Kelly Anderson

Antonia: Okay. Well to get started, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to Sunset Park?

Kelly: So, it was around 15 years ago. So maybe about, what would that be? 2009? Yeah. So I was finishing up a film called My Brooklyn, which was about the redevelopment of Downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall area. And the film was all about gentrification and examining my position as a gentrifier and sort of looking at all the patterns around how race and money have shaped urban space. And so I needed to live somewhere 'cause I couldn't afford to live there anymore.

And so I came out here and I just found this apartment here, this co-op, actually, it's a co-op, I purchased it. And so my immediate feeling was like this kind of relief to be out of that pressure cooker of Fort Greene, Downtown Brooklyn area, which felt so loaded in terms of having gone through this insane transformation over the course of 10 years. It just completely flipped the neighborhood. And, when I got here I was kind of like, oh my God, a normal neighborhood [laugh]. It just felt kind of normal to me. And you know, of course I'm always attuned to gentrification and thinking about, well what does it mean that I'm here? You know, who else is here? How long have they been here? What's their housing situation? How precarious is it? You know, all of these things.

Basically I just really liked the neighborhood. It was very family oriented. It felt extremely successful in terms of the local economy, and the public spaces are so well used. And I just, you know, I was like, this is a great place. And then I got to know some folks in the neighborhood. I got to know Marcela who was organizing at Neighbors Helping Neighbors at that time. And she knew My Brooklyn. So she organized a screening of the film for some people at the CB7 building. And that was great 'cause she right away realized the way that the film could help organize her tenants here. And then I also met UPROSE during that time, and met with Elizabeth Yeampierre. And we did a screening there too.

So it was a nice way to come into the community and meet different people who were already working on the issues that I've been interested in for a long time. And so one of the things that was coming up in conversations was Industry City, because it had just been purchased by Jamestown Properties. This would've been in 2013 right after Superstorm Sandy. And so there were a lot of questions in the neighborhood about what is this going to mean, what's going to happen, you know. And then as they started to redevelop it, I went down there one day and I was like, oh wow, they're really trying to speak to a certain demographic that I understood well, because it's similar to me. It's like creative professionals. And it really seemed to be luring a certain very different demographic to the neighborhood than the people who live here. So my immediate reactivity to it just made me want to figure out what was happening with it.

And talking to the local people, there was a lot of concern about how it could push up real estate prices in the neighborhood. There were just a lot of questions in the community. Like, are they going to try to rezone the area? Are they going to try to bring housing? So there was fear, concern, and that's when I and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg started working on the film together, because we were both in the same boat. He was a co-founder of Meerkat Media, which is a production collective. And you know, we were both just like, “What should we do?” Because some organizations very close to us, like Rooftop Films, were taking money from Jamestown and hosting screenings there. And I remember calling Jay one time and just being like, “What do we do? Do we go to this event or not?” And, and he was like, “Hmm, I don't feel comfortable going there.”

And so we just eventually started talking about it a lot and then figured maybe we could contribute to the organizing around it. Especially after Jamestown floated a plan to rezone. That's when we started, you know, in more earnest, working on a film that would follow the process and, and try to understand it.

Antonia: There's a interesting tension between, I guess like that cyclical process that I feel like you've experienced firsthand of living in an area in Brooklyn and then being priced out and coming to Sunset Park and then almost by way of your interests in gentrification, seeing that process happen again.

And, you know, a lot of the discussions that we've had in the classes, that process just moving across different neighborhoods, do you feel like, and then seeing more young creatives come to the neighborhood, have, do you feel like your conversations as you got more involved with community organizing that, you know, the residents were very aware of that process that was then now being pushed onto their community?

Kelly: Yeah, I think everyone in the neighborhood is really concerned about gentrification. The issue is that there's not always an understanding of what to do about it. So for sure, I think every single person in the community is aware that there's issues, that the average income in this neighborhood is pretty low, people are severely rent burdened. There's a lot of renters here that aren't protected by any kind of protections.

But I think what became clear, sitting through this entire process for years around the rezoning, was how hard it actually is to build capacity across all the different constituencies in the community, in different languages. You know, it's so complex. The whole issue of zoning and even the value of the industrial waterfront, you know, like that was a big thing here. 
This community has organized to keep this waterfront industrial and hopefully to repurpose it towards climate adaptation and mitigation, right? But keep it manufacturing. But even that requires a lot of conversation. I mean, a lot of people in this neighborhood haven't been here a long time. They just got here 5, 10, even fewer years ago. People may not see the value of an industrial waterfront. They might just be like, “It looks crappy and run down. We should put something nice there.

This is good.” You know? And  it's not for me to say what's good and what isn't good, but what I respected was that this community had gone through a community planning process and identified that they wanted to keep that waterfront industrial, and coming to learn how many people are actually working on that waterfront today in jobs that are really good for Sunset Park residents. So I think a lot of it is just how does, say, the community board steward a process, first of all, just for people to even understand what's happening, what the history is, what the proposal is, what our options are, you know, it's just, it's so hard. I think that's what became clear to me is like this is a neighborhood where people really show up and wanna be engaged.

But, it makes me ask, what would actually be necessary to have a real comprehensive community planning process? Because if you could do it anywhere, you could do it here. But even here, you know, they struggled. And also people had ideological differences. Some people were like, “We should embrace this change.” Some people were like, “No, we shouldn't.” Other people were like, “Well maybe we need to,” I mean you'll see this in the film, but there was a big split in the community between people who felt that it would be a good idea to engage with Industry City in a Community Benefits Agreement, and other people who were like “Absolutely not.” And that conversation was extremely divisive and difficult and I don't think the community was actually able to really process that enough to come to like a real consensus.

Because one of the issues was, I mean, this is just getting deep into the weeds of it, but like one of the issues, the, the critics of the CBA, the Community Benefits Agreement were saying these people have so much money that we'll never be able to sit across a table from them. And even if they agree to a bunch of great things, we'll never be able to hold them accountable. The people on the other side were saying the zoning on the waterfront is loose, they're already doing all kinds of stuff that's not manufacturing. Maybe we could use this as an opportunity to tighten up the zoning and get them to commit to keeping like one whole building for affordable manufacturing, for example. And so that was compelling, you know, and I think the people who were interested in going in that direction and the people who were like, no, we can't negotiate with them at all. We just have to say no to this rezoning.

I think bridging that gap would've been, I think there maybe was an opportunity there to have people really hear one another out better. But it was really hard. And that spoke to me about just like the kinds of conflicts we're experiencing so much everywhere between the center left, the far left, the, you know, reform versus revolution, you know. So it was a microcosm of a bigger issue, but I feel Sunset Park is a place where people at least stayed in the same room and heard one another out and then Covid happened and that kind of derailed the CBA process. And so it ended up that Jamestown ended up pulling its rezoning proposal, as you'll see in the film.

Delaney: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll jump in here. I'm, as I'm hearing you speak and hearing you orate about all of these really intricate concepts around zoning, [laugh] and civic structures, I'm sort of curious if we can maybe take a step back and learn more about you and your background and sort of where this sort of like radical leaning [laugh] originates from, if it's from, you know, a home situation, if it's from something you learned in your life on your way to Brooklyn or Sunset Park. But just sort of give like a, a quick overview of you and how you think.

Kelly: Sure. So I'm Canadian. I was born in Montreal. I was raised in Montreal. My family's English speaking. We left Montreal in 1980 because of a conflict there between the French, French Canadian Nationalist Québécois movement.

It was a civil conflict that my family left because of and we moved to New England. And I think without it being conscious, I think that really did deeply inform my thinking about displacement, about  land and certain kinds of nationalisms, and just trying to understand like, “What's my position relative to this and how do I feel about it?” And so that's part of who I am. I wouldn't say I was raised very political at all, but in college, I was at the University of New Hampshire for my first two years of college,

I got involved through a class on Central American politics in US involvement in Latin America. And that kind of… did that thing to me that can happen in college or around a movement, which just like completely shifted my entire way of understanding the world. I also got a job canvassing door to door for a group called PIRG, Public Interest Research Group. And I knocked on a lot of doors and talked to a lot of people about consumer protection, environmental issues. And so I became like a much more radical person in terms of my thinking and that's stuck since then. So I got into documentary filmmaking because, prior to that I thought I would probably be a journalist. I was into trying to advance like the needle on social justice movements or change.

And I wasn't really thinking about the documentary. I was thinking more about independent journalism because this idea of alternative media was really important. Because it was pre-internet, right? So you had like this mainstream media and then you had the alternative counterpoints. And so that was very in, you know, I was very informed by like, is it called a counter public? Like the idea of like a counter, like an opposition to the, or a check and balance or a counter to like mainstream versions of the way things are framed politically or told. And partly because of these films that I was seeing about Central America, you know, I was just blown away by like the what documentary could do in terms of just showing what's actually happening and how a lot of times that completely contradicted what the government was telling you was happening.

Like in El Salvador, the government was saying there's no military, no US military involved there. And then in these films, which people would sneak up from, you know, Central America, with 16 millimeter films you would see, oh wow, there's American advisors or even military there working. So that, you know, got me thinking about that. I went to Brown after that, I transferred to Brown, and one of my teachers got me introduced to Paper Tiger Television, which was a media cooperative where we were doing these critiques of media. You'd get scholars and activists to come and sort of dismantle mainstream media on camera and it went out over public access TV stations. 'Cause again, there was no internet yet. So that was the only way to kind of reach people.

And so all of that was just very formative for me. But I wasn't working on housing and urban stuff until later. I made like several films and then it was an urban planning student from Hunter College where I teach, who came to me one day, her name is Allison Dean. And she started talking to me about Fulton Mall, Downtown Brooklyn, and this research that she'd been doing about how the City wanted to just completely remake this area, and their vision of it was that it was failed because it was mostly black and immigrant and working class. And she had been doing this research for Pratt Center and you know, found that it was actually enormously successful if you just looked at it from another point of view, even economically. It was incredibly successful. So we started working on that film and it became this film called My Brooklyn, which is the one that I was talking about earlier.

And after that I was just really engaged by these kinds of issues. And I worked on another film with three other people about the Cooper Square Community Land Trust called Rabble Rousers.

Antonia: Amazing. In terms of just, I think your history and interest in alternative media and thinking about documentary film as kind of this way of really painting a realistic picture on the ground. How have you found that as a process of uncovering what's happening in Sunset Park? And especially from the perspective of speaking to residents and working with community organizers?

Kelly: Right. Sothe style of Emergent City is really different from some of the other films I've made.

So Jay and I decided that we just wanted the whole film to be very observed. It's kind of like “fly on the wall” camera, so nobody's really interviewed and there's no narration. So the film is very carefully structured and it took us a very long time. There's no overt sort of guiding voice, even in the form of like, Marcela [Mitaynes] telling you what you should be thinking about, right? So you see Marcela, you see Elizabeth, you see Carlos Menchaca (the council member), you hear from a lot of community residents, you see the developer. So you see a lot of different people, but the film sort of brings you into these different worlds where people are hashing it out and trying to influence the future of their neighborhood. So it's really a lot of meetings and a lot of just observed time in the community.

So I don't know if that really answers the question.

Antonia: Definitely. How did you go, sorry to interrupt that thought. How did you go about the character selection process? Because you, you know, you mentioned that it's a kind of observation or it has an observational lens. So when you were doing your research and understanding the story that you wanted to tell. Which were the kind of focal characters that you had to, I guess, yeah, prioritize for the story that you thought was worth focusing on?

Kelly: Well it was pretty clear Marcela was going to be in it just 'cause she's a really compelling person, and was active on the issue. Certain people were just working on the issue. So Elizabeth Yeampierre for example, was going be in it because, you know, originally we thought the film was really about gentrification, but then this whole climate angle came up and I was like, wow, this is really compelling.

Because there's competing visions for the waterfront and the Industry City rezoning, it's not just bad because of displacement, right? It's bad because it kills this other vision for the waterfront potentially, or that's at least what, you know, UPROSE and Elizabeth believed. And so it was pretty clear Elizabeth was going to be in the film. And then Carlos, being the council member who was going to make this decision on the rezoning, clearly was going to be in it. And he was very compelling to us because he came into office with so much support. He was such a well loved figure. And then, you know, just was in this conflict that was in my opinion, pretty, I don't know how somebody could have really gotten through that, he was just getting it from all sides, you know?

I think he was in a very, very tough position and it wasn't as simple as … I think a lot of people framed it as like, you're selling out versus you're with the community. But what that didn't really account for is that he was getting a lot of people coming to see him who were supportive of Industry City or supportive of the Community Benefits Agreement angle, you know. So, you know, it wasn't just like selling out versus what the community wanted, it was like, what's actually the right thing to do here? And it was, I think, really difficult. I think he, he tried hard, there's certainly a lot of bad feelings in the community about his process, but, you know, watching him navigate all that, I mean, that was pretty interesting.

And then the developer, of course, you just try to get that and we were lucky that we got some access to Andrew Kimball, who's the CEO of Industry City. And it's really an ensemble. It's not really character driven. I mean, there are characters or participants that come forward, but there's a lot of just people in the community that are speaking as well.

Antonia: Yeah. I'd love to hear more about your experience and kind of the, the evolution that you witnessed from when you first moved here to like, even now today, like the, the living conditions and how that's kind of progressed over time, given gentrification and all this, also this competing tension between the waterfront climate, different visions for what the future of the city should, sorry, Sunset Park should look like.

Kelly: I mean, I don't know, it's so anecdotal and subjective, right? I mean, like, I could just say like, there's more white people in the park with their dogs than there used to be.

But, you know, I don't really know what the data is. It doesn't feel the way Fort Greene felt to me, which was just a rapid overnight turnover. Somebody who knows more than me would have to say why that is. One thing is there's this gigantic Chinatown here, and that's growing also in its own way, you know? And so that's not gonna be, that's not that easy to just displace. I mean, when you see houses for rent or for sale, like from here on up to 8th Avenue, they're not even really advertising in English, you know? So I don't know, the ways that the housing market works are very interesting. Like, I keep getting flyers and people calling me, asking me do I want to sell my house? And so I'm like, no.

I hang up on them, but, you know, why are they calling me? Who else are they calling? Who are these things going to? Like I do get these flyers, I got one today that's like, do you wanna sell your house? And usually they're in Chinese, you know. So I don't know. I feel like maybe more down towards 4th and 5th avenues, closer to the trains, rents have really gone up and I think that inevitably displaces people. I've heard people say that there are people here that got displaced from this community, are living in New Jersey, and come back here to work and then go back to New Jersey, you know, so that's messed up, you know. So all I can say is like, I don't feel it's flipped over completely at all. I don't see a lot of like gentrified looking businesses.

You might see some different products in the stores and you know, you can get like oat milk in the supermarket, you know, butI can count on one hand the number of businesses that I think are actually catering to the newer white arrivals. And then most of those, some of those are owned by people in the community that live here, you know, that started small businesses. So it's been slower than what I've experienced in other places and it still feels like a predominantly Latinx and Chinese community to me, which is good.

Delaney: Something I'm curious about, and I think you'll have a great answer. So I look forward to hearing it, is how you see yourself as a documentary filmmaker and someone who lives here as an organizer and sort of like who your audience of organizing work might be.

Kelly: I mean, I'm not an organizer. What I've always done is try to make films that can be then used by organizers to do the work that they're doing. So I'm not myself an organizer.

Delaney: Then maybe speak to the impact, sort of your intended impact of your films or sort of elaborate on where you, why you're driven to do what you do.

Kelly: Well, I mean, I think usually it's about trying to like reframe an issue so that people see it in a new light and maybe think about it a little differently.

And you know, with My Brooklyn, it was a really big effort to reframe gentrification. Because gentrification was usually talked about—this was quite a few years ago now, like 12, 15, 12 years ago. People would always see it as being about people moving in and out of neighborhoods and who should live where. And like, it just felt like not a very strong analysis to be so individually focused, you know? And if people were like, oh, you shouldn't move here 'cause you're a gentrifier, that just doesn't seem like effective to me in the long run in terms of building a sustainable city, right? Because people are always moving places and they're always gonna go where they can find a good place to live that's less expensive or that they can afford.

So I wanted to give a more historical and systemic understanding of what really is happening with neighborhoods and that it's not just like individual choices about where to live.

It's also about zoning, it's about subsidies, it's about development policy. And so for me, that knowledge was so empowering, and I think people really absorbed it and were hungry for it at that time. It was kind of like throwing a bucket of cold water on this white liberal “Oh, we're so great, we're in Brooklyn,” kind of party. Because people were so like racist, in some ways, in terms of the way they saw Fulton Mall. They would be like, oh, I love Brownstone Fort Greene, but like that area is so, you know, we need to do something about that. And so to just say to them like, “Why? Why does your opinion need to drive everything? Your taste is your taste. It's not a fact of what should happen.” You know?

So I think sometimes for me, talking to people who are kind of in my world and saying to them like,”wake up, look at your impact. You need to think about things a little bit differently because you think you're doing all the right things, but you probably aren't.”here's a little bit of that for me. And in the process, though, a lot of people ended up finding the film very useful. I remember showing it at this organization called FUREE, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. And there was one kid who'd grown up in Williamsburg, he was Latino. And after he watched My Brooklyn and he saw the whole section on redlining and how like certain areas were disinvested in on purpose,

And he just said: “for the first time in my life I feel like it wasn't our fault that we had garbage all over the streets.” And so to me, the film did speak to a lot of different audiences successfully. And then the other thing I think it did was really, in conjunction with a bunch of other films and things that happened around that time, which was the end of the Bloomberg years in the city, I think people were just hungry for more tools to understand what had happened to the city under Bloomberg and why the change had been so dramatic all over the city. here was a hunger for understanding zoning in particular. Now, today when people hear about it, rezoning, they're more likely than not to be like, “What, what is that? I don't know if I trust it.” Whereas before people were like “Zoning? that's some weird technical arcane thing that I don't really understand.”

So I feel like at least in the activist communities, that film did contribute to a real growing consciousness around things that seem really technical, but are actually incredibly important. By the time I got to making this film, I think we felt that the world doesn't need a film right now that tells you what to think about an issue. What we wanted to do was just really show how diverse and hard the conversation is and how local democracy is really hard work, andhoping that communities could see themselves in the film and that that would bring conversation forward. So it's kind of different film by film, I guess, and different historical moments need different types of films, I think.

Antonia: Yeah, definitely. I'd love to go a little bit deeper in that, in the sense that, you know, the challenges that surrounded you started to, well that you investigated within the scope of the challenges that local democracies were experiencing here. So, you know, you, you mentioned how the community board were struggling to steward this process and there was challenges from, you know, language barriers to having a competing view of a different vision. Can you talk more about like the, the other kind of tensions and challenges that surfaced, maybe some that you expected and those that you didn't expect and like what the process of like resolution was that either wasn't successful or what was successful?

Kelly: I think a big thing was the tension between people who wanted to just be pragmatic and be like, let's get something, you know?

Let's work together, and even if that means working with the developer, let's just try to all work together to make something better. And that was really opposed to people who had a more radical analysis, I guess, of power and money, and that was so hard to broach. I don't think that the community board was able to really broach that. I think people didn't see eye to eye, but like I said before, I think that they stayed in the room together and heard one another. I interviewed Alexa Avilés, I don't know if you're talking to her, but we interviewed her and she said at the end of the process what was interesting was that after all of this happened, there was another rezoning about putting a school in the industrial zone.

And she said that the board was able to really understand what that meant, the land use and why a school shouldn't be in an industrial zone, and that they unanimously or close to unanimously agreed to not site the school there. And she said that she didn't think that would've happened if we hadn't gone through this whole process with Industry City. And that's always stuck with me because it was like, okay, people didn't come together around Industry City, but they did impact one another's thinking and they were able to come together on another issue.

Antonia: Yeah. It's almost like a similar parallel with like you by means of people learning more about rezoning, then they're able to like be a little bit more conscious of it and critical. And in the same sense, like there's this kind of unifying experience that comes with going through a, a difficult process of navigating something with individuals that have disparate views.

Antonia: No. Allowing you to have more consensus

Kelly: Maybe. I think there's a lot of people who still aren't very happy with each other. These are real hard things and it's not that easy to all get along. But I think everybody here is really committed to the neighborhood and loves the neighborhood and wants a lot of the same things. And it's really more about how we, what's the strategy for getting there. Do you know about the Equinor wind? One of the things at the end of the film is that part of the vision for the Just Transition on the waterfront is that this company called Equinor is going to be assembling wind turbines here on the waterfront that are going to be going out to this wind farm off the coast of Long Island.

And so, you know, the groundbreaking for that, I mean, Andrew Kimball, who was the developer of Industry City, but the CEO who now is the head of the Economic Development Corporation of New York City, right? He's the head of EDC, he's the head of all development for the city, basically. He's there breaking ground in a picture with Elizabeth Yiampierre from UPROSE. So like, you know, I think that people also were playing the roles that they play and that, you know, for some people at least they're not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in the sense that like, you know, some people who really radically fought a lot in the process are still able to get together and, you know, break ground on this thing that everybody thinks is a good idea, right? So I also think it's just, it is just life and it really is like democracy in a way. I don't know, is democracy the right word? It's just living in community with one another, right?

Kelly: How are we gonna do that? How are we gonna disagree? How are we gonna decide what we prioritize and how to make it happen? I don't know.  That's what being alive is to me,trying to figure that out.

Antonia: Yeah. Would you say that that's a unique characteristic of, I mean just like this ability to get back into the bullpen and you know, keep working with each other, that kind of like resilience. Do you think that's a unique characteristic of Sunset Park?

Kelly: Hm. Not unique, but I think it has a lot of that quality. Yeah. More than a lot of other places. I don't know why.

Delaney: Talk about sometimes when you see that or sort of like moments when you've felt that tingly feeling of like, wow, we're really, we're doing something here, aren't we?

Kelly: I guess. That's a hard question. I mean, I think, I feel it all the time. The park for me is like an amazing space. And not in a touchy feely way. It's just amazing to me that people can occupy and share this same space and it's like, there's such an incredible amount of accommodation and mutual kind of allowing for everybody. It's pretty wild. I mean, occasionally you'll get like an annoying gentrifier person who's like, “Can't they, you know,” somebody a while ago wanted to call the cops on some vendors in the park 'cause they didn't like that they were making noise or that they were selling like cheap plastic toys from China. But there isn't a lot of that. I don't think so. But mostly it's the stuff in the film, you know, when you see these community board people just like staying till one, two in the morning,

night after night and nobody's getting paid and, you know, it's just really tough. So, I don't know why Sunset Park has more of it. I think maybe it's the immigrant character of the neighborhood and I don't know. That's that. I'd love to know if you figure that out. Because it's a special place, but it's not unique, you know, it's just special.

Antonia: I think I've covered the majority of the questions that I wanted to ask. Do you have any final..?

Kelly: Wow, I must have talked a lot [laugh]. No.

Antonia: No, this has been amazing.

Delaney: I'm curious, you said you own this building?

Kelly: I don't own the building. I own the co-op apartment. Yeah, there's six of us.

Delaney: Okay. Maybe talk a little bit about what it's been like as a participant in social housing.

Kelly: Well, I could tell you about this building. So this building was rehabbed in like 1980, I think, or sometime in the 80s by a group of people.

Originally it was called Space for the Arts. And originally there was a certain income restriction and you had to be registered with the Department of Cultural Affairs as an artist to live here. And so it was musicians almost exclusively for a long time. Now it's kind of switched, you know, it's turned over some and half the people in the building are musicians now. And the income thing has phased out and the artist thing has phased out too. It's just kind of, it's a cool building. It's a co-op, like any other co-op in New York City. You know, there's nothing like super special about it, but that's its history.

Delaney: Yeah. Where did you learn the history?

Kelly: I was researching for My Brooklyn and I found a picture of, I found a newspaper article in the Brooklyn Eagle about the opening of the building in like 1980 something. Yeah. And I saw the picture and I was like, oh my God, that's our building. We still have the same door [laugh].

Antonia: Yeah. And, and you've lived here the whole time. amazing. Oh, well it's a really beautiful space.

Kelly: Thanks.

Antonia: The light is so nice. And also the balcony.

Kelly: That's a fire escape. But the church out front is amazing. Like, you just see a parade of life: death, funerals, weddings, and then there's a live reenactment of Jesus on the stations of the cross, at Easter, like they literally act it out and it's Chinese and it's English and it's Spanish. It's pretty, it's a cool church if you, you know, aren't opposed to churches.

Delaney: Complicated.

Kelly: Yeah, exactly. But there's a lot going on over there. It's nice. Yeah.

Delaney: Anything else that you would like to highlight for us sort of in this conversation around community organizing towards just housing and land?

Antonia: Maybe a question that you wish we asked?

Kelly: No, your questions were great. I think the questions I have are just like, you know, I think I already talked about them. It's just like, what would make it possible to actually, and maybe this community's doing it, like maybe this is as good as it gets, you know. But I do think one thing that could happen that would be better is like, how do you get the city to actually do community planning? instead of just responding to this private actor who comes here and says, I wanna rezone, and then everybody has to like, jump into high gear for five years and like kill themselves to defeat this proposal that like, that's so much work that could have been spent doing something else. You know, it was just opposing.

And so I think yeah, like how, how would you actually engage a whole community, you know? And I mean, maybe it just is happening, you know, UPROSE does part of it. The community board’s doing part of it, other people are doing part of it, you know, it's like everyone's doing their bit.

Antonia: Okay. Great. Well thank you so much.