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Homeless Count


An entry in the snarky blog Gawkerpointed last year to 5,000 new apartments planned for Manhattan as proof that there was no real housing crisis. I couldn’t help contacting the editors, asking them to consider that 5,000 new apartments in a city of eight million people is not proof of very much. I was told not to take their Web site so seriously.

It is hard not to take numbers seriously. They figure prominently in almost every policy debate, and seem to take over many discussions that involve housing. Statistics mold public opinion. In a few weeks, the city is planning to release one that is sure to get some attention – the number of homeless people in New York City.

Counting the homeless people in shelters can be done rather easily; counting the street homeless is difficult. The city tries to do it anyway, producing a “statistical estimate” after sending volunteers into one out of five neighborhoods. Its methods leave a lot to be desired, said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.

“I think our biggest problem all along has been the flawed methodology the city uses to produce the estimate,” Markee said. “People see those numbers and get an impression.”

This year, in a bid to bolster the credibility of that estimate, the city used decoys, college students disguised as homeless people, to test how well the volunteer counters actually counted.

But Markee believes the count itself simply distracts people from the real issues at hand -- the lack of supportive housing and the difficulty many people have getting into city shelters. On neither front, Markee said, has the city made any progress in three years.

Whatever the number winds up being, it is undoubtedly going to get more attention this year because of the coming mayoral election.

Housing Inspections

For several years the city and landlords have boasted of fewer housing code violations in buildings across the city. But in poorer neighborhoods, as I have pointed out before, buildings are often in very poor condition.

After more than a year of intense efforts by housing advocates, the city may finally adopt a more comprehensive inspection strategy. Rather than responding to tenant complaints, the city’s code enforcement agents would conduct regular inspections of buildings, from roof to cellar, in specific neighborhoods.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development will inspect 30 buildings with violation problems in three council districts every two months, according to the new strategy. The Norwood News’ Heather Haddon reportedthis news in March.

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waterfront Rezoning And Its Shortcomings


Some New Yorkers look at what is happening on the waterfront in Manhattan, with its ring of continuous public parkland, and think with glee: Some day the rest of New York will have this too.

But it is only in Manhattan that the public owns most of the shoreline, thanks to the claims of ownership by the early Dutch and English governments. Outside Manhattan, there is significantly less publicly owned waterfront land. As a result, absent the ability to attract $10 million or so to acquire a site for public use, each community must rely on the city's waterfront zoning rules to ensure that private waterfront development includes public access.

Waterfront zoning can be a powerful tool. It controls the placement of buildings on waterfront sites and requires public space along the water's edge and visual access to the water. But, despite the supposed force of law that zoning carries, there is little available for the city to enforce the rules once the buildings are built and occupied. There are many worst-case scenarios of public waterfront on private property - the poor maintenance along the Shore Parkway and virtually every pier in the City; the lack of security on every bridge walkway and beneath every elevated; and the locked gates at Shore Towers in Astoria and Waterside Plaza in Manhattan. On the waterfront, the economic instinct of the owner is to cater to the paying clientele, not the folks jogging past in knee high socks and tank tops. What good is foot traffic if they can't afford to buy anything?

Thus the enormous reaches of green space at the blue water's edge may remain out of reach.

This may be what happens at Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Much has been written about the rezoning of much of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, primarily along the waterfront. (See, for example, Tom Angotti's articlesin Gotham Gazette's land use topic page). To me, it represents everything that's right, and everything that's wrong, with land use planning for waterfronts in New York City.

It is right because the city is looking ahead to make better use of the waterfront, our most underutilized asset. It intends to commit $100 million upfront to the plan for the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront, and hopes to create 2,500 affordable apartments.

But it's also wrong, for several reasons.

It ignores the history of the neighborhood as a manufacturing center, once home to a famous shipbuilding industry; the USS Monitor was built near Bushwick Inlet during the Civil War. A massive rope factory built around the same time on Newtown Creek is now the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, a world-renowned incubator for small woodworking and related crafts. The plans should do more to ensure that "Made in Brooklyn" is recognized around the world.

The rezoning plan for Greenpoint and Williamsburg neglects the potential uses of the water itself, doing little to encourage potential uses such as marinas and boat launches. While there is now greater access of water taxi-style ferry service, the rezoning plan does not recommend where those water taxi stops happen, or where connecting bus service might be made. For a waterfront land use plan, the transportation component seems largely unaddressed.

In a city where even enormous projects get reduced to a single angle - the West Side Stadium gets the press, the 59-block rezoning area around it gets ignored - the debate in Greenpoint and Williamsburg has focused almost exclusively on the affordable housing. Yet this may never come even close to being realized. "The incentives for developers to include affordable housing units may be so negligible to their bottom line," Councilmember David Yassky pointed out recently, that Bloomberg's expectation for 25 percent of the new housing to be affordable may be extremely optimistic.

Meanwhile, little has been made of the failure of this plan to ensure some public entity will address the maintenance needs and operating potential of this public space in the future. But to me, this is very telling. It means the plan is really designed for the real estate developers of the present moment, not for the future generations of community dwellers.

What most New Yorkers don't know is that when the city created sweeping waterfront zoning rules in 1993, most waterfront areas in residential neighborhoods were placed in low density zoning categories that will never have public access. Looking ahead, the huge expectations on the private sector to provide and maintain public amenities at the water's edge, will go just as unrealized as the affordable housing. Without a dedicated entity to oversee development, operating and maintenance, to ensure the waterfront gets rebuilt and remains public, this plan will fail to make sure that the waterfront belongs to the people, not simply those who can afford to live along its banks.

Carter Craft, an urban planner, is program director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Big Projects And Bad News


It seems like a bad season for New York City megaprojects. The proposed BJs in the Bronx and Wal-Mart in Queens are history. The Jets stadium in Manhattan and Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn are facing new roadblocks every day. But even if all these projects were to join the pantheon of Big Apple deals that went rotten, what follows in their wake could be more of the same. The groups who oppose these projects because of the impacts they would have on surrounding communities still have to live with land use and zoning rules that make possible the emergence of new versions of the same old deals.

BJs and Wal-Mart

Organized labor was a key force in killing the proposals for a BJs in the Bronx and Wal-Mart in Queens even before they got to the formal approval stage. The labor practices of these retail giants would have lowered the wage bar for the entire retail economy. But labor paid very little attention to the land use and environmental impacts of big box stores and could very well look the other way when the next megastore proposal hits the streets. They’ve already taken the heat off the Rego Park developer who was going to play host to Wal-Mart. The alternative to Wal-Mart in Rego Park and elsewhere is likely to be a different brand of suburban-style mall with the same acres of parking and traffic snarls, a mammoth building that looks like a fortress, and price gouging practices that undermine local businesses. The city’s land use regulations allow such planning disasters that destroy public spaces, undermine public transit, endanger pedestrians, and destroy neighborhoods.

The zoning code is crying out for an overhaul to deal with these issues. The idea of a one-year moratorium on new superstores that’s being proposed by some City Council members makes sense because it would give the City Planning Department and City Council time to come up with sensible rules that require giant retailers to adapt to our cosmopolitan city of developed neighborhoods. The City Council should also require that all large-scale projects be consistent with official neighborhood plans.

Reports are that Wal-Mart is cruising for another New York City site and this time could come with its guns loaded. Since the demands of labor and their allies don’t extend to neighborhood impacts, Wal-Mart could make a few concessions to mollify labor critics so they can get their foot in New York’s door. The world’s biggest retail corporation could buy neighborhood support in areas long neglected by the city and private sector. Neighborhoods like Red Hook in Brooklyn are vulnerable because the city has let huge swaths of industrially-zoned land sit vacant for decades. Ikea already plans to take over a chunk of prime waterfront land to sell its tables and chairs. Red Hook and outer-borough neighborhoods like it could get inundated with megastores, creating weekend traffic jams and environmental disasters in once-quiet communities.

Another scenario is that Wal-Mart and its competitors will follow the example of the Chelsea Home Depot and limit themselves to sites where customers have to use mass transit or walk. These stores can add to the city’s lively sidewalk culture instead of killing it. But the city’s land use and zoning policies don’t encourage such comfortable fits.

The Jets Stadium

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has opened up its Hudson Yards site on the west side of Manhattan to competitive bidding and put aside for the moment the deal with the Jets football team to build their stadium there. State legislative leaders have declared that any plan for the Hudson Yards site requires their approval. Local community and business groups could hold up the stadium proposal in court long after July of this year, when the International Olympic Committee will decide whether New York will be the site of the 2012 Olympics.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg could have overplayed his hand on the stadium when he insisted on linking approval of the Jets stadium to the city’s Olympics bid. He could still decide to cut his losses and announce before July that the Olympics stadium will be in Queens (though a few Queens neighborhoods may have something to say about this), or he could privately assure the Olympic committee that he’ll switch to Queens later on if he has to. But right now he’s painted himself into a corner by declaring that it’s Hudson Yards or bust.

The Nets Arena

Since the Metropolitan Transportation Authority set a precedent by calling for competitive bidding on the Hudson Yards site, how can they make a sweetheart deal with Forest City Ratner for the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn? This logical question has punctured the public debate about Ratner’s idea of putting a 19,000-seat Nets basketball arena, at least 4,500 apartments and a million square feet of office space over an active rail yard and surrounding blocks. Ratner is facing stiff community opposition, could have trouble fulfilling his promises to the local groups that support him, and may have to take a look at an alternative plan put together by his critics.

Added to all of this are all the unanswered questions about financing these huge projects. The public tab for the Manhattan stadium, including direct and indirect subsidies, could reach in the billions. A recently released study of the Atlantic Yards project by the Pratt Institute Center for Community & Environmental Development guesses that deal could cost taxpayers another billion. And all this coincides with an announcement that $1.3 billion will be cut from the School Construction Authority. More city schools will go without athletic facilities and childhood obesity will spread while season ticket-holders for the Jets and Nets get comfortable seats. In the meantime, the City Council is now considering bills that would require council approval for all subsidies, prevent the use of the city’s capital funds for land acquisition, and require that payments in lieu of taxes go into the city’s general revenue fund. This latter item could limit the use of the mayor’s “creative” financing approachthat would rob the city budget to pay back bonds to finance the megaprojects.

So it’s bad news time for big projects. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think bigness is necessarily bad. The problem is that the city doesn’t plan in partnership with its neighborhoods to deal with new development, large and small. The big projects just have much bigger impacts and the consequences of poor planning are more dramatic. Too many giant projects are driven by corporate developers that have rigid business plans and suburban-style designs, and at best buy off potential opposition with meaningless promises and palliatives. How about having community plans that incorporate the kind of new development that’s needed? Let the giants conform to our rules if they want to play in our ballfield. That way New Yorkers and not the Nets can control their destiny.

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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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