Breaking the Bank

So, we won. We fended off the UFO from Planet Sprawl before it landed on our neighborhood.

Back in December I wrote that Commerce Bank, one of the most aggressive and fastest growing banks in the nation, was planning to build a suburban-style, drive-thru "little box" building in Park Slope. In less than three months we organized, fought and convinced the bank to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new building.

The suburbanization of New York City has accelerated rapidly in the last few years. As the rest of the country has become saturated with big-box sprawl crap, New York is one of the last places these businesses can go to continue their metastatic growth. Arriving in the city with business models that were developed and honed in the vast wastelands of strip-mall America, companies like Target, IKEA and Wal-Mart promise jobs and low prices, yet impose huge costs that go unaccounted for.

The way we fought Commerce Bank provides good lessons for future battles against these guys. We got organized and were very specific in what we wanted from the bank. We first tried working under the auspices of the existing neighborhood association, but when they proved to be too passive and slow we formed our own group, Park Slope Neighbors. We hit the street and the Internet with petitions and flyers and quickly built our own mailing list and active corps of volunteers. We didn't count on our elected officials to do anything. We dragged them along by building our own vocal constituency.

We spoke rationally and built a strong argument using the same tools and language that a big corporation uses (e.g. we used PowerPoint and said "win-win" a lot). We combined conservative neighborhood populism with progressive urban environmentalism to craft a tune that elected officials and community leaders could easily sing along to. We hammered the bank in the press and showed that we weren't going away. This compelled them to come to the table and meet with the neighborhood stakeholders.

Most important, we didn't sell the neighborhood short. We kept in mind that Brooklyn is no longer a place the people want to flee. People want to live, work and raise families here. We don't need to beg a big bank to set up shop here.

Our strategy and tactics worked. On March 3 Commerce Bank unveiled a new design for Park Slope. It's an honorable, red-brick building with tall ceilings and big windows. It's not going to win any architectural awards, but it is essentially welcoming and respectful to the neighborhood. Most important, the dangerous drive-thru and ugly Taco Bell-style signage are gone. We couldn't convince them to build apartments above the bank, but we did win some smaller concessions, like bike parking. It's not all that often that an unfunded grassroots community initiative compels a billion dollar steamroller of a corporation to sit down, listen and change its plans. But it might be easier to do than you think.

-Aaron Naparstek

Naparstek@nypress.com