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web link to the online article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/nyregion/thecity/06warr.html

 

03/18/05 BLOCK MAGAZINE

The Williamsburg Warriors
Dancing Against Rezoning
Drinking For Affordable Housing

by Alex Padalka


button designs by Warrior Chris

Who says Williamsburg hipsters only care about looks and parties? Well, maybe they do, but some care enough about where and how they party to learn the issues, organize meetings (albeit sometimes over drinks) and plan a defensive to the city's proposed rezoning. "Mixed neighborhoods make better dance parties," reads the Williamsburg Warriors' mission.

The Warriors are a new breed of community activism in this area, an entirely new animal compared to the long-established coalitions such as the North Brooklyn Alliance and the Greenpoint Williamsburg Association for Parks and Planning. While this neighborhood is already unique in the fact that its younger residents actually care to join the community's opposition to firehouse closings and massive power plants, there is a significant section of the populace that spends infinitely more time drinking and dancing than protesting and picketing, and only vaguely understands what exactly a community board does and why.

The city’s plan for the neighborhood as it stands now, however, threatens to infringe on this care-free lifestyle as much as on the working class housing. Those 40-story towers would indiscriminately block the light from old Polish homes and indie rocker lofts alike and force the whole bohemian shebang to search for yet another affordable enclave.

"I don't want to keep running from one cool place to another cool place," said Warriors co-founder Siri, playing with a button that said 'We Ain't No SoHo'. "I'm willing to fight, and I don't think I'm alone."

Realizing the threat, the Warriors did what they do best to fight back - they threw a rock show and invited all their friends to have a good time. The group’s name, incidentally, was by far not a result of long deliberation and committee meetings, according to co-founder Eve, but rather a pull-out-of-you-know-where thing.

At the heart of the Warriors' mission, however, is a deep commitment to keeping the character of the area and making sure its current residents still have a home when the developers have their say. Co-founders and band-mates Eve and Siri have been playing music, making clothes, bartending and throwing parties in Williamsburg for years, and they chose to do it here for a reason.

"I come from the Old South - so closed off to diversity, and the reason I fell in love with this neighborhood is because it is so open to diversity,” Eve said. The Warriors’ main goal is to “keep Williamsburg a mixed-use community, and a mixed culturally community,” she stressed. “Can you stop gentrification midstream? That’s what I want to do.”

With the proceeds from the January 20th rock show at Savalas, where Eve bartends, the girls have already bought a button maker and plan to make posters, t-shirts and buttons with a message to the rest of their neighbors. They’ve also set up a website where busy socialites can learn more about the city’s plan and the community’s response, and conveniently sign on to the massive letter-writing campaign to the city council.

The Warriors have come in at the last stages of the game, with just two months left before the historical city council vote. They are not alone to perk up in this important period, however - on February 27th they joined dozens of other “young people” at the Change You Want To See gallery for a planning meeting. Opened by community liaison and activist extraordinaire Philip DePaolo, the group was an impressive show of force from the so-called “creative industries”, most of which have come to know each other during the anti-war protests last year and actions around the Republican National Convention and the fateful elections.

Coming together again under one banner were over 30 groups ranging from alterna-activists Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, the Hungry March Band and Green Dragon to local business owners and representatives of civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel and more established organizations such as the North Brooklyn Alliance. In less than three hours, the group quickly divided the tasks for a focused campaign in support of the community’s alternative development plan, and judging from what they’ve pulled together at last summer’s NEO-CONey Island Block Party alone, there are bound to be some exciting and creative resistance actions in the weeks to come. If you haven’t yet, plug in and stay tuned, there is less than two months left.

Check out www.williamsburgwarriors.org for more information.

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save williamsburg

Waterfront Grab in Bkl'n
by Rahul Chadha , from the nyc.indymedia.org April 12, 2005
Developers See Big Money on the Williamsburg Coast
Photo: About 350 Williamsburg and Greenpoint residents gathered on the steps of City Hall April 4 to oppose Mayor Bloomberg's plan to rezone a vast swath of the North Brooklyn waterfront affecting both Williamsburg and Greenpoint. credit: Megan Joplin
Call it The Wall. A two-mile stretch of prime north Brooklyn real estate developed into a towering row of luxury condominium buildings that range in height from 150 to 350 feet, effectively cutting off the existing Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods from the East River waterfront. This is the future of the industrial strip of land that hugs the river, as envisioned in a massive rezoning proposal put forth by the Bloomberg Administration's City Planning Commission. Not surprisingly, hordes of opposition to the proposal has been organizing for the past few years, ever since the administration's plans were made public.
What really sticks in the craw of community activists is the Bloomberg plan's disregard of the (197-a) planning documents (so named for the section of the city charter allowing communities to develop their own development plans) formulated by a coalition of residents and members of Community Board 1, which serves the two north Brooklyn neighborhoods. Those plans, which were formulated over several years - up to 15 by some accounts - differ significantly from the Bloomberg plan, which itself claims to build on the principles put forth by the (197-a) plans.
Joe Vance considers that declaration a laughable conceit. "The (197-a) calls for a rezoning towards residential. Beyond that it's hard to see any correlation," says Vance, a member of the Greenpoint Williamsburg Association for Parks and Planning (GWAPP), a coalition of 40 community groups that have been lobbying for the community plans' adoption. Organizations like GWAPP see a laundry list of problems with the Bloomberg plan: the complete lack of guaranteed affordable housing, one quarter the amount of park land as recommended by the city government's own standards, and buildings whose size would be grossly out of context with the existing neighborhood. Vance also says the Bloomberg plan is driven by the mayor's desire for a waterfront park to help sell New York City to the International Olympic Committee, and the prospect of possibly providing one-third of the 60,000 housing units he aims to bring to the city, in one fell swoop.
The (197-a) plans call for a guarantee of 40 percent of the new housing to be designated affordable to current residents, whose median income hovers around $27,000. They also make provisions for small businesses and light industries, such as metal shops, furniture outlets and lighting manufacturers. The height of the tallest buildings would also be capped at 200 feet, 150 feet lower than the tallest buildings in the Bloomberg plan.
Community groups like GWAPP and the Williamsburg Warriors have spent the last few months lobbying City Council members hard in favor of the (197-a) plans, or at the very least, a compromise between the two. Chris Zucker, a Brooklyn native and resident of Williamsburg for the past three years, admits that he only had a rough idea just how drastically the proposed zoning plan would change the character of his neighborhood until relatively recently. Along with the two other members of the Williamsburg Warriors, Zucker grew into neighborhood activism, spending his energy convincing the disparate demographics within the affected neighborhoods - Polish, Latino, hipster - of the destructiveness of the Bloomberg plan. "I just don't feel like being priced out of every neighborhood I've ever lived in," says Zucker.
Activists see the gentrification of Soho as an ugly precedent to what might happen to their neighborhoods should the Bloomberg plan go through.
Council Member David Yassky, a Democrat who represents the affected neighborhoods, has already come out against the Bloomberg plan, but stops short of full endorsement of the (197-a) plans. "The community plan is much closer to our idea of what the community should look like," said Evan Thies, a spokesman from Yassky's office. "But we're willing to reach a compromise where we get more affordable housing and more open space." Meaning, essentially, that Yassky's office believes future affordable housing needs will inevitably precipitate the construction of buildings significantly larger than those currently in the neighborhood. Says Thies: "We have to allow for some larger buildings in order to facilitate the number of affordable units we need to sustain that community."
Compromise is not taboo, at least not to Vance, who says that GWAPP has been trying to find some common ground with the city for the past two years. "What we'd like to see happen is some real negotiations with the city, some true movement towards where we are," he says. But Vance is not buying in to the city's argument that affordable housing is unattainable without residential towers crowding out the waterfront. He says that buildings 15 to 20 stories high with 30 percent of the housing designated affordable are a feasible option. "They're real numbers - they work. The city just doesn't want to believe the numbers because they're too beholden to the development community."
The Bloomberg plan has already suffered several small defeats, having been condemned by Community Board 1, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate for New York City. However, on March 13 the City Planning Commission voted in favor of the Bloomberg plan, a decision that is hard to consider a surprise considering the agency was voting on their own proposal.
Warriors Eve Sibley and Siri Wilson were part of those who crowded the steps of City Hall during a seven-hour public hearing on the plans held April 2. "Our council members knew there were 300 people at the hearing, maybe 400, and that's nothing compared to the number of people we're going to get involved," said Sibley. The plans must still go through various committees before the 50-day City Council review process expires on May 3. It is expected that the council's adoption of a rezoning plan will occur sometime in May.





MORE ARTICLES ON THE REZONING....

 

New York Times 4-4-05
The Sun 4-4-05
NY Daily News
Village Voice 4-4-05
New York 1
New York 1(pdf)
WYNC 4-4-05
Metro(pdf) Warrior Eve's boss interviewed in this one!
Brooklyn Daily

contact the warriors founders: EVE & SIRI



the future is bright, don't give up. brought to you by sirius space and sleve76. greatly assisted by .ike the great.c.2005 and fabulous designs by warrior chris.