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Community Development Funding Cuts Under The New Bush Budget


Last month the Bush Administration released its fiscal year (FY) 2006 budgetand, as expected, it wasn’t particularly kind to many programs that professionals in the community development field hold near and dear.

Facing a projected 2005 federal deficit of $425 billion, the president’s budget proposes to eliminate or reduce funding for 150 federal programs, thereby cutting the deficit by about $20 billion. An additional $196 billion in cuts are proposed for the years 2007 and 2010, although they are not yet detailed.

Inefficiently Run Programs

Using the Program Assessment Rating Tool(PART), a process developed by the Office of Management and Budget to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs, the administration concluded that many community development institutions “are not getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities”.

As a result, the administration’s budget recommended that 18 community development programs, previously housed under Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Agriculture, Treasury, Health and Human Services and the Commerce Department, all be consolidated under a new Commerce Department entity called the “Strengthening America’s Communities (SAC)” (In PDF Format) initiative.

The FY 2006 budget, which begins in October of this year, proposed to fund this initiative at $3.71 billion. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the programs slated for consolidation received a total of $5.3 billion in 2005. Over the next four years, New York State is projected to lose $860.4 million in funds for community development programs.

Denying Entitlement

Across the country, constituencies that have a large stake in the programs targeted by these cuts are lining up to oppose the president, claiming that Strengthening America's Communities is just a smokescreen for Bush’s desire to dismantle what’s currently left of the federal community development support system.

For instance, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the official nonpartisan organization of U.S. cities with populations over 300,00, is protesting Bush’s targeting of the largest community development funding area, the Community Development Block Grant(CDBG).

The Community Development Block Grant, which was created in 1974 to address the community development needs of low-income people and is one of the oldest Housing and Urban Development programs, is a poster child for the sort of “big government” entitlement program that Bush seeks to include in the Commerce Department consolidation. Roughly $4 billion in these funds currently go to cities nation-wide. More than $200 million of that is distributed through 22 different agencies in New York City.

The federal government gives municipalities the discretion to distribute these block-grant funds to broadly defined areas of community development activity. In New York City over half of these funds are designated for “housing” and administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). HPD uses these monies mainly to support, improve and protect affordable housing for low-income families.

The city uses the rest of this money to fund a disparate range of programs including subsidized family day care, the administration of public facilities and City Planning. A small amount, no more than three percent, goes towards “economic development” activities like supporting small business development on neighborhood commercial strips.

Molly Wasow Park of the New York City Independent Budget Office, observed that it would be inaccurate to depict the President’s proposal as merely a shuffling around of community programs. “The President’s plan”, says Park, “would effectively eliminate the Community Development Block Grant and replace it with a smaller grant with very different funding priorities”.

Although Park warns that it is much too early to know what those new priorities will be, she speculates that the Bush Administration under Strengthening America's Communities would probably end up shifting block grant monies to “economic development” activities, which right now in New York City takes the form of neighborhood commercial strip revitalization.

In a possible sign of things to come, the Strengthening America’s Communities initiative proposal includes an “Economic Development Challenge Fund”. This fund represents a bonus grant program for low-income “development-ready” communities that, in the Bush administration’s words, “have already taken steps to improve economic conditions by meeting No Child Left Behind goals, reducing regulatory barriers to business creation and housing development and reducing violent crime rates.”

Community Development Lending

Traditional entitlements and war-on-poverty era social programs are not the only items on the president’s chopping block. So too are programs like the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund, which makes investments in institutions such as small, neighborhood-run credit unions, so that they can extend credit, savings products and other financial services to low- and moderate income people. The loan fund is currently run by the Treasury Department and was created by welfare-reform minded Bill Clinton with bipartisan support. Clinton used the fund to help usher in a more market-based, individual asset-building approach to federal anti-poverty programming.

In New York City there are 42 such institutions, which have received $45 million from the fund over the last decade. Mark Pinsky, president of the National Community Capital Association, a network of private-sector community development financial institutions that provides financing, training and advocacy, estimates that these funds have helped leverage an additional $1 billion in funds from other sources.

Pinsky predicts that the cuts in the fund will serve to undermine the community development financial institution infrastructure in NYC. He doesn’t deny that the fund and other programs included in the consolidation could stand to be improved in some ways, but says that the Bush administration’s wholesale claim that these programs are inefficient represents what he calls “popcorn policy. There’s a kernel of truth surrounded by a lot of hot air.”

The President’s budget even drew criticism when he didn’t propose cuts. For instance, although the administration offered an overall 2.4 percent increase for the Small Business Administration over current funding levels, the Microbusiness Journalnoted that close to half of that agency's budget has been cut since Bush took office and quoted the House Small Business Committee Member Nydia Velazquez as saying “What was once a Cabinet level agency that had a seat at the table, a $1 billion budget, and a large role in the decision-making process – has sadly become the shell of an agency.”

Ominous Signs

Theoretically, the president’s budget, for the time being at least, is merely an expression of the administration’s national priorities. It is Congress that will most likely determine the final budgetary outcome. In the past Bush has proposed a series of cuts to community development programs only to have many of them restored, at least in part, by Congress.

But no matter how the budget process progresses over the next few months, many see the president’s budget as an unwelcome sign. Dawn Rivers Baker, editor of the Microbusiness Journal, commented that "President Bush has an interesting way of supporting community development: cutting most of its funding. It's difficult to say at this point how much Congress is going to go along with but it seems pretty clear that community development organizations are going to have to look increasingly to their state and local governments, and to private sector donations, to make up for the federal funding they are likely to lose in the coming years."

It is unclear how New York City in particular, which voted overwhelmingly for Kerry in the last election, figures in the Bush administration’s plans. In an indication that Bush is looking to redistribute funds away from bastions of east coast liberal politics like New York, his Opportunity Zones, a new small business tax incentives program, is aimed at mid-western industrial areas whose economies are “in transition”.

In another ominous sign for New York, a White House description of the Strengthening American Communities, in making the case for dramatic change, complains that under the current system “many communities no longer in need of assistance continue to receive funding.” As a result, Bush’s budget proposes to change the eligibility criteria for community development block grant funds from overcrowding and advanced housing age, to job loss and unemployment, a shift which would most likely favor other areas over New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NYCMap


NYCMap is pronounced "nice map," according to city officials, who have spent $20 million of the taxpayers' money so far on this computerized mapping project. But, though the public paid for it, this really cool map is largely unavailable to the public. Some people think that is not very nice.

Maps are probably older than written language, the first maps dating back at least 5,500 years ago. Maps changed radically some five centuries ago at the onset of the age of exploration, changed again with aerial photography and again with space flight. Over the last 20 years, there has been another revolution in mapping technology, which has changed the way large cities function.

In any large city, every city agency, whether sanitation, or transportation or health, produces whole libraries of maps; how can construction crews lay new wires if they don't know what's there already? Too often, though, the maps used in different corners of the city government haven't quite corresponded with one another, resulting in…municipal chaos.

The new computer-generated "geographic information systems" reside in powerful databases that can hold a unified picture of all of the different layers of geography and infrastructure that make up a major city. That includes everything from bedrock and bodies of water, to gas mains and sewer tunnels, to tax lots and bus routes.

NYCMap is just such a system, one of the most sophisticated in the world. And therein lies the dilemma: How dangerous is it to let the public see the world-class map its tax dollars made possible? Access to NYCMap is tightly regulated, for fear the detailed urban plan could aid a terrorist attack.

Critics think this is wrong.

"Access to NYCMap should be free," said Gary Ostroff, vice president of Community Cartography, at a recent hearing of the City Council's Technology in Government Committee. "We live in a democracy. The government has no business collecting information it doesn't need, and if it does collect it, the information must be made public. … There should not be a monopoly on the holding of that data."

Work on NYCMap began in 1996, using a method of precise aerial photography which places geographic features like pavement edges and building footprints within two feet of their real position. About 7,500 photos were digitally dissected to produce a computerized "base map" of all five boroughs that charts everything from streets and buildings to subway entrances and manhole covers. The first version of NYCMap was completed in 1999. By 2004 the city had spent about $20 million on the project.

NYCMap provides a foundation for plotting and analyzing almost any kind information about the city: census data, demographic trends, crime statistics, school performance, voting patterns, etc. Map users can turn layers of information on or off as needed. For instance, a police department planner might want a neighborhood map that shows precinct lines, hospitals, schools, and crime statistics. A health official worried about West Nile virus in the same neighborhood might hide the precinct lines and crime stats, and show bodies of water instead.

City agencies and approved contractors can access the core NYCMap database to build their own applications on top of it. According to Marsha Kaunitz, director of Citywide GIS at the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, city agencies have created custom applications as diverse as mapping crime statistics, managing construction activities, dispatching emergency responders, and tracking sanitation trucks.

However, average New Yorkers have no direct access to the high-tech map they paid for. The city maintains two public Web sites built on NYCMap: the New York City Map Portal, and a site called My Neighborhood Statistics. Both sites will map an address and display some public information about the area. But neither service lets citizens see the detailed aerial photographs that NYCMap contains.

Most important, private citizens are prohibited from downloading the raw data that would let them invent new uses for NYCMap. A small real-estate broker might want to analyze the data to decide which neighborhoods to invest in, for instance. A senior citizens center might need it to design a program that shows their members the best way to get to public facilities near their homes, taking into account the special transportation needs of the elderly. An academic might hope to study gentrification patterns. Under current rules, none of them have access unless they become licensed as approved vendors to the city.

At the City Council hearing, mapping experts and community advocates agreed that the general public should not be able to see maps of sensitive infrastructure, such as gas mains and the electrical grid. But they said much of the information being held back by the city is not dangerous, and is already available in other public databases or visible to any pedestrian on the street.

"There is a burden to make the case" for restricting each layer of NYCMap, said Alan Leidner, a former director of Citywide GIS, who has been called the father of the city's mapping efforts. "There has got to be a specific reason why that particular layer is considered dangerous and another is not." He also pointed out that the licensing system gives incumbent contractors with access to NYCMap a strong advantage over challengers in designing bids for new work from the city.

Other cities around the world let the public have the kind of information New York City holds back. Residents of both Boston and Philadelphia, in fact, can see detailed aerial photos of their neighborhoods and download the raw data to build their own maps. The State of New York also lets the public download raw map data -- for any county outside of New York City, that is.

"We understand that other cities such as Boston and Philadelphia enjoy less restrictive policies than ours," Marsha Kaunitz testified at the council hearing. "However it is important to note that New York City is unique, both in the specificity of the data contained within our base map and in the level of risk we operate under."

Councilmember Gale Brewer, chair of the Technology in Government Committee, asked Kaunitz to publish a clear policy for what data is available and how interested parties can petition to use it. Later, she promised to keep pursuing the issue of widening access to NYCMap. "We will not let this go away," she said.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avoiding Eviction; Also, Landlords Lose A Case, Sort Of


Two things happened in the Bronx recently that could affect housing throughout the city.

The first was the launching of a new program to prevent homelessness, focusing on providing tenants an attorney at Housing Court. The second was the end of a contentious lawsuit filed by landlords against tenant organizers.

ANTI-EVICTION PROGRAM

A new effort to prevent homelessness by offering both social and legal services at Housing Court has been launched as a pilot project in the Bronx, the first of its kind in the nation.

“We’re hoping to solve a problem,” said Judge Fern Fisher, the administrative judge of the Civil Court of the City of New York. The problem is the record numbers of homeless people in city shelters. “At some point, some of those people were evicted at Housing Court.”

The new “Housing Help Program” targets the Bronx’s 10451 zip code, which covers much of Mott Haven. About 5,000 people were evicted from their homes in Mott Haven in 2004 of about 23,000 total evictions citywide.

As many as 20 percent of people in city shelters have experienced an eviction. While an eviction may not have been the immediate cause of their homelessness, the fact that so many have had cases in Housing Court makes it a natural place to focus homelessness prevention efforts, Fisher said.

As I wrote in October, the new program is being spearheaded by the United Way of New York City, which is providing about $1 million to finance it, in collaboration with other non-profits and several city agencies.

The program was one recommendation that came from a panel of housing and homelessness experts brought together by the United Way last year. The panel concluded that homelessness had three central interrelated causes 1) a shortage of affordable transitional and supportive housing, 2) economic hardship by NYC’s low-income working families, and 3) unmet needs of highly vulnerable populations.

In the Mott Haven area, people tend not to get help when they face housing problems, in part because social and legal services are limited. The neighborhood was chosen, too, because it sends proportionally more people to homeless shelters than many other neighborhoods. The program expects to assist about 650 families over a year, its collaborators said.

Now, when people from that zip code end up in Housing Court they will have the opportunity to participate in the program as long as their income is less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level (about $34,870 for a family of four).

The residents of 10451 will go through a separate intake process at the court, avoiding the often-long lines that plague Bronx Housing Court. If they decide to participate, their legal and social situations will be assessed. The services will continue outside of court, back in their neighborhood, where the organization Women in Need will follow up offering assistance to address specific problems, like providing job training and referring people for mental health services.

A single judge, Jaya Madhavan, will hear the cases involving residents of 10451 in a special courtroom that has been set up next to the court’s resource center. Madhavan was selected for the one-year assignment because he is a relatively new judge with a small caseload.

Offering more complete services to people at Housing Court will prevent evictions because evictions rarely have just one cause, said representatives from the agencies working on the Housing Help Program.

“There are a lot of things going on for a family that can bring on a housing crisis,” said Jo Gonsalves, director of affordable housing and homelessness programs for the United Way of New York City. Obvious problems that lead to Housing Court cases, like unemployment, often are joined by other issues: domestic violence, mental health problems, substance abuse and others.

“We’ve put together a program for families, who are stressed and frustrated and overwhelmed with the prospect of losing their homes,” she said of people who find themselves summoned to Housing Court by their landlords. “We don’t just offer legal services, we offer social services, which are right on site.”

Gonsalves said three principles guide the program:

Accessibility -- providing services right at the court and in the community; Responsiveness -- addressing the “full range of family needs, rather than a single problem at a time”; and, “Continuity of care,” -- helping families until their situations are stabilized.

“We’re very enthusiastic about this program,” said Steven Telzak, the interim project director for Legal Services for New York-Bronx. He said the court-based approach would allow legal service and social service providers to tackle the problems that have led to a Housing Court case. “We’ll leverage that (housing) crisis to help them in other ways,” he said.

Fisher said the collaborative effort that led to the new program reflected a wider view of homelessness than the court sees.

“We should be a full partner in solving societal problems,” she said.

By providing legal representation to people at Housing Court, even if for only one zip code, the program fulfills one long-time wish of many advocates. People who represent themselves in Housing Court, as almost 90 percent of tenants do compared to about 10 percent of landlords, often learn too late what “adversarial” really means when the word is used to describe the American legal system.

While many tenants can and do defend themselves in Housing Court cases, they are pitted against experienced attorneys representing landlords. Many tenants do not learn quickly enough how to defend themselves and an aggressive landlord’s attorney can use the traumatic thought of losing one’s home to good effect against a tenant.

Fisher said the program would reinforce the view that legal representation makes a difference and, if successful, give advocates ammunition to push for replicating it elsewhere and to lobby for a right to counsel at Housing Court.

“We want to show people that this is what works,” Fisher said. “That this is what it takes to prevent homelessness. When we have successes in programs like this” the value of legal representation will be clear.

Advocates in the Bronx reacted positively to the news of the program, but viewed it cautiously.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Andrew Laiosa of the Neighborhood Initiatives Development Corporation, a community-based organization in the Bronx. But he questioned the efficacy of using $1 million to service one area.

“It’s taking a lot of resources to service 650 families, or so,” he said. “It’s a strange strategy given the circumstances,” he added. The circumstances are significant cuts to rent subsidies, the lack of affordable housing and the continued rise in rents across the city, including the Bronx.

LANDLORDS LOSE A CASE – OR DO THEY?

The settlement reached in a lawsuit filed by landlords against tenant organizers who had worked in a building on Woodycrest Avenue in Highbridge also drew mixed reviews from advocates, organizations that support them and the landlords.

Landlords filed the lawsuit in 2003 after tenant organizers had begun working with tenants to compel their landlord to fix the building’s many problems. The landlords alleged that organizers had prevented them from refinancing a mortgage with Washington Mutual bank, had defamed the landlords and had trespassed in the building. The organizers had published and distributed a variety of flyers and met with the building’s tenants several times.

The case brought apparently unwelcome attention to Frank Palazzolo, a landlord who owns dozens of buildings in the Bronx although his financial connections to the buildings are often hidden. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development launched an investigation of Palazzolo’s control of buildings in the Bronx as a result. The investigation is pending.

The landlords were seeking $1.5 million in damages, but ultimately abandoned all of their claims. The settlement indicates that landlords are withdrawing their suit “with prejudice,” meaning they will not seek to re-file it later. They will post flyers in the building indicating that organizers can come back in the building.

“I think it says that tenants in a neighborhood like Highbridge have powerful and strong advocates on their side in their struggle to make their housing better,” said Edward Phelan, executive director of the Highbridge Community Life Center, one of the community organizations named in the suit.

But Jackie del Valle, the lead organizer, said the settlement might simply encourage other landlords to file similar suits in the future.

The landlords “were clearly not able to get a victory out of this,” del Valle said. “They spent a lot of time and money on this court case, which they could have used for the building. However, they did hold up organizing work and compromised Highbridge’s mission.

“Organizers prevailed, but I don’t think that they prevailed as strongly as they could have.”

A woman who answered the telephone number indicated on the flyers that announce the settlement to tenants but who refused to identify herself said the settlement was a fair resolution but did not signal a defeat for the landlords.

“We were working with the tenants,” the woman said. “The building was already in the process of being repaired. We felt we had no choice but to” file the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed as a way to impede organizers’ efforts, the woman said, because those efforts were preventing the landlords from making repairs. She did not indicate what exactly organizers were doing to prevent the repairs.

“We felt we needed the opportunity to finish the repairs in the building,” she said. “They were interfering too much. So we felt we needed them to back off so we could complete the repairs.”

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hotels in New York



The Plaza Hotel where workers are protesting a plan to convert 650 hotel rooms into luxury condos.

Three years ago, the notion of building a 14-story luxury hotel in a neighborhood once known for transvestite prostitutes and dangling cow carcasses seemed like a particularly risky investment.

Still, despite the attacks of September 11 and the economic decline that followed, developers of The Hotel Gansevoort in the Meatpacking District forged ahead, believing that a rooftop swimming pool with underwater music, a club named "G-Spot," and a lobby decorated with eel-skin and mohair was exactly what the city needed.

Apparently it is. Today, less than a year after opening, business is booming at the Hotel Gansevoort.

"We attract the hip, affluent, under 40 crowd," said Michael Lindenbaum of the Hotel Gansevoort, sporting a Hugo Boss suit, the mandatory uniform for hotel staff. "We're a South Beach/L.A. kind of property, a property with personality."

Rooms, which range from $395 to more than $5,000 a night, are booked full of business executives, fashion models, and celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Jay-Z, and even hotel heiress Paris Hilton (who could presumably get a room at one of the four Hilton hotels in Manhattan).

But one of the best things about the rooftop of the Gansevoort, those in the know say, is the chance to peer into the even more exclusive Soho House hotel across the street, which has a $2,000 a year membership fee.

These trendy hotels owe their success to more than just celebrities and eel-skin; the entire hotel industry in New York is stronger than it has been in decades.

Last year, New York City drew more tourists than ever before - 39.6 million visitors, according to the mayor's office. Hotel occupancy rates are at the highest level since 1969. And dozens of new hotels are currently under construction across the city, including Harlem, where developers last week broke ground on the first hotel in the neighborhood in 35 years. (See related article Criticism of New Harlem Hotel Lingers.)

For all that, some see a hotel industry threatened by a net loss of rooms and jobs. Some of the city's most recognized historic hotels may also be heading for extinction. And with new hotels springing up around the city, more of New York's neighborhoods are in danger of becoming tourist attractions.


The Hotel Gansevoort in the Meatpacking District.

A PLACE TO SLEEP IN NYC

The first building built in New York specifically as a hotel was the City Hotel in lower Manhattan in 1794 - one of the first hotels in the nation. By the early 1900s, there were approximately 700 hotels in the city. Coming to New York to stay in a nice hotel and shop is a tradition tourists have enjoyed for more than a century.

New York's hotels have often reflected the prestige and danger of the city.

In the 1920s, the Algonquin Hotel was a center of theater and literary life. Eloise, the precocious little girl who lived at The Plaza, gave millions of readers a glimpse (although fictional) into upper-class hotel life in New York. And punk rocker Sid Vicious killed his girl friend Nancy Spungen at the The Chelsea Hotel.

The city's hotels have not only been for the rich; they have also housed the middle-class and even the poorest city residents. Neighborhoods like the Bowery were once overrun with welfare hotels and "flop-houses." City government has used hotels to house homeless people, preferring to pay nightly rates, rather than build permanent housing.

The turning point in New York's modern day hotel industry, many say, occurred in the early 1990s, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani reduced the city hotel tax and the state eliminated its hotel tax as a way to stimulate the local economy. At the same time, the city's crime rate dropped, Wall Street boomed, and many began to rediscover New York as a place to visit.

"The repeal of the [state] tax signaled, in my judgment, the start of the resurgence of New York," Joseph Spinnato, president of the Hotel Association of New York told the New York Times.

In the months after September 11, 2001, the hotel industry, like any business related to tourism, took a huge hit. Hotel vacancy rates declined 10 percent and the average price of room decreased by as much as $50 a night.

The recovery has been quicker than many expected.

The hotel business is again thriving thanks to the low crime rate, positive image among people around the world, and a weak U.S. dollar, which has lured more foreign visitors who spend four times more than domestic travelers.

Today, there are approximately 70,000 hotel rooms in the city, the most of any city in the country. Of the 39 million tourists who come to the city, about two-thirds live in the northeast, within 250 miles, and many make day trips. But the other third - people from across the nation and around the world - are looking for a place to spend the night.

Experts predict that the average room rate in New York will rise to $236 next year, compared to the next most expensive city, Honolulu, where the average rate is $143 a night.

"All indicators point to 2005 as another watershed year for New York City's visitor industry," said Cristyne Nicholas, president of NYC and Company, the city's tourist bureau.

NEW YORK'S NEWEST HOTELS


Design for the Marriott Hotel in Harlem at 125th Street and Park Avenue.

Related in Community Gazettes:
• Criticism of New Hotel on 125th Street Lingers

• Ground Broken on $236 Million Hotel on 125th Street

• Harlem Marriott Is a Go

"The hotel industry is so strong right now, you could develop one almost anywhere and make it successful," said John Fox of PKF Consulting, a company that specializes in the tourism industry.

In the coming years, dozens of new hotels will test the strength of the hotel economy.

Last week in Harlem, developers began building a 34-story, 280-room Marriott on 125th Street, the first hotel to be built in the neighborhood since the Hotel Theresa closed in 1970. (See related story about the Harlem Marriott)

At Columbus Circle, the new Time Warner Center includes the 250-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel, complete with $2,400 a night suites.

Hampton Inn is opening new hotels in midtown, the financial district, and near La Guardia airport.

In downtown Brooklyn, the Marriott at MetroTech recently announced it was expanding its hotel by 280 rooms.

Jason Pomeranc, who owns the trendy 60 Thompson in Soho, has new hotel planned for the Lower East Side.

And Andre Balazs, the owner of The Mercer Hotel in Soho is planning two new hotels in the city, including one called the QT, which will feature hostel-style bunk beds, each with its own flat screen TV.

But the hotel business in New York is about more than just providing a roof and a bed - it is about service, marketing, image, and style. Like the discos of the 1970s, stylish entrepreneurs have become trendsetters, who draw as much public attention as the celebrities they attract to their establishments.

"Hotels are great public living rooms where the combustion of celebrity, drinking, and sexiness of seeing and being seen can be very theatrical," Donald Albrecht, author of the book "New Hotels for Global Nomads" told the New York Times.

LIVING IN A HOTEL

New York City's real estate market is so strong that many hotels are converting part or all of their space into residential apartments - and hoping New Yorkers will want to live there.

Hotels like The Mayflower, Helmsley Windsor, Delmonico, and Empire have all been sold in recent years and will be at least partially converted into residential buildings.

The Plaza is the most high profile example of this trend.

Beginning in April, The Plaza will convert 650 of its 800 hotel rooms on the upper floors into luxury condos, which will sell for between $2,500 to $3,000 a square foot. The Plaza will still maintain 150 hotel rooms (none of which will have Central Park views) and historic spaces like the Grand Ballroom, Palm Court, and the Oak Room will remain.

"Today, people are really buying a lifestyle, and owning [an apartment] at The Plaza will be like living in a hotel, but you own it," Dottie Herman of Prudential Douglas Elliman told the New York Post.

Financially, putting apartments in a hotel makes sense for owners and developers. Purchase prices can potentially generate even more annual income than nightly hotel rates, and it is easier to finance hotel construction if part of the building will be sold to apartment owners.

Despite all of the new hotel construction in the city, the number of hotels converting a portion or all of their rooms to apartments means that New York may actually have fewer hotel rooms, according to tourism industry experts.

"It is not an indication of weakness in the hotel industry, but the strength of the residential market," said Fox. "We could actually see a net loss of hotel rooms in the city."

HOTEL JOBS

Last week, when the new Marriott Hotel in Harlem hotel broke ground, Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised it would create 1,000 permanent jobs, half of which have been promised to local residents.

"Harlem's renaissance is moving forward at full speed," the mayor said.

The hotel industry is considered by many to be a good source of jobs.

Many hotel jobs are unionized and come with benefits. The average annual salary is approximately $40,000 a year. And hotels provide good entry-level positions for people with limited skills or education. Immigrants comprise more than half of the hotel and hospitality workforce, according to the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union.

Still, it is a comparatively small industry; only about 38,000 - or 1 percent of New Yorkers - work at hotels. Job growth in the industry has been slow in recent years, increasing by only 1.4 percent in the last five years.

Unions say that changes in the way hotels are owned and operated are making it more difficult to protect workers.

About a quarter of all hotel rooms in the nation are owned by four companies - Marriott, Hilton, Starwood, and Hyatt - and labor agreements in less expensive cities can set difficult precedents for negotiations in New York.

Also the trend of more hotels converting to residential apartments has workers worried.

The plan to convert hotel rooms to condos at The Plaza will mean a loss of 900 jobs. Union leaders, trying to stop the plan, have parked a giant bus in front of the hotel emblazoned with the words "SAVE THE PLAZA."

"We think the continued closure of hotels eliminates the best jobs in the city for blue-collar people," said Peter Ward of the hotel union. "And the city can't afford that."

NEW YORK'S HOTEL FUTURE

In an effort to create more tourism-related jobs, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has outlined an aggressive plan to double the Jacob Javits Convention Center and create a new convention, sports, and business district on the West Side of Manhattan.

Although the fate of the proposed West Side stadium for the New York Jets is still uncertain, the State Legislature and governor have approved the plan to expand the convention center , which includes a 1,500-room hotel on 42nd Street and 11th Avenue and millions of new square feet to develop hotels in the surrounding area in the future.

The hotel and tourist industry has been a key proponent of the expansion of the Javits Convention Center.

New York's convention center ranks 18th in exhibit space nationwide and is too small to accommodate about a quarter of the largest trade shows. According to officials, the city has lost 800,000 hotel room nights over the last five years when trade shows chose to go to other cities with larger convention centers.

"Expanding the Javits Center is the number-one priority for New York City's hotel industry," said Spinnato of the Hotel Association of New York City.

In order to help pay for a larger convention center, the industry even agreed to a $1.50 per key per night tax, a sharp turn-around from a decade ago when the hotel industry blamed high taxes for sluggish business.

But some question if a new convention center will really pay off for the hotel industry.

More than 40 other cities across the country have either recently expanded their convention centers or are planning to do so. And since the convention industry has not grown significantly in recent years, each city will be competing for a share of a limited business.

While high average hotel rates in New York are good news for hotel owners, some argue New York will likely lose future convention business to other less expensive northeast cities like Philadelphia or Boston.

"New York has had a hard time attracting out of town conventions because of the high cost of hotels," said Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future. "Hotel costs are one of the top considerations and it will always limit significant new business."

HOTELS AND NEIGHBORS

While some New Yorkers fear the loss of historic hotels like The Plaza, others fear trendy new hotels may overrun their neighborhoods, bringing buildings that are too tall and out of character with the rest of the area. They also fear noise, traffic, and high real estate prices.

In Harlem, seven teams of developers are competing to remake the Loew’s Victoria Theater on 125th Street. The property, just a few doors down from the Apollo Theater, is owned by the state, which is evaluating various proposals, including several that call for massive, modern hotels that would rise above smaller buildings on the block. Starwood Hotels and Resorts has proposed a $103 million W hotel with 156 rooms and 58 condos. Another proposal calls for a B.B. King jazz club and a five star, 304-room hotel.

On the Lower East Side, even young, stylish New Yorkers feel they are being driven out of the neighborhood by developers like hotelier Jason Pomeranc, who is planning a 22-story hotel on Allen Street and was quoted as saying that he looked forward to "the opportunity to not only impact the skyline, but to begin creating it." Residents of Soho have frequently complained about noise at Pomeranc’s other hotel, 60 Thompson Street. Last year, City Councilmember Alan Gerson called the hotel the "worst violator we’ve seen in the neighborhood."

And in the Meatpacking District, properties like the Hotel Gansevoort, the Maritime Hotel, and the Soho House (and soon The Standard, another hotel proposed by Andre Balazs) have helped transform the neighborhood into a tourist attraction.

“This year was the first time I saw a couple of British women walking around with a guidebook, saying `Is this the Meatpacking District?’ which is both an advance and a huge step back,” said Michael Musto, nightlife writer for the Village Voice. “Once you’ve gotten into Fodor’s, the writing is on the cobblestones.”

Related Links

Hotel Association of New York

NYC and Company

New York State Hospitality and Tourism Association

Curbed.com - website covering development in NYC

Hotel Chatter (news of the industry)

 

 

Not Ready for Wal-Mart


The buzz around town is that Wal-Mart is perched to devour Gotham, the last big city to be attacked by the global king of discounting. Walmart is proposing a 132,000 square foot store in Rego Park, Queens and scouring the rest of the city for giant holes to fill with its corporate flea market. The company calls this city of world-class sidewalk shopping “the next retail frontier.”

The reaction to Wal-Mart by organized labor is understandable. The company is the largest employer in the United States and the world’s biggest retailer, with annual sales of $256 billion. While dozens of suburban-style malls have crept into the outer boroughs in the last couple of decades, Wal-Mart is known as the industry’s supreme cut-throat, the mother of all anti-union mallers. (See Wal-Mart Watch ) We’ve all heard how they ban unions, cut wages, make their employees pay for their own health insurance, and drive out local businesses. According to Brian McLaughlin of the New York Central Labor Council, "Wal-Mart has deployed ruthless intimidation tactics while driving down wages and benefits in the retail industry and beyond.” Others hail the virtues of local retailers in creating viable communities.

The reaction by community activists is also understandable. There is fear that Wal-Mart’s bullying tactics will make it hard for neighborhoods to control their own destinies. Already groups in Queens and Brooklyn are building up the opposition army. At recent City Council hearings, some floated the idea of a moratorium on all new superstores.

These reactions feed a growing concern that Gotham’s great cosmopolitan culture will disappear. “Is America’s greatest city succumbing to ‘burbism?’” wonders Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation. “Is the nation’s most vibrant urban nexus substituting suburban sprawl for the pulsating vitality of its neighborhoods?”

Wal-Mart Supporters

There are also many voices cheering Wal-Mart on. Most of them talk about the bargains and choices Wal-Mart offers. New Yorkers who love to shop on Orchard Street and Canal Street know what that’s all about.

Other voices welcome all superstores because they say they bring dollars into the city. The mayor and City Planning Department claim that opening the way for these giants will keep shoppers from crossing the city line to shop in Long Island and New Jersey. Never mind that corporate retailers take their profits out of the city while local retailers tend to spend them locally.

Inadequate Land Use Regulations

True, this isn’t just a Wal-Mart matter. This is especially obvious when we take a look at the regulations the city has at its disposal to deal with big box stores in general. What we find is a very weak set of land use regulations that poorly equip city government and neighborhoods to deal with big box projects. First of all, most neighborhoods don’t have any plans that show what they want preserved and developed in the future, including what kind of retail space is needed and wanted. The City Planning Department doesn’t work with neighborhoods to create positive visions of what their neighborhoods should look like, so local residents and businesses usually find themselves forced to react defensively and negatively to proposals by developers.

Secondly, the city’s zoning covering large-scale retail facilities doesn’t regulate very well the things that local neighborhoods care most about, even those who might want to welcome big retailers. In 1996, the City Planning Department proposed zoning changes loosening restrictions on the siting of big box stores, but they were turned down by the City Council. The failed zoning changes didn’t address demands from neighborhoods and professionals to tighten up the rules so that mega-stores emulate our grand tradition of downtown department stores rather than copy Minnesota’s Mall of America. It also opened up new opportunities for big box stores to go into vibrant industrial areas, drive up rents and drive out good jobs.

The main thing wrong with the zoning is that it allows developers generous amounts of parking. This guarantees that the stores will function like suburban-style malls. Traffic and air quality problems neighbors fear the most will become a reality. The mandated environmental impact studies usually lead to a few traffic management changes that only open the way for more traffic. In a city that has a great mass transit system and a relatively low level of car ownership, surely the suburban model featuring acres of asphalt doesn’t belong. If Home Depot can open up a store in Manhattan without parking, it can be done in the outer boroughs too. There, developers and neighborhoods would have to come together to figure out how big retailers can fit into existing neighborhoods and act as anchors to reinforce local businesses instead of undercutting them.

Another problem with the city’s zoning is that there is very little control over building design. Too many giant stores can open up in New York as-of-right, without the public review that just about every suburban store has to undergo. Superstores can assault their new neighbors with ugly, windowless concrete walls on three sides. These blank facades kill all street life, the very thing that makes New York an exciting place to be. No one has yet quantified how many suburbanites who now flock to the city on the weekends would stay home and go to their own malls if what we have to offer them is the same as they already have in their own backyards.

So maybe a moratorium is a good first step so we can have a public discussion about how to change the zoning and how to plan in the long-term. Right now, nobody’s looking at the long-term. For corporations, the horizon has to be the bottom line or their stockholders would cut and run. And since global corporations have to keep growing in order to survive, they’re always looking at their new markets, not the old ones. Like most corporate retail giants, Wal-Mart will cease being profitable when it runs out of choice new markets where it can expand its global network. They’re finally getting around to central city markets like New York because they’ve run out of green fields in suburbia. But even if they can gobble all of us up, what could be next? It’s hard to believe that among all its achievements Wal-Mart has discovered the formula for eternal profitability. What will happen to its elephantine consumer meccas when the next trend in retailing hits (which could be back to Main Street)? Will they go belly-up like Woolworth and A&P did in a previous shift in trends? What will happen when China starts charging more for its merchandise? When energy costs shoot up and start emptying more malls? Lots of neighborhoods may be stuck with giant sores that will be much more difficult to heal than the tiny spaces left over when little mom-and-pop operations close up because the owners move to Florida.

Stay tuned. The latest news out of Canada is that Wal-Mart is closing down its first store ever to prevent it from going union.

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. 

Summit Calls For Community Planning Reform


When William Johnson became mayor of Rochester, New York, he made a bold change in the way that city did its planning: “I had to learn to listen.”

He listened, that is, to people who lived in Rochester’s neighborhoods. “We divided up the city into districts and asked citizens to envision their futures, look at their assets and help revitalize the city.” Then he made another bold change, in the budget: “Now we allocate funds for neighborhood priorities.” Rochester’s program is called “Neighbors Building Neighborhoods.”

Johnson spoke at the Summit on Community-Based Planning in New York City, held late last month at the Municipal Art Society, where about 100 planners and community people in attendance heard Johnson’s story of how he turned over responsibility for community planning to neighborhood-based groups. Then they dreamt that New York City would do the same.

Summit participants broke out into workshops where they hammered out proposals for community planning in New York City, taking up Johnson’s challenge to “think big.” The starting point seemed to be a consensus that the system is broke and needs to be fixed. Over and over and again people testified that there is little support by city officials and agencies for community planning. Fourteen years after the City Charter was revised to give the city’s 59 community boards explicit authority to prepare their own plans, only seven have been approved. Many more are slowly wending their way through the cumbersome review process. Some people told stories of how they had spent years of volunteer time to develop proposals only to have the Department of City Planning pick them apart and take out whatever it did not like, leaving a plan that few were satisfied with.

Once the plans are approved, city agencies, and the planning department itself, treat them as “only advisory,” which means they get filed away and forgotten, confirming everyone’s worst prejudices about the futility of planning. And in at least one case cited by some conferees – the Greenpoint and Williamsburg plans in Brooklyn – the planning department responded to the neighborhoods officially approved plans by promptly making its own zoning proposals that violate the basic premises of the neighborhood plans. Earlier this month, Community Board One in Brooklyn, which covers Greenpoint and Williamsburg, turned down the planning department’s zoning proposal.

The ideas for changing this state of affairs facing community-based planners ranged from the immediate and mundane to the visionary. They included, for example, giving more technical and financial resources to community boards and community-based organizations, to both plan and to implement their plans. One panel called for the city to fund every community board so they can contract their own planners, as called for in the City Charter. It was also noted that the average board serves 135,000 people, larger than whole cities like New Haven, Connecticut, but with a tiny budget of only about $200,000 and miniscule professional staff. Some participants wanted to see community boards have more than advisory powers, bigger budgets, more professional staff, and more of an ability to bring city agency representatives to the table as partners in decision making. Many proposed that the city provide training for community board members and staff, and one panel wanted city schools to orient students to community board functions. There was also a recommendation that community boards be able to propose legislation.

While the call for the city to support its community boards was clear, there was also some sharp criticism of community boards for not being representative of their diverse constituencies, inclusive and accountable. There were stories of community board members who didn’t seem to understand what they were voting on and others who were too powerful and appeared to have life-long positions. At least one workshop called for uniform guidelines for board membership and procedures across the city, greater outreach to constituents, and oversight of board members and those who select them. Many felt that community planning should be an option for all community-based organizations, not just community boards.

Many of the ideas generated in the summit came out of the Task Force for Community-based Planning, a three-year-old coalition of community and professional groups that sponsored the recent event. With staff support from the Planning Center of the Municipal Art Society, the Task Force developed the first-ever collection of community-based planning efforts in the city – the Briefing Book, available at the Municipal Art Society Website, and on Gotham Gazette’s Community Gazettes.

What It Will Take

If we look at other cities in the United States, such as Rochester, Seattle, and Baltimore, where community planning is widespread and institutionalized, there appear to be three central ingredients to make it work. In New York City, a city of hundreds of neighborhoods with many experienced and sophisticated local activists, none of these elements are in place.

First, there has to be the political will. The executive and legislative branches (mayor and city council) have to want genuine community empowerment. That doesn’t mean just letting people participate in public meetings – the community boards can already do that. It means letting neighborhood people make decisions about government priorities, and that means influencing the city’s budget and service delivery. It also means that the mayor and city council have to be prepared to accept some local decisions they may not agree with.

Secondly, there should be a broad strategic plan governing the city as a whole This will help ensure that neighborhood-based decisions don’t contradict city-wide policies or enact exclusionary measures. In the other cities with community planning, there are city-wide plans that form the groundwork for local plans. In Rochester, for example, the backdrop for neighborhood-level planning is the Rochester 2010 plan.

Third, the city has to put its money where its mouth is. Neighborhoods have to have the money they need to do the planning and to implement their plans. Every plan should have a budget and its priority proposals should find their way into the city’s capital and expense budgets. Seattle, for example, has a Department of Neighborhoodsthat every year funds neighborhood priorities.

At the summit on community-based planning, the elephant in the room was the Bloomberg administration, the latest in a long line of imperial administrations preoccupied with planning for giant downtown projects, blind to outer borough needs, and ready to give lip service to community planning. Maybe the snoozing giant will wake up as elections approach next year, but among this crowd there seemed to be little faith that (if you’ll excuse the mixed zoological metaphors) the leopard will change its spots.

In the meantime, City Council member Bill Perkins, who introduced Mayor Johnson, announced that as chair of the Council’s Government Operations Committeehe would be holding hearings on community boards and community planning on Tuesday December 14, 2004. In his introduction, Perkins said that “there are those who think that since the community boards are just advisory we needn’t pay attention to them. I disagree….Maybe we have to make the boards more than advisory….Maybe we have to change the nature of community boards.”

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bloomberg's Development Strategies: Who Benefits?



Mayor Michael Bloomberg's development plan will remake neighborhoods like Long Island City, Throgs Neck, and downtown Jamaica.

Articles in this Feature:
• Developing Affordable Housing and Jobs by Brad Lander
• Create Conditions for Business to Thrive by Sandy Hornick
• Reform the Building Code by Julia Vitullo-Martin

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration has launched development strategies in over 20 New York City neighborhoods to create new offices and new housing. At a recent forum at the Milano Graduate School, three experts gave their views on how the city's development strategies can best help New York.

Create Conditions for Business to Thrive by Sandy Hornick
An outline of the city’s plan to revive lower Manhattan, develop the west side of Manhattan, and strengthen business districts in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

Developing Affordable Housing and Jobs by Brad Lander
The Bloomberg administration is the first to create an urban planning policy around economic development, but the mayor’s plans also present considerable costs and risk.

Reform the Building Code by Julia Vitullo-Martin
The most important thing the city can do to secure its future in housing and development is to bring down construction costs.

 

Developing Affordable Housing and Jobs



Mayor Michael Bloomberg's development plan will remake neighborhoods like Long Island City, Throgs Neck, and downtown Jamaica.

Articles in this Feature:
• Developing Affordable Housing and Jobs by Brad Lander
• Create Conditions for Business to Thrive by Sandy Hornick
• Reform the Building Code by Julia Vitullo-Martin

When we consider Mayor Michael Bloomberg's development plans, we must ask questions like: Who is the development for? Who benefits from it? And what kinds of jobs are created? And the city's new development must be seen in the context of the decline and resurgence that New York City has experienced in the last 40 years.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, New York City experienced a dramatic decline, as manufacturing declined, business decentralized, middle-class white families moved to the suburbs. Sprawling suburban development became the norm, and many of the city's neighborhoods were abandoned.

Yet despite these deep negative trends, New York City has by many measures experienced a remarkable comeback. One component of the resurgence began in the 1980s – the rise of finance, business services, and cultural production as key elements of the city's economic base. Other trends, such as escalating land prices and a rising population, did not become fully evident until the 1990s.

The problem is that now we now have a much more unequal economy. Add in raising property values and housing costs, you have an even greater income divide between those at the high end of the salary scale and those at the low end.

The Bloomberg administration is the first to recognize economic development and create an urban planning policy around it.

The mayor's plan features a host of benefits. It would create recreational and open space. It would bring jobs, especially the short-term construction work - 18,000 construction jobs on the Far West Side, 15,000 to build the Nets Arena Complex, 10,000 for lower Manhattan redevelopment. It would create housing, particularly high-earning residents, who would likely otherwise live in the suburbs and generate the property, sales and income tax revenues for the city.

But there are number of costs and risks that I think must considered.

While it is true that city has an aggressive housing plan, but these rezoning and redevelopment initiatives build almost only market-rate housing. In lower Manhattan, about 6,000 of the apartments that have been authorized or financed, only about one percent are affordable.

Another concern is preserving the manufacturing jobs we still have. In 2000, about 250,000 manufacturing jobs remained in New York City. This is still a lot of jobs, and industry should not be written off. And the manufacturing jobs we are losing today are due in large part to high real estate prices.

In its effort to strengthen the office economy, the development plan ignores opportunities to use development to benefit the city's working-class and middle- and low-income residents, especially in neighborhoods of color. We have an increasingly segregated city by income and race. We should be conscious about that and make investments in those neighborhoods as well.

There are also environmental concerns. In a growing city that is going to have new office space and housing, we need to generate new energy and we are going to produce more waste. We need to think about this over the next 50 years in order to make the investments so certain neighborhoods aren't dumped on.

Brad Lander is the director of the and Pratt Institute Center for Community Environmental Development. His remarks are based on a report called Remaking New York City: Can Prosperity be Shared and Sustainable? (available in .pdf format)

 

The City's New Housing Subsidy


The city has run out of Section 8 vouchers, the federal rent subsidy that has been its main weapon in fighting homelessness. City officials have proposed a new subsidy program, to be financed by city, state and federal money, to replace Section 8, which will be called Housing Stability Plus. Homeless advocates are not impressed.

The drying up of Section 8 vouchers and the new subsidy were the focus of a heated public hearing of the City Council’s General Welfare Committee on December 1st.

The Section 8 rent subsidy program helps working poor people pay their monthly rent. People on Section 8 are expected to spend a third of their income on rent; the subsidy covers the difference up to “fair market rents” determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

About 120,000 New Yorkers are on Section 8, which is primarily administered by the New York City Housing Authority. About 150,000 people are on the waiting list for Section 8, which has been closed for about a decade.

Warning signs that Section 8 would run out have been evident for more than a year. In October, the city sent letters to people in the process of being certified for the assistance informing them that they would have to use their vouchers by December 19. But that date turned out to be wrong. The vouchers apparently ran out just before Thanksgiving.

“The city has broken its promise to these people,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, told the committee. “They took away the relocation program without anything up and running.”

Many of the homeless families who saw their Section 8 vouchers evaporate would likely end up in New York City Housing Authority apartments, the housing authority’s general manager told the committee. But city officials had few concrete answers for these people except to wait and see about the new proposed subsidy.

The people were seething at the committee hearing, particularly women in domestic violence shelters who are awaiting housing placements. Those shelters allow women to stay for only a limited time.

The city’s proposed subsidy to replace Section 8 is still being negotiated, although city and state officials told the committee that all of the major issues relating to it had been ironed out. The officials said the city is continuing to press the federal government for renewed Section 8, but by creating a new subsidy, some advocates questioned the mayor’s and governor’s commitment to New Yorkers.

“We urge the city not to give up on Section 8,” said Lauren Bholai-Pareti, executive director of the Council on Homeless Policies and Services. “The mayor and the governor should come together to assure we get that assistance.”

Without Section 8 to help place homeless families in permanent housing, city officials said the city would face a huge financial burden putting or leaving people in shelters without some sort of subsidy program. The city pays about $90 a night to house homeless families, or almost $3,000 a month, and its homeless services budget, much of which goes to pay for shelter, has nearly doubled since 1999, to about $700 million.

“Without this (subsidy), the shelter system would quickly grow,” Linda Gibbs, the city’s homeless services commissioner, told the city council committee. “Our hope is that in a matter of days we will see approval. The major issues have been resolved.”

Councilmember Bill de Blasio, the committee’s chairman, said the city’s proposal was a positive step, even if flawed.

“Before Washington cuts us off, you put something into play that is sort of an inoculation against that,” he said. “I appreciate that.”

The subsidy, Housing Stability Plus, would cost about $58 million annually, city officials said, money that would simply be shifted in the city and state budgets for public assistance.

“The state can cover it,” said Robert Doar, commissioner of the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. “It takes time to review all the aspects of the plan. We’re getting close to an agreement on what this will cost.”

But advocates rejected the new subsidy. It significantly differs from Section 8, they said, in very negative ways.

Unlike Section 8, recipients of Housing Stability Plus assistance would have to be on public assistance and the subsidy would decline by 20 percent annually until it ran out after five years. Gibbs told council members that the decline was intended to encourage poor families to become self-sufficient. But asked what the families would do if they could not pay what in effect would be a 20 percent increase in their rent, she said the agency was hoping they could pay it.

“We’ll make changes as needed,” she said. “The focus is making it work. We’ll figure out how to make it work.”

But she said people who could not become self-sufficient would have to look elsewhere for help: “This program may not be for them,” Gibbs said. “There are other service systems” that would help them.

But decreasing rent for families on welfare would not encourage self-sufficiency, said Paige Sayle, director of community relations and advocacy at the Partnership for the Homeless. People who receive public assistance have their benefits cut if they earn too much money. So, the families would likely “turn down jobs or take low paying jobs in order to keep their rent subsidy,” she said.

Decreasing rents could also discourage landlords from accepting the subsidy, advocates said, a point one landlord acknowledged.

“If someone’s homeless and doesn’t have a job then you know their income is going to be an issue,” said Frank Anelante, president and CEO of Lemle & Wolff, which manages over 300 buildings in the city. “That’s a problem.”

Gibbs assured the council that landlord partners of the homeless services department had said they would accept the subsidy.

It was unclear at the hearing what would happen to working poor families who do not qualify for public assistance. It was also unclear whether landlords would accept the subsidy that, unlike Section 8, offers no incentive payment to landlords for taking homeless families and declines each year.

“There are a lot of questions,” said Councilmember Gale Brewer. “We’re all wondering how this will work. And we wonder about the priorities.”

The new subsidy would pay lower rents than what Section 8 pays, another flaw advocates pointed out. Gibbs said the proposed maximum rents the subsidy would cover, based on family size, were still competitive. A family of four that qualified could rent an apartment at $925 a month in the first year of receiving Housing Stability Plus. A family of six would receive up to $1,176 a month in the first year.

“There has been a constant issue with the fair market rents,” said Steven Banks, the Legal Aid Society’s attorney-in-chief. “This is even lower.”

Added to the financial issues, the new subsidy also differs from Section 8 in what quality of apartments it would pay for. While Section 8 has famously rigorous standards that disqualify apartments with violations, the new subsidy would not impose standards that are as strict. Advocates said the city would end up putting homeless families in unsafe and unhealthy apartments under the new subsidy.

The flaws in the subsidy were somewhat beside the point, advocates said. That the city had clear warning signs that Section 8 would run out and did not do enough sooner was an indication of the wrong priorities, they said.

“There has been a 63 percent increase in homelessness since 1999,” Banks said. “That reflects need. The city needs to spend money on housing. It’s all about rent. That’s the flaw in the current proposal.”

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

2 Columbus Circle And The Need To Preserve Preservation


On the brink of its fortieth birthday, the landmarks preservation law – created two years after New Yorkers were shocked at the needless demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station in 1963 – has preserved more than 1,100 individual landmarks and 22,000 properties in 81 historic districts across New York City. Thanks to the law, and the efforts of the city’s preservationists, New Yorkers and visitors to the city can enjoy brownstone-lined streets of Brooklyn, garden communities of Jackson Heights and such indestructible-seeming architectural monuments as Grand Central Terminal, all of which might not otherwise exist.

Today, preservation is a proven tool for stabilizing and revitalizing neighborhoods, maintaining a record of New York’s architectural and cultural history, and creating a tangible link between past and future generations.

But while 40 years of landmark preservation is indeed cause for celebration, many preservationists are not in any mood to pop open the champagne. Communities throughout the city are increasingly frustrated by the agency created by the law, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which seems out of touch with our concerns.

A coalition of civic organizations has produced a report, Problems Experienced by Community Groups Working with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, (in pdf format) that cites nine problems with the commission and proposes several avenues for reform. The report was submitted to the City Council’s Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting and Maritime Uses, which scheduled a special oversight hearing for November 29 at 10:00 AM.

Among the host of reasons for communities' concern is the commission’s failure to hold public hearings on such buildings as 2 Columbus Circle and St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, both imminently threatened with destruction or a destructive alteration. These two -- one a mid-century Modern icon by one of America’s most progressive Modernist architects, Edward Durell Stone; the other a work of both architectural and spiritual importance to the Harlem community -- are what Penn Station was forty years ago: igniters. This time, however, the city has a Landmarks Law. The question is, why isn’t it being used?

One reason is money. At just over $3 million, the Landmarks Commission’s budget is the smallest of any city agency, and it has fallen precipitously over the past decade, with the staff being cut back significantly. Meanwhile, the commission’s workload has increased by volumes. In any given year, it receives close to 8,000 applications for alterations ranging from cornice replacements to entirely new construction. And with each designation of an individual landmark or district, the workload increases.

But, while money is tight, the city cannot afford in architectural and cultural terms to force the agency to scale back its efforts. The mission of the agency is to protect the city’s historical and architectural heritage. Once this heritage is gone, it is gone forever.

Another reason the landmarks law isn't being used is politics. The decreased funding for the Landmarks Commission is not merely a symptom of across-the-board municipal belt-tightening. It reflects the city’s priority list, with the real-estate development lobby right at the top. The bias towards large-scale development, which promises quick fixes to perceived urban problems, versus preservation, which can be a slower, more organic renewal process, has an impact not only on the budget but on the political dynamics determining which buildings do – and do not – get considered for landmark protection.

Although 2 Columbus Circle is by no means the only source of preservationists’ concern (why else would dozens of groups in communities as varied as St. George in Staten Island and the Upper East Side of Manhattan have leapt to endorse the coalition's report?), it provides a useful case study.

The Case For 2 Columbus Circle

Robert A.M. Stern is one of the most vocal supporters of preserving 2 Columbus Circle. His credentials go beyond his role as foremost chronicler of New York’s history (Stern is the author of New York 1960, New York 1880, New York 1900, New York 1930, and a forthcoming volume entitled New York 2000). He is one of the most famous architects in the United States, the former director of Columbia University’s acclaimed graduate program in historic preservation, and the current Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. When considering whether to designate a particular resource as an individual landmark or as part of a historic district, the Landmarks Commission frequently cites Stern’s opinions as proof of the resource’s significance. In terms of New York City landmarks, he is clearly an authority.

The campaign to save 2 Columbus Circle began in earnest in 1996, soon after the building turned thirty years old and became eligible for landmark designation, when Stern drew up a list of “35 Modern Landmarks-in-Waiting” that was published in the New York Times. Two Columbus Circle, the former Gallery of Modern Art built in 1964 to house Huntington Hartford’s art collection, was included along with the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Holding a public hearing to consider 2 Columbus Circle’s merits for landmark designation should have been a no-brainer for the commission. Yet, while the commission has moved to designate a few of Stern’s 35, it has determinedly ignored him on 2 Columbus Circle. It has also ignored the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Preservation League of New York State, both of which included 2 Columbus Circle on their latest “Most Endangered” lists. It has ignored New York Times architecture critics Herbert Muschamp (“The refusal of the New York City Landmarks Commission to hold hearings on the future of 2 Columbus Circle is a shocking dereliction of public duty”) and Nicolai Ouroussoff (“Stone’s design, and the people of this city, deserve more respect than this”). The commission appears unmoved by the signatures collected from over 1,000 individuals and every single major preservation organization in the city, including the Municipal Art Society, the Historic Districts Council, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, calling for a hearing – not official designation, just a hearing.

These advocates are the Silenced Majority, ignored while the new Museum of Arts and Design plans a renovation of the now-vacant 2 Columbus Circle that would destroy many of its distinctive features. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has described those features in this "unorthodox" building as "a marble skin, porthole windows and a street-level arcade that critics have likened to a row of lollipops." But even some critics of the building question the Landmarks Preservation Commission's refusal to give it a hearing.

Recognizing the commission’s delinquency on 2 Columbus Circle as part of a larger pattern of negligence, Stern recently issued a statement urging the City Council to exercise its oversight power, “a move necessitated by the continued failure of the city agency to fulfill its important duties.” He went on, “while reasonable people can disagree over the merits of designation, the reluctance of the Commission to simply hold hearings in the face of sustained, vocal, widespread, and indeed unprecedented demand, including the recommendations of two former Chairs of the Commission, is, frankly, inexplicable.”

The former chairs to whom Stern refers are Beverly Moss Spatt, a planner who served from 1974 to 1978, and Gene A. Norman, an architect who served from 1983 to 1989. Both have written to the commission to call for a hearing for 2 Columbus Circle, as has Anthony M. Tung, a preservation scholar and former Landmarks Commissioner. Tung wrote, “Simply, in the 26 years of my involvement in preservation matters, beginning with my appointment as a commissioner by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1979, I have never seen the commission turn its back on such a widely supported and substantive argument for a hearing…Have all of these people suddenly grown ignorant? Entered senility? Gone blind? Or is the commission being arbitrary and capricious?”

Arbitrary and capricious behavior by city agencies is grounds for legal action. The report points out that, early in its history, the Landmarks Commission was peppered with lawsuits brought by property owners and developers seeking to overturn the Landmarks Law. Today, a number of lawsuits have been brought by owners and community groups who believe that the commission should have applied higher standards to protect the city’s historic resources. Somewhere along the line, the Landmarks Commission was cast (by its leadership and real estate-lobbied mayoral administrations) in the role of back-room negotiator, transforming what was once a participatory decision-making process into a bureaucratic maze that thwarts meaningful public dialogue. The agency’s ability to determine the future of over 23,000 historic properties throughout the five boroughs has been seriously undermined.

The problems experienced by communities seeking to work with the Landmarks Commission reflect both an economic and a cultural shift in the agency’s operations. To try to debate which shift caused which is fruitless. The point is that the commission’s lack of transparency and responsiveness stymies community-based preservation efforts and leads directly to the loss of irreplaceable historic fabric. This loss and the growing chasm between the commission and its natural allies – the citizen-stewards of the historic city – must not become the legacy of our generation.

Kate Wood is executive director of Landmark West!, a community group currently leading the effort to preserve 2 Columbus Circle.

 



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