On Primary Day, Brad Lander parked himself in front one of
his favorite places in the 39th district: a corner on the edge of Kensington
that is surrounded by a school, a park, and a library.
“It’s a place of great civic energy,” he said, pointing out
the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church across the way. “Not a place I think I got
a lot of votes from, but still…”
That corner, though, turned out to be crucial in Lander’s
primary campaign to replace public advocate-elect Bill de Blasio in the
Brooklyn brownstone belt district. From that corner, Lander caught voters as
they emerged from the Fort Hamilton subway stop, and persuaded them to take
minute to pop over to the schoolhouse on their way home and vote.
Lander went about his campaign methodically, slowly
gathering support from some of the local political heavyweights, including Rep.
Jerrold Nadler, State Sen. Daniel Squadron, and Assembly Member Dov Hikind, as
well as the Working Families Party and the New York Times.
Lander comes to the Council with more of an
activist/academic pedigree than a political one. He served for six years as the
head of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a public policy institute
designed to aid local planning efforts. Prior to that, he led the Fifth Avenue
Committee of Park Slope.
“I see my service on the Council largely as an extension of
the kind of civic advocacy work that I’ve been doing,” he says. “Hopefully as a
Council member you get your phone calls returned a little quicker.”
His new colleagues say they expect Lander to quickly emerge
as one of the leaders on the Council.
“He’s going to be great, I think,” said Council Member Gale
Brewer, who has a relationship going back years with Lander. “He’s
really smart, and he understand the struggles that families go through, and he
understand the solutions.”
On the Council, Lander says his focus will be on education,
particularly around parental involvement, and on building what he calls
“sustainable neighborhoods.”
The remnants of an unsustainable approach to neighborhood
building is made plain a few blocks away from Lander’s favorite corner, across
a small pedestrian bridge over the highway into the neighboring community of
Windsor Terrace.
There, Lander points out a half-built brick home that
developers abandoned once the economy turned sour, destroying a mid-block
single family home in the process. A homeless Vietnam War veteran has built a
small shed against some of the rubble and moved in to the makeshift home.
Finding a home for the vet, and cleaning up the blight are some of his immediate concerns, he says, but changing city policies so that such properties do not linger is the longer-term goal.
This kind of failure to clean up after the housing bust
comes into larger focus down the street: the skeleton of a 7-story, 102-unit
building that looms over much of the three- and four-story neighborhood.
Historic stables that housed the horses riding around
Prospect Park were destroyed to construct the building that constructed before
the city could rezone the area. Now it sits empty, surrounded by blue
construction fencing. The building is in foreclosure. The equity investors are
in bankruptcy, and the bank has been liquidated.
No work has been done for months, and residents fear the
building will become a safety hazard if it remains vacant.
Lander says that though not much could have been done to
prevent buildings like it from going up, the task of the city now is to clean
up properties left unrealized by the housing boom through a combination of
higher taxes on vacant land and Department of Buildings regulations.
“The bank, the developer, the investors all made very bad decisions,” he says. “Now it’s time for the city to assert itself.”
