Older residents in some of Brooklyn’s most sought-after neighborhoods say Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration is prioritizing hipster cyclists over longtime residents by converting parts of local streets for bike infrastructure. One resident likened the approach to “Nazi Germany in 1933.”
The longtime Brooklynites say City Hall has ignored their concerns about plans to make Dean and Bergen streets more accommodating to pedestrians and cyclists. They argue that city officials are more focused on appealing to a new generation of affluent young residents than on serving the people who have lived in the neighborhoods for decades.
“It’s like people of a certain age are no longer welcome in Brooklyn,” said Betty Davis, 82, a Bedford-Stuyvesant resident.
“I don’t think anybody realizes what it means for someone at 82 years old to have to walk an extra five blocks to get to their bus.”
“Anytime you deprive any group of people — especially working-class, elderly and handicapped people — of public transportation, that is more than just an issue of civil rights. That’s an issue of human rights,” she said.
“As an elder, this feels like Nazi Germany in 1933. What are you gonna do next? Kill me because I’m elderly?”
Davis is among the many older residents who rely on the B65 bus every day.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority first proposed moving the B65 route two blocks north to Atlantic Avenue in its 2022 Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign Draft Plan. The agency said the shift could improve bus speed and efficiency.
But residents, supported by Community Board 8, had objected by 2023, describing parts of the proposal as “counterproductive and arbitrary.” They said the plan failed to address the route’s most significant bottlenecks in a neighborhood considered a “naturally occurring retirement center.”
The bus redesign remains in the workshop phase. Opposition intensified this spring, however, after Mayor Mamdani announced that Bergen and Dean streets would undergo additional changes as part of the city’s “Bike Boulevard” project.
The 10-mile corridor is intended to “prioritize cyclists and pedestrians” while still allowing motor vehicle traffic, the city said at the time.
“We are developing a bike boulevard on Bergen and Dean so both school children and older New Yorkers can navigate these streets safely, with the joint goal of also supporting fast and reliable buses,” a City Hall representative recently said.
City and transit officials have stressed that the bus network redesign and the bike boulevard are separate initiatives. Residents, though, say the timing makes it feel as if multiple unwanted changes are being imposed on the neighborhood at once.
“Someone’s selling us the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Kwasi Mensah, a Community Board 8 member and Crown Heights resident for 27 years. He described the proposals as a “war on motorists.”
Peter Anekwe, another community board member and a lifelong cyclist, has also questioned the plans. He argues that Crown Heights already has enough bike lanes and that moving the B65 could create additional safety risks.
“The elders and children have to cross the busy thoroughfare of Atlantic Avenue, which is where trucks are allowed to traverse. They have to now get caught up in that mix in order to utilize the B65,” said Anekwe, 62, calling the proposal an “attack on elders.”
Local resident Stephon Richardson said he believes City Hall is promoting the changes to win over newer arrivals who may be politically influential but might not remain in the neighborhood long enough to experience the consequences.
“It feels like Mamdani is talking from both sides of his mouth in the sense that he campaigned on keeping longtime black residents in their homes, not pushing them out,” Richardson said.
“These urban renewal policies aren’t going to state, ‘We’re doing this for these unsavory reasons to displace these people to bring in the professional folks who might make more money and align with us more politically,’” Richardson continued.
“They’re not for people in the immediate area of Crown Heights — it’s for the passer-by, the transients, the people who are gentrifying.”
