Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso on Tuesday released the 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn, a blueprint designed to guide the borough toward long-term, equitable growth.
The plan expands on the borough’s first comprehensive strategy from 2023 and offers a deeper look at structural inequities and an ambitious set of policy priorities to ensure every Brooklyn resident is healthy, housed and supported.
The 2025 framework, which spans over 350 pages, will shape the Borough President’s land-use recommendations while serving as a resource for city agencies, elected officials, community boards, and grassroots advocates pushing for change.
“It’s time for us to rethink how we manage this city," Reynoso said in a statement. "For too long, New York City has defaulted to zoning as our primary mechanism for planning – leading to the crisis loop we’ve been stuck in for decades. Comprehensive planning, however, allows us to simultaneously respond to our most pressing challenges while creating a long-term, forward-looking vision that ensures New Yorkers today, and those yet to arrive, have the resources they need to access opportunity."
A major addition to the 2025 plan is the creation of the Access to Opportunity Index, a tool that evaluates education, transit, jobs, healthcare and climate risk to identify where opportunity is most available and where it is being denied.
The index highlights disparities across neighborhoods. For example, high-opportunity areas include parts of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill. These communities benefit from strong access to transit, jobs and services, yet housing growth has lagged, limiting access for others, according to the report.
Lower-opportunity areas include Coney Island, Canarsie and Red Hook. The plan calls for targeted investment in these neighborhoods, with projects like the proposed Interborough Express expected to transform mobility and job access for nearly one million residents in southern and eastern Brooklyn.
“What this index makes clear is not where Brooklyn is failing, it’s where government is failing Brooklyn," Reynoso said. "And we can use this index as a tool of advocacy, accountability, and planning to build opportunity into the neighborhoods long deprived of it."
The 2025 Comprehensive Plan includes more than 100 maps and lays out strategies across eight key areas: Housing, Health, Climate, Jobs, Education, Public Realm, Transit and Freight, and Community Infrastructure. Each element ties into a borough-wide framework that addresses current inequities while preparing for long-term growth.
The plan is not a rezoning proposal, nor can it be enacted by the Borough President alone. Instead, it is intended to inform land use decisions and serve as a living document that can evolve alongside the borough’s needs, Reynoso said.
Long-term planning is needed in many areas, including finding solutions to housing displacement; tenants who are rent burdened and live in overcrowded homes; eviction and housing voucher harassment; flooding and increased temperatures due to climate change; chronic diseases; poor air quality; racial discrimination in the job market; loss of small local businesses due to online shopping habits; increasing costs for daily essentials; and poor transit options.
