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May 31, 2007
Eggs with Marty Markowitz
The Brooklyn BP on balancing cheesecakes with diets, affordable housing and why he doesn’t want to be public advocate
City Hall News
By Charlotte Eichna
A sit-down at Junior's with Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz provides a glimspe of the cuddly BP we all know and love.
Q: Switching gears—you’ve been a vocal proponent of affordable housing. What are some of the ways you’d like to tackle this problem in Brooklyn?
A: People I speak to that have left Brooklyn tell me, “Marty, we’d love to stay in Brooklyn. We can’t afford it here.” In Brooklyn, the problem is you want to build and we have no land, so you can only build vertically. And of course there is this romanticized version by some that all of Brooklyn lives in a brownstone. And that’s not true. We do have some wonderful, beautiful brownstone communities and I live in Park Slope and believe me, I love the area. But Brooklyn is home to all sorts of housing—high rise buildings, low rise buildings, tudors, colonials, limestones and brownstones and two families and four families—so we have a mix of all sorts of housing in the borough. But the truth of the matter is, as land becomes more scarce, you have to look for locations in the borough that lend themselves to building high rise buildings in order to meet the demand of those seeking a place to live, of all incomes. We don’t have land so we have to have smart development where we build housing and also respect the surrounding communities—we have to find that balance.Q: So this is one of the reasons you’ve been a force behind the Atlantic Yards development, right?
A: Absolutely, without a question. And also because Brooklyn is deserving of being a city that has national sports. Religion, music, family and sports are what bring people together. And the arena will be a big center of family life in this borough. We’ll have a national team to cheer for again, after over 50 years of our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers leaving. The kids in Brooklyn today deserve to have a national team just like I was lucky to have it in my era. And the jobs it will create, the housing, the beautiful architecture—it’s the right location, it’s the right space, it’s the right time. And it’s going to happen. And the people that are the naysayers, they won’t even be a footnote in history—and neither will I. Because once it opens, people will say, “Wow, it’s always been here. How did we live without this?”
NoLandGrab: How did we live without Marty Markowitz?
Q: When do you hope to see construction start?
A: I hope it will be yesterday. But hopefully maybe by the end of the year, at least, the process with the shovel, whatever, can happen, I hope.
Posted by lumi at May 31, 2007 7:32 AM