By now, you have seen flocks of petitioners on street corners across the five boroughs, hovering amicably with clipboards in tow.
They are scavenging for thousands of signatures to get their candidate on the ballot -- a prerequisite to the city's campaign season.
But getting on the ballot isn't exactly smooth flying. For many, it's like fighting off a flock of vultures. Opponents will challenge every signature a candidate has in hopes of shooting down the competition and swooping into office.
Now it's your turn.
Attempt to alight on the ballot as Hektor Heron, a comptroller candidate endorsed by the local party. You can try pecking your way through as Pidge the Populist, an insurgent City Council candidate. Or you can try to strut on the general election ballot as the third party candidate, Starla the Citizen Upstart.
Don't let your chance to get on the ballot fly away from you.
To learn more about the city's ballot process, see Understanding the Labyrinth: New York's Ballot Access Laws.
>Amanda Burden, chairperson of the New York City Planning Commission, boasts that since 2002, the city has completed a record 94 rezonings, creating the most sweeping revision of land use regulations throughout the city's five boroughs since the Zoning Resolution was rewritten in 1961. This massive rezoning effort supports the development priorities of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in 2007 introduced PlaNYC2030, a long-term plan to incorporate almost 1 million more residents by the year 2030.
The city's rezoning frenzy, though, highlights two fundamental problems with its approach to our neighborhoods. One is that the zoning is not based on any comprehensive review of community needs and priorities or any long-range planning. In other words, it's zoning without a plan.
The second and related problem is that, while the rezonings mainly create short-term opportunities for real estate development in neighborhoods where there is intense speculation, the city's planners falsely promote them as being aimed at preservation. In the endless succession of community meetings that go into the rezonings, the city's experts offer colorful slide presentations and discourses on technical details in an effort -- often successful -- to obscure matters. In fact, though, these rezonings are scams.
The principle culprit in this professional land use swindle is the Department of City Planning, the agency that Burden directs and that provides the staff for the 13-person City Planning Commission that she chairs. The Planning Commission officially sets the policy but it relies heavily on recommendations by the planning department staff and is dominated by mayoral appointees (7 out of 13).
The Department of City Planning is the custodian of the city's zoning but for most of its recent history has rarely done any comprehensive planning for and with the city's neighborhoods. It might more appropriately be called the Department of Zoning or, better yet, the Department of Real Estate.
Zoning is a regulatory scheme for controlling the built environment, the physical shell that contains our vibrant human communities. Zoning is not the same as planning but should be based on planning. The city planning department, though, treats the Zoning Resolution itself as the plan for the city.
That view focuses only on the physical dimensions of buildings and plots of land. It doesn't start with the needs of the people who live, work and pass through our neighborhoods. It doesn't address public places, how people relate to the land and one another, and the needs and problems that arise from these relations. There is no place in zoning for the flora and fauna, the natural environment within which we live. While these may be mentioned in the cumbersome environmental impact statements that accompany rezonings, those documents also have little to do with real long-term environmental and health issues.
Community planning, as distinct from zoning, looks at all of these things and lays out visions for the long-term future. There are well over 70 community plans in New York City, many more plans than city planning has done, and while 10 of them have been officially approved, the city has done little to promote and implement them. (I discuss this further in my book, New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate.) In several instances, such as Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the department has undermined the community's plans with its rezoning scams.
These scams come in four major varieties: affordable housing, building height, mixed use and waterfront access. In many instances, all are used at once.
In lower-income neighborhoods facing gentrification, city planning has upzoned -- increased opportunities for development -- to encourage the influx of new residents with higher incomes. This creates a ripple effect that jacks up land values and rents, forcing out people living in public and private affordable housing. Activists working to stabilize the neighborhood so that the people can afford to stay would probably oppose that scenario. So to sell the rezoning, the city latched on to and co-opted an idea that first came from the neighborhoods - inclusionary zoning -- and twisted it to serve the interests of the developers.
Under inclusionary zoning, the city would require that a certain percentage of new homes in an area be affordable. Here, though, is how New York's inclusionary zoning scam works. In designated areas ripe for development, the city changes the zoning to allow more development but offers potential developers the option of getting a bonus of 20 percent more floor area if they agree to make 20 percent of the homes affordable to people with low- and moderate-incomes.
The Department of City Planning's public relations campaigns give the impression that if their rezoning passes, affordable housing will get developed. The problem, though is in the details:
-- The inclusionary zoning is strictly voluntary, at the discretion of the developer. Housing advocates have pointed out that, when inclusionary zoning has been successful, it has applied to all developers everywhere in the municipality. That way it can't favor one neighborhood over another. It also has been mandatory for the simple reason that if it's voluntary, the affordable housing may not get built, particularly in today's real estate market. Many developers won't even be bothered with affordable housing even when the market is up.
-- Affordable housing is normally built with public subsidies -- that's right, it doesn't cost the developers and, in fact, they can make money on it. These subsidies are limited, especially in hard times when the demand for affordable housing goes up and available subsidies go down.
-- The affordable housing often is not affordable. The zoning requires that 20 percent of the units be affordable to households making up to 80 percent of the Area Median Income, a federal index for the region. Invariably, the median income for the entire metropolitan area is much higher than the median income for city neighborhoods facing gentrification pressures. For example, the median income in Harlem is half the Area Median Income. As a result, the recently approved 125th Street rezoning would produce units affordable to only 5 percent of Harlem households -- if they ever get built.
In neighborhoods dominated by low- to mid-rise buildings, city planning's upzonings encounter legitimate concerns from residents who fear that the new construction will be out of scale and tower over existing buildings. The planning department thus invented the myth that a rezoning, even when it increases the amount of building space, puts a cap on building heights and replaces zoning that has no height cap.
In such cases the new zoning -- called contextual zoning -- does indeed have an explicit height cap and other provisions that consider existing buildings in the surrounding area. But the older non-contextual zoning also had an implicit height cap that in practice kept tall buildings from being built. Whether it's the old or new zoning, developers can only build so high because the amount of floor area they can build is limited.
If the new zoning permits more floor area it may encourage property owners to demolish smaller buildings and build taller ones -- even with the new height limit.
This is exactly what happened with the 125th Street. Portions of this major thoroughfare had one to three-story commercial buildings before the rezoning even though, in theory, only the sky was the limit. Now they can be replaced with 20-story buildings.
In neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg that have had rich mixtures of industry, commerce and housing, rezoning schemes face opposition from people who believe that mixed use should be preserved and industry should not be forced out to build bedroom communities. Greenpoint and Williamsburg spent over 12 years preparing their neighborhood plans that proposed to preserve mixed use.
Not long after the City Planning Commission and City Council approved these plans, the Department of City Planning came out with a proposal to rezone large swaths of industrially zoned land for residential and mixed use. The problem is the new mixed-use zones allow for both residential and industrial uses to compete with one another. But in a hot market, like the one in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, no developers in their right mind would build for industrial tenants when they can sell or rent residential property for 10 times the price. In effect, the mixed-use zoning was a back-door residential rezoning.
In waterfront areas, residents worry that new development will block public access to the waterfront. According to waterfront zoning, all residential and commercial developers on the waterfront must provide a public promenade and preserve access corridors to the waterfront. The Department of City Planning uses these provisions to promote upzoning for new development on the waterfront, claiming that new residential or commercial development will provide public access
In reality, the city does not seriously consider creating public parks or placing waterfront land in some sort of trust. Even worse, city planning claims that the new development must be high-rise and sufficiently upscale so that developers can afford to build the public access. But the more high-rise and luxury the new development is, the more likely it is that the public promenade will become an exclusive backyard for the residents in the luxury towers.
The Department of City Planning used the waterfront access scam in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where new buildings going up are indeed becoming exclusive enclaves. A new public waterfront park proposed by residents and reluctantly promised when the neighborhood was rezoned has not been built.
The residents of Greenpoint and Wiliamsburg had a vision of a mixed-use low to mid-rise waterfront with public access -- not rows of luxury housing. Instead, it has seen its neighborhood, hit by the inclusionary zoning, building height, mixed use and waterfront access scams and its hard-fought community plans undermined.
History will determine whether the optimistic growth scenario behind the department's rezonings and the mayor's 2030 plan survive the current burst in the real estate bubble. But neighborhoods throughout the city will nonetheless have to live for some time with the zoning in place.
This is a good time for the city to rethink its approach to both community planning and citywide planning, starting with the real needs and priorities of its residents and workers instead of the amount of floor area that can be built. It is also a good time to shift the main focus of development from lower-income neighborhoods that have experienced intense displacement pressures to the many low-density outlying neighborhoods that were down-zoned by the department.
This would require a complete turnaround in the way the Department of City Planning deals with community boards and community organizations. Instead of wearing out people with endless informational meetings and public hearings -- sessions that result in few, if any, actual changes to the city's plans -- how about a real dialogue between residents and government about the needs and priorities of communities? How about planning for long-term sustainability, from the top-down and from the bottom-up?
Tom Angotti teaches urban affairs and planning, is director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development and co-editor of Progressive Planning Magazine.
The one thing that everyone with an interest in the Gowanus Canal can agree on is that it needs to be cleaned up.
But the three important questions are: (1) what needs to be done, (2) why, and (3) when? It is the city and not the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that has the correct answers to these critical questions: (1) address the sewage overflow issue, (2) because it is the contaminant most affecting quality of life, and (3) do it now.
The city's plan would address the current leading contaminant of the Gowanus Canal that most affects the quality of life of those who live and work in the area -- the raw sewage that runs into the canal when the combined (storm and sanitary) sewer system overflows. Upgrading and modernizing the flushing tunnel and pumping station, as well as selective dredging and capping of exposed sediments, can begin under the city's plan this fall; the city has allocated at least $175 million to accomplish this urgent goal.
(For an opposing viewpoint on cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, see Brooklyn's Lavender Lake Needs Superfund.)
This work, combined with the city's requirement that private developers build new storm water systems when they develop properties along the canal, will dramatically reduce the sewage overflows that are today the primary source of pollution of the canal. In addition -- just as a Superfund designation would do -- the city will compel the parties responsible for the decades-long pollution of the canal to contribute money to finance additional dredging of the sediments at no expense to taxpayers. The city, officials have said, will work collaboratively with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to complete this cleanup. Rejecting a counterproductive Superfund designation will not mean excluding the federal government from a central role in the cleanup.
The chief concerns of area residents are the odors and unsightly floatables in the canal caused by combined sewer overflows. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency has no intention (affirmed publicly by its Region 2 Director Walter Mugdan) to address the issue of sewage in the canal. The agency plans to dredge only the sediments at the bottom of the canal. While this is an important objective, the cost to remove all of these sediments is staggering and, notably, these sediments are not affecting area residents.
A Superfund designation could put on hold the city's efforts to address the important sewage issue. And given the Superfund's track record at other polluted waterways, even the sediments may not be removed for 25 years or more -- witness last week's news that, after a quarter-century, the dredging of the Superfund-designated Hudson River is just now set to begin!
Let's be clear: Sediments at the bottom of the canal pose no threat to human health unless humans come in contact with those sediments on a regular basis. That would happen only if an individual purposely and repeatedly dove to the bottom of the waterway. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency plans to ignore the sewage that runs into the canal during heavy rainfall and instead spend $400 million on dredging sediments at the bottom of the canal that are not impacting people.
More broadly -- based upon empirical evidence from other similar Superfund designations of waterways that have multiple parties responsible for their pollution -- what path would this cleanup be likely to follow if the Gowanus was designated a Superfund site?
The first step is for the federal government to conduct analyses of the condition of the canal. The Environmental Protection Agency has some seed money to accomplish this. During this period all plans for city remediation of the canal as well as private investment would be put on hold because no one would be willing to spend money until the agency's expectations for the cleanup are clear.
Further, during this time it will be unlikely that government authorities would be willing to issue permits for anyone to do work along the canal. So, there would be no private investment to create new infrastructure that would separate storm water from the combined sewer system. The city's plans for the pumping station, flushing tunnel and selective dredging and capping of exposed sediments to be performed by the Army Corps of Engineers also would likely be stalled. As such, there would be no improvement in the quality of life for nearby residents and workers because the sewage and exposed sediments would not be addressed. In fact, the $15 million budgeted by the Army Corps of Engineers would be rescinded if a Superfund designation were to occur, city officials have said.
Also at this time, the federal government will be looking for "potentially responsible parties" to determine who may be liable for past pollution. This is necessary because the agency does not have money to fund a cleanup of the canal. The federal government would sue these "parties" to raise this money. Decades, yes decades, of litigation would ensue, because those that are sued would just turn around and sue others to defray their costs.
The Environmental Protection Agency will not come up with $400 million by going after private parties. There are no Exxon/Mobils or General Electrics involved here -- no deep pockets. Take a look at most of the property owners and businesses currently on the canal and who have been there historically. It is impossible to imagine how the agency could suggest that it could raise $400 million them.
However, the potential does exist to raise the money by going after the city and the utility, National Grid. Should the federal government sue the city and National Grid to raise the money that it is unable to obtain otherwise (arguing they are potentially liable parties) we would all be able to thank the agency for higher taxes and utility charges when the city and National Grid seek to recoup these monies. (National Grid took over Brooklyn Union Gas, whose coal gasification plant has been blamed for some of the canal's pollution.) And while this litigation is going on, the city would not be able to pursue its current cleanup plans and National Grid would cease the voluntary cleanup it has initiated as a part of the state's brownfields program.
While the analyses grind on and the lawsuits and countersuits rage, the condition of the canal would deteriorate. Twenty years from now, the area would likely look like it does today -- or worse. One only has to look into other Superfund projects like the Hudson and Passaic rivers. Both of these were designated as Superfund sites in the 1980s; neither has seen any cleanup activity commence in more than 25 years.
So let's have the city, state, and private sector -- working with the Environmental Protection Agency -- get going on the cleanup without all of the wasted time and endless litigation that inevitably accompany a Superfund designation.
David Von Spreckelsen is a senior vice president of Toll Brothers and a member of the Clean Gowanus Now! Coalition - a group of two-dozen developers and property owners along the canal. †Toll Brothers received ULURP approval for a zoning change for a mixed-use project along the canal from the City Council earlier this year. The project will include 450 market rate and inclusionary housing units.