Mayor 'Shuns' Sunset Park's Request For Help With Industry City

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — Sunset Park officials' plan to turn a massive rezoning of Industry City's 35-acre campus into a win for the community took a blow recently when Mayor Bill de Blasio's office denied their request for city funds to help the waterfront.

The mayor, through a Dec. 13 letter from planning Director Anita Laremont, told Council Member Carlos Menchaca and Community Board 7 Chair Cesar Zuniga that the city cannot use its money to help Sunset Park with the rezoning given that it was proposed by a private developer, not the city itself.

Menchaca and Zuniga had asked the mayor to help fund a new school, job tracking and tenant protections for Sunset Park as a major facet of Menchaca's "Industry City, our way" plan, which he has said will ensure the controversial transformation of the complex helps, instead of harms, the working class, immigrant neighborhood.

Menchaca and Zuniga said Monday that the mayor's response was offensive, arguing that the Industry City rezoning should warrant city help given that it is the largest private application to rezone a waterfront industrial zone in New York City's history.

“To expect a community, even one as engaged, organized, and ready as Sunset Park, to clarify these concerns on its own without any assistance from the city’s vast resources and expertise is a slap in the face," the officials wrote.

“If this is how the Mayor responds to a community’s request for assistance and dialogue when facing the largest private rezoning application for one of the City’s last remaining industrial zones, it calls into question their commitment to strengthening and preserving the City’s manufacturing and industrial integrity on the waterfront," they continued.

But Laremont contended that the Neighborhood Development Fund, where the money to help Sunset Park would come from, is reserved only for city-led rezonings, not private applications like Industry City's.

The de Blasio administration is already working on the housing insecurity, climate change adaption, underemployment and industrial preservation concerns that the Industry City application, submitted officially in October, has brought up in the neighborhood, she added.

Industry City's massive rezoning application, now in the beginning stages of its public review period, currently proposes altering zoning rules to make way for 900,000 square feet of new food and retail space, 600,000 square feet of classrooms and educational facilities and a pair of hotels with more than 400 rooms.

Laremont's response has renewed calls among residents opposed to the rezoning that Menchaca veto the rezoning altogether. Menchaca has said that he will not approve Industry City's application unless a set of conditions, the mayor's help being one of them, is reached.

The council member should instead be focused on a comprehensive plan for the waterfront instead of negotiating with Industry City, they said.

“Sunset Park residents now call on Council Member Carlos Menchaca to keep his word and publicly announce a veto of the private plan and instead invite him to start public planning with and for Sunset Park residents,"Protect Sunset Park organizer Antoinette Martinez said. "Next year the city must submit a comprehensive waterfront plan for 2030. That’s the plan we need our Council Member to prioritize first."

Industry City has said that, at Menchaca's request, they plan to revise the proposal to eliminate the hotels and limit retail before it reaches the end of the five-month approval process. The developers and a coalition of community members are working on a legally-binding "community benefits agreement" that will enshrine these changes.

Community Board 7, which held a public hearing on the application earlier this month, is expected to take its vote on the proposal in January. The application would then head to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the City Planning Commission and City Council.