Sunset Park Activists Say Brooklyn-Queens Tram Planning Lacks Community Input

Image courtesy of Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — Some of Sunset Park’s most established activists have criticized the leadership of Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector (BQX), the main advocacy organization backing the proposed $2.5 billion inter-borough streetcar project.

The activists — Elizabeth Yeampierre and Ryan Chavez of UPROSE, which has focused on economic and environmental issues in Sunset Park for 50 years — also reiterated their past critiques that the BQX has been developed without meaningful community input, and could wind up hurting the very people advocates say it will benefit.

As proposed, the BQX would connect Astoria to Sunset Park via a 17-mile streetcar system. The project was backed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in February, with supporters saying it’s a needed transportation upgrade that will connect waterfront communities to growing job opportunities.

This week, Friends of the BQX, which paid for the first study of the plan and is now promoting it, made its board of directors public, listing the members on the group’s newly launched webpage.

The board includes major real estate developers, such as Two Trees Management, Tishman Speyer and The Durst Organization, and business associations like the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and Brooklyn Allied Bars and Restaurants.

Community organizations and activists are also among the Friends, including the Red Hook Initiative, which works with neighborhood youth, the Williamsburg-based Los Sures, and Paul Steely-White from Transportation Alternatives.

Industry City and the Fifth Avenue Committee, which develops affordable housing in South Brooklyn, are the board’s two members affiliated with Sunset Park.

But Yeampierre, UPROSE’s executive director, said Friday that her group was never contacted by the Friends before they went public with the BQX's design.

Yeampierre said that while UPROSE is not inherently against the BQX, the Friends board is dominated by real estate developers who would benefit financially from the project.

As a result, she said, the train's planning process has lacked meaningful community input.

Chavez and Yeampierre said they met Thursday with Ya-Ting Liu, the newly appointed executive director of the Friends group and a former leader at the New York League of Conservation Voters.

The activists said they left her with a series of questions they want answered, including queries on the train's proposed funding system and the fares it would charge.

Addition, city officials have said that ongoing public meetings on the BQX — including recent gatherings in Astoria and Sunset Park, with another planned for Red Hook on May 19 — are the beginning of a robust process that will seriously consider public opinion on the proposal.

But Yeampierre referred to the meetings as “community management, not community engagement."

“It is by definition a top-down development process that incorporated no grass-roots (input)” said Chavez, the infrastructure coordinator for UPROSE, describing the public BQX discussions as a “travelling sales show.”

Liu offered a different take on Friday.

"The board we announced this week has played a vital role in establishing the Friends group, setting the vision and our priorities," Liu said in a statement. "This outreach is just beginning, and we expect to work with every community in the corridor [where the BQX would run]."

"As someone who has worked on other community organizing efforts around transportation issues for nearly a decade," she continued, "I can tell you first-hand that the information that comes from the community is pivotal to city planners when making important final design and technical decisions."