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Urban Issues: Housing


 

URBAN ISSUES - HOUSING

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John Edwards

Edwards proposes an American Dream Tax Credit that would offer low and moderate income families up to $5,000 to help cover the cost of a down payment when buying a home. He also supports increasing funding for section 8 vouchers and the enforcement of fair housing laws. Edwards supports Community Block Grants to improve neighborhoods.

John Kerry

Kerry proposes an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that would create 1.5 million rental apartments over ten-years. He also proposes a Community Development Homeownership Tax Credit that would encourage the construction and rehabilitation of 500,000 homes over the next ten years. Kerry also promises to enforce fair housing laws.

Dennis Kucinich

Kucinich wants to create a housing trust fund to build 1.5 million new apartments and houses over ten years. He also proposes restoring full federal funding for Department of Housing and Urban Development's section 8 vouchers. He promises to enforce fair housing laws.

Al Sharpton

Sharpton supports housing assistance for low-income families and promises to enforce fair housing laws.

George W. Bush

Bush created the American Dream Down Payment Act that over the last two years helped 80,000 people purchase homes. With this act, the Bush Administration aims to “dismantle the barriers to home ownership.” In addition to helping low-income families with funding, the program puts pressure on mortgage companies and the real-estate industry to provide opportunities for minorities to purchase affordable housing. The White House claims there are 1 million new minority housing owners since 2002. Bush estimates at least 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade.

However, the Bush administration is increasing requirements in order to qualify for federal housing subsidies. Beginning January 2004, a new regulation requires 8 hours of community service for approximately 60,000 people who live in public housing in New York City. If they do not abide by the regulations, they can be evicted. At the same time in recent years, federal subsidies for low-income housing in New York City have decreased. Between 1999 and 2003, the federal subsidy for the housing authority decreased by $58 million or 6 percent.

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GOTHAM GAZETTE’S RELATED ARTICLES


Urban Agenda: Housing
• Federal Housing Policy and New York City
• Public Housing
• Section 8 Housing

 

The Make-Up Of The Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation


It does not look as if the diverse downtown communities will have much to say about plans to redevelop Lower Manhattan. The new 11-member commission named by Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to plan for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan is top-heavy with business executives and City Hall insiders. Local community leaders, people who live and work in the area, and the victims of the economic fallout from September 11 are not included.

The governor named seven of the panel members and effectively retains control of the new body, named the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation. The authority is a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, headed by Pataki appointee Charles Gargano. It has the power to condemn land and override city land use regulations. In other words, it can thumb its nose at the city's new mayor and city council.

Four of the appointees to the new body are from the banking and financial services sectors. Two are from the ranks of Giuliani staffers who are wondering whether they will have a job after January 1. And another is a former Giuliani commissioner who is now a corporate executive.

The only representative from labor, Ed Malloy of the Building and Construction Trades Council, can be counted on to advocate any redevelopment that means more jobs for the limited and exclusive membership of the building trades. But no one represents the 80,000 workers who lost their jobs after September 11 or the 80,000 whose work has been cut back. Most of them are or were in the service unions, and many were not unionized at all. Many are immigrants whose access to relief and services has been limited.

Only one of the nominees, Madelyn Wils, Chair of Community Board 1, represents the directly affected neighborhoods. Portions of Community Board 2 were also heavily impacted but they are not represented. Absent are representatives from Lower Manhattan's diverse residential community, which includes Tribeca, Battery Park City and Chinatown. Absent are representatives of the families of the victims, who have a stake in shaping any memorial planned for the site and its surroundings.

WHY THE BIG RUSH?

Pataki's move might give one the impression that the governor is moving swiftly to support redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the September 11 disaster. However, John Whitehead, chairman of the new development corporation, made the point that "How quickly its done is not the primary concern. We want it to be done right." This makes the naming of the directors look more like a timely move to preempt any initiatives taken by Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg, who during his campaign stated that an independent authority was not needed. Most estimates are it will take five to ten years to redevelop the area. If there is no big rush, then why move so quickly to name an authority?

In the early days after September 11, downtown property owners, particularly Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease on the World Trade Center site, talked loudly about the need to reconstruct the financial district and the twin towers as speedily as possible as a defiant symbol of resistance against terrorism. There was talk of the need to override local land use and environmental rules. It soon became clear that it would take at least a year to clean up the site and many more to rebuild. In his election campaign Fernando Ferrer suggested that this was an opportunity to strengthen business districts outside of Lower Manhattan, a strategy that would help keep businesses from moving out of the city. Mayor-elect Bloomberg appears to share that view.

Cries were also heard from the residents and businesses in Lower Manhattan. They noted that Wall Street was just one of several parts of an evolving mixed-use community including over 100,000 residents, thousands of retailers, schools, parks and a network of community services. Over the last decade, thousands of vacant office units were converted to residential use, a response to the enormous commercial vacancy rate. In Tribeca, industrial buildings were converted to residential units. Before rushing to create new office space, it would be best to consider the millions of square feet of vacant office space that followed construction of the World Trade Center in the 1970s. Would it make sense to once again build for a market that never was there in the first place?

WHO WILL PLAN?

Will the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation be able to create a plan that makes sense to all those concerned about the future of the downtown? From the solitude of their office towers, can the appointed commissioners hear the diverse voices and build consensus? Or will they plunge ahead and use the exceptional powers granted by the governor to implement their own plans?

Is it too much to hope that the governor will name more directors and bring in leaders with roots in the affected communities to coordinate the planning efforts? Because everyone now recognizes the need to rebuild Lower Manhattan in the context of a comprehensive plan, the Authority could sponsor a broad public process that brings in all sectors of the community to develop a vision and strategy for the area. This should be coordinated by Community Boards 1 and 2, and the mechanism should be Section 197-a of the City Charter, which allows community boards to submit plans to the City Planning Commission and City Council for official approval. The redevelopment authority should pledge in advance to finance implementation of the projects that win consensus in the 197-a plan. This could have the effect of building consensus among the community's diverse sectors, and could minimize the inevitable expense and delays of conflict and litigation.

A 197-a plan for Lower Manhattan would help stimulate community planning throughout the city by setting a precedent of producing plans that get implemented. Up to now, communities have been reluctant to do 197-a plans because the city has made no commitment to help them or implement their recommendations. The plan for downtown Manhattan could be the first in a series of much-needed plans that engage diverse communities in plotting their futures.

The Overdevelopment Debate


 

Related Articles:
• Embracing Growth, Preserving Neighborhoods by Richard Barth

On our Community Gazettes, a look at three specific struggles:
• Staten Island: Confronting Rapid Growth
• Bay Ridge: Fighting the Fedders Houses
• Throgs Neck: Protecting a Waterfront Community

A red Cape Cod house on Bentley Street in the Staten Island neighborhood of Tottenville once had a backyard, but no longer. Where once was a lawn there now are two new two-family homes, bringing four new families to the neighborhood.

This scene, reported by the Staten Island Advance is being repeated throughout Staten Island, and through the rest of the city, in places like Bayside in Queens and Throgs Neck in the Bronx, where residents believe that an explosion of poorly planned, badly constructed, ugly housing developments threaten their attractive neighborhoods.

Old single-family houses have been torn down to make way for rows of flat-roofed, wooden townhouses in Staten Island and bulky brick apartment buildings in Queens. Developers have demolished bungalows in Throgs Neck and replaced them with as many as six attached houses. Few of the new developments offer open space, parks or play areas. Some have no trees or landscaping.

All of this construction adds to the number of people in the neighborhood. But the city has not increased basic services enough to accommodate the new people. The result is new burdens on the old residents.

But now the city is offering some relief. At his State of the City speech at the Silvercup Studios in Queens last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged to help fight overdevelopment. "Physical improvements and development are part of our efforts to improve neighborhoods, but we'll also work to end overdevelopment where it has gotten out of hand," he said. After tremendous applause he smiled and said, "I thought you'd like that."

But what is overdevelopment, particularly in a city whose fame and fortune come from its skyscrapers and towers, people crowding onto sidewalks and into trains, its sheer human density and diversity? And how can the city balance the need to protect neighborhoods with the demand for affordable housing? The problems encapsulated by the term overdevelopment are real, but they are also complex, messy, and not easily resolved.

DEVELOPMENT VS. OVERDEVELOPMENT

Development in New York City is regulated by the zoning code of 1961. Written at a time when officials believed planning should be centralized, the code assumed the city would have a population of some 12 million people and zoned accordingly. It allowed for denser construction than had existed previously in many residential neighborhoods that had predominantly single-family homes. Along with conditions that make building new single-family homes onerous and expensive, the plan virtually required multiple units in many neighborhoods.

High market demand for the new housing accelerated the trend toward larger homes, townhouses and apartment buildings. Townhouses in Staten Island, for example, are priced between $250,000 and $500,000. Although loathed by longtime residents of the borough, they sell quickly, usually to New Yorkers moving in from other boroughs. (See related story.)

The reason is simple. As Alan Cappelli of the Building Industry Association points out, buyers get more house for their money in Staten Island than anywhere else in New York. The market demand is immense, and no amount of neighborhood protest is going to stem those forces.

Faced with the growing number of New Yorkers in search of housing, the city has two choices. It can adopt policies that would squeeze more families into existing units, producing the kind of crowding found in many parts of Queens where dozens of immigrants cram into housing designed for a single family. The second choice is to permit more construction.

New York City's well-being requires development – particularly new housing to accommodate the hard-working people who want to live here and contribute to the economic and social life of the city. And it is certainly better for the city that home-owning, tax-paying New Yorkers move to Staten Island than to, say, New Jersey.

Yet Bloomberg, who generally supports economic development, has entered this war on the side of the anti-development forces, condemning "overdevelopment" and instructing the City Planning Commission to do something about it in the outer boroughs.

The mayor says he knows overdevelopment when he sees it. He describes "houses so poorly designed that they have front doors that open directly into the street and houses that have no front yards, that even lack sidewalks." The mayor went on to condemn developments "that seem, with little exaggeration, to pile homes, one right on top of one another."

The mayor's examples, however, are extreme and apply primarily to Staten Island. Indeed, the nature of the overdevelopment charge is generally that some new building is in the wrong place. Sensible regulation can easily address the problem of the poorly designed houses or those without sidewalks. The dense development the mayor cites, on the other hand, describes the very essence of Manhattan.

Despite what might look like a rush to judgment, however, Bloomberg intends to put expert opinion between him and angry residents: He has instructed city planning to carry out studies on growth management in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, similar to the study already conducted in Staten Island.

NEIGHBORHOOD CONCERNS

The features of overdevelopment most likely to rile neighbors are traffic and the disappearance of open space. "Overdevelopment is the No. 1 issue here," James Vacca, district manager of Community Board 10 in the Bronx, which covers Throgs Neck, Pelham Bay and City Island, told the Daily News (See related story). "Our open space is disappearing, blocks are becoming congested beyond belief and there's not a parking space to be found."

The vanishing open space is usually, of course, private property and therefore available for development. When it is city property, such as a community garden, community boards have an opportunity to weigh in.

One only has to drive through some of the communities to understand the concerns about traffic. At its best, New York's planning has encouraged high-density development at places where subway and bus lines converge -- the West Side of Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica Center -- and low-density development far from transportation. Most of the neighborhoods reeling from overdevelopment are indeed badly served by public transportation. Thus more development and more people mean more cars and the parking woes, slow travel times, noise and pollution that they bring.

But a number of experts argue that choking off development is not the solution. Some say the focus should be on improving mass transit to serve the newly developed areas better. And others argue that what is needed is a judicious combination of allowing for more density in some areas –- or upzoning -- and downzoning, or permitting less density, in others.

Mobilizing the Region, a transportation advocacy group, points out that Staten Island's proposed huge downzoning -- which would make attached homes illegal and detached homes the norm -- is "a Band-aid solution for a larger problem," which "is too much unplanned, medium-density development. A better solution is to create growth centers with increased housing density and commercial areas.” This, it says, would focus the island's economic development where it makes most sense.

On the other hand, simply downzoning will freeze things as they are now and leave the traffic nightmare in place. While Staten Island needs more and better mass transit, Mobilizing the Region argues, its "de-centered nature does not lend itself to intensive transit investment. Without any centers, a good mass transit system is simply not feasible."

Some of the objections to overdevelopment focus on aesthetics and will not be addressed by changes in zoning. "The word overdevelopment doesn't quite describe the concern in Bayside and Bay Ridge, which largely has to do with the replacement of big old houses with rental units that are much less charming but that conform to the use and bulk restrictions of the zoning code," says Norman Marcus, former general counsel of the City Planning Commission and now a lawyer with Swidler Berlin.

Such changes are taking place in other attractive neighborhoods as well. As Brendan Sexton, who owns a house in Staten Island's historic St. George district, says a bit sadly, "the day of the detached single family home is probably over. They're just too expensive to build. The two- or three-family home is more realistic."

WHAT IS TO BE DONE

Some problems can be solved by the kind of sensible rezoning that the current city planning director, Amanda Burden, prefers. (See Embracing Growth, Preserving Neighborhoodsby Richard Barth.) In Staten Island, for example, the commission proposes that new one-family homes have two on-site parking spaces rather than one, and two-family homes have three spaces rather than two. The commission is also sensitive to the many ugly unintended consequences of earlier zoning restrictions and is proposing new homes that feature traditional pitched roofs rather than the flat roofs now encouraged.

City planning has also intervened piecemeal with some special district zoning, such as in Bay Ridge (see related story ). While special districts allow planners to avoid having to overhaul the entire code, they only provide a stopgap.

But beyond zoning, the basic problem in many growing areas is that the city has been derelict in providing the new services needed by new residents. The city knew that the opening of the Verrazano Bridge in 1964 would set off a great migration to once unsettled Staten Island. But government never provided the necessary public transportation or roads to carry people to jobs and services. Nor is the government seriously contemplating further transportation investment in the near future.

In the end, the city is going to need to zone to increase density in some areas, particularly in desirable sections near both public transportation and the waterfront, and to downzone areas that truly cannot accommodate more people.

The city is proposing to do this in some neighborhoods. It hopes, for example, to convert large swaths of manufacturing areas to residential use. On part of the Brooklyn waterfront, this would allow for the building of apartment towers as high as 35 stories. In other neighborhoods, such as East Harlem and Park Slope, the city has rezoned to allow high-rise housing to go up on some avenues, while preserving lower density on side streets.

Although acknowledging that it is usually easier to change the zoning to decrease density than to increase it, Michael Schill, director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at the NYU School of Law, says he would like to see the city allow for increased density in some areas. “The city is doing all this good stuff in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, but why not comprehensively look at the entire city? Where is transportation strong? What neighborhoods have the infrastructure to add people?" he says.

Schill notes that when the city rebuilt certain neighborhoods over the last two decades, it deliberately focused on low-density housing. Now those neighborhoods could sustain higher density. "The city did such a good job that it created a market for those areas that can now be developed more intensively,” he says. “The Bronx has great transportation. It was built for a lot of people, then it emptied out, then the city rebuilt the Bronx but with fairly low density. We now need to recognize there is a market for density along with a scarcity of vacant land. We need to increase density when areas can support it."

Despite the attention paid to overdevelopment, Norman Marcus points out that overall, the outer boroughs may have suffered until recently from a "dearth of construction." The new development, particularly in the Bronx, he says, represents "a vote of confidence in the city, a sign that the problem all along hasn't been the zoning but the market's unwillingness to go into some of these areas."

But the political fallout for any mayoral administration proposing denser zoning could be immense. The solution is probably that time-honored device of all well-intentioned but uneasy elected officials: a commission to look at the proposal, with a report due at a date well into the future.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, former executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

 

 



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