Gowanus Lounge in Metro Today Talking About Brooklyn's "Growing Pains"

In the shameless self-promotion department, we're pointing out that the Blogorithms column in today's Metro has a Q&A with Gowanus Lounge about "Brooklyn's Growing Pains." It's written by Paul Berger, who covers NYC blogs for the paper, and also produces his own excellent blog, Englishman in New York. In any case, you can find the article here, but since it's about us, we're going to copy and paste it for your reading pleasure:

With so much development going on in the city, how are New Yorkers supposed to separate the good from the bad? Robert Guskind, an editor and journalist, has a passionate interest in Brooklyn development. He blogs at The Gowanus Lounge (gowanuslounge.blogspot.com).

What inspired you to start blogging?

I grew weary of just talking about issues I really cared about like quality of life and development in Brooklyn.

Is current development in Brooklyn generally a good thing or a bad thing?

I have concerns about development that’s going on throughout the borough. I think there are significant issues about scale and density and the impact it’s going to have on quality of life, especially with an overburdened infrastructure.

For example?

If you look at the waterfront developments in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, which are some of the larger developments going on, they are taking place in parts of the borough where mass transit is already at breaking point and there’s no transportation plan to make it better.

Can you think of a good development?

The Richard Meier building at Grand Army Plaza. It’s a new development, but it respects the scale of the neighborhood and it looks like it will be beautiful.

A poll found that 78 percent of people had not been following news about the Atlantic Yards project. Why?

People switch off because it’s a complicated issue. It gets down to abstract things like scale and density, and legal issues like eminent domain. But I don’t think it’s unique to Atlantic Yards. It’s the same with all major initiatives and projects. Like the rebuilding at Ground Zero, for example.

How are people to know what’s going on?

That’s where local blogs come in. There are a lot of people out there doing great work, consuming and filtering a tremendous amount of information. But yes, frankly, it is difficult because of the sheer volume of development going on all over.