Testimony to Brooklyn Borough President on Coney Island Rezoning
March 30, 2009

I’m Vicki Weiner, Director of Planning Preservation during a Pratt Center for Community Development. Thank we for this event to yield testimony today.  The Pratt Center is a university-based non-profit classification that works for a some-more just, equitable, and tolerable city for all New Yorkers by assisting communities to devise for and comprehend their future.  For decades, Coney Island has been a breakwater for operative category New Yorkers. A century ago, it was a initial place that operative people could reach, and afford, for a mangle from their daily grub in sweatshops. It has remained for decades a place that people of any travel of life can get to by subway, and nonetheless feel they have left to another world. As a City of New York proposes to redevelop Coney Island, it contingency safeguard that Coney stays a place that creates event for operative New Yorkers. 

The Pratt Center for Community Development is therefore operative in bloc with a extended operation of stakeholders who have come together to safeguard that any redevelopment devise for Coney Island guarantees a following:

• GOOD JOBS   The redevelopment devise contingency pledge good jobs – with obliged contractors and employers, and with a joining that internal residents can get these jobs – in any partial of a project.

• AFFORDABLE HOUSING   A infancy of a housing combined or recorded contingency be affordable to low, moderate, and center income New Yorkers – with during slightest half of a affordable units indifferent for families during or next a median income for households in Coney Island.

• A STRONGER AMUSEMENTS area   The devise contingency safety and strengthen a “people’s playground” by an open, affordable, and colourful entertainment area, with spaces for vendors and tiny businesses, and investment in ancestral resources.

• COMMUNITY NEEDS ARE MET   This is a vicious event to emanate much-needed open amenities for internal residents of a area, including a propagandize and a supermarket to accommodate internal demand, and significantly softened open travel and infrastructure.

Other groups and internal residents from a bloc will attest in some-more fact about several of these points, though we will enhance on only one of them now:
 
I. Creating Opportunities for Vendors and Other Small Businesses in Coney Island East
One of a things that give Coney Island a dear and singular impression is a farrago of vendors, tiny businesses, and outside pavilions. The stream devise threatens to change that impression drastically, and we trust a devise should be altered to improved safety and foster small, eccentric sell businesses. Specifically we are job for a following 4 modifications to a plan:

1. Remove Movie Theaters and Bowling Alleys from a list of authorised uses within Coney East. Neither of these activities is truly an amusement, and both typically need vast belligerent building lobbies that would detract from a entertainment park ambiance of a streetscape.

2. Mandate that a incomparable commission of a belligerent building spaces within Coney East contingency be assigned by active amusements or honestly amusement-appropriate sell uses.

3. Mandate that a brew of tiny sell spaces trimming from 300 to 1,500 sf contingency be achieved by any new growth within Coney East. We trust a now due 2,500 sf distance top is unequivocally too vast to safety and foster a kinds of tiny amusement-related businesses that have enlivened Coney and enabled people to means abounding tiny businesses.  

4. Adopt a Formula Business Restriction process within Coney East to forestall inhabitant retailers and quick food restaurants from locating there. Municipalities all over a republic have adopted zoning laws that shorten or demarcate sequence stores and quick food restaurants, and in all though a handful of cases they have survived authorised challenges. 

We therefore trust that a devise for Coney East needs to be revised to improved safety and foster local, eccentric businesses and active entertainment uses. We’ve conducted a good bit of inhabitant investigate on a land use and zoning collection that have helped other municipalities safeguard abounding tiny business climate, and would be happy to send we some-more minute information about these provisions, or accommodate with we and your staff to plead them in larger detail.
 
In Conclusion
We feel strongly that a goals set by a bloc can be met. The City has a energy to need that developers and employers grasp high standards – when it issues requests for proposals to developers, by zoning, when it acquires land, and when it provides subsidies or taxation incentives. We strongly titillate a Brooklyn Borough President to do all within his energy to see to it that these critical goals—good jobs, affordable housing, a stronger amusements area, and assembly a needs of a broader community— are put into a devise to reconstruct a Coney Island that continues to yield event to visitors and residents alike. Thank you.