The
Red Hook StarRevue
OCTOBER 2016
SOUTH BROOKLYN’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
FREE
Miracle on Mill Street by Noah Phillips
H
urricane Sandy design. “Everybody. We rebadly affected ally take pride the Red Hook in developing Houses, worsen- some of the most vibrant ing the already uncomfort- urban centers the able living conditions for Red around world, and so Hook’s 6,217 New York City why shouldn’t Housing Authority (NYCHA) we do that in residents. Sandy and its as- our own backyard for an sociated floods destroyed area that really boilers, damaged roofs be- needs it?” yond repair, and compro- The Real mised playgrounds, lighting, Challenge Hurricane Sanunderground conduits, fenc- dy hit NYCHA developments ing, and sidewalks. A new paradigm
Four years after the storm, a process is underway not only to repair the damage, but to improve Red Hook’s NYCHA development overall. NYCHA has received $3.2 billion from the federal government, mostly the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to repair the damage from Hurricane Sandy. Of this money, almost $440 million will be used for Red Hook Houses East and West. The architects working on the design for the recovery effort are Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF), a Manhattan-based firm that has worked on projects ranging from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to the World Bank Headquarters in Washington DC to the Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea. “Everybody here is very excited about the project,” says Jill Lerner, KPF’s principal for the Red Hook Houses
in every borough except Staten Island.
FEMA upgrades will modernize and upgrade NYCHA living. (Artist rendering courtesy KPF Associates)
“The storm’s surge impacted 10 percent of NYCHA’s developments, knocking out power to more than 400 buildings and leaving 386 buildings without heat and hot water,” according to the NYCHA website. “With FEMA funding agreements in place and finalized in Fall 2015, extensive repairs to more than 30 developments can move from planning and design to construction and completion.” A few years after the storm, KPF undertook a large research study on the many different aspects of NYCHA’s building portfolio. “Our firm has been very interested in the challenges facing the NYCHA campuses,” says Jill Lerner “so we did some research that informed their Next Gen NYCHA program, and became familiar with the Urban design opportuni-
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ties, and with NYCHA and the NYCHA portfolio.”
housing projects keep pace with the rest of the neighborhood.
When the FEMA grant was approved, KPF considered submitting propos-
“I think one of the really interesting thing about this project is to have NYCHA be part of that development of the neighborhood from a social and an economic point of view so it’s not just the main streets [such as Van Brunt Street] that are developing,” says Ratliff. “The FEMA funding helps NYCHA join that trend rather than being this unfunded animal that misses out.”
"We felt this would be something that we could really build on, leveraging the FEMA dollars to make a better and more resilient community.” als for three of the Sandy-impacted NYCHA sites. “We decided that Red Hook was where we felt we could make the biggest contribution,” says Lerner. “Red Hook’s a really interesting changing community. The Houses have a very interesting footprint architecturally, two parts that were built in different times, and the campus has architectural integrity. In addition it has a beautiful tree canopy, and it has a lot of landscape potential. We felt this would be something that we could really build on, leveraging the FEMA dollars to make a better and more resilient community.” Devin Ratliff is KPF’s project manager for the Red Hook Houses. Ratliff, a Brooklyn resident, joined KPF in 1999, and as project manager works with the designers and NYCHA to “make sure we’re ticking all the boxes” on the programmatic and technical portions of the project. One aspect of the Red Hook project that appeals to him is the opportunity to help Red Hook’s public
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One critical aspect of working with NYCHA means engaging residents to share information and get feedback. But getting residents to meetings has always been a challenge for NYCHA. “We need some clarity, some transparency,” says Wally Bazemore, a longtime Red Hook Houses resident. Tenants are “completely out of the loop, they don’t know what these guys walking around with these white helmets and reflectors are doing.” Bazemore says that while NYCHA could do more to reach out to residents in advance of meetings, such as publicizing events online and at local non-profits, much of the responsibility for poor attendance is that of tenants themselves. “I think they’re more concerned about the day-to-day things they have to do to get by, I guess they feel like they’re powerless, they can’t do any damn thing anyway,” says Bazemore. “When you have a community where only 12% vote, what do you expect?” Yet despite the limitations of outreach, (continued on page)
October 2016, Page 1