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If you happen to fall in to the New York Harbor, the Hudson, the East River, or Jamaica Bay, you need not fear bacterial infections or diseases from industrial pollution, according to a draft of a yearly report from the city's Department of Environmental Protection. Unless you fall in after a storm.
In fact, despite their sullied reputation, the quality of most of the waters around New York City has been pretty good in recent years. Since passage of the nation's Clean Water Act of 1972 and improvements in the city's handling of sewage in the 1980s, city waterways have improved. Perfection is a long way off. But for a city that disposes of 1.9 billion gallons per day from wastewater treatment plants in New York waters (in 2003) and lives with the effects of pollution from years gone by (such as PCBs dumped upriver in the Hudson), the waters are relatively clean.
"During the last two decades, water quality in New York Harbor has improved to the point that the waters are now commonly utilized for recreation and commerce throughout the year," says the Department of Environmental Protection’s draft report. Charles Strucken of the department says they are still working on the final report about New York water quality (not drinking water).
One problem that continues to plague the waterways stems from storm water and sewage being combined. When it rains, the pipes and water treatment facilities can't handle all of the waste. Sewage is sometimes discharged directly into the waters.
The storm runoff also brings pollutants from the land and streets, such as motor oil, pet waste and pesticides, says Maureen Dolan of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
In anticipation of the sewage discharges, the city closes beaches even before storms. In the summer of 2004, she reports, 12 beaches were closed, for a total of more than 400 days. The Bronx experienced the most with 289 beach closure days for eight beaches. Dolan expects similar figures for 2005 (results have not yet been tallied). The technology is there to keep the sewage out of the waterways. "In 2005 we should not have sewage flowing into the beaches," says Dolan.
"Right now looking out my window, I can see down a depth of eight feet," says Dan Mundy, founder of Jamaica Bay EcoWatchers. He became active in the mid-1990s, when he saw conditions in the bay where he lives deteriorating. Since then, the waters have improved. Though 300 million gallons a day of treated sewage water comes into the closed estuary adjacent to JFK Airport, Jamaica Bay is holding its own, says Mundy. "The bay is swimmable. Fishing is great."
Swimming and fishing are all right in the Hudson and East Rivers, too. "The water is cleaner now than it was ten years ago -- and by some estimates 100 years ago. It is perfectly safe and sanitary to swim in it," says the Manhattan Island Foundation, which sponsors an annual swim around Manhattan.
Don Riepe, Jamaica Bay Guardian for the American Littoral Society, which looks after shorelines , says eating fish such as striped bass, bluefish and other game species from the waterways is generally safe. Because of pollutants that rest on the bottom, he recommends staying away from bottom feeders. "Things like American eels that live in the bottom of the bay you don't want to eat. You don't want to eat shellfish. Everything else, use common sense. Don't eat a lot, and make sure it's cleaned properly." He recommends taking off the skin and fat layer because that's where "pesticides and heavy metal accumulate."
Waterways around New York generally look better this year, reports Barbara Cohen, New York Beach Cleanup Coordinator for the American Littoral Society, which sponsors a statewide beach cleanup day each September. Volunteers collected 73,408 pounds of debris around Manhattan alone last year. Though figures haven't been compiled yet for the 2005 cleanup, Cohen says that this year "beaches seem to be cleaner than in the past."
The debris, what those in waste treatment call "floatables," contributes to the look and to the physical well-being of waterways. "The main source of floatables is street litter, which ends up in the city's storm drains (catch basins) and sewers," reports the city's environmental department Web site. Plastic accounts for 42 percent, paper and polystyrene for some 26 percent apiece.
"In New York, cigarettes, caps and lids, and food wrappers accounted for nearly half of all the debris items collected," reports the American Littoral Society about their 2004 cleanup.
Debris is a problem for the small waterways, too. In the cleanup this year, Cohen says, "Coney Island Creek is a bad area in terms of litter and other debris."
Debris is one of the Harlem River's problems as well, but as a tributary of the Hudson, it also suffers from the same PCB contamination that the Hudson does, reports the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
The worst problem for the tributaries and "small embayments" are bacteria from the storm runoffs, says the Department of Environmental Protection's draft report. "Some of these tributaries are the only remaining areas where bacterial counts exceed standards on a regular basis."
The report details pollution from industry and storm water discharge in Newton Creek, which marks the border between Queens and Brooklyn and flows into the East River. Improvements to the creek are scheduled for completion in 2007.
The infamous Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn remains polluted and even smelly at times for the same reason, reports Crain's New York Business. Developers who want to build housing along the canal are reportedly daunted by the city's recent postponement of the canal's cleanup.
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The Bronx River also faces storm runoff that pollutes other New York City waterways. That's a problem for Jamaica Bay, too. There are still algae blooms on occasion, caused by an excess of nitrogen from the runoffs. When the algae die, it sucks oxygen out of the water, and fish leave or die. "The bay is also losing 50 acres of marshland a year, and no one has figured out why so far," Mundy says. Shell fishing is still prohibited.
Still, Mundy says in the past four years, he has become optimistic. The Department of Environmental Protection is building huge holding tanks to handle the overflow. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on capital projects.
Mundy and others who have watched the water for a long time are convinced that the beauty of New York's rivers and harbors is not just on the surface.
The Waters of the Harborby Peter Fleischer, about the Department of Environmental Protection's 2002 water quality report.
Earth Day by Eric Goldstein, including a look at the waterways.
Congress Acts to Protect New York's Water by Congressman Ed Towns, about state water table legislation (for drinking water)
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Earlier this year, Housing Here and Now, a coalition of housing advocacy organizations, released a list of the city’s top ten worst landlords and set up a Web site to identify others. Now, the coalition has taken its campaign a step further. They issued a report that found that one quarter of buildings that receive rent subsidies from the city Department of Homeless Services and the Human Resources Administration have been cited by another city agency for serious violations, such as no heat and rat infestations.
The city’s record of paying landlords for substandard apartments is, unfortunately, not very good. By contrast, the federal Section 8 subsidy has rigorous standards for apartments it pays for. The agencies that administer Section 8 -- the housing authority, the city and the state -- routinely cut off the subsidy when an apartment fails inspection.
But the Section 8 program, disliked by the Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration, is on its way out. Last year, the mayor took a controversial step in light of Section 8’s troubles: The city created a new subsidy called Housing Stability Plus.
As I’ve written before, many advocates called this subsidy “Section 8 lite” when it came on line earlier this year. They considered it inferior in many respects, not least of which is because it declines by 20 percent each year until the fifth year when it ends entirely.
The city has yet to give a satisfactory response to how someone on public assistance is going to cover a 20 percent annual rent hike. At best, the city appears to be pinning its hopes on some strange ideas -- that landlords will not seek to evict tenants who do not pay rent or that tenants will somehow find the income.
Beyond this, however, in administering the new subsidy the city leans toward the more lenient housing quality standards that it uses for people on public assistance rather than those used by Section 8. Last year, the public advocate released a report of homeless people who received the subsidy living in apartments with significant violations of the city’s housing code. In its own report, Your Tax Dollars At Work: How NYC Subsidizes Slumlords, Housing Here and Now found more of those tenants.
“We share their concerns for client safety and commend them on the thoughtful report,” Jim Anderson, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, said of Housing Here and Now in a statement. “We are confident in the integrity of the apartment inspection process -- and, as the authors show, the vast majority of the certified apartments exist in buildings that meet their standards."
Many of the violations that do exist, Anderson maintained, were in the buildings, not in the individual apartments being subsidized. "We don’t think the appropriate response is to bar homeless families from competing for decent apartments in buildings that have violations, prolonging their shelter stays in the process....”
Housing Here and Now’s lead organizer said the city should simply not give priority to slumlords for the subsidy.
“In the case where there is a landlord with a sketchy record, that landlord should not necessarily be denied but they shouldn’t be at the top of the list,” said Chloe Tribich of Housing Here and Now.
The city has also launched an “aggressive” effort “to address unsafe building conditions through code enforcement,” the spokesman said. At the very least, they will have a good idea of where to start thanks to the advocates’ report.
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â
In New York City’s quiet suburban-like neighborhoods far from Times Square and Wall Street, there’s lots of buzz these days about “overdevelopment.” Homeowners in these low-density enclaves are worried developers will start building to the maximum allowed by zoning, which in some cases can mean two houses in the place of one or even an apartment building here and there. The Bloomberg administration has responded by downzoning “to preserve neighborhood character” in some 42 areas of the city. Downzoning reduces the potential for development while upzoning allows more development.
New York Times correspondent Janny Scott recently repeated the common orthodoxy about what’s behind the downzonings. She said it was: “A swelling population, an overheated real estate market and the biggest building boom in 30 years.” This is how it’s perceived by many out in the neighborhoods. But growth pressures are only part of the picture.
According to New York City Councilmember Tony Avella, chair of the Zoning and Franchises Committee and a long-time critic of “overdevelopment,” while the current zoning in many low density neighborhoods is “totally inappropriate and hasn’t been changed in years, there is a correlation between overdevelopment and lack of planning. We need to totally revamp the way the City of New York does planning.” Avella is a supporter of the Campaign for Community-based Planning and is working on legislation that would change the way planning is done.
The real problem with downzoning to stop overdevelopment, or upzoning to encourage development, is that they both avoid any serious planning, both in each neighborhood and in the city as a whole. They don’t allow local residents and businesses to address serious concerns they have with everything from housing needs to traffic, because zoning regulations are limited to use and density controls.
Imagine if the city were to take seriously the question of building housing to meet the present and future needs of New Yorkers. The city’s planners might do some projections and then work with every neighborhood in the city to see how they could accommodate their fair share of the need. This is exactly what was done in Seattle during the four-year term of Mayor Norman Rice. The State of Washington mandated a city-wide growth management plan, and the mayor then organized a team of planners to work with 38 neighborhoods, each of which developed its own plans. Every one of the neighborhood plans accommodated their share of the city-wide growth needs, and none refused to do so, mainly because they were empowered to determine how and where the growth would occur. Overdevelopment wasn’t a problem because every neighborhood had its proportionate share in development.
But it remains to be seen how many of the same neighborhoods in New York City complaining about overdevelopment are willing to support planning. For example, do the Staten Islanders who backed recent downzonings there recall that there was once a sensible plan for Staten Island that would have concentrated growth on the island, preserved open space, and prevented the inefficient low-density sprawl that has multiplied traffic and McMansions everywhere? The South Richmond Plan was introduced in 1971 by then State Senator John Marchi, but got beaten back by those who cried – yes, you got it – “overdevelopment.”
The South Richmond Plan was an early version of what the American Planning Association has popularized as “Smart Growth” – concentrating development around existing areas with density and infrastructure. While the term can be interpreted to mean many different things, it’s a concept that could be applied in New York if indeed there were the will to plan. Growth could be allocated in places around the city where it made good sense – building on existing densities and using infrastructure that’s already in place.
But is the downzoning in low-density neighborhoods part of Smart Growth? Or is it just adding pressure to other neighborhoods that are reeling from intense development pressures and facing huge affordable housing and service shortages? In fact, the biggest development pressures in the city aren’t in Bayside and Riverdale but in neighborhoods closer to the overheated downtown real estate markets -- Chelsea, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Long Island City, and Harlem, for example, where single-family homes are already rare.
If overdevelopment brings excessive densities, the real issue is what constitutes “excessive?” It’s all relative. If there is any place in the city where densities might be considered too high it’s the centrally-located neighborhoods where upzonings are now concentrating more development. There is no magic formula for balancing growth and open space, but New York City is widely known to have one of the lowest ratios of open space per capita, especially in the more developed parts of Manhattan and the outer boroughs.
If our city planners were really concerned about excessive density and an overloaded infrastructure they wouldn’t be upzoning these areas so that more high-rises can be stuffed onto blocks that already have little “light and air” – features that zoning was supposed to safeguard. These are the neighborhoods that lack open space, have the worst air quality and noise, and have to deal with overcrowded subway platforms and buses.
It’s not just a matter of taking advantage of existing infrastructure but abusing the infrastructure. A blind fixation with development at all costs has produced a void in the public discussion about the problems faced by the city’s infrastructure – for example, solid waste and public transportation systems. It’s automatically assumed these systems will handle new growth because they’re so large, but every one of them is stretched and the costs of expanding these systems are high. Contrary to development advocates, high density isn’t necessarily any more efficient than low density. Economies of scale that come with higher densities can actually change to diseconomies of scale, and lead to a deterioration of the environment and the health prospects of residents.
Isn’t what the Bloomberg administration doing “Smart Growth?” Perhaps lurking in the far reaches of City Hall there lies such a rational motivation. But those who follow the poll numbers might wonder if the strategy has more to do with gaining support for Manhattan Mike in the outer borough homeowner neighborhoods with high voter turnouts. Could the pre-election tax rebate to homeowners and continuing favorable property assessment be part of a bigger strategy along with downzoning?
A statement by City Planning Commission chair Amanda M. Burden may give us a clue. Burden was quoted in the October 10 New York Times: “If you allow the character of a neighborhood to be eroded, the people who live in that neighborhood will leave the city.” Here we have a new version of the “white flight” thesis that contributed to the post-war ideology of suburban development in the U.S. The myth then was that central cities deteriorated mainly because whites left for the suburbs. But white flight was more an effect than a cause – the interstate highway system (the largest public works project in the world) and federal mortgage insurance (which prohibited loans in non-white neighborhoods) were the triggers to suburbanization and the ensuing racial apartheid.
Today the suburbs aren’t exploding as they were then, and New York City is awash in new investment. In the last few decades whites have continued to move out of the city but their neighborhoods have remained intact. They have been largely occupied by working families of diverse ethnicities. In some neighborhoods, however, there have been widespread abuses of zoning and building codes as housing has been illegally subdivided to accommodate new immigrant populations. But the problem isn’t flight to the suburbs, it’s how to re-make New York City’s homeowner neighborhoods so they can provide more safe and affordable housing for New Yorkers. If white flight changes voting patterns, that’s another matter.
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.Â