Recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the New York Times that housing issues were now a priority for his administration. The issue, he said, was crowded out of the top of the list when he first took office because the city was facing a huge budget deficit and reeling from the terrorist attacks of September 11.
The cost of housing and homelessness are linked and the mayor’s new sense of urgency was reflected in a flurry of recent announcements on housing. In about a week’s span in April he announced a pledge, with City Comptroller William Thompson, to put $130 million of Battery Park City Authority revenues in a trust fund for affordable housing and announced plans to spend $472 million on supportive housing, $27 million on a renovation and rehabilitation project in the Bronx, and two initiatives to redevelop land in Brooklyn.
With all the focus on housing issues, however, he somehow missed one that is making headlines in all of the newspapers: The Rent Guidelines Board, which is deliberating on whether and how much to raise rents on close to a million apartments in the city. Advocates see it as a curious omission.
“The mayor has to take a position on this,” said Michael McKee of Tenants and Neighbors. “How long can he fail to utter the words â€rent stabilization’?”
At a press briefing after the board held its first vote on a rent increase – setting a range for increases on one- and two-year leases – the mayor again sought to distance himself from the board’s deliberations, staking out middle ground between tenants and landlords.
“Any raises will obviously be too much for tenants,” Bloomberg said. “Any raises will obviously be too little for landlords.”
The board voted 5-4 on the ranges: 2 to 4.5 percent increases for one-year leases and 4 to 7 percent on two-year leases. But it was the preliminary vote. Now, tenants will try to convince the public members to vote for lower rents and landlords will try to convince them to go for higher rents.
“It has nothing to do with the numbers and anybody who thinks it does, does not understand the Rent Guidelines Board,” McKee said. “It’s all about politics.”
McKee was referring to the board staff’s reportsthat reported increases in landlords’ costs at about six percent. While landlords’ costs have gone up, though, the economic situation for most New Yorkers has not markedly improved and, in fact, for many it has gotten worse. More people are spending more of their income on rent, real wages have fallen, homelessness is at record highs, and the number of people on public assistance has increased for the first time since 1993.
The mayor could and should act to prevent another increase in rents, advocates said, because of the affordability problems New Yorkers are facing. At a mayoral candidates’ forum in April, all of his Democratic opponents said they supported a rent freeze.
But Bloomberg apparently is not openly going to pressure the board.
“Well I didn’t tell them how to vote,” he said at the press briefing.
Marvin Markus, the chairman of the Rent Guidelines Board, said he did, however, consult with City Hall on the board’s deliberations.
“They’re interested in the economic impact,” Markus said after the preliminary vote. “I talk to them. I don’t talk directly to the mayor, but I talk to his people, yes.”
The board’s deliberations were considerably more heated than last year –- one man was arrested at the meeting for the preliminary vote and the start of the meeting itself was delayed for 30 minutes by frenzied protests. And tenant advocates are convinced that after more than three decades of rent increases, a rent freeze is a real possibility, even after the 5-4 vote for the range of increases.
“Additional public members have started to understand that affordability is an issue,” McKee said. But, he said, tenants have to make their voices heard at the board’s hearings in June before its final vote on June 21 to achieve a rent freeze.
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.
FOOTBALL STADIUMS
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Location: |
West Side, Manhattan
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Seattle, Washington | Atlanta, Georgia | St. Louis, Missouri |
Opening Date: | Fall 2009 (projected) |
1992 | 1995 | |
Uses: | New York Jets football games, 2012 Olympic Games, large convention gatherings, 2010 Super Bowl, concerts, and other events. | Atlanta Falcons football games, 1996 Summer Olympics, NCAA Final Four, Super Bowls, concerts, conventions, religious events. | St. Louis Rams football team, conventions, concerts, monster truck rallies, and the 1999 Mass led by Pope John Paul II. | |
Size: | Seats 75,000 people | Seats 71,228 people | Seats 60,600 people | |
Cost: | $1.7 billion | $210 million | $280 million | |
Public Cost: | $600 million ($300 million each from the city and the state) | The state donated the land. A hotel tax pays the 30 percent of the total cost covered by public funds. | $60 million from city and state, plus $6 million in year in city funds for debt payments. | |
Private Financing: | $800 million from New York Jets. An additional $1.9 billion is needed to extend the No. 7 train, which developers plan to pay for with tax revenue from neighboring development. |
Construction of the Georgia Dome was financed through tax-exempt industrial revenue bonds issued by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority. It was also subsidized by the sale of luxury boxes, which ranged from $20,000 to $120,000. | Financed by private investors, including TWA Airlines, which relinquished its role in 2001. Edward Jones purchased the naming rights in January 2002 for $2.65 million a year. | |
Voter Referendum? |
No |
No. | No | |
At Issue: | The proposed West Side stadium is the most expensive in the nation and calls for $600 million in public subsidies. The 2012 Olympics is not a guarantee. Some argue that the financing for the stadium circumvents the city’s budget process. Many economists doubt that the convention business will pay off as promised because other costs (like hotel room rates, transportation, etc) make New York less competitive than other locations. Local residents are concerned about traffic, parking, and noise. The MTA is projecting billions of dollars in deficits for years to come and has not made the extension of the No. 7 line a priority. | Discussions about a new football stadium began in 1984 when the Atlanta Falcons wanted a new facility that they would not have to share with the Braves baseball team. In 1989, approval came from the state, the Atlanta City Council, and Fulton County Commission to build a dome stadium only if it was connected to the convention center and supported by the hotel tax. The plan gained considerable momentum after Atlanta was awarded the 1996 Olympics. Atlanta built numerous other sports venues for the Olympics and a new baseball stadium for the Atlanta Braves baseball team. | A few years before the stadium was built, St. Louis approved new taxes to pay for $150 million expansion of the convention center. In 1999, after the stadium failed to increase convention center business, officials agreed to build a new 1,000-room hotel next to the center to help generate business. The plan was subsidized with $98 million in federal funds, $80 million in city aid, and $21 million in state tax credits. The hotel still only operates at 55 percent occupancy. | |
Benefits Promised: | The New York Sports and Convention Center would serve as the home of the New York Jets football team and the Olympic Stadium if New York wins the 2012 Olympic bid. It features a retractable roof and a changeable floor plan so that the stadium can be converted into a large event space for the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The plan would give New York City the fifth largest convention center in the nation. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the stadium will create 18,000 construction jobs and 6,900 permanent jobs. He promises the plan to expand the convention center will increase tourism, boost the hotel industry, and provide development for the west side of Manhattan. | A main objective was to keep the professional football team in Atlanta. Combined with the World Congress Convention Center, officials promise that the dome would help draw big sporting events and increased convention business. | The city said that the expanded stadium/convention center would triple convention center business and generate $12 million a year in new tax revenues. They also predicted an increase in hotel business. | |
Benefits Delivered: | The Georgia Dome has been a popular sports venue hosting two Super Bowls, NCCA Final Four basketball games, and college football games. Atlanta’s convention center drew record attendance through much of the 1990s. However, despite expanding convention space by an additional 1.4 million square feet in 2002, convention attendance is now half of what it was in 1995. | According to a study by the Brookings Institution, the plan has not generated the expected tax revenue or convention business. Convention attendance dropped in recent years from 156,000 to 115,300 between 2000 and 2004. Although organizers promised 50 major conventions a year, in 2004, it only had 23. |
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BASEBALL STADIUMS
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Location: |
South Bronx next to current ballpark
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Toronto, Canada | San Francisco, California | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
Date: | Spring 2009 (projected) | 1989 | 2000 | 2001 |
Uses: | New York Yankee baseball games | Toronto Blue Jays baseball games, Canadian football games, concerts and other events. | San Francisco Giants baseball games, concerts, other events. | Pittsburgh Pirates baseball games, concerts, job fairs, and other events. |
Size: | Seats 50,900 people | Seats 50,516 | Seats 41,503 people | Seats 38,496 people |
Projected Cost: | $800 million | $600 million (Canadian) | $319 million | $262 million |
Public Cost: | $300 million from New York City for a new Metro-North station. The city will also have to build parkland along the waterfront and better parking facilities around the stadium. | $262 million (Canadian) | Public land donated. Also $15 million in tax increment financing by the city, which the Giants must pay back to the city with interest. | $219 million ($143 million from city; $75 million from state). |
Private Financing: | $800 million for stadium paid for by Yankees | 30 different corporations paid $5 million each and Canada’s three major breweries also contributed $5 million each. | $70 million for naming rights, advertising partnerships and other sources, another $70 million from the sale of charter seat licenses, and a $155 million loan to the Giants from Chase Securities. | $44 million from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Also $30 million over 20 years from PNC Bank for naming rights. |
Voter Referendum? | No | No | Yes | Yes. With 70 percent of the vote, citizens rejected a taxpayer-financed stadium. |
At Issue: | For years, the Yankees have tried in the past to build a new stadium, either on the west side of Manhattan or at the location for the proposed stadium at 161st Street. In the past, the Yankees have demanded large public subsidies, but now say they will pay for the stadium themselves. However, the team is still asking the city and state to pay $300 million for surrounding infrastructure. The Yankees and city officials say they will announce an agreement and more details in early May 2005. | By the time the stadium was completed, it costs significantly more than predicted and the Ontario government was left responsible for the debt. | The main issue in San Francisco was who should pay for the new stadium. In four referendums, voters rejected public financing for the ballpark. A fifth referendum in 1996 approved the Giants’ use of public land in China Basin to build the stadium with private financing. The Pacific Telesis Group paid $53 million in 1996 to name the ballpark Pacific Bell Park through 2019. SBC Communications bought the company and in 1997 changed the name of to SBC Park. | In November 1997, voters in 11 counties rejected a plan to raise taxes to build a new stadium. City and state officials ignored the voters and built it with mostly with public funds. The city of Pittsburgh funded its $143 million share through a sales tax. Three-term Mayor Tom Murphy recently announced that he would not be seeking another term after 11 years of fights on the budget, stadiums, and economic development. |
Benefits Promised: |
The Yankees promise that the new stadium will also help create parkland, retail shops, and restaurants, and parkland for the South Bronx. |
City planners said they had learned their lesson after building Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which has been called “Canada’s monument to mismanagement,” and promised to build a ballpark that would turn a profit. | Developers promised to build a privately financed stadium that would be accessible by public transit and help spur housing, retail, and restaurant development in the surrounding area. | One of the main objectives of the new ballpark was to keep the Pirates from fleeing to another city. It is also part of plan to revitalize downtown Pittsburgh; in addition to games, it hosts a variety of events and is surrounded by retail stores and restaurants. |
Benefits Delivered: | The stadium has had financial difficulties in recent years. The ownership filed for bankruptcy protection in November 1998 and Sportsco International LP bought the stadium out of bankruptcy for $85 million CDN. In February 2005, Rogers Communications, the owner of the Blue Jays, bought the stadium for $25 million. The Toronto Argonauts, a Canadian football team, is now in negotiations to relocate to an outdoor stadium at York University in 2007. | San Francisco’s ballpark is often hailed as the first privately funded ballpark built for Major League Baseball since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. The stadium is accessible by numerous forms of public transit, including buses, streetcars, light rail, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System and ferry service. City officials boast of 6,000 apartments that have been created as a result. | The Pirates stayed in Pittsburgh. The downtown area has seen some revitalization, but the city continues to struggle financially, raising taxes and laying off city workers. |
When Mayor Michael Bloomberg argues that the city should build a new stadium for the Jets football team, he often points to other cities like Atlanta or St. Louis. These cities already have domed stadiums like the one Bloomberg wants to build and have played host to the Super Bowl, the 1996 Olympics, monster truck rallies, and even a visit from the Pope.
“New Yorkers will be the big winners if this project becomes reality,” the mayor said.
But Mayor Bloomberg does not mention that these stadiums have not turned out to be as great a deal as officials initially predicted.
In Atlanta, an expanded center was met with a drop in attendance. In St. Louis, surrounding hotels are still empty. And he never mentions the Seattle King Dome - once the largest dome in the world - which suffered an even worse fate. In 2000, the aging structure was blown up even though the county still owed $125 million on it.
Closer to home, officials in New Jersey recently agreed to a new $750 million stadium for the New York Giants football team, even though the state will have to pay $30 million for surrounding roads and will still owe $124 million in debt on the old stadium. In Newark, the housing authority diverted $3.9 million in federal funds meant for low-income residents to a new arena designed to keep the Nets basketball team from moving to Brooklyn.
In the last 25 years, the nation has experienced a stadium and arena boom.
More than 50 stadiums or arenas have been built in the U.S. and Canada since 1990. And 12 baseball stadiums, nine football stadiums, and eight basketball arenas are being promised for the future, according to League of Fans, which was founded by Ralph Nader.
In New York City, six sports teams - the Jets, the Yankees, the Mets, the Knicks, the Rangers, and the (recently purchased) Brooklyn Nets - all want expensive new places to play.
While fans may argue that teams play a significant role in the life of a city, most economists agree that stadiums and arenas are bad public investments.
"By having a sports team or a new stadium or arena, you don't increase the level of per capita income, and you don't increase the level of employment," said Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of sports and economics. "There's no direct economic development of communities."
Some critics, such as those who run Web sites like www.fieldofschemes.com, see all of these sports complexes as boondoggles.
They point toward examples like PNC Park, a $262 million baseball stadium for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which was built mostly with taxpayer money, even after voters rejected it.
“I fundamentally don’t believe that the public ought to be investing in ballparks,” Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy said at a recent forum (read the full transcript). “That said, we have built a new football stadium, a new baseball park and a convention center, and we spent $1 billion. That’s reality; that’s the marketplace.”
But others argue there is a good way to build stadiums.
SBC Park, a baseball stadium in San Francisco, for example, was paid for almost entirely by the Giants. It is hailed as the first privately funded ballpark for Major League Baseball since Dodgers Stadium was built in 1962.
Not all stadiums are equal.
Football stadiums seat 75,000 people and if they have a roof can be used for other large indoor events as well. These facilities cost the most. (Click hereto see how the West Side stadium compares to other similar domes.)
Baseball stadiums are smaller, seating 35,000 to 50,000 people, and in addition to games can only be used for open-air events. (Click hereto see how the proposed Yankee stadium compares to other ballparks.)
Indoor arenas are used for basketball and hockey, seat around 20,000 people, and cost the least. (Click hereto see how the proposed Brooklyn Nets arena compares to other arenas.)
But when comparing New York’s proposed stadiums and arenas to others across the country, some things are clear:
See how New York’s stadiums and arenas match up (click below to get to the three grids):
* The proposed West Side stadium, and existing domed football stadiums.
* The proposed Yankee stadium, and existing ballparks.
* The proposed Brooklyn Nets arena, and existing arenas.
* The mayors of Pittsburgh, Kansas City and San Francisco explain how they built their stadiums.
Related Articles:
* New York Sports Economy
* Stadium Fever
* The 2012 Olympics and New York
* The West Side Stadium
* Bringing the Jets Home Dreaming of a Jets Stadium in Queens
Related Links:
* NewYorkGames.org
* New York Association of Better Choices
* Hell's Kitchen Online
* No Land Grab - Anti-Nets Arena Web Site
* Develop, Don't Destroy Brooklyn
* Field of Schemes
* League of Fans
* Ball Parks
* Stadiums of NFL
Although we have more shoreline than practically any other metropolis in the United States, most New Yorkers are strangers to their waterfront. The development of industry and the advent of highways along the water’s edge have combined to block us from our city’s best asset.
Vibrant, diverse communities need affordable housing, public open space and distinctive urban design. A delicate balancing act is required to turn these simple ideals into realities. The place to renew this equilibrium is along the East River in north Brooklyn.
In Greenpoint and Williamsburg, factories, warehouses and vacant lots block the waterfront, depriving residents of access to some of the best views in the city. The city’s current rezoning plan for the area seeks to correct this and envisions bringing people back to the waterfront.
The plan calls for new affordable housing, parks and a 1.6-mile esplanade along the river. Private developers would build the residential buildings and adjacent sections of the waterfront esplanade. To finance this esplanade, developers would build larger than usual buildings with more apartments to sell or rent.
This might seem like a great deal: Without spending a dime of public money, the city gets waterfront access. But this model of development just doesn’t work. Across the Hudson in Jersey City, citizens have been waiting for the completion of their privately-funded public waterfront esplanade for more than 25 years.
Where separate, distinct sections of the esplanade have been built in Jersey City, public access is often difficult or restricted, and the large buildings form barriers between the neighborhood and the water. The kinds of activities and facilities that make a public waterfront inviting -- fishing, kayaking, playgrounds, food vendors, boat launches -- are shunned by private developers because of liability risks. Jersey City taught us a lesson in imbalance. Why make the same mistake in Brooklyn?
The precedent we fear is already being set. At one development known as Schaefer Landing, now under construction south of the Williamsburg Bridge, there will be two paths to the waterfront. One will connect to the luxury condominiums and will always be open. The other will be from the street and will be locked at dusk.
The rest of Brooklyn’s waterfront could be developed the same way. Even when the waterfront is built out, inland residents of Greenpoint and Williamsburg may find themselves locked out of Independence Day fireworks over the East River.
Now is the time to envision the future for this 1.6-mile stretch of East River shoreline. The City Council will vote on the rezoning plan as early as Monday, May 2. If the mayor and the council can work together to budget funding for the waterfront during this rezoning process, the city can begin acquiring the land now and setting a schedule for immediate development. A recent editorial in The New York Times suggested that the city "build the entire promenade, guaranteeing public access and uniform maintenance."
The city can get a jump start on its legacy by creating a local parks conservancy to help implement the vision, manage its development and raise funds for the esplanade and other area parks, like nearby McCarren Park. By removing some parcels of land from the rezoning and reserving them for new open spaces, both Greenpoint and Williamsburg will see benefits now and in the future.
Making an upfront investment in the city’s waterfront can bring the whole project back into balance, free up developers to invest more in affordable housing and reduce the need to build towers soaring to 40 stories. By making north Brooklyn’s waterfront public, we can ensure that local residents never have to pine for their native shores. This rezoning can give these neighborhoods something they have never known -- a truly public place at the water’s edge.
Kimberly Miller is the director of planning for the Municipal Art Society.Â
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These days the news gushes with claims about the presumed benefits of giant new development plans, like Hudson Yards and the Jets Stadium, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, the Columbia University expansion, Olympics 2012, and the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. But we do not hear the many more fascinating stories about community-created plans. These plans transformed entire neighborhoods by stopping redevelopment bulldozers and creating housing affordable to all residents. They confronted gentrification instead of creating it. The Planning Center of the Municipal Art Societyhas catalogued some 70 such community plans.
We are reminded of the first such community-based plan in New York City – The Cooper Square Plan -- by the death last month of Walter Thabit at his home on East 11th Street. He was 83.
Thabit was New York’s anti-Moses. In 1959 he helped found The Cooper Square Community Development Committee and Businessmen’s Association (now The Cooper Square Committee), which organized against and defeated a giant urban renewal plan proposed by the city’s official master builder Robert Moses that would have wiped out 11 blocks in the Lower East Side. The project would have displaced 2,400 tenants, 450 single room occupants, 4,000 homeless beds and over 500 businesses. City officials planned to turn over the land to a union-backed developer who would have created 2,900 units of middle-income housing. In 1961, after more than 100 community meetings, Thabit completed the Alternate Plan for Cooper Square, which proposed that the original residents of the area should be the beneficiaries and not the victims of urban renewal. Community leaders Frances Goldin, Esther Rand and Thelma Burdick were joined by many others over a period of almost 50 years to implement the community’s vision for a stable neighborhood affordable to people with modest incomes.
The Cooper Square Alternate Plan was the precocious pioneer of community-based planning, and its history of nearly half a century proves that gentrification can be beat if it’s confronted before it starts. The plan was inked fourteen years before community boards were started, two decades before community planning became a buzz, and three decades before the first community plan was approved by the City Council.
Today, much of the housing that was going to be demolished has been preserved for low-income tenants, and hundreds of new low-income housing units have been created. The last of the vacant urban renewal sites is now a construction site. Avalon Chrystie Place includes four buildings with 708 housing units, one-third of them for low-income households; 85,000 square feet of retail space; and a community and athletic center to be operated by the University Settlement and the Chinatown branch of the YMCA. When all of the housing is built, about 60 percent of the housing units in the 11-block urban renewal area will be for low-income people and remain so in perpetuity. This is better than any other urban renewal project of this size (with the exception of those that became 100 percent public housing) and even exceeds the goals of the original Cooper Square Plan.
Thabit’s Legacy To Community Planning
The New York Times shrank Walter Thabit’s lifelong contributions to community planning into a short obituary (April 4, 2005). In contrast, the press tips its hat every day to city officials like Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff whose visions of urban grandeur are often linked with the Robert Moses legacy. Perhaps Thabit, and the scores of community planners in the city who were his colleagues, are invisible because they are immersed in the inglorious, behind-the-scenes tasks that don’t wind up as splashy real-estate deals.
Thabit was a true professional. In the Alternate Plan for Cooper Square he methodically analyzed land use, social and economic trends, dutifully listened to what community residents and business people had to say, and transformed it all into a highly professional document that the Cooper Square Committee fought to have adopted. It took almost a decade, but the community’s plan was eventually accepted by the city. It then took more than another three decades of lobbying, protesting, and organizing to get it all done. Throughout this decades-long process Thabit selflessly contributed countless hours of his professional diligence.
Thabit also did planning in Morningside Heights and East New York. His book How East New York Became A Ghetto, published in 2003 by New York University Press, is a scathing critique of the role that racism plays in creating ghettos and destroying communities. In addition, he worked for the city at various times (a senior planner with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and with the Department of Transportation), taught in colleges, and ran his own planning firm in New York City for 17 years.
Thabit’s influence in the planning profession throughout the U.S. was substantial. He was one of the first in a generation of “advocacy planners” who worked with community groups fighting official plans that threatened to bulldoze low-income neighborhoods. In 1964, he founded and led Planners for Equal Opportunity (PEO), the first organization of professional planners that focused on questions of social equity and racial justice, which was eventually succeeded by the Planners Network.
A month before Thabit’s death, we lost another planning great – Yolanda Garcia, director of We Stay/Nos Quedamos in the Melrose section of the Bronx, who died at the age of 53. That they were not as well-known as the sundry real estate moguls in the city helps explain why New Yorkers pay so much attention to just a handful of mega-projects, and so little to their own communities. If the press would spend more time covering the rich heritage and continuing accomplishments of community planning, we all might get a better picture of the other options for the future of our city.
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
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.
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.
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.Â
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.Â