A City Council subcommittee hearing on the controversial rezoning of the Broadway Triangle proved North Brooklyn’s prime fight over development and affordable housing, now nearing its end, remains as bitter and divisive as ever.

Opponents of the project have not backed down, and promise to continue with a lawsuit filed this fall to block the city’s plans to redevelop one of the last large open tracts of land left in Williamsburg.

The lawsuit and strong opposition to the project has not slowed its proponents, who turned out in force at the Land Use Subcommittee hearing November 19 to lend support to the city plan.

The department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is seeking to rezone a 50-acre parcel of land in Williamsburg - bounded roughly by Union and Flushing avenues and Broadway - to make way for 1,850 new apartments.

Of these, 46 percent would be set aside as affordable housing, intended in theory to benefit the low-income residents of nearby South Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

At the hearing, city officials said they would use eminent domain if necessary to acquire needed parcels of land on the site.

Critics of the plan, who oppose the use of eminent domain, have long contended the affordable housing component, and number of housing units overall, is not nearly enough.

An opposition group, the Broadway Triangle Community Coalition (BTCC) is pushing an alternative plan that would build 4,800 apartments - 75 percent of them affordable - on the site.

HPD Commissioner Rafael Cestero testified that the city’s plan was the result “of a careful balancing act among many competing and worthy priorities.”

He said the proposed rezoning was “developed with the primary goal of creating housing for low income families in this community.”

But when Councilwoman Diana Reyna, who represents the district and is a vocal opponent of the plan, asked Cestero to identify which communities he meant, the commissioner was unable to respond.

The answer was Community Boards 1 and 3, Reyna responded. “It was a very simple answer,” she added.

The tense exchange underscored feelings of anger towards the city for a planning process many allege was exclusionary all along.

Community groups believe they have been systematically ignored by the city, which they say colluded with two favored community-based organizations, the United Jewish Organization and the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, to form rezoning and development plans for the site.

“This community has an alternative plan that represents their interests,” Juan Ramos, the chairman of BTCC, told a crowd at a protest rally on the steps of City Hall staged before the hearing. Inside, Ramos told the subcommittee, “this is the last opportunity for us to get this right.”

Diane Jackson, president of the Cooper Park Houses Association, and others like her, said their concerns were never addressed by the city. “Affordable housing is important to us, but so is the planning process,” Jackson said.

While Congress members Nydia Velazquez and Ed Towns, as well as Reyna, oppose the rezoning, many powerful elected officials favor the plan.

State Senator Martin Dilan and Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the Brooklyn Democratic County leader, sent representatives to the hearing in support of the project.

Lopez chairs the state assembly’s Housing Committee. His girlfriend runs RSBCC, one of the two groups working with the city on the project. Lopez’s representative defended the planning process, saying it was open to community review, and urged the council to approve the project.

“Delay of this process, especially in light of the economic downturn, may postpone the realization of any affordable housing for yet another decade,” Lopez’s representative said. “The people of Brooklyn should not have to suffer the consequences of inaction.”