Can Ikea Grow in Brooklyn?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As the district attorney of Kings County presses his investigation into the naming of judges to the county’s notorious court system, another drama is unfolding in Brooklyn — over whether a potential employer to hundreds will be able to open a store in the borough. Ikea, the Swedish furniture maker, wants to open a major retail outlet on a stretch of waterfront in the neighborhood of Red Hook. The area, which was long home to a significant slice of the city’s industrial and shipping business, has long since fallen on hard times. Of the 15,000 or so residents of Red Hook public housing developments, more than one in five are unemployed.
While people living in the job-hungry housing developments seem to be in favor of the proposed Ikea, a small but vocal clutch of opponents — including, it seems, the borough president Marty Markowitz — appear to be trying to kill the project with a thousand tiny cuts. The current obstructionist tactic of choice by the not-in-my-backyard crowd is to express fears that the store will be too successful, resulting in lots of new traffic to the now-desolate peninsula.
When the city recently held hearings to determine the scope of environmental issues to be formally addressed by Ikea, the borough president’s office threw in with the NIMBY crowd by submitting a document calling on the furniture company to examine the possible traffic impact on scores of intersections, including some that are miles away and clearly have nothing to do with the project. Conducting a borough-wide traffic study is a thinly-veiled attempt to slow the project down.
Ikea has already committed to using private funds to build new traffic lanes near the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, to create a free ferry service to and from Manhattan, and to run free shuttle buses to and from downtown Brooklyn. All of these promised changes will have the kinds of benefits that Mr. Markowitz and the other governmental authorities in Brooklyn have thus far failed to implement. The Ikea case is shaping up as a test of whether the Brooklyn Renaissance will take place with the help of Borough Hall or despite it.
