Big Real Estate and the 35th City Council District Race

(This article has been updated. See below.)

In May of this year, the New York Times published a story about a political action committee being organized by a group of real estate and Wall Street executives to aid candidates who support pro-development policies. According to the Times, the PAC, known as “Jobs for New York,” plans to spend up to $10 million to influence the outcome of 25 City Council races this fall.

The formation of the Jobs for New York PAC shows how the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision can affect small local campaigns in ways that can be proportionally more profound than national races. Typical City Council campaigns have a smaller base of prospective campaign contributors than national, State-wide or even City-wide races. For example, candidate Laurie Cumbo running in our local 35th District recently made news when her campaign announced reaching an impressive $100,000 in contributions. But Jobs for New York can dwarf that amount with a budget that allows it to spend $400,000 in each race it enters. And there are good reasons why its sponsors would do so: City Council members may have limited sway over education, transportation and the environment, but the position of a local Council member on land use matters in their district is often decisive, as other members tend to follow the local representative’s lead. Those decisions—on rezonings, subsidies and deals involving City property—can be worth tens of millions or more to developers.

There are also good reasons why big developers would be interested in the 35th City Council District, which includes all of the neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, and Prospect Heights, as well as parts of Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant—each an expanding real estate market experiencing accelerated gentrification. Fort Greene has seen tremendous impact from the 2004 downtown Brooklyn rezoning, which so far has produced 29 new high-rises with 5,300 apartments, according to a March article in Crain’s citing a study by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. And Prospect Heights awaits further pressure for upzoning the areas near Barclays Center from new owners of buildings along Flatbush Avenue.

But a look back over the last ten years should make it clear that having a City Council member with a debt to corporate real estate interests could be detrimental to our community. During these years, our current representative, Letitia James, has supported downzonings in Clinton Hill and Crown Heights to maintain neighborhood context in the face of development pressure. She has supported the creation of new historic districts in Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, preserving the scale and character of these areas in a way that zoning cannot. Council Member James recently won a commitment for the preservation of the Pacific Branch Library, instead of its sale for demolition and redevelopment, as part of a rezoning deal for a 32-story tower in Fort Greene (she also was able to negotiate for deeper affordability for other nearby subsidized apartments). And of course, Ms. James has been tireless in calling for accountability at the Atlantic Yards project. It is fair to ask if her successor in the 35th District would do any of these things if that individual owed their seat in part to assistance from powerful developers.

More to the point, in today’s environment where demand for housing is resulting in higher costs displacing more long-time residents every day, and increased residential density is straining municipal services like education and transportation, we should wonder where exactly our next City Council member would stand on future challenges. Would a representative supported by the real estate lobby vote to lower the income targets for affordable housing subsidized by the City? Changing those guidelines would help to ensure subsidized units built in the 35th District would actually be affordable to its residents, but would make HDC financing less advantageous to developers. How aggressively would that representative demand that builders of new high-rises in upzoned areas pay a share of the cost for improved transit and new schools to handle the increase in population?

A few days after the Times broke the story on Jobs for New York, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, the Crown Heights North Association, and the Crow Hill Community Association co-sponsored a forum for candidates in the 35th District City Council race, which was held at P.S. 9. The candidates were asked whether they would accept assistance from a PAC backed by real estate developers. To my relief, all five candidates attending (including Olanike Alabi, Laurie Cumbo, Ede Fox, Richard Hurley and Jelani Mashariki) each stated they would not.

Relief turned out to be temporary. For each of the first four days of last week, I received direct mail from Jobs for New York supporting Ms. Cumbo’s campaign. These pieces have, variously, addressed such topics as job creation, affordable housing and public safety. But how serious are the Jobs for New York sponsors about those issues? If our experience with the Downtown Brooklyn Plan and the Atlantic Yards project are any guide, claims by developers about creating jobs and affordable housing need to be taken with more than a grain of salt: their objective, after all, is private profit, not public largesse. And the Jobs for New York mailer on safe streets features a large photo of police cars from the city of Sutherlin, Oregon. Enough said.

Because Jobs For New York is an "independent expenditure" PAC, Ms. Cumbo's campaign by law cannot communicate with it. I know of no evidence that she or her staff have violated this prohibition, so Ms. Cumbo's pledge at the June forum not to accept aid from the PAC technically may be intact, even if she has yet to publicly reject its endorsement. However, any candidate that was to win a City Council race with such outsized assistance as Jobs for New York can provide would at the very least have to be aware of the potential for that assistance to go to an opponent in a future race. And with Jobs for New York able to spend an unlimited budget thanks to Citizens United, its backing could be decisive.

I spoke recently with a local elected official about the impact of Citizens United on City Council races. He noted that the 2007 "pay to play" reform limiting campaign contributions by individuals doing business with City government had since resulted in a steady decrease in such contributions by real estate interests. Now, with the Supreme Court having ruled that political spending is Constitutionally-protected speech, it's not clear what kind of local legislation can set any limit to the influence of large developers on City Council members.

In fact, it may be that only the voters can wrest control of their local races from PACs like Jobs For New York by refusing to elect candidates who receive their support. That's an extreme step that could perhaps unfairly stigmatize candidates who receive unsolicited assistance from PACs, but the alternative may be to risk allowing developers control over land use in our neighborhoods until no more buildable capacity exists. By that time, not just the landscape, but the voters themselves, will have changed.

Update July 30: Following the publication of this article on July 29, Ms. Cumbo today released an email statement through her campaign presenting a principled argument against the "much maligned Citizens United ruling" and the type of outside spending on City Council races being done by Jobs for New York, stating that it "erodes the goals and principles" the New York City campaign finance program was intended to advance.

Her statement continued:

"That is why I have officially and respectfully asked JOBS NY to immediately discontinue spending any independent funds in support of my campaign. ... Of course, this group no more answers to me than I do to them, so I cannot promise what they will do.

"I thank JOBS NY for its excitement and belief in this campaign and I look forward to working with its various constituencies as your next City Council Member. It will be my mission to create win-win partnerships and a community where we respect all our neighbors, old and new, and build on our incredible history and move forward with our collective voices…together!"

Ms. Cumbo should be recognized for publicly asking Jobs for New York to cease spending in support of her candidacy, though her request comes more than a week after the mailings began. However, her statement appears to express opposition to the tactics of Jobs for New York, while at the same time accept its endorsement, a position that may benefit from her further clarification.

Today, residents of the 35th City Council district received another mailing from Jobs for New York in support of Ms. Cumbo's campaign.

(Disclosure: I have contributed to the campaign of one of Ms. Cumbo’s opponents. However, I believe that what I have written in this blog demonstrates that my views on corporate development in this part of Brooklyn were established well before the 35th District race began. For the record, the challenges posed here should be raised with all candidates running for its City Council seat.)