In just four years, PlaNYC has proved itself a remarkably valuable planning tool for New Yorkers, with unprecedentedly broad reach. In accessible language, it presents a unifying vision linking hundreds of components that go into New York City's environmental sustainability, from stormwater management to brownfields remediation to energy efficiency retrofits. Updated last month, PlaNYC provides a vision and guide to anyone seeking to do their part to improve the city's environment and reduce its carbon footprint.
In short, PlaNYC provides an overarching vision for New York City’s growth. While much of the plan -- both the original and the update -- addresses actions to be taken by government agencies, numerous objectives require mobilizing the rest of New York City – especially businesses, community-based organizations, labor unions and other groups that can advance PlaNYC’s goals. This knowledge is empowering. It enables the community-based organizations and businesses that the Pratt Center works with to orient their efforts to work toward specific sustainability goals, whether by planting trees, investing in energy efficiency upgrades, developing affordable housing, or through a host of other activities.
Yet while PlaNYC provides important guidance for neighborhood-level sustainability projects, it does not involve New Yorkers in creating the PlaNYC vision itself, or holding PlaNYC's creators accountable to achieving their commitments. What’s more, PlaNYC takes an end-run around the governing document of New York City, the City Charter, and the democratic process.
For much of the 20th century, the City Charter included a mandate for a master plan, but it proved unworkable. More recently, New Yorkers amended the charter to foster public participation in city planning. Section 197-a of the charter enables community boards and other groups to propose community-based plans for their neighborhoods' future development, and gives those plans official stature as part of the city’s land use resolution.
The City Planning Commission has approved 11 of those plans. The very drafting of them serves as vehicle for building neighborhood-wide consensus around planning priorities and for advancing them through the political and budget processes.
Yet in its own planning the city has largely ignored 197-a plans. In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the city's rezoning fundamentally contradicted the neighborhoods' 197-a plans.
The complexity of implementation across city agencies has contributed to the plans' gaining so little traction. Another problem is that community boards must devise their visions in the dark, without knowledge of the city's own strategic priorities for the very same geography. If the city finds the plans unworkable, it is to some degree a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The charter also promotes public participation in planning through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP. Community boards get an advisory vote on proposed land use changes, all of them site-specific.
ULURP too, however, has suffered from a lack of a transparent and enforceable framework for planning in New York City. Needs that are inherently neighborhood, borough or citywide in scope -- notably for affordable housing and school capacity -- end up being addressed through individual land use decisions, often project by project. The result has been uneven and often highly inequitable distribution of both the benefits and burdens of development.
As its name indicates, ULURP focuses exclusively on land use decisions, reflecting the early 20th century view of planning as strictly a matter of building height, bulk and type of use. PlaNYC vividly reminds us that the development of a sustainable city involves many other dimensions and an obligation to update public participation to reflect the realities of planning today.
The mayor’s new director of long term planning and sustainability, David Bragdon, should be well prepared to lead the way to a meaningfully public PlaNYC. As president of Portland, Oregon's Metro Council, Bragdon oversaw the Portland Plan, a visioning process that engaged 17,000 residents and provided direct input into the city's comprehensive plan, which is now going through a public review.
New York City is the only large city in the nation that does not have a comprehensive plan. The size and complexity of our metropolis make such planning challenging, but not impossible -- and in fact, imperative. A public review process of the kind that Portland used offers an important opportunity to get New Yorkers engaged and invested in planning for neighborhood growth -- and sustainability.
PlaNYC suffered a serious blow early on precisely because it lacked such engagement. As introduced on Earth Day 2007, PlaNYC called for charging people to drive into Manhattan’s business districts. Loud opposition immediately drowned out he congestion pricing plan, and efforts by the Bloomberg administration to rally popular support came too late. While the mayor and his staff had consulted planners and environmental groups, they had not pursued a community-engagement strategy ahead of the plan’s release. The administration had to abandon congestion pricing.
To its credit, the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability has learned from that mistake and begun to take meaningful steps toward community engagement. This time around, it held a series of sessions with leaders of community-based organizations.
Some of the ideas from these sessions are highlighted in the most recent edition of PlaNYC, such as this statement from Ana Dioguardi of Queens Community House: “I think that low-cost housing for families earning $40,000 or less is the number one thing many neighborhoods in the city need." Notably, though, the Queens initiatives highlighted in the plan itself, Hunters Point South and Willets Point, will provide relatively little housing for low-income households.
In addition, this month the city will launch its Change By Us social media site, which will help grassroots environmental projects working in support of PlaNYC’s goals to connect with neighbors, volunteers and other activists.
All of this activity represents a step forward. But it does not disguise the fact that PlaNYC is a document that is both top-down in its origins and accountable only on the terms its creators set. That needs to change. PlaNYC needs to be more than a public relations document; ultimately, it must be something that the city as a whole can meaningfully contribute to, and that is more than a shadow planning process.
For this to happen, the City Charter needs updating to make New Yorkers part of the process not just on individual land use decisions, but on more comprehensive strategic planning about the future of New York City. Last year's charter revisions made only minimal adjustments to existing land use provisions; a future Charter Revision Commission can and should do much more.
One step would be to transform PlaNYC from a project of the mayor's office to a charter-sanctioned civic body akin to the City Planning Commission, with representation that includes appointees from not only the mayor but other city- and borough-wide elected officials, as well as community board review.
PlaNYC could also assign each community board to identify its preferred measures to advance specific PlaNYC goals within its district boundaries. Routine participation in key decisions across all neighborhoods would help build a culture of local responsibility around planning and sustainability. That, in turn, would redirect energies away from NIMBY and into more constructive directions. It also would help reduce the unfair advantage wealthy communities now have over poorer ones in their ability to get their needs addressed through the planning process.
Finally, PlaNYC could build sustainability on the foundation of the City Charter's fair share provision. This requires that siting decisions for city-sponsored facilities, including power plants and waste transfer facilities, consider whether neighborhoods are already disproportionately burdened. PlaNYC could identify metrics -- from park access to air pollution levels -- that would allow the city to set targets for reducing the environmental burdens that growth places on our most vulnerable communities.
Such community engagement will require investment. Community boards need the expertise of planners, and the boards themselves need to become more reflective of the communities they represent -- both things beyond the ability of PlaNYC itself to change.
But PlaNYC won't be complete until it goes through an actual public process that shapes implementation. Public participation cannot be just a media project. The administration must now fulfill the opportunity it has created by giving New Yorkers a meaningful stake in PlaNYC’s direction and execution.
Alyssa Katz and Eve Baron are senior fellows at the Pratt Center for Community Development. Baron coordinated the Campaign for Community-Based Planning.
Vision 2020, New York City's plan for its waterfront, seems to offer something for every New Yorker: promenades along the shore, bucolic wetlands with lots of fish and wildlife, ferries and kayaks, industrial jobs, and new condos with waterfront views.
Looming behind the plan's picturesque images of clear skies and kayakers, however, are the waterfront views from prime real estate locations. Behind the frothy rhetoric designed to garner public support, Vision 2020 is really a business plan.
Overall the plan envisions parks and natural habitats. It also anticipates creating infrastructure that would allow industrial areas -- smaller than they once were -- to thrive. And it calls for new housing "for people of diverse income levels."
Public access, natural restoration, industrial and commercial development – all reflect the interests of those who own land on and near the waterfront. Public promenades and parks on the waterfront will be valuable amenities for luxury towers, as will the "panoramic water views of great beauty."
The few natural areas in the plan are to be in locations that are not prime targets for large-scale development such as Jamaica Bay and along the Arthur Kill on Staten Island. They will be preserved as museum-like exceptions along the 578-mile coastline that is being masterfully engineered for the fun and profit of humans. The industry and public utilities on the waterfront will be allowed to stay where they are, although the plan does not address the negative environmental impacts of these industrial areas on surrounding communities.
In short, the city’s long-term plan for the waterfront, a revised version of the original 1992 plan, continues the trend toward conversion of the coastline from a working waterfront to prime real estate. It is perhaps fitting that the main feature in The New York Times about the city’s waterfront plan appeared in the Real Estate section.
Even with construction stalled by the recession, the article said, "The groundwork is being laid for the next great phase of waterfront development in the city." Casting a covetous eye at the Queens and Brooklyn waterfront, Jeffrey Levine of Levine Builders told the Times, "It is a great opportunity to buy land and warehouse it for development."
The plan has won praise from many civic groups, who have essentially entrusted the future of the waterfront to city hall. In November, to promote and celebrate the 2020 plan, the non-profit Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance held a conference that outlined the future as seen by the city's leading policymakers. Alliance board chairman John Watts praised Mayor Michael Bloomberg as "the waterfront mayor."
The 2020 plan has one important new element –- the plan to literally dive in the water. At the waterfront alliance gala, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Steel introduced this new element by calling for development not just on land but in the water. Steel said, "The waterfront is the sixth borough" -- just as important as the other boroughs. City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden chimed in, saying, "The water is the heart of the city," a new territory to be explored. "Now is the time," she said, "to go from the water's edge into the water."
The plan envisions the waters surrounding the city to be so clean that people can swim, fish and boat in them. And it claims that more ferries and boat traffic are both possible and necessary.
Developers have sought for decades, to build out into the water using deep pilings and new buildings on piers. That also could be what going "into the water" means.
A recent show at the Museum of Modern Art proposed alternatives to address seal level rise that included salvaging waterfront real estate by essentially making it "waterproof." Is the waterfront plan helping to encourage such dubious and expensive?
The plan does not address such possibilities. Nor does it confront global climate change, which could cause the sea level to rise and dramatically alter the waterfront -- both on the water and along its edge. David Bragdon, director of the Mayor's Long-term Planning and Sustainability Office, suggested at the conference that there may need to be changes in zoning to either "harden" or "soften" sections of the shoreline -- presumably make them more resistant to sea level rise or return them to their natural state. But no one echoed his concerns.
While the prospect of future building in the water may be much too risky even for the most aggressive speculators, some citizen activists think more safeguards are needed to protect the shoreline. Marcy Benstock of the New York Clean Air Campaign believes the waterfront plan "is an invitation to catastrophic storm damage" and wants the city to "stop subsidizing development in, on or near the water." Benstock sees a connection between the plan's call for streamlining permitting on the waterfront and the stated interest by developers in lowering environmental standards.
Another cautionary voice comes from environmental justice advocates. The NYC Environmental Justice Alliance claims that the 2020 plan does nothing to address a major problem with the 1992 plan: the polluting facilities that are part of much of the working waterfront and tend to be in and adjacent to low-income communities of color. The 2020 plan has minimal requirements for public access and amenities and offers no guarantee that environmental and public health issues will be addressed.
While Burden acknowledged environmental justice concerns in her speech at the November conference, these have yet to translate into more rigorous regulations governing industrial uses on the waterfront or anything other than token amenities for residential communities.
In the current financial climate as many upland real estate deals dry up, the lure of waterfront views may very well grow in importance. With a goodly stock of vacant condos sitting on the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts, however, the city's economic gurus may find it hard to entice even more development to the shore.
The leading role of the city's Economic Development Corp. in waterfront planning suggests the focus will be on business generators. EDC is a non-profit corporation controlled by the mayor's office. The business-friendly entity was set up to run like a corporation and negotiates major development deals.
Vision 2020, developed by the city planning department, is actually but one piece of the city’s waterfront plan. Vision 2020 falls under the larger umbrella of the city's WAVES (Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy). Few details about WAVES, launched in April 2009, are available on its web site. The other major component of WAVES is the Waterfront Management Advisory Board, a body made up of 12 mayoral appointees that claims to be responsible for implementation. Little is known about the functioning of that board.
Economic Development Commission Executive Director Seth Pinksy focused his comments at the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance conference on developing the industrial and maritime waterfront and reforming the regulatory regime. From its founding by the Dutch up until the 1970s the most active parts of the city’s waterfront were those used for commerce and industry. Many stretches of water, especially outside the busy ports in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, were quiet places for rest and relaxation for residents living within reach. There also were, and still are, many public utilities including sewage treatment plants, power generators, and waste transfer stations dotting the waterfront. Some sections were inaccessible to the public, blocked off by highways and other barriers.
In the 1970s, as shipping containers replaced the old system of unloading bulk cargo using cranes, ports need large amounts of land to store the containers. The city's port facilities moved to New Jersey, where the land was a lot cheaper. This change opened up new territory for the city's residential real estate industry, especially along the stretches of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront where "waterfront vus" of the iconic Manhattan skyline promised high rents, sales prices and investor windfalls.
While developers scrambled to buy up derelict waterfront properties, city government dallied, failing to develop any comprehensive plan for the waterfront until 1992 when the City Planning Commission approved the first Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. One year later, the commission approved waterfront zoning, which codified a new system for private waterfront development. Waterfront zoning requires that developers of new residential and commercial facilities provide public access along the water's edge and keep public corridors open so that people from the surrounding communities can see and get to the waterfront. This zoning mechanism was based on the idea of creating public open space through public-private partnerships instead of publicly funded park development.
After almost two decades of experience with the city’s waterfront zoning, it would appear that it has made it far easier to rezone the industrial waterfront for upscale high-rises in neighborhoods, even when there is intense opposition by waterfront communities. According to Burden, over 1,000 acres of waterfront land has been rezoned since 2002. In her comments, he did not mention, however, the fierce zoning fights in strategic locations like Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
Over the years more parks, promenades, bicycle paths and other public benefits have been built on the waterfront. While all New Yorkers and visitors use them, they have come at a price. These amenities could have been much larger and served many more people if they did not depend on having new high-rise development that hems in the public waterfront and uses it for its own front yard.
Vision 2020 does not address huge differences among planners, community residents, and other New Yorkers over what to do with the city’s waterfront. All but one of the speakers at the waterfront alliance conference ignored the sharp conflicts between visions, and the even more serious problems implementing the visions.
Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, recognized the problems as he ticked off several "conflicting priorities." For example, both the 1992 and 2010 waterfront plans called for full reactivation of the 65th Street rail yard and old Long Island Rail Road line in south Brooklyn. Opposition from surrounding communities and other obstacles continue to stand in the way, yet that is still part of the plan. There are conflicts between the future vision for Governors Island as a haven for open space and recreation, on one hand, and proposals for more intensified use of the nearby Red Hook Container Terminal on the other.
Ward seemed to suggest that time would better be spent recognizing and trying to resolve the conflicts instead of hoping they could be resolved by another plan. Since Vision 2020 leaves large gaps when it comes to big issues like environmental justice, high-rise development on the waterfront and in the water, sea level rise and the limitations of public-private partnerships, many in city government and the civic community continue to look beyond the plan.
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.
This article has been corrected. Please see details at the end of the article.
Name just about any big and controversial development project in New York City -- the new Yankee Stadium, Bronx Terminal Market, Willets Point, Coney Island, Metrotech -- and behind them stands a single powerful dealmaker that makes them possible, the New York City Economic Development Corp. or EDC.
When business owners at Willets Point in Queens denounced Mayor Michael Bloomberg for proposing to take their property to build a hotel, convention center and new residential community, EDC, which planned and negotiated the project, stood in the shadows.
When the mayor's office, working with a local, non-profit development corporation, proposed a plan for Coney Island, EDC stood in the shadows behind a local subsidiary that it backed, the Coney Island Development Corp.
And when the mayor's office announced PlaNYC2030, the city’s Long-term Sustainability Plan, EDC stood in the shadows even though it had commissioned the study that preceded the plan and contracted with the management-consulting firm responsible for putting it together.
In the last eight years the EDC has sponsored over 500 projects, including some of the largest new developments in the five boroughs and citywide. With this portfolio, EDC probably has more to do with planning the city -- where, how and when new development happens -- than all the city agencies that are entrusted with doing so. Despite that, the agency receives little scrutiny or even attention.
Perhaps it was only in the final stages of the recent and failed Kingsbridge Armory Project in the Bronx, which would have handed over the vacant property to the Related Corp. for development of a mall, that EDC's role as intermediary between developers and the mayor's office emerged clearly into the sunshine. EDC had spent years brokering the deal only to find that the community/labor coalition it had engaged would not back down on the issue of a living wage for workers at the proposed mall.
What is this city entity that is sometimes called quasi-governmental, a city agency or an arm of the mayor's office? Despite its name it is not a private corporation or financial institution, nor is it an independent public authority like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or the Port Authority, entities Robert Moses helped invent to protect decision-makers from public oversight.
EDC is a non-profit that is wholly owned and financed by the city. The mayor appoints its board of directors, and most of its budget of over three quarters of a billion dollars comes from the city.
EDC's stated mission is "fostering economic growth." It does this by responding to private-sector proposals and helps to pave the way for their success. With New York advertising itself as the "Real Estate Capital of the World," major real estate deals including malls, condos and business centers, get special attention from EDC. Since an uncontested doctrine links the city’s economic health to its ability to keep the cement mixers going, growth is usually assumed to be good.
Though entirely under the mayor's control, EDC is set up to work more like a private corporation than a city agency. The mayor appoints its directors without having to worry about incidentals such as unions and civil service regulations. EDC boasts that it promotes "public service with a private sector culture," and has an "operational flexibility" that leaves it free from many of the agency rules and procedures that often hold back innovation and change. This preference for the private model is clear when you go from the city's public website with a dot.gov address to EDC's website with a dot.com address.
Since taking office, City Comptroller John Liu has repeatedly faulted the EDC for the way it operates. Last spring, his office released an audit charging the EDC had failed to turn over $125 million to the city, and more recently he criticized EDC officials for spending too lavishly on international trips. Overall, Liu has said, the agency's operations lack transparency. “It has become a powerhouse agency, but we have very little understanding of what comes in and out of it,” he said. “You cannot see anything that is going on.”
Last month, the Industrial development Agency, a part of the EDC, issued new rules designed, officials said, to increase transparency and accessibility but denied they had anything to do with Liu's criticisms.
A key to EDC's "flexibility" is its internal structure, more like that of a private corporation than a city agency. Its current executive director, Seth Pinsky, like previous chiefs, comes from the world of finance and real estate. Under him are 13 vice presidents, a chief operating officer and chief financial officer -- no bothersome departments and directors that can't be moved around or kicked out by the CEO.
Below the executives is a legion of mostly young professionals who enter and exit through EDC's revolving doors as they learn the ropes and discover that the real power and money is with the companies with whom the agency is supposed be a partner.
Like its staff, EDC itself is young. It was born in 1991 out of a merger of two previous non-profits, the Public Development Corp. and Financial Services Corp. The Public Development Corp., founded in 1966, turned out to be a useful vehicle for the negotiation of tax benefits and subsidies that purportedly prevent the flight of jobs and capital from the city, and these functions continued and grew.
After the merger EDC began to manage the city's Industrial Development Agency, which produces bonds to finance commercial and industrial projects. (For an in-depth look at the Industrial Development Agency, see Gotham Gazette's Subsidies in the City: Part I and Part II.)
EDC also has ended up running some projects that haven't been able to find a home anywhere else in the city government. For example, it is in charge of four city markets, including the innovative and successful Essex Market on the Lower East Side and La Marqueta in East Harlem, which has yet to prove sustainable.
These potentially vital neighborhood markets, however, are dwarfed by the multiple mall and supermarket projects fostered and financed by the group, including what could become the city’s first Walmart. More small-scale local markets could help bring healthy, fresh food to every neighborhood, especially at a time of food-related epidemics such as obesity and diabetes. In short, EDC's approach to economic development seems to mirror the preferences of the larger businesses in the private sector and direct public funds in their direction.
Despite having one foot squarely in the private sector, EDC is considered the "lead agency" on just about every major development proposal. Even though it's not a city agency, it has become, in effect, the city’s most significant entity for land use planning.
While the New York City Planning Department boasts of having done more than 100 rezonings since 2002, these only change regulations, while EDC actually negotiates the deals with major developers that determine what gets built. EDC's planning is always limited to the individual project and does not necessarily extend to neighborhoods or the city as a whole. But neighborhood-level and citywide planning rarely occurs in this city. Unlike other major U.S. cities, New York has never had a comprehensive master plan except for a 1969 draft that never even received a hearing at the City Planning Commission. Although there have been some 100 community-based plans, only ten have been officially supported and adopted.
When it comes to buying and selling land for development, EDC plays a critical role, even though it often has to work through other city agencies. EDC tells the mayor’s office what land and other forms of subsidy the private corporations say they need, and the mayor can then direct appropriate city agencies to act. This means that EDC is in the pilot's seat when it comes to long-term planning.
Because of the corporation's unique commitment to "public-private partnerships," its plans tend to support those of private developers whereas the presumption is that city agencies should operate in the public interest. For example, EDC issued a Request for Expressions of Interest for the Willets Point project in Queens. The responses, submitted by private developers, shaped the physical plan and zoning that were finalized by city agencies and approved by City Council.
EDC's general procedure of following the lead of private developers has recently taken over one area that it was previously excluded from -- affordable housing in urban renewal areas. These were normally under the jurisdiction of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the city’s housing agency.
EDC is now, however, the "lead agency" responsible for developing a plan for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area in the Lower East Side. For years, many community groups have insisted that the vacant land there be redeveloped for low-income housing, since the tenants who were displaced by the government’s “slum clearance” program were low-income and the city promised low-income housing would be built. EDC's emergence as the lead player, particularly in the last decade when just about every new large-scale luxury residential project has a small component -- usually 20 percent -- of "affordable housing," suggests that "public-private partnerships" driven by market-rate development are supplanting initiatives in which the public sector takes the lead.
One of EDC's most impressive powers is its ability to contract out studies and planning without having to go through competitive bidding or rely on the city's experienced professional staff. EDC was the conduit for important public documents such as the city’s 2007 Long-term Sustainability Plan, PlaNYC2030. Its citywide Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy (WAVES) promises to set the pace for waterfront development in the decades to come and go far beyond the Department of City Planning's Comprehensive Waterfront Plan proposal.
Whether EDC does better planning and development because of its special position and powers is an open question that we might all disagree on. But EDC has assumed critical government planning powers that the City Charter and local law give to city agencies. By negotiating and making decisions in the shadows, EDC can avoid the sunlight that helps citizens understand what is getting developed and decide whether they want it or not. We may know what EDC's executives say to the public through their public relations office but little is know what is said in their exclusive discussions with developers.
Tom Angotti is professor of urban affairs a planning at Hunter College (CUNY) and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning.
CORRECTIONS: This article originally reported the EDC has seven vice presidents. It has 13, including executive vice presidents. In addition, a spokesperson for the agency said it can acquire and dispose of property. Due to an editing error, this article originally said that the EDC issued new rules to increase transparency. The rules were issued by the Industrial Development Agency, which is part of EDC -- not by the EDC itself. The copy has been edited to reflect these changes.
Finally, due to the editor's oversight, the article did not mention - but should have -- that Tom Angotti was a member of City Comptroller John Liu's task force on community based agreements.