Elderly residents of some of Brooklyn’s hottest neighborhoods are accusing the Mamdani administration of catering to hipster cyclists by taking over streets for bike lanes, saying it’s “like Nazi Germany in 1933.”
The longtime Brooklynites claim that City Hall refuses to listen to their concerns over plans that would transform Dean and Bergen streets into more friendly pedestrian and bike areas because pols are more interested in pandering to the new wave of deep-pocketed young residents.
“It’s like people of a certain age are no longer welcome in Brooklyn,’’ griped Betty Davis, 82, of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“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 one of the neighborhood’s many aging residents who use the B65 on a daily basis.
The MTA first proposed shifting its route two blocks north onto Atlantic Avenue as part of the 2022 Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign Draft Plan in hopes of increasing speed and efficiency.
But neighbors backed by their Community Board 8 made clear as far back as 2023 that aspects of the proposal seemed “counterproductive and arbitrary” for the neighborhood — which is deemed a “naturally occurring retirement center” — and did not address the route’s biggest chokehold areas.
The bus redesign project is still in the workshop phase, but concerned residents were reinvigorated in their opposition this past spring when Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that Bergen and Dean streets would be even further transformed as they become absorbed by the “Bike Boulevard” project.
The 10-mile corridor would “prioritize cyclists and pedestrians” without eliminating vehicular traffic, the city claimed 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 rep recently added.
City and transit leaders emphasized that the bus redesign and bike boulevard plans are separate — but residents find it too coincidental for so much unwanted change to come at once.
“Someone’s selling us the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Kwasi Mensah, a member of Community Board 8 and Crown Heights resident of 27 years, calling the plans a “war on motorists.
Fellow community board member and even lifelong cyclist Peter Anekwe has argued that Crown Heights already has sufficient bike lanes and that rerouting the B65 would actually cause more safety concerns.
“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,” fumed Anekwe, 62, saying the plan was an “attack on elders.”
Local Stephon Richardson said he believes City Hall is dangling the plans to appease transplants who can be politically swayed but might not stick around long enough in the neighborhood to feel the impacts.
“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.”
