Councilman David Yassky: What’s Next?
By Kate Meyer
On a busy stretch of Flatbush Avenue, a stark white awning hung over the shell of David Yassky for Congress headquarters, where the clean-up process had already begun.
A week after City Councilman Yassky lost a heated race for congressional representative of Brooklyn’s 11th district, piles of Yes for Yassky t-shirts and boxes of informational pamphlets sat in the corner of the small storefront headquarters, whiteboards still read the cross streets of neighborhoods within the district for volunteer canvassing, and the only people left in the office were Yassky’s campaign manager and his mother.
Packing up the office punctuated the end of a long and controversial campaign for Yassky, who represents parts of Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint on the City Council but moved into the Park Slope section of the 11th district to qualify for candidacy. The race quickly devolved into a racial maelstrom in the media, with accusations flying that Yassky was an opportunist and a colonizer who was trying to capitalize on a race with three black candidates who would ostensibly split the black vote and catapult him into the national political arena.
Yassky was considered the frontrunner at many points in the race, but in September 12th’s Democratic primary, Yvette Clark brought in 31 percent of the vote compared to Yassky’s 26 percent, again setting up a black female to represent the district that was created after the 1968 Voting Rights Act and was first held by Congress’s first African-American female representative Shirley Chisholm.
Clarke was able to secure the support of two major unions, Service Employees International Union locals 1199 and 32BJ, whose 11th hour campaign day electioneering proved to be more potent than either Yassky’s endorsement by The New York Times or his sizable campaign coffers, which topped all of his opponents by a margin of more than $150,000, according to Federal Election Committee records.
Clarke’s win has been attributed to her strong union support and the racial backlash against Yassky, as well as a split vote over the controversial Atlantic Yards development plan.
“It was a confluence of things,” said Doug Muzzio, a political analyst and professor of public affairs at Baruch College. “There’s the large macro race issue, there’s the issue on the ground of getting out the vote and there’s the in between issue of the Atlantic Yards plan. Atlantic Yards hurt Yassky and helped Clarke.”
While Clarke fully supported Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development project, a plan that would create a $4.2 billion housing and office complex in Prospect Heights, as well as an arena for the New Jersey Nets, Yassky was less clear on where he stood with the project.
“David supported the project in theory, but knew that there had to be things that the project needed to be worked on in order for it to be a great project — cutting down the buildings, talking about the traffic,” his campaign manager Gregory Joseph said. “David was on the right side of the issue because you wanted someone in Congress who was going to be able to see the benefits of the project but also the need to change it so it would fit better into the neighborhood and better into the environment.”
Again one of the lamppost issues of the election was drawn out in racial lines, with much of the black community supporting the project that would hypothetically create more jobs and affordable housing, while many white voters were more skeptical of the plan’s massive development and questioned whether affordable housing would actually materialize.
Yassky intimated that the plan needed revision, but his connections with a number of major developers, many of whom contributed to his campaign funds for an aborted run for district attorney, may have pushed anti-Ratner voters toward candidate Chris Owens, the son of incumbent Rep. Major Owens and an outspoken opponent of the Atlantic Yards proposal.
“When [Yassky] sat on the fence about the Atlantic Yards, I thought that was going to hurt him,” said Philip DePaolo, community liaison with the People’s Firehouse, a public safety watchdog group based in Williamsburg. “Because Chris Owens came out against it, I think he took a lot of the white votes. So for me that was his undermining. That really hurt his white base.”
But Yassky had no time for Monday morning quarterbacking or shoulda wouldas after the primary. The next day, Yassky was back at City Hall to cast his vote on a veto override, standing just feet from Clarke.
“There wasn’t really much time for him to sit down and think about this,” Joseph said. “He just really went back to work doing what he was elected to do. He kind of hit the ground running.”
Considering he is often characterized as having an opportunistic political strategy, where Yassky will head from here is now the question du jour. Yassky moved from Washington D.C. when positions on the city council opened up, then ran an aborted campaign for district attorney which some say he abandoned when he saw he may have had a chance at the 11th district.
“One of the knocks on him is that he’s always trying to run for office and that is so not the case,” Joseph said.
When asked if Yassky was planning to run for another office before his council term is up in 2009, his spokesman Evan Thies demurred, saying Yassky is focusing on getting back to his work at the City Council.
After already establishing himself as a politician with certainly citywide but also national ambitions, Yassky has few options for moving up at the moment, Muzzio said. Possible steps could include running for Brooklyn D.A., should Charles Hynes give up his seat, running for borough president, or even taking on Clarke again in two years should her term go unsuccessfully. All of these options seem highly unlikely, however, and the most probable route Yassky will take will be to finish out his term on the City Council and reevaluate the political landscape then, Muzzio said.
“He’s a potential player out there, but he just lost the race — a big one,” Muzzio said. “So I don’t know how big a player on the stage of New York city and New York state politics Yassky is going to be.”
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The Engine 212 Building Finally Cleared Out
In nearly three years of disuse, Engine Company 212 has fallen into disrepair, and while the Company itself has become a martyr for fire safety advocates, the tragedies it could have helped to contain outweigh its symbolic value.
Engine 212 would have been the designated first responder to the recent ten-alarm Terminal Market fire that ripped through fifteen warehouses in Greenpoint.
Furthermore, Engine 212 represented the bulk of ambulance service in Williamsburg, which is now serviced by emergency medical units from Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue in Manhattan.
Now that the city has rezoned the waterfront through Williamsburg to Greenpoint for the development of more than twenty 400-ft.-tall apartment buildings, the danger is even greater. Engine 212 would have been just two blocks away from the waterfront, in a prime location to protect all of the development sites. Without that company, the likelihood of dangerous, potentially fatal fires raging out of control before emergency crews arrive is a grave concern for Williamsburg residents and fire safety advocates in the community.
