Building Blocs, Not Lofts-How a young politician built a coalition to defeat Vito Lopez

[hrmjustin]

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

During the Bloomberg era, which it now officially seems appropriate to talk about in the past tense, the term global city came into wide use to describe a New York not where strivers from around the world come to settle, but where the wealthy from London or Moscow or Mumbai merely pass through in a fever of luxury acquisition.

If you had paid a visit to the campaign headquarters of Antonio Reynoso, who was running for the Democratic nomination for one of the many City Council seats that will change occupants this year, you might have been inclined to challenge the current vernacular. Mr. Reynoso, a young Dominican-American who grew up in Section 8 housing, defeated Vito J. Lopez, the disgraced former Brooklyn Democratic Party boss and assemblyman, with what in political terms is called a coalition, but which in practice seemed like something more sincere and less manufactured.

On the day before Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Reynoso’s tiny storefront office on Williamsburg’s south side was filled with old Hispanic men and the kind of 25- and 30-year-olds you instantly envision when your mind wanders to the category of Millennials Living in North Brooklyn. One lanky volunteer, a doctor’s son named Kevin Worthington whom I accompanied as he tirelessly knocked on doors in the Bushwick Houses with a volunteer who lived there, had come to this particular moment from his native Strasbourg in France and via social justice work in Mexico. Other impassioned volunteers included Peter and Susan Restler, the parents of Lincoln Restler, a founder of the New Kings Democrats, the liberal political club that is made up of young Obama supporters and that backed Mr. Reynoso.

Peter Restler is a partner at a private equity firm, and Ms. Restler is a former managing director at J. P. Morgan. “They are strong progressives,” Lincoln Restler told me, which ought to tell us something about the kind of political variance that exists on Wall Street.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/nyregion/building-blocs-not-lofts.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytmetro&_r=0