The city's planners are working overtime to clear the way for over 60 million square feet of new office space in such business centers as West Midtown, Lower Manhattan, Long Island City, and now downtown Brooklyn. While realtors see a big demand for prime office space now, it remains to be seen whether this amount of commercial space will be needed in the long run with the continuing trend of gradual movement to the suburbs. City officials backing this expansion are acting more like cheerleaders for local real estate than custodians of the quality of life in our neighborhoods.
The new downtown Brooklyn rezoning plan is now moving through the city's land use approval process and local residents and civic groups are turning out in droves to raise their questions and register their complaints. Even though some were involved in earlier discussions about the plans, there are still so many things that are important to neighborhoods that are not in the plan. The key questions have to do with impacts on the surrounding residential areas, transportation, lack of open space, and displacement of existing residents and businesses.
With its Downtown Brooklyn Plan, the city wants to create 4.5 million square feet of new office space and 1,000 new housing units in a small area just across the East River from Wall Street. Brooklyn civic groups say the potential expansion will be seven million square feet while the city is only considering the potential environmental impact of 4.5 million. The plan includes parking for some 2,500 cars, a 1.5 acre park, and some widening of sidewalks. The plan also incorporates proposed expansions of Atlantic Terminal, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn Law School, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn urban renewal area, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music cultural district. Atlantic Terminal is also the site of a controversial plan to build a basketball arena for the Nets while displacing perhaps 1,000 residents and businesses.
Where Are the People?
The downtown Brooklyn plan deals primarily with office buildings, not people. To its credit, the City Planning Department actually put its rezoning proposal in the context of a comprehensive overview of downtown Brooklyn. But the plan is still mostly about square feet of building space and has very little to do with the quality of urban life, which is what matters most to people who live and work in the city.
In the plan the people are invisible. The plan states that only 1,200 people now live in Brooklyn's business core. But 150,000 people live in the immediately adjacent neighborhoods. Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Park Slope and Prospect Heights are blank spaces. What do these people want to improve their daily lives? Are they only passive recipients of the abundant "growth" stimulated by the rezoning? Who will get the jobs that come with development, and who will lose their jobs? How do the locals relate to downtown and what are their development needs? What do they want to preserve that might be threatened by rising property values and speculation fueled by downtown expansion? Where are the tools to protect residential and commercial tenants from being displaced? Will they get any of the windfall profits reaped by property owners whose land gets up-zoned?
Traffic is one of the biggest gripes of Brooklynites, and downtown Brooklyn is already a congestion and pollution nightmare. It is both a destination and a thoroughfare for access to the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The plan will only make things worse by expanding parking, which will encourage more people to drive there. The dangerous and disagreeable environment faced by pedestrians in downtown Brooklyn, which the plan obliquely acknowledges, would only be addressed by limited sidewalk widening. There's no commitment by the Department of Transportation to reduce traffic. Downtown communities remember how the department successfully undermined the recent multi-million dollar Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Study, which went through years of public discussion to end up with only a few changes to traffic signals. The Department of Transportation has yet to demonstrate the will to reduce roadway capacity, the most essential measure needed to clean up the downtown traffic mess. The mayor has also backed away from his proposal to put tolls on the East River bridges, an action that would have significantly helped relieve downtown traffic. The same Brooklyn elected officials who defend the interests of the elite school of bridge commuters are also cheerleading for the downtown rezoning, compounding the damage.
There are no improvements to mass transit in the plan except for some station upgrades that may be made by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the future. The downtown's biggest problem is the lack of a decent surface transportation system. Buses are inadequate and perpetually stuck in traffic. Imaginative proposals for a downtown trolley loop that could be linked to the redeveloped waterfront have been around for decades but are nowhere to be found in the plan.
Disappearing Public Spaces
Not to be accused of forgetting entirely about greenery, the city's planners threw in a nice little park. Since it will most likely be surrounded by concrete and glass office towers, this public amenity is more likely to become a backyard play space for corporate tenants, much like Metrotech's little mall. In the meantime, downtown Brooklyn will become a forest of skyscrapers with fewer public spaces.
One of downtown's most lively public spaces today is Fulton Mall. The downtown plan will wipe it off the map. This historic mall was one of the city's first commercial strips that limited access by motor vehicles (city buses run through it). Once the nearby Metrotech complex was built, however, corporate tenants and white collar workers increasingly looked down their noses at the low-rent shops selling cheap goods and the management and clientele, who are mostly people of color. The mall's problems with truck loading were never seriously addressed. The city let the mall stagnate. Why can't the city's planners figure out how to preserve vital street life where it already exists; isn't that what good planning is supposed to be about?
Finally, questions about the downtown plan are growing with mounting opposition to the proposal for an arena over Atlantic Terminal. Developer Bruce Ratner commissioned famed architect Frank Gehry to decorate the arena site with one of his signature buildings. Gehry's noted Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain dropped jaws. But one can only wonder whether anyone will see his sculpted icon when it's surrounded by the commercial clutter of Atlantic Terminal. Most Brooklynites passing by will be trapped in the borough's most gridlocked intersection.
Downtown Brooklyn and its plan are large and complex. They both raise questions and merit much more careful discussion. But the starting point should be the people who live and work there, not the number of square feet of building space that should be built.
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Planners Network Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.
#####
• Field of Schemes by Letitia James
• Netting the Nets by Marty Markowitz
The city's planners are working overtime to clear the way for over 60 million square feet of new office space in such business centers as West Midtown, Lower Manhattan, Long Island City, and now downtown Brooklyn. While realtors see a big demand for prime office space now, it remains to be seen whether this amount of commercial space will be needed in the long run with the continuing trend of gradual movement to the suburbs. City officials backing this expansion are acting more like cheerleaders for local real estate than custodians of the quality of life in our neighborhoods.
The new downtown Brooklyn rezoning plan is now moving through the city's land use approval process and local residents and civic groups are turning out in droves to raise their questions and register their complaints. Even though some were involved in earlier discussions about the plans, there are still so many things that are important to neighborhoods that are not in the plan. The key questions have to do with impacts on the surrounding residential areas, transportation, lack of open space, and displacement of existing residents and businesses.
With its Downtown Brooklyn Plan, the city wants to create 4.5 million square feet of new office space and 1,000 new housing units in a small area just across the East River from Wall Street. Brooklyn civic groups say the potential expansion will be seven million square feet while the city is only considering the potential environmental impact of 4.5 million. The plan includes parking for some 2,500 cars, a 1.5 acre park, and some widening of sidewalks. The plan also incorporates proposed expansions of Atlantic Terminal, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn Law School, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn urban renewal area, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music cultural district. Atlantic Terminal is also the site of a controversial plan to build a basketball arena for the Nets while displacing perhaps 1,000 residents and businesses.
Where Are the People?
The downtown Brooklyn plan deals primarily with office buildings, not people. To its credit, the City Planning Department actually put its rezoning proposal in the context of a comprehensive overview of downtown Brooklyn. But the plan is still mostly about square feet of building space and has very little to do with the quality of urban life, which is what matters most to people who live and work in the city.
In the plan the people are invisible. The plan states that only 1,200 people now live in Brooklyn's business core. But 150,000 people live in the immediately adjacent neighborhoods. Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Park Slope and Prospect Heights are blank spaces. What do these people want to improve their daily lives? Are they only passive recipients of the abundant "growth" stimulated by the rezoning? Who will get the jobs that come with development, and who will lose their jobs? How do the locals relate to downtown and what are their development needs? What do they want to preserve that might be threatened by rising property values and speculation fueled by downtown expansion? Where are the tools to protect residential and commercial tenants from being displaced? Will they get any of the windfall profits reaped by property owners whose land gets up-zoned?
Traffic is one of the biggest gripes of Brooklynites, and downtown Brooklyn is already a congestion and pollution nightmare. It is both a destination and a thoroughfare for access to the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The plan will only make things worse by expanding parking, which will encourage more people to drive there. The dangerous and disagreeable environment faced by pedestrians in downtown Brooklyn, which the plan obliquely acknowledges, would only be addressed by limited sidewalk widening. There's no commitment by the Department of Transportation to reduce traffic. Downtown communities remember how the department successfully undermined the recent multi-million dollar Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Study, which went through years of public discussion to end up with only a few changes to traffic signals. The Department of Transportation has yet to demonstrate the will to reduce roadway capacity, the most essential measure needed to clean up the downtown traffic mess. The mayor has also backed away from his proposal to put tolls on the East River bridges, an action that would have significantly helped relieve downtown traffic. The same Brooklyn elected officials who defend the interests of the elite school of bridge commuters are also cheerleading for the downtown rezoning, compounding the damage.
There are no improvements to mass transit in the plan except for some station upgrades that may be made by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the future. The downtown's biggest problem is the lack of a decent surface transportation system. Buses are inadequate and perpetually stuck in traffic. Imaginative proposals for a downtown trolley loop that could be linked to the redeveloped waterfront have been around for decades but are nowhere to be found in the plan.
Disappearing Public Spaces
Not to be accused of forgetting entirely about greenery, the city's planners threw in a nice little park. Since it will most likely be surrounded by concrete and glass office towers, this public amenity is more likely to become a backyard play space for corporate tenants, much like Metrotech's little mall. In the meantime, downtown Brooklyn will become a forest of skyscrapers with fewer public spaces.
One of downtown's most lively public spaces today is Fulton Mall. The downtown plan will wipe it off the map. This historic mall was one of the city's first commercial strips that limited access by motor vehicles (city buses run through it). Once the nearby Metrotech complex was built, however, corporate tenants and white collar workers increasingly looked down their noses at the low-rent shops selling cheap goods and the management and clientele, who are mostly people of color. The mall's problems with truck loading were never seriously addressed. The city let the mall stagnate. Why can't the city's planners figure out how to preserve vital street life where it already exists; isn't that what good planning is supposed to be about?
Finally, questions about the downtown plan are growing with mounting opposition to the proposal for an arena over Atlantic Terminal. Developer Bruce Ratner commissioned famed architect Frank Gehry to decorate the arena site with one of his signature buildings. Gehry's noted Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain dropped jaws. But one can only wonder whether anyone will see his sculpted icon when it's surrounded by the commercial clutter of Atlantic Terminal. Most Brooklynites passing by will be trapped in the borough's most gridlocked intersection.
Downtown Brooklyn and its plan are large and complex. They both raise questions and merit much more careful discussion. But the starting point should be the people who live and work there, not the number of square feet of building space that should be built.
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Planners Network Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.
#####
• Field of Schemes by Letitia James
• Netting the Nets by Marty Markowitz
• Cheerleaders for Real Estate? by Tom Angotti
This past summer, 75 Bronx families in the Pueblo de Mayaguez housing development were heartened when help seemed to be on the way. After many years of deteriorating building conditions, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was planning to take the three buildings away from its owner through foreclosure. Tenants asked for the right to buy the buildings as a cooperative.
Instead, the federal agency sold the buildings at public auction for $4.7 million to a landlord with over 1,000 violations on the 11 small buildings he already owns. The apartments will no longer be preserved as guaranteed affordable housing, and the new owner will face less scrutiny.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development turned down the tenants' request even though New York's local housing agencies supported their bid, supposedly because the city and the tenants expressed their interest too late. But advocates claim that the federal agency allowed an even later bid in Newark, and that Dallas and Boston have received warmer treatment.
New York City may get the cold shoulder again in three additional developments in Brooklyn and Harlem that are facing foreclosure. Residents of these building are now scrambling to put together a proposal that the city can take to the federal agency. But they fear that there will be a repeat of what happened at Pueblo de Mayaguez -- the agency will again take the properties to auction and sell them to the highest bidder, without taking the purchaser's track record into account. "We were in shock when we received the notice of foreclosure," says long-time tenant N. Abdullah of Gates-Patchen Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. "We want to have a say in who comes in to purchase. But it seems as if HUD is trying to push us out of the building, to get the building off their hands. If we were facing eviction for non-payment, we would at least have our day in court. But HUD doesn't want to listen to us, or even tell us what is going on."
If this is a pattern, it could put at risk 20,000 apartments of federally-subsidized affordable housing for low-income families, primarily in high-poverty neighborhoods in central Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Staten Island.
Little attention has been paid to this growing problem of "fail-outs," when landlord neglect and deteriorating building conditions lead the federal housing agency to cancel its subsidy. The risk of "fail-outs" has grown in part because the Department of Housing and Urban Development has gotten more aggressive in its approach to distressed projects in the past year, supposedly, according to an agency memo, in order to "ensure the properties are decent, safe, sanitary, and in good repair."
But advocates see a more nefarious purpose. Noting that one of the Bush Administration's top strategies for reining in costs in the federal budget is reportedlyto shed the cost of housing subsidy contracts , they suspect that Washington is looking to balance the budget at the expense of vulnerable tenants, in low-income neighborhoods, in a state that President George Bush has little hope of winning when he runs for re-election. "HUD has allowed these owners to keep the subsidy funds - misused, misappropriated - for years, letting them walk away with the money" says Bronx Legal Aid attorney Ellen Davidson. "Why not make owners reinvest in the property?"
Tenants fear that foreclosure could result in a new slumlord owning their building, and the cancellation of their building's subsidy contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When that happens, many income-eligible tenants receive housing subsidy vouchers, which they can continue to use in the building or take elsewhere. However, for a variety of reasons, many are screened out and do not receive vouchers. In addition, the entire voucher program is now threatened with reduction or elimination almost every year during federal budget negotiations.
Many tenants in these buildings are eager for change after years of neglect. "Our building has been allowed to literally fall apart," says Kim Smith, a tenant leader at Ennis Francis Houses in Harlem, "with no heat, no hot water, mold and mildew, and part of the plumbing system totally collapsed. We want the current management out." But they also want a say in what happens. "We are afraid that any slumlord could come along and buy our building. In the midst of this second Harlem Renaissance, can we please both get renovations and keep our subsidies?"
There are some bright spots, which show how "fail-outs" can become a win/win that preserves affordable housing and strengthens communities. Working with the 465 families at the Dr. Betty Shabazz Complex and Medgar Evers Houses in Brooklyn, a number of non-profit agencies acquired the two developments to preserve them as affordable housing - owned by a newly created not-for-profit that includes the tenants. Residents at the Diego-Beekman properties in the South Bronx are working on a similar workout.
But a real solution would take comprehensive and coordinated action. In the past, the city has not generally been eager to take the lead in this effort, since they do not want to foot the bill if the federal government withdraws funding. But now the city is seeking to arrange successful workouts on several properties, and tenants say they are waiting for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to meet them halfway.
New York City's housing developers, advocates, and community organizations have thrived despite a massive reduction in federal resources for building affordable housing over the past 30 years. Few suspected that they would need to fight for the preservation of federally-subsidized affordable housing in the city's lowest income neighborhoods.