In late 2015, after having endured a long documented history of abusive and racist working conditions , workers at B&H Photo sought to unionize (a little fewer than 300 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse, 57 at the Bushwick warehouse, and 80 at B&H's flagship west side store). No sooner did B&H then hire the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis and the ruthless, reactionary, Trump-ally under federal investigation, Ronn Torossian, for PR.
A little over a year after the union drive began, B&H management announced abruptly during contract negotiations with the workers' union, the United Steelworkers, that they were moving their Brooklyn warehouse operations to New Jersey because their leases were set to expire. They claimed that this wasn’t a punishment to their unionized workforce, who would be offered jobs at the new facility. This offer did not include transportation or any subsidization of the cost of commuting to South Jersey, 75 miles away; in other words, an empty offer.
Following the Steelworkers complaint to the NLRB, B&H's next PR hire, Michael McKeon (the closest Republican lobbyist to Governor Cuomo), claimed that B&H had already been seeking out a new warehouse since 2013 and that as a result the union's complaint was "little more than face saving posturing because they know there is no obligation to bargain over a relocation decision if unrelated to labor costs.”
Following the Steelworkers complaint to the NLRB, B&H's next PR hire, Michael McKeon (the closest Republican lobbyist to Governor Cuomo), claimed that B&H had already been seeking out a new warehouse since 2013 and that as a result the union's complaint was "little more than face saving posturing because they know there is no obligation to bargain over a relocation decision if unrelated to labor costs.”
Yet, the reason for relocating cited by Mckeon and B&H was a lie. B&H owns the Bushwick warehouse through an investment vehicle, 105 Evergreen LLC, that’s registered to a PO Box used exclusively by the company’s executives: Sam Goldstein, CEO; Herman Schreiber, Chairman; and Lipa Friedman, who manages “the development arm of B&H.” The warehouse was also acquired in late 2014 for $21.5 million, which is after the 2013 warehouse search that McKeon cites.
Management also seems to have been less than honest about its lease expiring at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A 2008 lease memorandum between B&H and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (the non-profit, city-run agency that manages the Navy Yard) stipulates the term of the lease as: “A period of approximately 22 years, commencing on the Commencement Date and ending on July 31, 2030 [my emphasis]."
In an interesting arrangement, the Brooklyn-based film production company Steiner Studios took out a lease over the same premises in the Navy Yard in April 2016, but which doesn't stipulate the termination of B&H's preexisting lease. In September 2016 Steiner Studios also took a $30 million mortgage on the premises (courtesy of the New York State taxpayer, who pays for an annual $420 million film production tax subsidy of which Steiner Studios is one of the largest beneficiaries), which also made no stipulation about terminating B&H's lease. In any case, it was convenient for B&H that the Steiner lease in April 2016 was filed just two days after a real estate development company called First Industrial Realty Trust finalized its acquisition of what is now B&H’s new warehouse in Florence Township, New Jersey.
This was just one part of a string of very convenient developments for B&H. In fact, it was only months earlier -- and just one week after the United Steelworkers petitioned the NLRB in October 2015 as the official representative of the B&H workers -- that First Industrial submitted its proposal to the Florence Township Council to subdivide the original property. Fortunately for First Industrial they hired the politically connected law firm Parker McCay, run by a member of the powerful Norcross family of New Jersey power brokers, which would explain why even though they left much of the site-plan application blank, their proposal -- including an expedited development schedule ensuring that the warehouse be completed by December 2016 -- was approved by the planning board.
B&H signed its lease at the New Jersey warehouse the month after it was completed, in January 2017, which is when they announced the move.
The Bushwick warehouse, which management closed down months later, has since been one of the contentious points of the neighborhood-wide rezoning, as the company has aggressively lobbied the Department of City Planning (DCP) to rezone the 150,000 s/f building from manufacturing to uses more profitable for them (namely, luxury residential development). To get a picture of how big a windfall this would be for B&H, the similar sized but commercial-zoned warehouse next door bought around the same time for $33 million was just sold (along with the fee-rights for the ground lease) for $81 million.
In other words, if DCP rezones the warehouse, B&H’s property would increase in value by tens of millions of dollars. Good for B&H, a big Eff You to everyone else: Bushwick, which loses more of its manufacturing base in place of luxury housing that reinforce the neighborhood’s growing inequality, and the workers being punished for their union.
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This is but a microcosm of how DCP operates.
As Winston Von Engel, director of DCP’s Brooklyn office, said at a community meeting in February, “Our intention is to preserve the character and the buildings, not the people in them.”
Indeed, Von Engel’s racist and classist slip to the Bushwick community manifests a history of racism and classism that’s always been deeply baked into the city’s planning and urban fabric.... It’s in the “planned shrinkage” of the outer boroughs in the 70's. It’s in the slapdash construction of the West Side Highway north of 125th, where Riverside Park ends and Harlem begins (though today, as Columbia University has moved into the neighborhood, the City is not so stingy). It’s why neighborhoods were sledgehammered to make way for highways to shuttle cars to Long Island at the expense of public transportation where today people can’t get to work. It’s the Triborough Bridge, the Fulton Street Mall, and so on...
Von Engel and his Planners are “interested in preserving the architectural character in the neighborhood” over the people who live there like how a New York Times real estate critic can marvel at the “ragtag appearance” of the Park Avenue viaduct ("a crust of soot and water and stone powder, like some fearsome skin disease") that begins at the foot of Spanish Harlem. Sure it chokes off the elegant garden malls of Park Avenue, delineating the manifest economic apartheid where the Upper East Side ends and Spanish Harlem begins, but a "full-bore restoration project would wipe out all the aching ancientness of the thing." And what a shame that would be?
Yet, for the central issue at stake in Bushwick of housing affordability in the face of displacement, it is a trap to view DCP as the determining body, as housing legislation is controlled at the state level. (Incidentally, Bushwick’s current State Senator, Martin Malave Dilan, when he was the district’s city councilman 20 years ago voted for the fateful and narrowly-won vacancy decontrol law, which has allowed landlords to take hundreds of thousands of apartments out of stabilization. One of the largest recipients in the State Senate of campaign contributions from the real estate industry, Dilan has more recently failed to vote on repealing vacancy decontrol when it came up in the Senate -- among other anti-tenant positions he's taken.)
When DCP talks about affordability, it’s referring to the mandate that developers set aside 20% “affordable” housing on rezoned areas (which they then get a tax subsidy for). Yet, this does nothing for tenants already living in Bushwick. When you consider that the cheapest chicken cutlet goes for $10 a pound at the closest supermarket to the recently rezoned Rheingold Brewery, that other 80% sure seems to accelerate the neighborhood’s dispossession. DCP’s “affordability”, in other words, is a Trojan Horse.
Where DCP does have critical power is determining how land is used, including manufacturing, and for its over 80 year history, the DCP's footprint in New York City -- on the west side of Manhattan, then in Long Island City, in Williamsburg, and so on -- has indisputably been deindustrialization. As Robert Fitch explained in The Assassination of New York,
City Planning presents whatever it does as the golden mean between preservation and modernization.... Indeed, de-industrialization doesn't seem like a public policy, because no one ever announces it as such. No one ever says simply, "We're going to get rid of those goddamn factories!" Even now, the DCP argues that it is simply compelled by objective forces... [zoning changes] are not presented as efforts to reduce the amount of manufacturing in the city; rather they are offered as responses to a changed situation in which manufacturing is no longer needed.
In Fitch's story, published 25 years ago, despite the DCP's stated objectivity, its planning vision typically coalesced with that of the city's private financial and real estate interests.
Not much seems to have changed.
In early June, B&H (or Halcyon Management Group or M&H Realty or whichever name it chooses to use for its real estate assets) will be speaking to the community about its proposal, which will invariably include their "affordable" housing provision (which is mandatory anyway as a consequence of the rezoning). But why should anything they say be considered as having a shred of good faith?
Indeed, not only did B&H go about busting their workers' union by lying about their Navy Yard lease and ownership of the Bushwick warehouse, but at the very same time they were lobbying the Department of City Planning on the Bushwick rezoning. (Naturally the city’s lobbying database doesn’t link to specific contracts, but you can search under “105 Evergreen LLC" or "M&H Realty LLC".) Through both entities, B&H has been paying the lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig $113,473 since January 2017. (Rudy Giuliani had been a partner at Greenberg Traurig until the other week, when he had to step down after possibly implicating the firm for regularly paying hush money on behalf of its clients.)
As Fitch wrote in 1993,
A basic de-industrial strategy of New York City's elite planners relies on the simplest maneuver imaginable: they illegalize manufacturing by up-zoning the land. When manufacturing closes down or leaves for lack of space, they point to declining job totals to justify another re-zoning which illegalizes more manufacturing.
The warning is eerily prescient of today.
In 2005, the future of Williamsburg had been transformed by DCP against the wishes of the community. Follow the trend to Bushwick, where DCP says that "the city’s plan preserves about half of the neighborhood’s existing manufacturing space." Half of that existing space is by Flushing Avenue, on the neighborhood's western border, where B&H is. The other half is at the neighborhood's eastern edge, where the gentrification wave is but a couple L-train stops away.
In 2005, the future of Williamsburg had been transformed by DCP against the wishes of the community. Follow the trend to Bushwick, where DCP says that "the city’s plan preserves about half of the neighborhood’s existing manufacturing space." Half of that existing space is by Flushing Avenue, on the neighborhood's western border, where B&H is. The other half is at the neighborhood's eastern edge, where the gentrification wave is but a couple L-train stops away.
