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Vote by Council committee no surprise to NYU expansion opponents


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Photo by Camillo Miller


NEW YORK – Disappointed but not surprised – that was the refrain from groups opposed to the expansion of New York University's Manhattan campus after an influential committee voted to recommend a modified version of the plan 19-1 earlier today.

Members of the groups said they were weighing their options in their struggle to hold-up the expansion – including by turning to the courts – and even proposed an alternate plan that they said would be more environmentally friendly.

The City Council is expected to follow the land use committee's recommendation and approve the measure that would allow the university to expand by 2.45 million square feet in Greenwich Village.

The decisive vote in the land use committee came when the Village's representative, Councilwoman Margaret Chin, spoke in favor of the modifications negotiated between a sub-committee and school officials.

Chin said the changes took into consideration the most pressing of the community's concerns.  

“Last month I didn't support the plan as presented,” she said. “But this new proposal strikes an appropriate balance. There were major modifications and significant concessions, and though not everyone gets what they want, it's a compromise.”

By comparison, Patrick Deer, an associate professor of English at NYU and a key member of NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, called the changes “cosmetic" (The name of the group is in reference to NYU president John Sexton).

Groups opposed to the measure said the committee and its members had failed to uphold their responsibilities to constituents.

“Too many on the council abdicate responsibility by saying they'll do whatever the council person who comes from the district calls for,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “But they're elected to govern the entire city, not just part of it.”

Under the new plan, there will be a 21.6 percent reduction in density from the original application, with over half of that coming from two buildings: one at Washington Square Village, where density would be reduced "below grade"; and the proposed building at Mercer Street, where density would be "above grade."

The Washington Square Village would be reduced by 185,000 square feet – from 770,000 square feet to 585,000 square feet – while the Mercer Street building would be reduced from 250,000 square feet to 69,000 square feet.

The university will also set aside $150,000 of funding as a good faith measure to demonstrate their commitment to upkeep of open spaces in the expansion area, a key component that they say ensures the university will be able to pay if they go into default.

According to Lynn Brown, the senior vice president of NYU, the proposal was a win-win for the city and the school, and would add to the "fabric of the neighborhood and contribute to New York City's economic viability.”

The modified plans include a change in the height of some of the buildings, addressing concerns about blocking light and views – in particular, the building on the corner of Mercer Street and Bleecker Street will be lessened from 168-feet in height to 85-feet, which Chin applauded as a needed change.

The difference was demonstrated via two different images projected onto a screen that juxtaposed the sizes of the buildings. The images drew jeers from a frustrated crowd of anti-expansion advocates who wielded signs and used Occupy Wall Street hand signals to voice their opinion of what each speaker was saying.

Brown insisted the compromise “met the goals of addressing the community's needs,” calling the plan substantially different than the plan that was fought over in late June.

The lone dissenting vote came from Councilman Charles Barron, who encouraged his fellow land use committee members to “have the courage to vote no” on the proposal, which he argued failed to address a book-size list of complaints and concerns issued by the expansion's opposition.

“Did you read through all of the community's concerns?” he asked. “Because your presentation does not address any of them.”

These concerns, he said, stem from the air, water, and noise pollution that will come from the 20 years of construction that the expansion will take. “We need to listen to what the people who live in the neighborhood want and then send this back to the drawing board.”

While some other council members cited similar concerns – not to mention NYU's failure to act like a “good neighbor” in the past – they deferred to Chin, applauding her “hard work” in negotiating the compromise.

Even though she voted in favor of the changes, Councilwoman Inez Dickens had said Chin's reference to the “good faith” agreement with NYU regarding the neighborhood's concerns was insufficient.

“When we vote on this at the Council meeting next week, I want to see teeth in the enforcement,” Dickens said of NYU's responsibilities to maintain open space and work toward cleaner construction standards.

Ultimately, however, she said she would vote for the measure because “the area residents need those jobs.”

At least 25 percent of construction work must come locally from the area, the agreement mandates.

Meg Rooney, a graduate alumna actively involved with anti-expansion group that includes faculty, said they were committed to continuing the fight. But how exactly they would proceed was not yet clear, she said.

“There are a number of options,” she said, noting legal action was being considered.

Because of the number of faculty opposing the measure – over 40 departments have voted against the move – there has also been talk of a no-confidence vote in Sexton.  

Alicia Hurley, another vice-president at NYU who attended Tuesday's meeting, said more faculty supported the measure than opposed it.

Despite the number of departments opposed to the move, which include Stern Business School and the Economics department, the university has 170 departments.

Earlier that day, the faculty group had presented their own plan on the steps of City Hall just hours before the land use committee was scheduled to meet.

Called "Room for Everyone: NYU Faculty's Green Alternative to 2031," Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media, culture and communication, said it was a “green” plan in the “true sense of the word, unlike the "“green-washing” of the university's plan.

The proposal called for the re-purposing of space already owned by NYU that they said was either under- or inappropriately used.

The group pointed to administration buildings that could be moved out of the “core” of buildings in Greenwich Village, as one example, and a cafe that opened up in a school-owned building. This, added Deer, would accomplish the goal of expanding academic use of the available space.

The group of professors said that by NYU's own admission only 18 percent of the proposed buildings to be constructed in the next 10 years would go towards academic purposes, thereby undercutting the necessity of the expansion.

The remaining 82 percent would be for other uses, like a gym exclusively for student-athletes, a move that would allow the school to retain its NCAA credentials, as well as further administrative uses. More housing is also planned, but opponents questioned why it was required to be so close to campus.

The group also suggested the cost of the plan could well bankrupt the university. Most troubling, said Miller, was the lack of a business model explaining how the project would be paid for.

Although there is no definitive figure, NYU officials suggest the project will cost between $3 and $4 billion. Currently, NYU's endowment is at $2.83 billion, according to the faculty group.

NYU's Brown said the expansion plan is “essential” for the university to remain competitive.

She also said that concerns over funding were equally misplaced, adding that the university had successfully raised $3 billion in a fundraiser 4 years ago, an amount she is confident the school can easily exceed.

She also countered that NYU had built out at a rate of 200,000 to 300,000 square-feet per year over the past few years, and that the expansion plan would be consistent with that.

“We have some of the biggest real estate people on our board,” she continued. “They wouldn't let a project go forward if we couldn't pay for it.”

The university will provide “at least 7,500 square feet of the new Zipper building ground-floor space” to community use and a public atrium, according to information provided at yesterday's meeting.

An additional 6,000 square feet of “existing space for community use” will also be made available, they said.

___

Matt Hunger, a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist, writes on everything from municipal issues to the arts and sports. He can be reached at matt.hunger(at)gmail.com. 

NYC tax break helps owners improve luxury condos, report says


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Photo courtesy edgeplot

ALBANY, N.Y. – A nearly 60-year-old New York City program designed to help landlords improve conditions for tenants in hardscrabble living conditions has strayed so far from its original purpose that owners commonly use it to fix up co-ops and condos, says a report released earlier today

The J-51 program has become one of the city's most expensive incentives, costing $256 million in 2011, according to the report by the Community Service Society of New York, a 165-year-old group that does advocacy and research to address poverty. 

Even as the cost of the program increased 50 percent from 2001 to 2011, the number of apartments improved under the project only increased by 7 percent, the report said. And the apartments being improved aren't are all broken down hovels--some of them are luxury apartments. 

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration is expected to introduce a bill in the state Legislature today that would renew the program, which expired at the end of last year, with some changes that could possibly restrict the use of the abatement for condos and apartments. The administration did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Jack Freund, vice president of the Rent Stabilization Association, said the group believes the policy continues to be useful to rental housing. 

“Given the very high level of real estate taxes, the program provides incentives to work to get the tax burden down," he said, adding that with the city's support he expected the bill to pass in Albany.  

Hilary Klein, lead organizer with the community-based organization Make the Road New York, said the city is giving tax breaks to landlords who make unnecessary improvements just to drive up the cost of their apartments.

“In spite of the original intentions behind it, J-51 functioned as a giveaway for landlords. It is enabling gentrification and displacement,” Klein said. “Our overall perspective is that it should not be renewed and that the resources would be used better elsewhere for other types of housing enforcement."  

“J-51 is helping to subsidize high-end, luxury apartments in places like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant that are obscenely unaffordable for the low and moderate-income New Yorkers,” said David R. Jones, president and CEO of the Community Service Society, in a statement. “It’s time to overhaul J-51 so that eligible property owners who receive tax exemptions and abatements are actually making improvements to affordable housing stock that otherwise would not occur.”

The abatement applies to buildings with a total of 709,000 apartments. Over a third of "dwelling units” in the city fall under the program, so a great deal of New Yorkers have been touched by the program in some way. 

But, according to the report's authors, the program has grown unwieldy and amorphous. Owners who convert apartments into coops and condos qualify for the benefit for three years after conversions are finished.

In fact, no one had to apply to make improvements under the abatement, the report said. Owners whose property met the qualifications were simply due the write-off regardless of whether they would have made the improvements themselves. 

The expiration of the abatement has set off a bit of a showdown between real estate and tenant groups. The latter want to see the abatement renewed without any changes, while some tenant groups want to see the abatement altered and used as a bargaining chip in Albany to get concessions on rent legislation they prefer. Still other tenant advocates would simply like to see the abatement expire.

Thomas Waters, a housing policy analyst at CSS who co-authored the report, says the city’s housing situation has changed dramatically since the abatement was created and amended.

The program was created in 1955 with the aim of converting coldwater tenements -- flats featuring a sink with only cold water -- into more modern apartments. 

In signing the program into law, Mayor Robert Wagner described J-51 as being designed “to encourage improvement of substandard dwellings and in a way to aid in providing decent living quarters for those who are unfortunate enough to be obliged to live in substandard housing built many years ago and lacking the ordinary decencies and comforts of modern dwellings.” 

The J-51 program works in three ways. First, owners who make eligible improvements to existing buildings qualify for exemptions and pay a reduced property tax. That amount is based on the value of the building before the improvements for 10 years and after that the new value is phased in over four years. Second, some owners receive abatements that reduce the overall amount of property tax they pay until almost all of what they spent on improvements has been reimbursed to them over a number of years. 

Some owners can actually qualify for both an exemption and an abatement depending on the kind of improvements they make. 

Government-assisted buildings and formerly city-owned buildings get 34-year tax abatements. 

Waters says he thinks the program needs to be refocused, but said that after undertaking his study “it is hard to say what J-51 does.”

NYU's Controversial Expansion


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Photo provided by New York University

New York University took back its place in the center of New York’s university expansion controversies by submitting its NYU 2031 expansion proposal to the city last month.

The ambitious plan adds 6 million new square feet of academic and residential space. 2.5 million will be in Greenwich Village, NYU’s historic home, spread across four buildings near Washington Square Park. The rest of the expansions will take place along the health corridor on 1st avenue, Downtown Brooklyn (for NYU-owned Polytech Institute) and Governor’s Island.

The university says that it needs this space to grow and compete and that its plans are community-friendly. John Beckman, Vice President of NYU said that by “incorporating spaces that no one would meaningfully count as open spaces now -- like roadways, parking areas, and fenced in areas -- into our renovation of the open space, we actually add open space on the two blocks even with the footprint of a new building.”

It will also create jobs, including 2,400 construction jobs over the next 20 years, generating an extra $490 million for New York’s economy, according to the Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce. Some laborers and construction workers supported the plan and urged officials to sign off on it.

But opponents of the plan which include local residents, tenant associations, community boards and even some NYU faculty, say that by removing what little space the community has left and flooding it with thousands of new students would ruin the village as a neighborhood and that 20 years of construction would fill their lives with noise and pollution. NYU requires multiple zoning waivers for the plan to go forward.

University Growth

New York City already has the most college students of any city in the nation, including Boston, and their population keeps rising. Many universities across the city are aggressively expanding their campuses and student bodies.

Columbia University is already building in northern Manhattan, while Cornell University will soon build a satellite campus on Roosevelt Island. NYU-owned Polytech is spreading throughout Metrotech Plaza in downtown Brooklyn, having recently acquired several floors of space from a Bruce Rattner owned building, with more on the way. Fordham University expanded its Lincoln Center campus and CUNY is growing as well, with new buildings at John Jay and City College, with a new community college on the way.

“Universities benefit greatly from being in the city,” said Sharon Haar, an architecture professor at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago who wrote the book “City as a Campus.” She said that despite some conflicts over space, universities feed cities with high tech industry and skilled service jobs and in turn, benefit from being in the city by tapping into its culture, infrastructure and body of potential students.

The NYU expansion is the largest single development plan the village has ever seen. In size and expense, it’s comparable with Columbia’s expansion, which also added 6 million square feet of space which cost about $6.3 billion.

But the challenges differ. Columbia’s expansion ran into opposition from several firmly-rooted private businesses which challenged the Empire State Development Corporation’s eminent domain in court. The court ruled against the businesses in 2010 and ruled again, recently, that the corporation may be given power to evict the tenants, if the sides fail to reach an agreement. NYU’s plan won’t involve eminent domain but public land, which earned it more enemies from Greenwich Village and beyond.

Pros and Cons

“It’s clear that the overwhelming sentiment from Lower Manhattan residents, as well as from NYU’s own faculty, workers, students and tenants, is against the scheme,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

NYU’s Beckman countered with a university-commissioned poll of 600 NYC voters held in 2011, which found that 70 percent of respondents favored the expansion. The poll also found that the Greenwich Village project which accounts for 2.5 million square feet out of the total, was the most popular among respondents. The plan was phrased as “the creation of a new public school in the Village and new open spaces and parks.”

Beckman also said that no upzoning would take place and that the ratio of the buildings floors to lot size would not be altered. However, the buildings do require zoning changes and the demapping or elimination of certain streets, squares and gardens. In response to suggestions that NYU build elsewhere, like the financial district, Beckman said that more than half of the planned expansion was already happening outside the village. But this is not enough for many.

Residents say that parks and other open spaces are getting destroyed rather than created and point to the fact that current zoning regulations. Furthermore, the influx of 10,000 to 12,000 students and staff can overwhelm local supermarkets and basic services, said Kelly Magee, a spokeswoman for Councilwoman Margaret Chin who represents the district.

“Tearing down gardens and houses and building a huge tower on top of that, that’s not expansion, that’s desecration of a neighborhood,” a community resident said at a city hall rally against the proposal.

Residents also worry about the debris, pollution and noise that will accompany the construction for the next 19 years. After similar concerns were raised in upper manhattan, Columbia pledged to make its construction site as environmentally friendly as possible by using special construction equipment to minimize dust and soot. It’s unclear whether NYU would attempt the same thing in Greenwich Village but the residents don’t look forward to any prolonged construction on such a scale.

They are also worried about the area belonging increasingly to NYU, which is the source of local gripes. “The shared open spaces that NYU currently stewards have broken fences, dirty walls, poor lighting, collapsed concrete and derelict play spaces,” said resident Ellen Moran. “They have given Greenwich Village broken fences, broken promises and broken contracts. Let’s not add broken government to the list.”

Suspicion towards the university is uncomfortable for some faculty members who live in the neighborhood and oppose the plan. Some turned out to rallies to oppose the expansion but many didn’t want to reveal their names for fear of going against the will of the university.

“It’s not really NYU – it’s the administration and the board of trustees that hatched this plan,” said an associate humanities professor, who declined to identify himself because he was concerned about backlash from the university leadership for himself and his department. “We’re completely devastated.”

He added that the expansion is detrimental because it will be funded with basic tuition which will put NYU students even deeper in debt. NYU students are $659 million in debt, the highest in the country for a non-profit university, exceeding the GDP of several nation states.

Beckman said that the expansion will be funded through a combination of philanthropy, financing, and the use of working capital. “We always take account of tuition in all our financial decision-making; if we don't think a project is affordable, we don't do it -- it's that simple,” he said.

Politics

Opponents mounted a political campaign, bombarding elected officials with letters opposing the plan and staged several rallies at city hall to oppose the expansion.

The plan is currently under review with Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who has two more weeks to go over it. Stringer is known as an ally of university expansions in Manhattan, helping broker agreements for the expansions of Columbia and Fordham. But he remained elusive on what he would do about NYU. Stringer makes no binding decisions on zoning but his advice can carry weight among lawmakers.

“To address some of the issues they care about, I have to look at what small business thinks about this project, what larger city economic issues, how we educate our kids, so there’s a lot that goes into the system,” he said.

Councilwoman Chin took a slightly stronger tone. “I have serious concerns about the University’s expansion plan. NYU has asked for a lot, and I am not sure they need it all,” she said. Magee said that Chin is currently reviewing the plan and talking with all parties to try to come up with the best possible solution.

After Stringer, the plan will go to City Planning for 60 days, after which it will go to the City Council for final review and a vote. This gives the different sides several months to try to convince elected officials.

“History shows that anything that NYU wants, NYU will get,” said Berman. “The only way to stop it is to prevent them from doing it.”



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