Borough president’s report highlights stark differences in access to education, health, and transit across BK nabes
The centerpiece of the “Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn” is a borough-wide access to opportunity index, the darker green, the better. One particularly dire example: if you live in Borough Park, you’re expected to live 20 years longer than someone in East New York. Graphic via the report.
By Cole Sinanian
The Brooklyn Borough President thinks New York City is driving blind.
As one of the world’s only major metropolises without a comprehensive plan to guide long-term development, the City’s lack of cohesive vision results in yawning gaps in transit access, health outcomes and general wellbeing across its diverse neighborhoods, argues BP Antonio Reynoso in his updated “Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn.”
Released last week, the plan draws attention to the stark inequalities between Brooklyn neighborhoods and offers potential solutions.
“For too long, NYC decision makers have been forced to make choices about development projects and resource allocations without this greater context,” Reynoso writes in the introduction. “We’ve seen time and again that planning issues do not occur in isolation, and we cannot solve entrenched problems on a site-by-site, or issue-by-issue, basis.”
Health and wellbeing — and the ways in which local infrastructure fails to provide it to many Brooklynites — feature heavily in the plan’s pages. Brooklyn’s average life expectancy of 80.7 years, for example, largely matches that of New York City, at 81.5, though life expectancies vary widely neighbor-to-neighborhood.
In parts of Brownsville, life expectancy at birth is 70.5 years. Meanwhile, a Borough Park native can expect to live nearly 92 years on average. Health data reveals a trend that quickly emerges over the course of the report: the lower-income, largely immigrant and nonwhite communities of Brooklyn’s southern and eastern quadrants are much worse-off than their fellow Brooklynites in the borough’s northern and western regions closest to Manhattan.
The highest rates of food insecurity, for example, can be found in Coney Island, Brownsville, and Gravesend, where 20-27% of the population is food-insecure, or lacking access to quality supermarkets and grocery stores. In Bed-Stuy and Sunset Park, fast food is overrepresented, with as many as 19 bodegas to a single supermarket.
Chronic diseases too more frequently plague eastern Brooklynites. The highest rates of adult asthma can be found in Brownsville, East New York, eastern Crown Heights, East Flatbush, and Canarsie, while the lowest are in northwestern Brooklyn and to the east of Prospect Park. Neighborhoods with large Latino populations like Ocean Hill, Cypress Hill, and Sunset Park, the report notes, have the borough’s lowest rates of health insurance coverage.
Some of the report’s health recommendations are in line with left-wing populist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s policy proposals, namely city-operated grocery stores that would provide reduced-cost, nutritious food items located strategically in food-insecure neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, Sunset Park, or East Flatbush. Local food pantries could also be partly supplied by the city, the report suggests, as many community-operated food pantries struggle to store and provide perishable food.
Environmental factors are related to local health outcomes, Reynoso’s report argues. In the south Brooklyn communities of Red Hook, Sunset Park, and East New York, a high concentration of last-mile delivery centers brings high truck volumes, which in turn leads to more traffic and local air pollution. Similarly, communities along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway like Williamsburg, Bushwick, Gowanus, Red Hook, and Sunset Park have the borough’s worst levels of air pollution.
As far as psychological health, residents of Brownsville, South Williamsburg, East New York, Sunset Park, Borough Park, and Coney Island were most likely to report two straight weeks of poor mental health. The City’s Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD) sought to address this by routing mental health-related 911 calls to professionals better equipped to handle psychological crises than the NYPD, but, as Reynoso’s report details, B-HEARD has major gaps. It is not universally available, nor does it employ true mental-health professionals, instead relying on EMTs working for the NYPD and FDNY.
A central theme of the report is the relationship between community health, local transit infrastructure, and sustainability. More greenery, more bike lanes and CitiBikes, and new transit connections would help improve wellbeing in Brooklyn’s underserved neighborhoods. Despite its large park infrastructure, Brooklyn remains the borough with the lowest tree canopy coverage in the city, at just 18%. CitiBike infrastructure, while robust in north Brooklyn, is virtually non-existent in Coney Island.
Proposed projects like the long-delayed Interborough Express (IBX) would connect Broadway Junction and Sunset Park via the existing Bay Ridge Branch rail line, and provide a critical connection between Brooklyn and Queens. Other proposed transit developments include an updated in-system transfer between Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street, which currently can only be done by exiting and re-entering the subway, and a connection between the underground Broadway G train stop and the elevated J and M trains.
And infrastructure projects could bring jobs and renewed industry to Brooklyn’s underserved areas. Reynoso’s plan supports the controversial Brooklyn Marine Terminal redevelopment (BMT), albeit with a focus on prioritizing maritime activity over housing. Potential for shipping and industrial jobs should be maximized, the report notes, with “no residential uses interfering with port and industrial activities…” Port activities at the BMT should be maintained, the report argues, as “the loss of Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront to housing development further underscores the need to preserve and expand Brooklyn’s remaining industrial waterfront.”
