Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso outside Borough Hall (photo: office of Brooklyn Borough President)

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed and exacerbated widespread disparities in communities across the city, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso launched an effort to create a comprehensive plan that would drive long-term decisions in the borough with a focus on public health outcomes. Later this month, Reynoso is expected to release the final recommendations from that effort after months of soliciting input on the public’s priorities for Brooklyn’s future.

Unlike some major cities across the world and even other municipalities in the United States, New York City does not have a single comprehensive plan that guides its development, addressing everything from housing to transportation, school seats, firehouses and police precincts, parks and open space, and much more.

Successive administrations have created various planning documents over the years – PlaNYC under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, OneNYC under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, and most recently, AdaptNYC and yet another iteration of PlaNYC under Mayor Eric Adams – while the city charter also includes more than a dozen other such guidelines and mandates that affect zoning, development, and infrastructure. 

Proponents of comprehensive planning, including Reynoso, argue that this patchwork of rules and regulations should give way to a plan with some central logic of the various needs of communities, where land use decisions are based on broader strategic goals.

“This city for too long has been focused on zoning…but what we don't do is planning,” said Reynoso, a Democrat and former City Council member, in a phone interview. “What ends up happening is that we have huge gaps in infrastructure, services and resources in mostly poor neighborhoods that are getting developed at a higher rate than more affluent areas.”

Reynoso has long talked about more equitable housing growth across the borough, with more growth in whiter, wealthier areas that have often been unwelcoming to development. While previously serving in the City Council, he passed major waste management equity legislation, and has also been a long-time proponent of more expansive and equitable transit infrastructure in the borough. His comprehensive plan combines all those efforts, while prioritizing housing affordability and better health outcomes, two major needs that have deepened as a result of the pandemic.   

In 2019, Reynoso and his Council colleagues, along with a coalition of advocacy groups, Thriving Communities, urged a Charter Revision Commission to propose a ballot measure on comprehensive planning. After that effort failed, Council Speaker Corey Johnson issued a report in December 2020, proposing a comprehensive planning framework through legislation. That too was unsuccessful amid pushback from the mayoral administration and hesitancy among some Council members, prompting Reynoso to undertake his own initiative once he was elected Brooklyn borough president, taking office in January 2022.

Reynoso partnered with the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the New York Academy of Medicine to first create an existing conditions report on Brooklyn’s long-term needs. The report provides a detailed breakdown of the demographics of the borough, health outcomes, socioeconomic indicators and trends, land use and built conditions, the housing landscape, transit infrastructure, environmental conditions, and neighborhood and public safety metrics. 

Using various data sources and academic studies, the report points to the link between housing and health, concluding that “Advancing affordable housing is critical to achieving health equity. This will require nothing less than collaborative engagement from stakeholders including city planning and policy, neighborhood advocacy, architecture and construction, real estate development, and City government.”

“We shouldn't be negotiating off of how people feel, and their personal experiences related to resources and infrastructure. We should be doing it off of datasets,” Reynoso said.

That report helped create the draft recommendations, which have been presented to the public for feedback that Reynoso’s office has been collecting through a survey over the past few months. For instance, on housing, the recommendations include requiring 100% affordable housing in perpetuity for projects receiving public subsidies, encouraging transit-oriented development in zones within half-a-mile of subway and rail stations, and designating the entire borough as a cease and desist zone that bans certain real estate solicitations from investors, developers, and speculators.

On healthcare, the draft recommendations include expanding Neighborhood Health Centers, creating an Office of Healthcare Accountability that provides price transparency for health services at hospitals, siting healthcare facilities in mixed-use development, and more. Environmental recommendations include a zoning text amendment to require new evacuation plans for new construction in floodplains and support for the NY & NJ Harbor & Tributaries Focus Area Feasibility Study (HATS), which is focused on coastal storm risk management. 

The survey is scheduled to conclude on Wednesday, June 7, and will help form the final report expected later this month. While the report could help shape Brooklyn’s future for years to come, it cannot require anything be done by the city given the limited powers of the borough president’s office. Still, Reynoso and partners are seeking to use the significant bully pulpit of the office and the weight of the planning effort to turn heads.

“New York is really unique in not having a comprehensive plan...We're really behind the times,” said Moses Gates, RPA’s vice president for housing and neighborhood planning. “A comprehensive plan is something that's not a small undertaking. It would take a lot of involvement. It’s something that would take some effort, but is well worth it.” 

As Gates noted, in terms of population, Brooklyn would qualify as the fourth-largest city in the country. “This is the biggest comprehensive planning effort since Los Angeles updated its comprehensive plan in the early 2000s, if you're just talking about the size of an area,” he said. But the major difference being that Brooklyn will not have the power to implement its own plan. 

Though the borough president’s office plays an important role in the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), its recommendations are strictly advisory. Borough presidents do allocate tens of millions of dollars in capital funding each year and make appointments to key boards, like the City Planning Commission. They can also work with City Council members to introduce legislation.

Reynoso says that his comprehensive plan will help him expedite the process by determining whether a developer’s proposal is beneficial to the borough. “In our process, if you fall within the principles and the guidelines of the comprehensive plan, we're going to be moving forward with approval very quickly,” he said, referring to the office’s role in the ULURP process, which is often decried as too long and involved, slowing down and sometimes torpedoing needed development. “We're trying to see that we can get that out in three days instead of 30 days.”

It will also be a crucial tool that gives Brooklyn residents, and City Council members, clear and objective data on which they can base their own decisions on development issues, and which they can also use to hold the city accountable.

“For lack of a better word…it’s just shaming people,” Reynoso said. He cited the City Council’s oft-used tradition of “member deference” where the Council generally votes with the wishes of members whose districts will house a certain project. “They use member deference to shoot down projects that are extremely meaningful to the greater good, because in their local district, they have a lot of pushback, or they don't want to expend political capital,” said Reynoso, who faced some criticism of his own for his part in stalling a proposed rezoning in Bushwick, in his Council district, amid negotiations with the de Blasio administration. 

Reynoso said the comprehensive plan will also preempt efforts by NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) officials and residents that have resisted more development in their communities. Lower-income communities of color, he said, have built tens of thousands of units of housing in North Brooklyn in the last decade, compared to paltry development in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods in South Brooklyn. “We won’t allow for that community to come to us and say that they don't want development to happen or that they're not excited about it,” he said. “We're going to make sure that people know. I think the information is going to be valuable for us to go to that community board and say ‘you've done nothing, and it's time you step up.’”

Advocates and experts are hoping that a successful effort by Reynoso will encourage other officials to follow suit, whether it's the four remaining borough presidents or even the mayoral administration. “Borough President Reynoso has been a great partner in working with the administration to deliver housing at all income levels and in all communities across Brooklyn, and we look forward to working with him in this process,” said a Department of City Planning spokesperson in a statement. 

At least one other borough president, Manhattan’s Mark Levine, has undertaken a similar, though more targeted, effort. In January, Levine unveiled a housing plan for his borough that identified 171 locations that can accommodate more than 73,000 new units of housing, 41% of which would be affordable homes, and suggested a list of areas for rezonings. 

“I really feel like a comprehensive plan can build trust,” Reynoso said. “We can show people that there's a larger picture out here that we're looking at, not just housing, and that we're going to take care of everything else you need as well.”

Council Member Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn Democrat and co-chair of the Council’s Progressive Caucus, said Reynoso initiative is “a tremendous opportunity to advance equity in Brooklyn.” 

“Antonio is using his bully pulpit, his policy operation, his outreach and organizing capacity at Borough Hall to ask every community in the borough to step up and contribute to working together to address the public health and housing inequities between too many Brooklyn communities,” he added. 

Restler pointed, for example, to the stark disparity in life expectancy in the borough. In Brownsville, a predominantly Black neighborhood, the life expectancy is 74.1 years, more than a decade lower than in Borough Park, a predominantly white neighborhood where the life expectancy is 84.2 years, according to the existing conditions report. 

“I believe that Antonio is advancing a vision that is resonant with a diverse cross-section of leaders across North Brooklyn, Central Brooklyn, Downtown Brooklyn, and Southern Brooklyn, and he has the potential to bring us together to buy in on the sensible comprehensive planning goals that his office will eventually release,” Restler said. (Several other Brooklyn Council members did not respond to requests for comment on the planning effort.)

Chris Walters, senior land use policy associate at the nonprofit Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, is hopeful that Reynoso’s initiative can demonstrate that comprehensive planning is “not this crazy idea.”

“I’m hopeful that it can serve as a model for process and then as a model for outcomes, for showing how a comprehensive plan can make decisions more transparent and make decisions more democratic,” he said. 

Walters said the plan can move the city away from a “project-by-project focus” towards a broader vision where investment in communities is informed by equity objectives. 

Skeptics of comprehensive planning in the past have said the city already conducts such a strategic analysis through its fair share criteria, which are established in the city charter and that require a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits associated with city facilities” such as schools, homeless shelters, waste management facilities, and jails, to name a few. Those criteria have largely failed to meet their stated goals and there are communities across the city, particularly low-income communities of color, that have often been overburdened with what they see as undesirable infrastructure such as shelters and simultaneously suffered underinvestment in facilities in high-demand like parks and libraries. 

The previous administration’s opposition to comprehensive planning was expressed by Vicki Been, then Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, at a City Council hearing in February 2020. “Much of the criticism of the fair share criteria is that they are like an environmental impact review, all you have to do is show that you considered the fairness of the distribution. You don't have to meet any numerical or other target because one wasn't set because it's too difficult of a question,” she said in her testimony. “And so there's no reason to believe that moving the question into what we call a comprehensive planning system would accomplish anything other than what is accomplished in the conversation about fair share.” Been, now an NYU professor, did not respond to a request for comment for this article. 

The Department of City Planning’s executive director at the time, Anita Larement, said at the hearing that comprehensive planning wouldn’t solve the problem of local community opposition. “On the one hand, people are looking for more community control over decision-making, which actually we know will lead to more problems in regards to siting things that people don't want in their neighborhoods. And this notion that somehow on the other hand if we can do comprehensive planning that we will solve these problems? What I would really submit is that, that is not correct,” she said.

“To say that fair share hasn't worked doesn't mean that we don't need this comprehensive equity focused approach,” Walters said. The next step, he said, is to try to ensure that the comprehensive plan is “more than just a roadmap” and involves binding actions that the city should take. At the local level, he said Council members should put forward their own district plans and principles, with proactive steps for equitable development rather than reacting to each individual project that comes across their desks. 

As Gates said, those decisions often “get made on an ad hoc basis with no context as to the greater needs of the city. And that's what the plan is there for. It’s there to illustrate the greater needs of the city and how we plan on meeting them.”

“I think this is a model that could be workable at the city level,” said Council Member Restler, “and if the borough president proves it here in Brooklyn then we should consider legislation in the Council that could give this more teeth.”

“It's an important document because Brooklyn obviously continues to evolve, continues to change, continues to grow. So to really look at the borough comprehensively is something that borough presidents should be doing at least every year or two,” said Carlo Scissura, President & CEO of the New York Building Congress, in an interview, praising Reynoso’s initiative.

Howard Slatkin, a former top City Planning official under de Blasio and currently executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a nonprofit policy group, had a more measured take on comprehensive planning. “What the Borough President [Reynoso] is doing and what Borough President Levine has done are totally legitimate and valid ways of trying to provide a context for decision making,” he said.

But, he said strategic plans need to be living documents that can also accommodate policies and development that don’t meet their stated objectives.“Plans are not gospel…The plan is a way of coming up with some targets for public policy to hit. And just because something doesn't hit your target doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.”

He also pointed out that plans are only as good as the people in charge who will implement them, and that elected officials need flexibility for their own priorities. “The plan doesn't substitute for the decisions. The decisions are the responsibility and the right of the people who are elected to office today,” he said. “You can't pass a plan and say that your successor in office doesn't get to change it. That's not the way democracy works.”

[LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: Borough President Antonio Reynoso's Vision for Brooklyn]

Note - This article has been updated with comments from Carlo Scissura and Howard Slatkin.