So long Gowanus, see you in 12 years

¡andale! ¡andale!

¡arriba! ¡arriba!

e.p.a.

Yay!? Our neighborhood has an "official" toxic dump in it now! It won't get cleaned up for at least another 15 years at best -- 25 years most likely. What a win! Not.

The community conventional wisdom got this one completely backwards. City Hall and the developers had a lot of incentive to get a reasonably proper clean-up done relatively quickly. A lot of money was there and the Mayor was committed to getting it done. The greedy self-interest of the real estate developers actually worked in our favor on this one. They needed that canal cleaned up to fill the lux condos they wanted to build. And even if their clean-up was of lesser quality than a federal clean-up, once people started living, working, shopping and recreating right next to the canal, there'd be a new class of advocates and stakeholders pushing for more, better and continued clean up. So, that's what we could have had.

What did we get instead? Now it's pretty much a certainty that the EPA will take decades to I.D. and litigate 150 years-worth of polluters at this site. It will take a minimum of 15 years and probably closer to 25 years to get the work done. So, maybe we'll enjoy a clean Gowanus as elderly retirees. But even that is a big if.

Big loss if you ask me. Brownstone Brooklyn needs to take a hard look at it's knee-jerk anti-development stance. We completely shot ourselves in the foot on this one.

i'm not sure that fast tracking the building of a bunch of high rise apartments along the gowanus was the only way to get this thing cleaned up.

a lot of people (myself included) like the gowanus area as it is, but would like to see the canal cleaned up. i happen to like the industrial feel, the ramshackle buildings scattered about artist studios, galleries, an indoor rock climbing adventure, a great club (bell house) and many other interesting places to discover.

i don't think that slapping up a few highrises a la the williamsburg waterfront was the answer to the problem (by a developer which specializes in suburban development, no less).

brooklynpotter is correct...we have no idea how long the city would take to clean that mess up. they've already been sitting on it for decades as it is, and money is now more scarce than it's been in the last 10. it's quite possible that the site is going to be cleaned up via superfund in relatively the same amount of time it would have taken the city to do so.

there are 2 sides to the story obviously and i see both sides, but it's good to play devil's advocate on this one too, because we just don't know how it would have ended if this didn't get designated a superfund. partly it's just nice to know it IS going to be cleaned up now. i don't hear as much of a push for the area of greenpoint which is sitting over something toxic, and perhaps it would be good to watch and see which area gets cleaned up quicker.

i have no issues with development stopping; would you want to live there?

maar de oesters zijn zo lekker!

There is no reason to believe that the SuperFund will clean up the Canal. Having grown up in the vicinity of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, that neighborhood looks the same as it did in the late 70's when they bought out the residents and put a cyclone fence around the entire place. This federal agency has no obligation to "make right" a very small piece of real estate to benefit the very few New Yorkers who will be able to afford to move into luxury condos there. Actually it would be more responsible, as a federal agency, to simply kick the few people out of the vicinity and fence the whole thing in and/or pave over.

which city projects have successfully completed, even well undertaken, under bloomberg? guiliani? i believe the city's proposal to clean the canal would go through years and years of red-tape.

i don't think anyone is going to clean the canal in a timely manner, really the larger issue. real-estate values be damned, this is a health and environmental catastrophe.

i totally agree with union street on this one. the epa is a joke, and superfund sites are, no pun intended, a disaster.
i think you had it exactly right when you said
"Brownstone Brooklyn needs to take a hard look at it's knee-jerk anti-development stance. We completely shot ourselves in the foot on this one."

brooklynpotter wrote: do you think that bloomberg would be able to get this job launched during his term, then continued after he leaves office, then completed faster and properly?

Who knows? If Bloomberg goes for a 7th term, he might have seen this thing through.

The lengthy timeframe is one of the reasons why I actually really liked the idea of having private developers involved in this project from the beginning (despite the fact that I also agree that Toll Bros. are, for the most part, scumbags). Having the developers involved means that you have big stakeholders with a ton of greedy, self-interest in seeing the clean-up get done well-enough to attract the kind of people who are willing to drop $750K on a lux condo. I think the developer greed really could have worked in the community's favor this time. But b/c of Atlantic Yards, 4th Avenue, the disgusting Feder's condos all over the place, we're all so f'ing angry and disgusted at Bloomberg-enabled developers right now, we can't even think straight about this stuff anymore.

But, hey, we showed those greedy developers this time, didn't we! We're gonna keep raising our kids alongside a post-industrial toxic waste site for at least another 20 years just to spite them. Looking forward to this summer's crop of vicious, baby-eating Gowanus Mosquitoes.

Moving forward it looks like Brooklynites might be more interested in how much Superfund gets funded for this future cleanup. I have no idea whether taxes will be reinstated on polluting industries to help pay for the fund, but we certainly will now have a bigger stake in seeing that the program is funded and does what it was intended to do. Even those who opposed the Superfund labeling, like Union Street, seem to agree that one of the reasons the program is ineffective is that Superfund is underfunded.

http://www.martenlaw.com/news/?20090422-superfund-tax-reinstated

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:h.r.00832:

booklaw wrote: The city's plan ensured that construction would move along rapidly.

The city's plan did not ensure that any cleanup would occur, ever.

The city's plan made it quite likely that the children and grandchildren of the inhabitants of the new high-rise buildings to be constructed near the Gowanus would resemble Thalidomide babies.

+1

The city's plan made clean-up by polluters "voluntary"

A "pay in or be subject to the full cost" voluntary is the same as a "pay in or be sued to obtain the full cost"... so you have the same delays and the same uncertainties as in in EPA Superfund designation.