Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

Topics

Topics

Reclaiming the City's Abandoned Land


Bushwick
Abandoned industrial land in Bushwick, one of 17 NYC neighborhoods
receiving Brownfield Opportunity Area funds

Some of New York's least friendly spaces -- its brownfields -- hold the key to achieving many of PlaNYC's goals for a greener, greater New York. To create more livable and sustainable communities for today's residents while accommodating one million new ones, the city must reclaim and redevelop many of its 7,600 acres of abandoned, under-utilized and sometimes contaminated industrial land.

PlaNYC offers a framework for reusing thousands of brownfields to provide affordable housing, generate jobs and offer usable open space. Redeveloping these lands would also promote the plan's goals of protecting wetlands, improving public health and cleaning up toxic waste. PlaNYC calls for state legislative action, and it also includes several important initiatives the city can implement without any approvals from Albany.

The city has taken some steps to advance the cleanup and re-use of brownfields, but there is much more the Bloomberg administration can do.

Releasing Community Redevelopment Grants

Mayor Michael Bloomberg achieved an important PlaNYC goal in early March when then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver signed a legislative memorandum of understanding that included $2.7 million in State Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) grants for nine communities around the city.

This brings the number of New York City neighborhoods to 17 that will receive a total of $4.5 million in state Brownfield Opportunity Area planning funds, covering over 2,000 brownfield sites in Jamaica, West Brighton, Sherman Creek, Sunset Park, Red Hook, East Williamsburg, South Bronx Waterfront, East New York, Port Morris, Harlem River/Bronx, Broadway Triangle, Gowanus, Port Richmond, Eastchester, Newtown Creek, Bushwick and Harlem.

Another half dozen city communities are poised to take advantage of new Brownfield Opportunity Area funds that the state is making available this spring. These funds are being used to conduct environmental and economic studies, and to identify strategic sites and redevelopment uses that meet community needs, such as affordable housing.

Create a City Office for Brownfield Activities

The $4.5 million in state funds supporting these 17 community-based brownfield initiatives need a parallel commitment of city resources to ensure coordination of land use, planning and site specific actions. There is also a tremendous need for improved communications, training and technical assistance both for city agency staff and the communities involved in brownfield planning.

PlaNYC calls for the creation of a central city Office of Environmental Remediation to coordinate all the city's brownfield activities. Bloomberg budgeted $1 million for this office in 2008 and his fiscal plan includes $2 million annually in future years, but the office has not yet been created.

The city hired four new people with hazardous materials technical capacity at the Department of Environmental Protection, but no new personnel have been brought on board to conduct outreach, training and technical assistance. City Council legislation to make the Office of Environmental Remediation a permanent part of city government would help insure that this important function continues after Bloomberg leaves office.

Restructure the State's Brownfield Tax Credit

The mayor scored another partial victory in January when Spitzer proposed creating a 10 percent brownfield tax credit bonus for projects built according to a Brownfield Opportunity Area plan. That same bill would free up the state Department of Environmental Conservation to start accepting historic fill sites into the Brownfield Cleanup Program. (Historic fill is material brought into a site to raise the elevation of low lying areas to permit development and typically is used along New York City's waterfront.)

Because the filling occurred prior to any regulation, these materials contained contaminants, including metals and petroleum. To date, most city fill sites have been rejected from the state's cleanup program. Albany lawmakers, occupied with the budget, have not yet considered these thoughtful reforms.

Provide Financing and Insurance

PlaNYC provides $15 million for a remediation fund that would provide low-interest loans for testing and remediation and $10 million for environmental insurance. Both initiatives are desperately needed, particularly to advance affordable housing and other projects struggling to cover the additional costs involved in building on brownfields.

Unfortunately, the city's efforts to develop a remediation fund haven't moved, and this is at least partly due to the delay in establishing the Office of Environmental Remediation. The city should use a portion of the $15 million slated to finance brownfields for the Metro Brownfields Program, an innovative public-private brownfield remediation financing program whose progress has been stymied by the restrictions placed on the federal grant made available to credit enhance remediation loans. (Note: New Partners for Community Revitalization is a partner in the Metro Brownfields Program.)

The city's environmental insurance initiative calls for the creation of a policy that protects property owners before they test their site. This has not moved forward and whether there is a need for such insurance is unclear. There is, however, a need for environmental insurance policies that would protect against cost overruns associated with planned cleanups and provide liability protection. Policies that address cost overruns are difficult to secure on cleanups of less than $5 million, and the premiums are very high. If PlaNYC funds were used as a buffer – essentially to cover the first narrow layer of remediation cost overruns before the insurance coverage kicks in -- it would reduce the premium costs for the developer and increase the availability of policies. Separately, PlaNYC resources could be used to subsidize premiums, particularly on projects with narrow profit margins such as affordable housing.

Give the City Regulatory Authority

City Hall has said its top brownfield priority is to get authority from Albany for its own cleanup program. The fact that the Department of Environmental Conservation has practically shut down the state's Brownfield Cleanup Program in the aftermath of recent lawsuits makes the need for city autonomy that much more urgent. A bill in the State Senate would give the city this authority, but the Assembly has not introduced a companion bill, nor has the Paterson administration shown any interest in handing over authority to the city.

And, with a moratorium on new Brownfield Cleanup Program applications lasting through early July, it is unlikely that Albany leaders will consider such a change before the legislative session ends this summer.

Instead of waiting for the state, the city should advance those PlaNYC initiatives that do not rely on state action. The $4.5 million in Brownfield Opportunity Area funds that are advancing 2,000 brownfield sites in 17 communities should set the pace for accelerating achievement of the PlaNYC brownfield goals. However, continued progress is dependent on City Hall establishing the Office of Environmental Remediation and delivering the communications, technical assistance, training, financing and insurance assistance these communities need. The good news is that none of that depends on Albany.

Jody Kass and Mathy Stanislaus are co-directors of New Partners for Community Revitalization, Inc.

Back to the Sustainability Watch homepage

 

Is the Long-term Sustainability Plan Sustainable?


illustration
PlaNYC could benefit from more collaboration in the planning process.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's unprecedented long-term sustainability plan for New York City, PlaNYC2030, is a year old. But the failure (at least for now) of what the mayor's office declared to be a keystone of the plan -- congestion pricing in Manhattan -- should lead to some serious reflection about how to create a workable long-term plan for the city.

As the State Assembly refused to even hold a vote on the plan to charge people a fee to drive in Manhattan, the mayor blamed elected officials in Albany. His opponents faulted the mayor's proposal and tactics.

Whatever the merits of congestion pricing, its defeat reveals a fundamental flaw in the mayor's approach to long-term planning that was obvious to many urban planners from the start. The plan was prepared by the mayor's staff and a team of outside consultants, and designed in such a way that civic, environmental and neighborhood groups could not truly engage with the administration in a two-way dialogue about the plan. In scores of public forums and focus groups, people from the mayor's office offered presentations showcasing the plan and asked people who attended to submit their comments. It was a one-way, top-down process. There was no conversation, and the decisions about what to put in the plan remained in City Hall. As a result, grassroots support for the plan, and congestion pricing, was limited to passive assent and a more enthusiastic core of environmental groups.

Why Process Matters

Why should it make any difference how the plan was developed? If it's a good plan, why not just line up and move on? Unfortunately, that was the message coming from City Hall about congestion pricing, and it didn't work. While many of the other 146 proposals in the mayor's plan are also good ones, they too will go nowhere fast unless top-down planning in City Hall can meet bottom-up planning in the city's neighborhoods on an equal footing. And many of the proposals in the plan would have been even stronger from the start if they had been enriched by lively public discussions and debates. That kind of debate improved the congestion pricing plan, making it simpler than when originally proposed and adding provisions for residential parking and help for lower income New Yorkers who drive into Manhattan. This indicates that even if discussions take much more time -- and the congestion pricing debate took almost a year -- they are a fundamental part of the planning process and should not be cut short.

With only 20 months left in the mayor's term, the big question now is what parts of the plan will survive into the next administration? Will term limits limit the dreams of long-term planning? The answer to these questions will depend on the large pool of civic, environmental and neighborhood groups that for a long time has proposed long-term solutions to the city's problems and so applauded the mayor's plan, but were left to play second fiddle in the new City Hall concert. Mayor Bloomberg can accomplish many things in 20 months just by using financial resources normally available to the executive branch, only to see the next mayor change priorities and divert resources.

Origins of PlaNYC

The problems with the planning process go back to the administration's first attempts at long-term planning. After challenges to many large-scale projects directed by then-Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff (remember the Jets stadium), the city's Economic Development Corporation hired former City Planning Commissioner Alex Garvin to prepare a study of long-term growth opportunities and constraints in the city. This study, dated May 2006, assumed there would be a million new people by the year 2030, and found opportunities for new high-density neighborhoods along the city's industrial waterfront and on top of rail yards and roadways. Garvin's bold vision was accompanied by proposals to create new public spaces and improve mass transit to support new growth, obvious concerns of both real estate investors as well as current residents.

The Garvin plan was sketchy in many respects and if it had been put forth as a land use plan for the city it would surely have met with some harsh criticism by neighborhoods, particularly those already bearing the brunt of massive real estate speculation and megaprojects. Some of the opposition would have been knee-jerk not-in-my-backyard sentiment but some would have been rooted in serious skepticism about the ability of the city to provide adequate services, protect existing residents from displacement and deal with the long-term environmental consequences of growth. The Garvin plan was a growth plan and only suggested how environmental impacts could be addressed. It was commissioned without public input and, significantly, was done by the mayor's economic development office and not the City Planning Department or City Planning Commission.

Without public discussion, the Garvin plan became the foundation for PlaNYC2030. Months later, in September 2006, the mayor created an Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, placing it within his Office of Operations, and an advisory group. Seven months later, on Earth Day 2007, they unveiled PlaNYC2030.

City Planning Outsourced

The 2030 plan appears to have been largely prepared by a management consulting team under contract with the city's Economic Development Corporation. Calls to the corporation confirmed this, but we were told we could not obtain a copy of the contract without filing a Freedom of Information petition. The firm, McKinsey & Company, is one of the largest that serves global corporations, and Rohit Aggarwala, director of the mayor's Long-Term Planning and Sustainability Office, was hired directly from McKinsey.

The plan looks more like a strategic planning report for a big company anxious to save money on energy than a blueprint for city government. It was marketed like a corporate strategic plan, replete with full-color charts, a Web site, focus groups and "stakeholder" meetings throughout the city. The mayor's office and consultants locked up the planning process, and when they finished their work, it was taken around town for viewing.

While the mayor's office organized focus groups to test its ideas, the plan was never officially approved, as long-term plans are in other New York municipalities and just about everywhere in the nation. In New York City there is a clearly defined process for approving plans, outlined in Section 197-a of the City Charter, our constitution. Plans should be presented to the community boards (there are 59 in the city), borough presidents, City Planning Commission and City Council. At each step, there are required public hearings and votes. Borough presidents and City Council members are elected, and can speak for local constituencies not represented in a highly centralized government run by a single powerful mayor. Community boards are appointed but they are the only official form of neighborhood-level governance, in neighborhoods that average 135,000 people. None of these bodies was consulted. In addition, there are many community-based organizations, civic and advocacy groups that usually take part in the process and were not involved in any significant way.

Missing: Planning at the Neighborhood Level

In general, bottom-up, neighborhood level planning is alive and well in New York City. The Municipal Art Society's Atlas of Community-based Plans shows that there are over 80 community plans, many of them both visionary and inclusive. They were often developed when neighborhood activists felt city government was not responsive to their needs.

Some issues critical to communities are notably absent from PlaNYC: affordable housing preservation, waste management, industrial retention, living wages, noise, public health crises like obesity and HIV/AIDS, education, immigration, and discrimination. Critical issues like traffic and parking throughout the boroughs seem to have been submerged by congestion pricing for Manhattan and a far-off promise of bus rapid transit. And the plan never spells out the real-world impact on neighborhoods of its citywide initiatives.

In community-level planning, neighborhoods confront the ways that global issues play out in a very real and tangible way on the ground as they affect the daily lives of people. PlaNYC instead uses quantitative metrics that fail to resonate with the everyday lives of people in their communities. For example, PlaNYC sets a goal that every city resident should be within a 10-minute walk from a park. As New Yorkers for Parks has pointed out, however, the goal is so broad that it has little meaning for communities planning to make green space accessible for all. Many people need public space on the block where they live, and for some people even a 10-minute walk is too much. Many green spaces serve regional recreation needs but do little for people living next door.

PlaNYC's methodology is linear, dealing with simple cause-effect relations that may have little to do with complex neighborhood-based visions. For example, planting a million trees would reduce greenhouse gases by a quantifiable amount. Congestion pricing would reduce car trips by a predictable percentage. But as the congestion pricing debate proved, it is simply not enough to make one isolated change a city priority when its local impacts are not clear. This kind of "results-oriented" thinking ignores the complexity of life in the city and is especially unsuited to a multicultural city where many, perhaps even a majority of residents, find this approach to be alien. Within African, Asian and Native American thinking, for example, there are powerful holistic theories that integrate instead of disaggregate the human experience. And environmental justice advocates have long criticized how some measures touted as good for everyone in the city actually have different effects from neighborhood to neighborhood and reinforce inequalities.

Is the Honeymoon Over?

One year since the launching of PlaNYC2030, the time has come for supporters of sustainability and long-term planning to go beyond simply patting the Bloomberg administration on the back for all the good things in the mayor's plan and move on to serious discussions. While the city is the better for the unprecedented launching of a public discussion about sustainability in the policy arena, we should not forget that New York is decades behind other cities in Europe and the United States when it comes to long-term sustainability planning.

As we contemplate next steps some people might prefer to see PlaNYC2030 fade away in order to save long-term sustainability. Unfortunately, this could set back any future efforts to address long-term environmental and public health issues. Rather, the best antidote to this understandable frustration is to intensify the public discussion about sustainability in New York City, measuring the progress being made and giving both credit and criticism to the mayor and city agencies when due. Moving the debate beyond public relations and campaign rhetoric can, in turn, lead to a genuine top-down/bottom-up dialogue about how to construct a long-term plan for the city that is sustainable for generations to come. This is the objective of Sustainability Watch, a project of Gotham Gazette and Hunter College's Center for Community Planning & Development. May a thousand flowers bloom on Earth Day!

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. 

As City Grows, Affordable Housing Shrinks


photo by Paul Goyette
Affordable housing is becoming harder to find across the board.

As New York City grows, it will need more affordable housing.

A city cannot be truly sustainable if people do not have safe, healthy, and affordable places to live in it, so any serious plan for the city's future must focus on providing homes for households at every income level - especially the 36 percent of New Yorkers with incomes of twice the federal poverty level or less. These are the people with the greatest unmet needs, and their needs can only be met through planning and government action, because the market on its own will always fall short.

Unfortunately, however, we are moving in the wrong direction. The supply of housing affordable to the city's low-income households is eroding rapidly, not only in a few gentrifying neighborhoods but everywhere.

In the last five years alone, we have lost 15,949 Mitchell-Lama rental apartments and 2,686 project-based apartments in the Section 8 federal housing subsidy program. That is, admittedly, a little less than the number of new rental apartments created so far through Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace plan, but the lost Mitchell-Lama and Section 8 apartments were on the whole affordable to much lower income people than the newly created ones.

Even public housing is under threat. The New York City Housing Authority has a $195 million operating deficit due to severe underfunding by three levels of government - city, state, and federal.

Worst of all is the loss of affordable rent-controlled, rent-stabilized, and unregulated housing. The U.S. Census Bureau's New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey shows that we are now losing 30,000 rent-regulated apartments affordable to a family of four with a yearly income of twice the federal poverty guideline. And we are losing similar unregulated apartments at a rate of 28,000 per year. The New Housing Marketplace Plan is producing some new apartments at a comparable rent level (up to $968 a month in 2005), but not nearly fast enough.

The High Cost of Lost Housing

This loss of affordable housing is hitting low-income households hard. Even in economic good times, income gains are being outstripped by rent increases. And in bad times, disaster is right around the corner. The Housing and Vacancy Survey shows that poor households have persistently high rent burdens. In 1996, the median poor household in an unsubsidized apartment paid 63 percent of its income as rent. In 2005, that figure was 62 percent.

Meanwhile, near-poor households, with incomes from 101 to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, have been falling farther and farther behind. In 1996, the median household in this group paid 36 percent of its income as rent, but by 2005 that figure had risen to 42 percent. The sad truth is that these New Yorkers are rapidly falling into the dire situation of the poor. Two thirds of near-poor households and one third of poor ones are working, but high rents are consuming the benefits of work.

These rent burdens translate into real hardships for low-income people. For six years, the Community Service Society has been conducting an annual "Unheard Third" survey of low-income New Yorkers. The survey makes it possible to see the impact of the affordable housing shortage in terms of hardships like falling behind in rent, having utilities cut off, doubling up with another family or staying in homeless shelters.

The survey shows that in 2002 and 2003, 46 percent of poor households experienced at least one housing hardship. By 2006 and 2007, that figure had risen to 50 percent, despite the fact that the city's economy improved markedly during this time period.

The situation for near-poor households deteriorated much faster. In 2002 and 2003, 28 percent of them experienced at least one hardship, but by 2006 and 2007, 44 percent of them did- almost as high a rate of hardship as the poor households.

What's worse, the more severe hardships -- doubling up or staying in homeless shelters -- rose sharply for both groups: from 7 to 16 percent for the near poor and from 16 to 24 percent for the poor. This helps explain why a record number of families are in the city's homeless shelter system.

Ending the Erosion

Reversing this disastrous loss of affordable housing is the first order of business for housing policy. If the city's population is going to grow by a million by 2030, as city planners project, that probably will include some 125,000 more low-income families, unless there is an unanticipated change in the city's job mix as well as patterns of migration and demographic growth.

The bottom line is that we need to turn a loss of over 60,000 affordable apartments a year into an increase of 6,000 a year. This challenge will require an enormous increase of commitment beyond the New Housing Marketplace.

Solutions like inclusionary zoning and the creative use of government-owned land and existing subsidy streams can help. But real progress also will require a combination of stronger regulation and major new subsidies. That, in turn, will take a significant increase in political will.

For years, city and state office holders have been allowing the rent control and rent stabilization laws to weaken. Programs to create new housing have produced too few apartments, and too few of the apartments created have been targeted for poor and nearly poor households. Now we need stronger rent laws, and large new subsidies to serve low-income New Yorkers.

These are politically controversial, but if we aren't discussing them, then we aren't really planning for New York City's future.

Tom Waters is a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. 



Print Friendly and PDF

Editor's Choice


Gotham Gazette: New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
Gotham Gazette: 
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years