The North Brooklyn Parks Alliance is helping lead an effort to create a Northside Improvement District, a business improvement district the group says would bring supplemental, reliably funded services to one of New York City’s fastest-growing and most commercially dense areas, with the unfinished Bushwick Inlet Park as a central case for why the money is needed. In a February 5 message to neighbors, Executive Director Katie Denny Horowitz wrote that the alliance, which she has helped lead through two decades of work on local parks and public spaces, began organizing for the district in 2023 alongside residents, small businesses, property owners and elected officials.
Horowitz tied the push to recent winter weather, writing that after recent snowstorms, neighborhoods with business improvement districts were cleared faster, with shoveled sidewalks, collected trash and walkable streets, while North Brooklyn was left waiting. She said those disparities echoed what many residents experienced during the pandemic, when neighborhoods with supplemental, reliably funded services fared better than those without, and described that earlier moment as a turning point that prompted the organizing effort.
According to Horowitz, the alliance, known as NBK Parks, has spent more than 20 years partnering with city and state agencies to support public space maintenance in Brooklyn’s Community Board 1, work she said includes maintaining parks, providing professional horticultural care and stewarding plazas and open spaces that serve tens of thousands of people each week. She pointed to Bushwick Inlet Park as the clearest example of the gap the district is meant to address, calling it the anchor park of the 2005 Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning and writing that it remains unfinished and underfunded.
The alliance is directing supporters to a campaign for the proposed district at improvenorthsidebk.org and pointed to earlier coverage of the organizing effort in the Brooklyn Paper. More information on the group’s parks work is posted at nbkparks.org.
