CM Restler on tourism management and Brooklyn office market
Restler thanks EDC for helping manage tourism in Dumbo and expresses deep concern about the weak office market in downtown Brooklyn and Dumbo, with buildings 80% vacant, calling for new economic development strategies.
Okay.
Thank you, Chair Lee, for making me laugh and for doing such a great job leading these hearings.
It's great to join you and Chair Maloney.
Thank you to the EDC team for being here as well.
I'll say...
One nice thing first, which is not what I, I don't do that at every hearing.
I am very grateful to Jennifer Sun and some of her colleagues for joining us in Dumbo recently.
to try to help us better manage tourism in the neighborhood and EDC's willingness to
kind of be a creative partner and go outside of what might be its traditional roles to try and help address needs and issues in our community is appreciated.
Some other city agencies that were asked to help declined.
So we appreciate EDC for stepping up and working with us.
And I really want to thank you for that.
We love Jennifer Sun as well.
She's great, and she's really done, I've been really appreciative.
Other thing I will say, just to put a marker down, I am deeply concerned about jobs in New York City, and as I look across my district
on the kind of waterfront in Brooklyn, downtown Brooklyn, the office market is just incredibly weak, and we need to be developing new economic development strategies to revitalize downtown Brooklyn and Dumbo,
where we have buildings that are 80% vacant right now.
So we're working on a white paper ourselves with some expert help, but really want to make this a priority partnership opportunity with EDC in the months to come,
where we try to ensure that our communities are really dynamic 24-7 live work communities.
They're just filling out the live part right now.