bisnow. “Development is happening at a pace that I think they're comfortable with because they're making record profits. I want to be very careful about allowing real estate folks to control the narrative about why they do or don't do things.”

Since starting his term as borough president in 2022, Reynoso has advocated for the removal of parking minimums for new residential construction and called on the real estate industry to help shelter the hundreds of thousands of migrants that have arrived in NYC over the past three years. He’s also spoken out against NIMBYism, been involved with Mayor Eric Adams’ initiative to educate tenants about their rights and appointed an academic focused on urban planning and climate change mitigation to the City Planning Commission.

Reynoso sat down with Bisnow this week to discuss Adams’ City of Yes proposal for housing creation, where he wants to see more development in Brooklyn and how to understand what’s really behind the NIMBY pushback against development in some neighborhoods.

Prior to becoming Brooklyn BP, Reynoso spent two terms on the New York City council representing District 34, which includes Bushwick, Ridgewood and Williamsburg. He worked as former Council Member Diana Reyna’s chief of staff from 2009 until his own run for office. He is a graduate of Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where he earned a BA in Political Science in 2006, working as a community organizer in the years between his graduation and his political career. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Bisnow: What do you think is the biggest issue facing your constituents right now as it relates to commercial real estate and housing?

Reynoso: It's affordability. There's no other way to put it. In New York City, there's a robust housing market for the rich and the middle class, and the poor are having a hard time making it month by month. It really feels like there's no light at the end of the tunnel for many residents in Brooklyn. 

Bisnow: You’ve endorsed City of Yes, contingent on it including Accessory Dwelling Units. Can you tell me about your reasons for supporting the proposal?

Reynoso: Obviously there's a need for more housing. I think there's a sentiment throughout New York City that the City of Yes proposal is some radical, revolutionary change that is going to change the character of the city of New York. That is not something I agree with.

City of Yes is a chapter that should be written as part of a larger book. We have so much more we need to do to make housing more affordable, to build more housing, to allow for people to have choice in neighborhoods, and we're just not there yet. City of Yes is changing text that should have been changed years ago to speak to our time versus 50, 60 years ago. But the reason I support it is because we need more housing. I'm supportive of any thoughtful or innovative opportunities to promote more housing.

Bisnow: Why are ADUs a sticking point for you?

Reynoso: For a long time in the City of New York, development has been happening in what they call ‘opportunity areas,’ which tend to be poor, Black and brown neighborhoods in and around transit areas. The people that have done practically nothing when it comes to addressing the housing crisis in our city have been areas in our borough, in our city that are mostly single, two- and three-family home areas. They just are NIMBYs, for lack of a better word — just people that are afraid of change or are not contributing to the greater good of the housing market. 

It just makes it hard for me to make a case to these Black and brown areas, when it comes down to doing citywide texts, that we would again ask them to bear the burden of assisting us in getting us out of this hole, while people that live in smaller-zoned areas again contribute nothing. My reasoning for supporting the ADUs is that equity is deeply important and I want to be able to make the case that we're all contributing, not just a few of us.

Bisnow: How do you then square that with a fellow borough president, Queens' Donovan Richards, who has said that he can only support the proposal without ADUs?

Reynoso: I think we all have unique takes on how to address this housing crisis per borough. I don't want to speak to a fellow president from another borough and their decisions that they're making. I know in Brooklyn, we need housing of all types. Everyone's going to play a role in Brooklyn, but the circumstances of Brooklyn might be different than the circumstances of Queens. We need contributions from every single part of this borough.

Bisnow: What impact could City of Yes have for Brooklyn’s housing supply specifically?

Reynoso: I think after we pass this, 10 years down the line, you won't be able to really tell what the difference was. Maybe cumulatively, we'll look at the entire borough and see how many units were built through it. The impact will be there, spread out over a significant amount of land here in Brooklyn.

What I think is also important, and I think people fail to see, is that we would be passing a citywide text amendment. That is very rare. A citywide comprehensive plan is the way we solve for a lot of our issues — not only housing, but in the city. Right now, our politics makes it so that we're hyper-localized in how we plan. One community could feel that it doesn't want to change character, doesn't want to increase housing, it might not want a homeless shelter, it might not want a school or a park or whatever it is. They believe that what happens in that district at a very local level doesn't affect the rest of the city. That's just not something that I believe in. 

Every single part of the city contributes to some other part of the city. I want to make sure that people understand that we're all connected. City of Yes is doing that. Every other problem — education, transportation, housing, crime — can be better solved if we're making citywide decisions versus these five thumbs that we seem to have created in the city of New York, where neighborhoods really don't feel connected.

Bisnow: How would you want to see it impact South Brooklyn?

Reynoso: Somebody in Bay Ridge doesn't know that they've built less than 100 units of housing over the last 60 years. They don't understand the impact of the lack of development and how that's contributed to that crisis there. City of Yes is going to allow them to see, I hope on a larger scale, how other communities are doing their part.

The modest increase that we're asking from folks in South Brooklyn becomes more tenable and something that they can see themselves doing. We're not talking about putting a 40-story tower in Bay Ridge. We're talking about five stories near a city center or six stories near transit, or allowing for you to convert a garage into a studio apartment. It truly is a drop in the bucket, but it’s significant in a real way. What I'm hoping to see in South Brooklyn is just a buy-in for doing something.

Bisnow: Another group that you need to get buy-in from is developers. What’s the math behind your argument that housing developers could make as much money building below Eastern Parkway as they could building in Williamsburg? It’s a hard argument to make with the current contrast in transport connections from those two areas to Manhattan.

Reynoso: I don't think that the proximity to Manhattan is the value of the transit network in New York City. This idea that the reason why Williamsburg is doing well is its proximity to Manhattan? I actually think that Williamsburg is a neighborhood in the classic sense: You could walk outside and within less than 10 blocks you could find anything you could possibly need. That type of built environment is what people are looking for.

Transit is valuable to get to Manhattan, but [also] to get to anywhere in the city. The G train, for example, is increasing its ridership on a regular basis. Proximity to Manhattan is not the do-all end-all. It's building better neighborhoods that have value.

It doesn't matter where you go. In the neighborhoods that don't even have transit access, the rents are sky-high almost everywhere in Brooklyn, including Flatbush and Bay Ridge and Midwood. You just can't find affordable rents anywhere. So this idea that the market can't carry the cost, I just don't agree with that. If you're still fetching $3,000 for a two-bedroom in Bay Ridge, those numbers add up.

Bisnow: You said at a Bisnow event last month that you're “tired of Black and brown city council members going through rezonings again and again, and white city council members further south never doing it.” Can you expand on what you've seen as the differences between these parts of Brooklyn, and how City of Yes would bring better balance?

Reynoso: It's not necessarily council members that represent largely white constituencies saying that they don't want to do something. It's just that the city never presents those as opportunity districts. They only present the Black and brown ones.

If the argument is that these neighborhoods have to be in close proximity to Manhattan and have transportation access, they did rezoning in East New York, which is the furthest part of Brooklyn to Manhattan. Again, a Black and brown district with a Latino council member and a Black council member at that time. There's not a consistency there, because then we would be talking about rezoning in parts of Park Slope rezonings in and around Brooklyn Heights. Those areas have a proximity to Manhattan that should be valuable in a high-opportunity area, but those areas are not getting rezoned.

The city was not equitable in the work that it was doing to find locations in Brooklyn that it wanted to rezone. I'm just trying to push back here and ask the city to do better and make decisions that are equitable.

Bisnow: You’ve recently thrown your weight behind efforts to halt an apartment proposal near the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. You called the gardens sacred and said you were protecting its shadows. How do you square that with your push to help Brooklyn add more housing supply at a time of record low vacancy rates?

Reynoso: I have approved dozens of proposals all throughout Brooklyn. There's been no denial of any development in Brooklyn that comes through my office. This is a very unique and special case. It would be equivalent to me building on an African Burial Ground. There's just some places where we can't build.

In this case, it's not so much those shadows in a park. It's the Botanic Gardens. It needs sunlight to thrive and survive, and it exists specifically to showcase international and local plant life. Outside of that unique case, there's very few other moments where you could possibly see me not supporting development and growth in Brooklyn.

I want to be very clear, also, that there is a rezoning that happened here already during the David Dinkins era. They can build right now, as of right. They just want to do more. The problem with that is that it would affect the purpose of the Botanic Gardens.  

I wouldn't support any building in and around the Botanic Gardens that would create a shadow on the Botanic Gardens exclusively. This one very unique situation of an overzealous developer trying to take advantage of the crisis versus actually trying to do right.

Bisnow: Are you concerned that City of Yes could lead to more scenarios like this one at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, where the argument that there is an overwhelming need for housing is used to push into public space?

Reynoso: What people feel is that the City of Yes is supposed to solve the crisis. It absolutely doesn't do that. I actually think that City of Yes falls deeply short of a comprehensive plan, but right now this chapter is the only thing that is politically viable in our environment. Once we do any rezoning, we need to talk about increasing park space, increasing schools, transportation access, all these things that are deeply important because they make good neighborhoods. 

When these scenarios come up, what ends up happening is that communities feel that the only time they're going to get this valuable infrastructure that builds real neighborhoods is negotiating against growth or against development. The city has made that the only way for neighborhoods to be able to get what they want.

I don't necessarily disagree with people that these types of actions make it so that it's a bigger drain on city resources like parks, but I think that's a different conversation. We're not going to solve crime with the City of Yes, we're not going to solve parking with City of Yes.

I think that's the challenge that the mayor is having right now, is that all these council members are asking for things that this is not supposed to be solving for. This is simply a change to a text amendment that makes it more flexible, it gives a little more wiggle room and less bureaucracy and red tape for developers to build buildings that make sense during our time.

Bisnow: Very little got built in terms of housing in NYC last year, with developers largely blaming the death of the 421-a tax incentive. What’s your stance on the 421-a extension for select projects and on the abatement’s replacement, 485-x?

Reynoso: I remember the conversation last year being about how it is practically impossible to build in New York City without these tax abatements. They were saying conversions will never happen in the city, it's practically impossible even with a tax abatement. It was part of this tactic used by real estate to scare people into getting them what they want. And now, we see all these applications coming in for conversions citywide over a tax break that they thought wasn't significant enough. Applications came pouring in for conversions.

Every side is going to do its part. The tenants are going to fight for maximum opportunity so they're not getting evicted unjustly and so forth. The real estate industry is going to do everything it can to make their bottom lines as profitable as possible. Having these narratives put forth is deeply important for them to do that. 

There are many reasons why we didn't see development last year. One is this is an incentive program that they absolutely knew was coming. It would have been a failed administration had the Governor not been able to pull off a housing deal for two years in a row. Everyone knew it was coming, so if you can just hold out a year to fight for tax abatements that would increase the amount of money you're going to make, then why not take that chance? That's exactly what they did, and they got what they wanted. I'm not going to allow for developers to try to own this idea that no development happened exclusively because 421-a was knocked off.

Bisnow: Some developers have said they won't use 485-x because it's got too many wage and affordability protections. Do you think it’s a better deal? 

Reynoso: I think that 485-x is a better deal. Right now, we’re fighting for a significant amount of affordable housing. You want to start dealing with that so that these developers don't feel that they're obligated or don't want to pay for low-income housing in their projects and feel like we're asking them for too much. Start paying people a living wage so they can afford the apartments that they're building for you — 485-x would make it so that a significant amount of the people working on these buildings would be able to afford to live in the same buildings, which I think is valuable for the developers. It's creating a larger middle class in the city of New York, which can save us and could save their work.

This is deeply profitable for developers no matter the scenario, and I think it's showing. They're trying to say that they don't have choice, that we've limited their opportunities. We're giving them choices to make, and at this point, they're making a conscious decision not to make those choices.

Bisnow: I would be remiss if I didn't ask this, given the events of the last week and comments that have been leaked to the press: do you have any concerns that the FBI investigations into Eric Adams have any potential impact on City of Yes and housing development going forward? 

Reynoso: City of Yes and the fight for it stands on its own merit. No matter what's happening internally in the Mayor's Office, this proposal had the opportunity to pass regardless.