Despite a demonstration on the steps of City Hall and apparent racial division among its members, the City Council excluded the revered and rebuked Sonny Carson from a street-naming bill at its stated meeting on May 30, turning a normally routine procedure into a controversy. The council also -- and much less contentiously -- adopted a bill to strengthen the repair process for the city's most dilapidated buildings and a measure requiring building owners to submit up-to-date floor numbering lists to the fire department.
The council rejected an amendment by Councilmember Albert Vann to commemorate Carson, a controversial black activist, on a four-block section of Gates Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The vote was 25 to 15 with 7 abstentions. The bill, some council members said amid boos and hisses from the audience, represented a battle between the desire of one neighborhood to honor an activist versus reluctance by others to commemorate a man who many see as divisive.
"The issue is not just Sonny Carson," said Vann. "It's the community's prerogative."
Last month, the parks committee voted along racial lines to remove Carson's name from a street-naming bill (Intro 556). Throughout the street renaming debate, council members opposed to the designation have cited Carson's criminal record and anti-Semitic comments.
Inside the council chambers, where jeers reverberated from a packed mezzanine, Councilmember Charles Barron accused Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who opposed including Carson's name on the street-naming bill, of hampering a community-driven process. Exceeding his two-minute comment period, Barron said the speaker divided the governing body more than the late activist could ever split the city's communities.
One of many members who defended their votes, Quinn reiterated her stance opposing Carson's inclusion in the street-naming bill, contending any recipient of a city honor should be a uniting figure, not a dividing one.
"I think it is incredibly important that when we rename streets in the City of New York, when we give somebody a higher governmental honor…. that when we do that we make sure those individuals who we honor are people that sought to bring our five boroughs together," Quinn said in a press conference prior to the council vote. "I don't think Sonny Carson embodies those core values."
Normally, the street-naming process is kicked off by a recommendation from a local community board. It is then brought before the council by an individual member, approved by the parks committee and formally endorsed by the council in one of two package street renaming bills submitted every year. Vann's amendment at the stated council meeting was a last-ditch attempt to reincorporate Carson's name on the package bill.
Following the amendment's rejection, the council approved the remaining 51 honorary designations, which included the likes of modern dancer Alvin Ailey and 1920s state Senator Mark W. Allen, by a vote of 40 to 4 with 3 abstentions.
In an attempt to rid the city of habitual housing code violators, the City Council unanimously approved the Safe Housing Act -- a bill aimed at New York's most dilapidated buildings.
Currently, improvements to buildings are done primarily on a quick-fix basis through the city's Emergency Repair Program, which often addresses rat and other vermin infestations, a lack of heat and hot water and broken front doors. Although the current program attempts to fix the most hazardous problems as quickly as possible, it leaves many of the more complicated and repetitive improvements simmering.
Going beyond the emergency repairs now conducted by the city, the Safe Housing Act (Intro 561) would single out 200 distressed buildings a year and require the completion of long-term improvements. An owner notified by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has four months to fix all heat and hot water violations as well as 80 percent of all hazardous and immediately hazardous violations.
Introduced by Quinn and Councilmember Letitia James, the bill requires that the owner of the distressed building fund all of the mandated repairs and pay any outstanding fees from the previous repair program.
The year following a building's inclusion in the safe housing program, the housing department will monitor its compliance -- at least every three months -- and require the building manager or owner to participate in a building management-training course.
Buildings selected for the program -- estimated by the housing department to cost $10.1 million in its first year - must have a history of housing code violations. If owners do not cooperate with the program, the city will conduct top-to-bottom repair work through a contractor and subsequently send the owner a bill. If the owner continues to be uncooperative, the city could eventually take over the building, Quinn said.
"The goal of this bill was to come up with a piece of legislation that could take significant steps forward to preserve affordable housing in our city, and to take the worst buildings in the City of New York and make them highly livable buildings, and to hold bad landlords accountable," Quinn said in the press conference prior to the council meeting. "I hope the message this bill sends is that if you are a slumlord, your days are numbered in the City of New York."
The bill, James said, should target the city's worst offenders and support populations who often suffer from poor housing conditions, including communities of color, immigrants and seniors.
In conjunction with legislation signed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week, the City Council approved a bill (Intro 496) requiring buildings over 150 feet provide lists of floor numbers lists to the fire department if the floors do not comply with standard numbering
When Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle’s plane crashed into a high-rise last year, first responders were faced with non-standard floor numbering -- when one floor does not correspond with its actual story, such as one level being titled the 25th floor when it is really the 24th . This labeling can affect the fire department's ability to address a disaster or emergency quickly, council members said.
Introduced by Councilmember Gale Brewer, the bill attempts to address a growing trend to give floors a higher number than their actual story in order to increase the apartments’ market appeal and value. The fire commissioner will develop rules outlining the filing procedure, which will be conducted electronically.
Citing "the deplorable lack of information available to New York City's firefighters," Brewer said, "the inability for the fire department to quickly retrieve accurate building information wastes precious initial response time and is life threatening for our first responders and those in need."
The bill follows legislation approved earlier in May (Intro 553) by the council that requires that the building department notify the fire department when it issues permits for substantial renovations --changes that could also affect the fire department's response time.
The City Council also approved a Business Improvement District (Intro 555) for Court-Livingston-Schermerhorn -- a vibrant commercial site in downtown Brooklyn. The area comprises 314 properties and is valued at nearly $357 million.
The district, introduced at the request of the mayor, will make way for the collection of a special tax to improve the area, according to a committee report. The extra funding, set at $765,000 for the first year, will go primarily toward cleanup to retain a strong local business presence, a spokesman for downtown Brooklyn Councilmember David Yassky said.
In March, a fire ripped through a two-family home on Woodycrest Avenue in the Bronx, killing 10 people, including nine children. It was the largest loss of life in a fire since the Happy Land nightclub tragedy in 1990.
Investigators cited a number of factors that contributed to the horrific event: a wooden staircase, the lack of a sprinkler system, and smoke detectors without batteries. Still the house complied with the city’s building code, the regulations meant to ensure the safety of New York’s 950,000 structures.
Recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took what many view as a significant step toward preventing future tragedies by proposing a massive overhaul of the city's building code, the first in nearly 40 years.
Under the proposed regulations, for example, all new buildings over 55 feet tall, which would include the Bronx home, would be required to have a more fire-resistant stairway, automatic sprinkler systems, and hardwired smoke alarms that sound in every room. If the house on Woodycrest had been built today under the new code, the city argues, the residents probably would have escaped alive.
However, some question the unintended consequences of the new regulations: specifically, if they will drive up the cost of construction and in turn, increase the cost of housing.
“I have concerns about mandating that two- and three-family houses have sprinklers and how much it will cost,” said City Councilmember Erik Dilan, who chairs the Housing and Building Committee.
In its revised building code, the Bloomberg administration tried to strike a tenuous balance between safety and cost. It sought the help of 400 professionals – architects, union leaders, contractors, developers, and safety advocates – who volunteered more than 300,000 hours to help draft the 1,300 page document.
“Nobody ever wants to deal with the details,” the mayor said, “but these are the things that make this city affordable and livable and safe.”
Even though the city held a press conference to announce the new code, last minute revisions still are being done before it goes to the City Council at the end of May. Then over the next few months, the details will be rehashed again in public hearings. If approved by council, the new code would go into effect in July 2008
Then the biggest challenge, some argue, may be enforcing it.
The last major overhaul of the building code occurred in 1968. While lawmakers have made some amendments to it since, the regulations were essentially piled on top of existing mandates, creating loopholes, redundancies, and conflicting rules.
Attempts to revise the code in recent years have been thwarted by the competing interests of various parties – developers, architects, contractors, unions, safety advocates and environmentalists – each with their own agendas.
"When the mayor asked me to write a new building code, I wasn’t sure it was possible," said Department of Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster. "It hadn't been possible in 40 years."
Experts say two factors created the climate that made the current revisions possible. First, the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 gave many of the stakeholders the political will to sit down and work out a new code. And Bloomberg, who keeps a check list of his administration’s accomplishments, promised to do it when he was a first a candidate in 2001 and worked to keep that commitment.
Perhaps the biggest change is that, if approved, the city’s code will for the first time be modeled after the International Building Code, which governs construction in most U.S. states. In adapting the code for New York City, the committee modified it to address the city’s density, small lots, and variety of structures.
“This is a significant development for New York City,” said Carl Galioto, a partner at the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. “We will have a building code that is better informed by national standards.”
The primary goal of the building code is to ensure safety of New Yorkers by mandating how each new building is constructed.
If approved, the code would require:
- Automatic sprinklers in more residential structures
- Hardwired smoke detectors in most residences
- New pipe systems and secondary water supplies to help firefighters get water to taller buildings.
In response to the World Trade Center collapse, new skyscrapers would include:
- Wider stairways
- Fireproof, pressurized stairways
- Stronger walls around stairs and elevator shafts
- Glow-in-the-dark exits signs
- And construction to withstand high winds and other extreme events.
"There's a lot in this code that's going to make the town a lot safer," said Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta at the press conference announcing the revisions.
Still, some critics say that there should be additional safety measures.
Last year, the New York Times reported that many of the recommendations from a major federal investigation into the World Trade Center collapse are still being debated.
Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, for example, questions why the steel joists which did not hold fireproofing in the World Trade Center when the fires burned at extreme temperatures would continue to be allowed in tall apartment buildings
"If we aren't allowing them in office buildings, we shouldn't be allowing them in residential buildings, or any high rise for that matter, until we figure out a way to properly fireproof them," Corbett told the Associated Press.
And even though the city learned valuable lessons from the Woodycrest Avenue fire in the Bronx, the proposed changes still fall short of the fire safety standards in some other large cities. For example, in many locations across the country, a two-family house like the one that burned in the Bronx must have two exits; in New York City, many two-family houses are allowed to have only one exit.
“In Chicago there would have to be another way out,” Larry Langford, a spokesperson for that city’s fire department told in the New York Times after the Bronx fire.
In addition to mandating what kinds of safety features each building must contain, the building code also regulates practices on construction sites. And workplace safety is a growing concern.
There were 29 construction related deaths in the year leading up to September 30, 2006, a 60 percent increase from the 18 deaths the year before.
The Bloomberg administration has made some changes to try to address workplace safety. For example, currently a safety manager is required only when a building 14 stories or more is under construction. The new code would extend that requirement to buildings 10 stories and up.
But overall, much of the new code would not substantially change the regulations that govern demolition and construction sites, according to Henry Kita of the Building Trades Employers' Association.
"In many cases the International Building Code was not as specific as the current code," said Kita.
New York City construction costs have been increasing by 20 percent a year, according to some estimates. The Bloomberg administration syas it worked to contain cost in the future.
Proponents of the new building code say it would be easier to understand and follow, especially for contractors from outside the city. It would reduce the complex process of getting the city to approve new and less expensive materials and equipment. And the buildings department would accept online applications and allow for less frequent license renewal, which will save contractors time.
Some believe this streamlining of the process could help spur the creation of more affordable housing.
“If the administration succeeds in securing its adoption, the impact should become quickly manifest in the increased volume and lower cost of new homes in the outer boroughs, where the cost of construction is a much greater factor than in Manhattan,” wrote Peter Salins of the Manhattan Institute.
However, Marolyn Davenport, the senior vice president the Real Estate Board of New York, is concerned that construction costs could actually go up under the new regulations. And she argues some provisions serve no other purpose than to allow contractors to charge more for their work. For example, the current code and the new code both require that new ceilings must be hung on a metal grid.
“There is no benefit,” argues Davenport. “It just allows someone to make more money.”
Mayor Bloomberg's proposed plan also calls for new environmental measures that he says may cost more in the beginning, but will save money over time. The code would require more efficient heating and cooling systems and that all roofs be painted a reflective color.
But experts say it is difficult to tell if the new rules would affect construction costs until it is put into practice.
"On the question of cost, the jury will be out for a while," said Henry Kita of the Building Trades Employers' Association.
Despite concerns about some of the costs of new regulations, City Councilmember Erik Dilan, who chairs the Housing and Buildings Committee, said he believes that "most of the issues have been hashed out" and that the new code will be approved by the end of the year, if not earlier. In that case, the new code would go into effect in July 1, 2008.
And those who drafted it made sure that it won’t be another 40 years before it is revised again. It includes a provision that requires it to be reviewed and updated every three years.
“This is not the end of a process, it is the beginning of the process,” said Carl Galioto, a partner at the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.
Once the code is approved, assuming that it is, its regulations must be translated into reality at worksites throughout the site. The City Council has particular concerns in this area. For one, some members question the policy that allows builders to "self-certify," their projects, meaning architects and engineers can decide if their projects are in compliance with regulations. The policy saves the city time and money, because the buildings department then only audits about 20 percent of the self-certified projects. But critics say some architects and engineers approve construction plans and methods that would not pass muster with inspectors.
In February, the City Council passed two bills on the issue. One would bar those who have previous violations from self-certifying future projects. Another punishes those who falsely claim their projects are in compliance with zoning regulations. Both bills are still sitting on the mayor’s desk awaiting a signature or veto.
However, Queens Councilmember David Weprin wants to eliminate self certification for one-, two-, and three-family homes altogether.
"The Department of Buildings has completely lost control of the honor system that allows builders and architects to sign off on their own work," Weprin said at a news conference last month. "As a result, we have developers acting with complete impunity with the only people that are truly watching being the community members."
The real challenge, some say, is to ensure that the new regulations are followed.
"The code is only as good as its enforcement," said Kita.
The Department of Buildings already has a full workload. Every year, the city agency reviews over 65,000 construction plans, issues over 158,000 new and renewed permits, and performs over 320,000 inspections. And the number of complaints is rising.
A 2005 City Council investigation found that the Department of Buildings was struggling to keep up with the high volume of complaints and was slow to respond, particularly in Queens.
Complaints about after-hours construction work – builders work at night in an effort to finish the project on time and avoid inspections -- have risen from 635 in 2001 to 6,160 in 2006, according to a recent article in the New York Post. At the same time, the number of violations written by city inspectors increased only from 59 in 2001 to 249 last year.
The Department of Buildings says that it has hired more staff, increased its inspections by 18 percent, and now responds to 93 percent of non-emergency complaints within 40 days, according to the latest data.
Some officials are also troubled by the rash of building collapses in recent months, each connected to renovation projects or new construction.
In March, a five-story building in East Harlem caved-in, closing subway service for hours. In Soho, a dilapidated building fell down before it could be properly demolished. The Greenwich Village bar Chumleys – once a hang-out for literary figures like E.E. Cummings, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer – closed its doors after its chimney collapsed. And most recently in Brooklyn, a 200-foot-long piece of roof of a building slated to be torn down for the Atlantic Yards project tumbled to the sidewalk below.
These events have become so routine that the real estate blog Curbed has started a building collapse betting pool so readers can leave tips on the next catastrophe.
"In the Bronx, we only have seven or eight inspectors," said Camilla Pinkney-Price, who works in the office of State Senator Ruben Diaz. "Until we get that corrected, buildings are going to continue to collapse."
Related Articles:
NYC’s Construction Boom (2007)
Reforming the Building Code (2004)
The Department of Buildings (2002)
Immigrant Construction Workers (2001)
Related Links:
History of Building Code
Review Proposed New NYC Construction Codes
FAQ about the new Construction Code
Benefits of the Proposed Codes
Learn more about the Model Code Program
Mayor Michael Bloomberg called it “New York City’s next great neighborhood,” the city’s “first green community,” and an “integral part” of his long-range sustainability plan, plaNYC2030. He was talking about Willets Point, a polluted 160-acre industrial area between Shea Stadium and Flushing that the city hopes to redevelop.
But will the “new” Willets Point really be all of those good things? In the pursuit of “jobs and housing,” will anyone check to see if the new development is really sustainable?
The city’s idea is to put 5,500 housing units, a hotel and convention center, a million square feet of retail and 500,000 square feet of office space in an area that how has 225 businesses and employs some 1,800 workers. The Iron Triangle, as Willets Point is often called, has a large concentration of auto repair and service businesses, the largest distributor of Indian foods in the U.S., and several waste transfer facilities. A section of the area lacks public sewers, which the city has neglected to install despite repeated requests by business owners.
The claim that the Willets Point plan will be green rests on the promise that the existing contaminated land will be cleaned up, the new community will be transit-oriented because it’s on the Number 7 line, and maximum use will be made of energy efficient and other environmentally friendly building technologies. But since this is being sold as a “green and clean” model for New York City, this is the time to ask some hard questions.
Green Auto Repair:: Could the city do more to “green” the existing auto repair shops, rather than simply closing them down or pushing them out? If the plan goes through, hundreds of mechanics in Willets Point will be forced to operate in low-tech storefronts and neighborhoods where the most logical location for dumping crank case oil is the city’s sewer system. Instead, the city could create an auto center using the latest pollution-prevention technology. This could sustain the livelihoods of area workers instead of threatening them.
Who Benefits?:: Sustainability and green sound nice, but the question is always what and who gets sustained? The Willets Point proposal seems to do a pretty good job at sustaining real estate development in Queens. The city’s Economic Development Corporation has been negotiating the plan with big developers whose main commitment is to sustain their investors’ returns.
Clean Up or Clean Out?: Why does the whole area have to be cleared before environmental hazards can be eliminated? This sets an unfortunate precedent for cleaning up contaminated areas: You have to wipe everything out and start from scratch. Examples of remediation that don’t require massive relocation are plentiful.
Economic Effects: Sustainability should mean sustaining the economic livelihoods of people as well as preserving the environment. But under this plan, the thriving local economy in some immigrant communities in Queens could be overwhelmed by megaprojects and their corporate tenants.
The Future of Businesses:The city promises to offer job training, counseling, English language classes, legal and other services to workers who would be displaced by the Willets Point development. Business owners will be bought out. But even with such assistance, the many workers and businesses who have been in Willets Point for decades and even for generations, have created networks of clients and other businesses that would be difficult to rebuild if everyone is scattered. And a number of the businesses have already sold their land to speculators, so they won’t really reap the full benefits. One of the canons of sustainability is preservation and strengthening of existing economic and social networks.
Living with the Jets: Is this the right place to put housing? Willets Point is directly in the flight path of LaGuardia airport and bordered by highways. If you think the planes are annoying during Mets games, imagine living there. To minimize the irritation to residents in such cases, developers generally install double-paned windows and construct fully climatized buildings, but this means people are stuck inside with their windows closed to keep out the noise and contamination. This hardly seems consistent with a green community.
Increased Congestion: How much parking will there be in and around this “transit-oriented development?” This phrase “transit-oriented development” can be used to sell just about any project in New York City which, after all, has subways and buses everywhere. But as is the case with Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, many projects do not call for any additional transit capacity, so the development invariably means more crowded trains and buses – and more people opting to drive. The Number 7 subway line is already over capacity at peak hours and platform crowding is alarming. With climbing ticket prices, more and more Mets fans will be come to the game in with their SUVs. And since Willets Point is planned as a regional “destination,” its economic success will rely on drawing suburbanites who are less likely to use mass transit. At best, the area would be a bigger park-and-ride hub for suburbanites than it already is and the added traffic will further clog Queens' highways.
What about Corona? In his announcement the mayor mentioned the downtown Flushing plan and the city’s commitment to promote development in Flushing. But Willets Point is right next door to Corona, one of the city’s largest and most diverse Latino neighborhoods. It looks like the new residential enclave will be walled off from Corona, its retailers will tap stadium and convention business, and the project will have little spillover effect. Bloomberg may have had tacos in Mexico City, but will anyone check out Corona when they go shopping or to a Mets game in Willets Point?
Whose Parks? The city plan puts a park in the dead center of the new development. This “public” space will effectively be a backyard for the new tenants, walled off and disconnected from Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the Corona neighborhood.
Green and Grand or Blean and Bare: It will probably be another year before Willets Point gets through the city’s land use review process, Cleanup and development will undoubtedly take at least another five to 10 years. Changing economic conditions and future mayoral administrations could leave the project to languish or die, letting a once-active business district lie fallow for many more decades.
The Big Picture:: This all leads to the final question. Are megaprojects, like the one planned for Willets Point, consistent with the vision of sustainable development. Or would more modest efforts, aimed at nurturing existing neighborhoods like Corona, be more sustainable and cost-effective?
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
While plaNYC is extraordinary in its ambition, it misses a vital opportunity to make New York a truly sustainable city - one that harnesses growth and public investment to generate jobs that pay a living wage and allows everyone to participate in our economy.
The plan will revitalize the city's infrastructure, reduce pollution and build better transportation. It will generate new opportunities for businesses and contractors. And it will require thousands of workers to dig the new parks and tunnels, install energy conserving equipment in buildings, plant green streets to capture storm water, clean up brownfields, and do scores of other heavy lifts.
But unless this vision includes an unerring focus on creating good jobs and training a new generation of skilled workers, the city's future growth will not benefit all communities. Wages have stagnated over the past five years, while the cost of living has shot up 15 percent. Almost one in five New Yorkers, including many who work, lives in poverty. Too often, private developers and large corporations receive generous subsidy and incentive packages but create mostly low-wage jobs, or worse, actually cut jobs over time. And too often, development proceeds behind closed doors, without meaningful community involvement or attention to the public interest.
In a city that grows more and more unequal, we must do a better job of sharing both the prosperity and the burdens that growth brings.
City-sponsored economic development, including the initiatives laid out in plaNYC, can help reverse these trends. For example, tax dollars spent for economic development can be tied to creating decent jobs, with wages, benefits and career ladders that help families thrive. The many environmental initiatives can generate skilled "green-collar" jobs that pay living wages. And the city can strengthen the business community by looking beyond large corporations, to helping manufacturers and small businesses struggling with rising rents.
There is also room for more transparency and accountability to local communities. We should track the number and quality of jobs created to better understand who benefits from the city's investments and who doesn't. We should channel growth to the people and places where opportunity is needed, not only where it is convenient. And we should target new training programs to build opportunity in low-income and immigrant communities.
One of the last stops of the plaNYC 2030 listening tour was Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where our organizations and 50 other community, labor, and religious groups met with the mayor's staff to discuss the next 25 years. We commend them for the meeting.
But one of the key messages to emerge from that forum needs to be repeated again and again: plaNYC will not meet the challenges of growth unless it directly addresses the need for living wage jobs that can sustain working families.
The mayor ended his Earth Day speech by promising to "swing for the fences." If plaNYC's public investment strategies are linked to commitments to build a new base of good jobs, Bloomberg will indeed have hit the ball out of the park.
Annette Bernhardt is deputy director of the Justice Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Adrianne Shropshire is executive director of New York Jobs with Justice.
Â
Let's give the mayor credit for all the good ideas in his visionary 2030 plan - and not just when it comes to transportation. The Open Space section of the plan also has important recommendations. One million new trees in 10 years will clean our air and waterways, improve our health and cool our sidewalks, schoolyards and parkland. The GreenStreets program has helped us imagine our city as a greener place. It will be expanded with new "plazas" in some neighborhoods. A number of long neglected city parks will see funding and finally be usable. Parking lots will be required to plant shade trees.
But a "visionary" document that adds a million people to New York with no significant new parkland is unacceptable. New York has less than half the parkland per capita of most other U.S. cities, and our parks are far more crowded because so many of us live in high-rise buildings with no backyards. The report notes that New York grew in population so quickly that neighborhoods like Flatbush (and many others) developed without public space, then it suggests we place what remains of public land in the hands of developers because we need more housing.
Yes, we need more affordable housing. But we also need a public waterfront with token additions of housing, not massive rows of skyscrapers or big-box strip malls with token private esplanades. Our waterfront and our few regional parks are the lungs of our city, which give us places to go for rejuvenation and physical activity. Housing should be built inland, where the subways are. When railroad yards are decked for housing, as the report recommends, 50 percent of the deck should be added to public space. Many of our subway and railyards are in neighborhoods that are significantly underserved by parkland. With good planning, we can have housing and provide a healthy environment.
The report does not mention community gardening. Opportunities for gardening should be increased in our city. Any food grown here does not have to be shipped to New Yorkers by truck. Gardening is a superb physical activity, which can also keep New Yorkers mentally healthy. Everyone who wants a garden should have one whether the goal is food or urban beautification.
New York's visionary 350-mile Greenways system should be extended and quickly completed. New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have worked to get greenways on the ground, but there has been much administrative foot dragging. Finishing our greenways by 2030 would have been a great goal for a more sustainable city.
Bloomberg, who noted that no one has ever called him a tree-hugger, has set the bar by calling for a "greener greater New York." If recommendations of PlaNYC are implemented, our waterways will be cleaner and we will have more opportunities for swimming and boating. We will drive less and have a better transit system. New buildings will use less energy. Land will be purchased upstate to protect our drinking water supply. Our streets will more often be tree-lined and some long neglected parkland will be made more useful.
No doubt well-funded lobbies will be working to knock the bar down as they already have by getting City Council to limit the number of pollution-free pedicabs on our streets. It is now our job to take the opposite tack and to get this mayor and his successors to raise the bar, not lower it.
Dave Lutz is the executive director of Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, which works for a healthier, greener city.
Â
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to build on an estimated 7,600 acres of contaminated land, known as brownfields, will eliminate health hazards that plague poor neighborhoods and communities of color and create space for desperately needed housing. The mayor's plan is visionary, courageous and insightful, and the implementation plan includes provisions that empowers residents and community based organizations and directs funds where they are most needed.
A Transparent Process
A dozen groups, including New Partners in Community Revitalization has lobbied the city to create a centralized office focused on redeveloping city brownfield sites. The mayor included such an office in his plan, but it now needs the authority, staff and funding to develop and implement his agenda. Moving forward, the office will also need to ensure that the projects it assists have emerged from a community planning effort or have support of the local community. And any project that seeks city help to develop a brownfield must demonstrate that their projects are consistent with the city's sustainability goals.
Duel Role
The primary focus of the city's new Office of Environmental Remediation is to advance the redevelopment of the city's brownfield sites, but it will also be charged with regulatory oversight. When the same agency that develops a project also has the responsibility for regulating it, an inherent conflict arises. To avoid that, the new office will needed to develop policies and procedures and hire the right personnel to assure a user-friendly program while achieving regulatory goals.
Making the Best Use of Funds
The mayor announced that the city will provide $15 million for a public-private revolving loan fund to finance remediation and related costs. But it is not clear how the city will get these dollars into specific projects. The city government should maximize its funds by leveraging private dollars for remediation through partnerships with community lending institutions such as NY Metro Brownfields Redevelopment Fund Program, which uses federal and city funds to credit enhance remediation loans.
Environmental Insurance
The mayor also announced a $10 million investment for an environmental insurance initiative, which will be important for developers of affordable housing. Because of the scope of the overall development, the city will be in an excellent position to negotiate reasonably priced environmental insurance policies (even for small sites), with few or no exclusions.
A Fight in Albany?
The Bloomberg administration is asking the state to give the city regulatory authority for cleanup oversight. This could be tough. State enforcement laws create the liability so it is the state that has the authority to provide liability relief. Delegating that authority to the city would be unprecedented, so such a change would likely take a long time. Therefore, the city needs to focus on getting the state to immediately fix the problems with its Brownfield Cleanup Program, so that contaminated historic fill sites (sites contaminated with debris or waste from commercial or industrial processes that was then mixed with soil to build up areas for development) are no longer excluded. This exlcusion provision disproportionately affects New York City.
Also on the mayor's to-do-list in Albany is fixing the state's Brownfield Opportunity Area program. The state government must release the funds promised for local planning for brownfield sites. These funds have been held up for years because two agencies, the Department of State and the Department of Environmental Conservation, have to sign off on every detail and every step of an already long and demanding process.
The legislature and the governor understand the need to fix this, and there seems to be agreement that the state's planning agency, the Department of State, should be solely responsible for this program. Yet, it is still unclear whether Albany will act to fix this in the few weeks before the legislative session ends.
Working with Private Property Owners
The mayor has also called for new incentives to encourage private property owners to participate in the state brownfield planning program.
One way to achieve this is to grant the existing eight percent increase in brownfield tax credits only to projects that built in a way consistent with plans that emerge from the state's Brownfield Opportunity Area program. If the project is not consistent, it would not receive any tax credits. Beyond asking the state to create incentives, the city should use its own resources to encourage private property owners to participate in brownfield planning and development and to take a strong role in improving these once blighted areas of our city.
Jody Kass and Mathy Stanislaus are co-directors of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a NYC-based nonprofit working to revitalize low and moderate income neighborhoods through brownfields reclamation.
Â
The 2030 plan is a mixture of good and bad. The most problematic proposals would let the city continue to subsidize development in waterways and floodplains, harming irreplaceable marine habitats in the waters around the city.
This policy will make the city more vulnerable to the rising sea levels, more violent windstorms, severe storm surges and flooding that the plan acknowledges are coming with climate change. The city is overdue for a hurricane like Katrina. When it comes, as many as 3 million people may have to be evacuated to shelters, the plan says.
Retreat from the Coast?
If New York wants to be a model for other cities and for sustainable development around the globe, it needs to limit subsidies for sewers and other infrastructure to support development in flood-prone areas, and end subsidies almost entirely for construction in or on the waters around the city. Climate scientists refer to such policies as a "retreat from the coast." These sensible measures are completely missing from the plan.
PlaNYC proposals for protecting New Yorkers from looming storm and flooding threats are weak or counterproductive. Having the city planning department, which advocates waterfront development, continue updating the Federal Emergency Management Agency's floodplain maps will do no good if the information is unreliable, if citizens can't get it or use it easily, or if officials ignore it in budget decisions. PlaNYC's proposal to complete the city's application to FEMA for discounted flood insurance could just create incentives for development in floodplains, putting people in harm's way.
Building out into the water is even riskier than building in upland floodplains--and far more environmentally destructive. The waters around the city provide invaluable habitat for an astonishing variety of species. Habitat loss and destruction is the single most important factor in declining global fisheries, and a recent study warned that worldwide fisheries stocks will collapse by 2048 unless the way we use aquatic resources changes. With fisheries the most important source of essential protein for the world's malnourished populations, we need to halt all possible in-water construction. The great Hudson River system (including waters around the city) is one of the most important contributors to East Coast fisheries. Its natural ecosystems can sustain and renew themselves forever--but only if public officials leave aquatic habitats alone.
When a Park Is Not A Park
The plan pledges to promote parks, recreation and waterfront access and revitalization. But the administration has used this same rhetoric before to cloak its support for misplaced development and other habitat-threatening ventures on and in the water. New water and sewer infrastructure, paid for with skyrocketing ratepayers' fees, may be extended out into the water to serve the catering halls, sports complexes and multiplexes proposed as part of the so-called Hudson River Park project. PlaNYC's proposed mini-power plants and new brownfields programs could be used to subsidize this kind of misplaced, non-water-dependent development in the water as well. The way plaNYC mischaracterizes the 1972 Clean Water Act to support using public waterways for "recreation" is especially disturbing, since football fields, stadiums and huge playing fields that don't need to be in the water could be sold as "recreation."
PlaNYC's unexamined premise is that the City must grow by nearly a million people by 2030. This is a questionable assumption for a coastal city built primarily on islands, and especially for Manhattan, which is nearly impossible to evacuate in catastrophes. New York's top public spending priority should be making the city safer and better for all the people who live and work here already--maintaining an unparalleled existing mass transit system in good repair; keeping its superb stock of existing housing affordable; reducing class size until every child can read. Using taxpayers,' ratepayers,' straphangers' or drivers' money to expand the city at its periphery for a wealthy few would be gross misallocation of public resources--both natural resources and limited public funds.
Marcy Benstock is director of the Clean Air Campaign.
Â
Mayor Bloomberg's 2030 Plan touts the Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning and waterfront development as a shining example to be followed elsewhere in the city. But a closer look will show that what's happening there is the displacement of affordable housing and the people who live in that housing. I have seen first hand these devastating effects and would not want to see them in other neighborhoods.
One huge problem is that the new "affordable housing" to be built is calculated using the citywide Area Median Income, which is much higher than Brooklyn's median income. The median income for a family of four is $70,900, and 80 percent of that is considered low income. Yet in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, the median income is close to $30,000, and with average wages of under $14 an hour most renters cannot afford the units the city considers affordable.
The city's inclusionary zoning, which gives developers the option of adding floor area if they include "affordable" housing units, is not working to solve this problem. We see mostly luxury development where affordable homes and businesses once stood. In areas adjacent to the waterfront, a lot of new apartments are being built, most of them with no affordable units. Such developments are destroying low-income and working class neighborhoods that have been home to generations of working people and immigrants.
The surge of new luxury units is changing the demographics of this and other less affluent communities and forcing people to move. The new wealthy residents have higher incomes, putting pressures on local retail outlets to change what they offer and how much they charge. Instead of hardware stores, affordable supermarkets and laundromats, the commercial core changes to noisier bars, expensive restaurants, boutique food markets and so on. Stores offering less expensive goods can no longer pay the cost per square foot to rent in the gentrified neighborhood.
While some affordable homes are to be built, there is a larger net loss of affordable housing in the surrounding areas as real estate values and rents rise. With the loss of rent protections and the lack of enforcement, neighborhoods are being torn apart.
Contrary to the mayor's plan, private developers do not need to hefty tax incentives to build where the most new homes rent or sell at the market rate. But then maybe the mayor doesn't think anything can be done about rising housing costs? As he said during the November 1, 2005 mayoral debate, "This is an expensive city; it always has been, probably always will be."
Phil DePaolo is president of the New York Community Council.
Â
On April 22 - the 27th observance of Earth Day-Mayor Michael Bloomberg went to the Museum of Natural History to unveil what his administration has dubbed plaNYC. Predicting that the city could add 1 million more residents by 2030, the plan says such a boom, while a sign of economic health and vitality, could threaten the city's aging facilities, infrastructure and environment.
With that in mind, the mayor and his staff set out 127 specific proposals on land use, water supply and quality, transportation, energy, air quality and reducing greenhouse gases. The ideas range from the specific - opening more city playgrounds after hours, for one - to grander schemes, such as using "creative financing" to boost use of solar power in the city. The proposal to charge an $8 fee for motorists driving into part of Manhattan on weekdays garnered the most attention and opposition, but the mayor's office said other proposals, particularly in the area of energy use, could have an even greater effect on the city.
This week we offer several commentaries on the process that created the plan and its overall vision. This series of reactions launches Sustainability Watch, a joint project of Gotham Gazette and the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development. Next week, another group of experts will weigh in on specific aspects of the proposal, including congestion pricing, development of brownfields, creation of more green space and various ideas to save energy.
Sustainability Watch will try to keep alive the debates about what's good and not, look at what's missing, discuss how the plan is working and monitor the gaps between plan and practice. This is an opportunity for open public discussion about a range of city policies, and a first concerted attempt to tackle thorny environmental problems. As part of this, we urge you to comment on these articles and the mayor's plan through our message boards (attached to every article) or by emailing us at info at GothamGazette.com.
Searching for Land - and Finding It
By Julia Vitullo-Martin
Director. Center for Rethinking Development
With New York at risk of being a victims of its own success, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has set out a plan that develops the city's land to its fullest, from the far West Side to Sunnyside.
Growing Equality
By Joan Byron, Alyssa Katz and Brad Lander
Pratt Center for Community Development
The mayor's plan needs to be expanded to ensure that growth and sustainability do not bring more segregation and inequality as well.
Making a Great Plan Even Better
By Ron Shiffman
Professor, Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
PlaNYC is the most important initiative undertaken by any mayor in decades but it could be even better - and fairer.
Too Many Consultants, Not Enough Community
By Tom Angotti
Director, Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development
Unless the administration truly engages neighborhoods, civic groups, community organizations, the plan could become just one more City Hall laundry list.
How to Build Support
By Eve Baron
As it sets about implementing plaNYC 2030, the mayor's office should pay attention to those who have already been planning for the future in areas across the city.
By Julia Vitullo-Martin
Wealthy, beautiful and safe, New York is at the top of its game right now. In the 30 years since the fiscal crisis pushed it to the verge of bankruptcy, New York transformed itself from a dangerous, dirty city of decayed buildings, shuttered storefronts, filthy parks, abandoned real estate and forlorn neighborhoods into the dominant world city. But nothing in this life stays the same, and New York's competitors, themselves world players, are lapping at its heels.
London, for one, is intent on reclaiming the greatest-city-on-earth crown that it held for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. And while London and New York share many strengths, they also share fundamental problems deriving from aging infrastructure - transit, water, sewerage, power, parks, schools -- designed decades ago for a smaller and far less mobile population. Further, both share problems springing from their huge success. Not only does it often seem that everyone on earth wants to live in either New York or London, from their sidewalks and streets, both cities look like everyone is already there.
The tremendous demand for residential, commercial and retail space in New York has overturned the city's old problem of abandonment while handing it a whole new set of problems. Land costs, already excessive, are heading ever upward. Construction costs are the highest in the country by far. Every site in the five boroughs now seems to have development potential, though not every site should necessarily be developed to the full extent that its zoning allows. Many sites are being developed beyond the capacity of the local infrastructure, particularly transit, but also schools, parks and sewers.
Economy and Environment
Supervising New York's phenomenal success is Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former investment banker, who over the last year appraised his city's virtues and faults with a cold banker's eye and concluded that now is the time to use today's wealth and resources to prepare for an indefinite but highly competitive future. His plan for 2030 is premised on green assumptions, which is great, but as Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff notes, every initiative in the plan is based on economics first, which is even better. After all, environmentalists have long known, it is easier to be green when you're rich than when you're poor.
The essence of good green policy-not to mention good development-is to use the resources you have as intensively as possible. New York is energy efficient because it is dense and its transportation infrastructure unites its otherwise sprawling territory. The mayor's plan pushes that density and intensity even further. If we have it, he wants to use it, and use it well. Some of his proposals make sense precisely because land in this city has become so expensive. "We've been on a search for new land, and we'll take it wherever we find it," Doctoroff says.
Land Over Rails
One interesting place they found it was in the city's many exposed railyards, rail lines and highways. Thus the plan commands: Deck 'em over. Most yards and highways remain undeveloped and exposed because costly platforms must be built first-adding immensely to the costs of construction. Only the most valuable real estate-Grand Central's lines under Park Avenue, for example-warrants the extra cost. Yet as the plan notes, exposed railyards and highways are "places where communities stop, where neighborhood is divided from neighborhood." After citing the redevelopment of Caemmerer Yards (Hudson Yards) on the Far West Side of Manhattan, the plan-as it often does-heads immediately across the East River to discuss neighborhoods outside Manhattan , like Sunnyside Yards in Long Island City, Queens (pictured below).
Spanning nearly 200 acres, the dramatically exposed (and rather beautiful but hazardous) Sunnyside Yards are close to existing excellent transit and should benefit from the East Side Access project planned to connect the Long Island Rail Road with Grand Central Terminal. Residents of a mixed-use development would be able to walk to shopping on Steinway Street in Astoria, which would be reconnected to the cut-off areas to the south. Charming, funky Dutch Kills would get an economic infusion. Long Island City's restaurants, clubs, and bars-many of which are now struggling without quite enough people-would boom.
Similarly, building over the former railroad space alongside the Staten Island Ferry would eliminate a homely blight and bring new residents and workers, while reconnecting the lovely but deteriorated St. George neighborhood to the waterfront. The economics may not yet work in Staten Island, but the straight commuting shot from St. George to Wall Street is promising.
Transit for New Neighborhoods
Which brings us back to London. In some ways, what London accomplished in developing an entirely new financial center in the Docklands would be like New York developing a new financial center in St. George, Staten Island, or Red Hook, Brooklyn-both neighborhoods that once looked as far away from Wall Street or Midtown as the Docklands looked from Fleet Street. But London provided light rail to get there, realizing that transit opens up formerly fallow areas to good, green, efficient development-while a lack of transit just means expensive, polluting, ugly sprawl.
New Yorkers will be debating for some time to come where that light rail-or extended transit-should go: up the West Side of Manhattan? Along the Brooklyn waterfront? The North Shore of Staten Island? The possibilities are many.
The mayor's plan has elegantly laid out the strategies and initiatives, backing up arguments with data and excellent graphics. This excellent document gives us all a level playing field for debate. So let the conversations begin!
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a former columnist for the Gotham Gazette, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of its Center for Rethinking Development.
By Joan Byron, Alyssa Katz and Brad Lander
PlaNYC reflects visionary thinking - by the city and the diverse group of involved and interested people and groups they included. There is a lot to celebrate. But for all its innovation on sustainability, we would like to see a plan that does more to shape the city's growth to generate more equality and opportunity as well.
Environmental Justice: Congestion Pricing and Beyond
For the first time, the city has identified environmental justice as a guiding principle. PlaNYC's initiatives promise great benefits for communities that have carried far more than their fair share of environmental burdens.
The city's plan to hold down the demand for new electricity as its population grows will limit the need for new power plants; meanwhile old, dirty plants that have polluted the air in communities in Queens and elsewhere will be cleaned up. A new initiative will measure street-level air quality in neighborhoods throughout the city.
Congestion pricing promises to be a boon to working class neighborhoods in upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, as well as to other parts of Manhattan. In Red Hook and Sunset Park, for example, just 3 percent of commuters - 1 percent of all residents - drive into Manhattan to work. The other 99 percent in those communities will benefit from the revenues created by congestion fees, which will be reinvested into mass transit improvements, and from cleaner air resulting from fewer vehicles going through their neighborhoods on the way into Manhattan. The same patterns hold for other outer-borough neighborhoods, even those far from subways, like Sheepshead Bay and Marine Park in Brooklyn, Soundview in the Bronx, and Southeastern Queens.
PlaNYC also makes important strides toward the redevelopment of brownfields, which are concentrated in lower-income and environmentally burdened neighborhoods. The city will establish a new brownfields office, expedite cleanups, and involve communities more actively in decisions on how to improve and reuse these areas.
The Next Steps
Now, more needs to be done to make environmental justice a guiding framework for New York's future. Monitoring air pollution is an important start. The city should inventory a greater range of environmental burdens in each neighborhood, and set goals and timetables for their reduction.
Unfortunately, the mayor's plan does far too little to address the fastest growing part of the traffic problem: trucks. Truck traffic weighs heavily on communities, mostly low-income, near industrial areas and highways. But the mayor's plan leaves out the Cross Harbor Rail Tunnel, which would take millions of trucks off the city's highways, bridges and streets. With truck traffic expected to grow by 70 percent between now and 2030, and the most vulnerable New Yorkers already suffering the health effect of unacceptable levels of diesel emissions, we cannot ignore the project with the most potential to take trucks off our streets.
Housing: Preservation Needed
The plan seeks to double the amount of land available for housing development - through transit-oriented development, rezoning and decking over railyards and highways - to accommodate an additional one million New Yorkers. If done right, balancing the need for growth with community input and planning that strengthens neighborhoods, these are smart ideas.
But there's so much demand for housing that new market-rate development will trickle down to provide more housing for low or moderate-income renters or buyers. We need to include aggressive measures to make sure that "new" land spawns housing affordable at a range of income levels.
The plan mentions inclusionary zoning as one tool-using voluntary density bonuses to prod developers to set aside 20 percent of the units as affordable housing. While we support the program, evidence from around the country shows that mandatory programs - ones that require the inclusion of affordable units - work better. And on publicly owned sites, more than half of the new housing must be affordable to the average New Yorkers.
Unfortunately, even with all these ideas, we cannot just build our way out of the housing crisis. As long as the city keeps growing, rents will keep rising, putting more pressure of millions of New Yorkers. So we must do more to preserve existing affordable housing. PlaNYC is disappointing here. While it restates the administration's commitment to preserving the affordability of existing Mitchell-Lama and other subsidized apartments, it offers no new initiatives. If we want to make growth work for the millions of existing New Yorkers, we need to strengthen rent regulations-most importantly, by repealing vacancy decontrol. Protections against harassment and displacement will also be essential as improvements to open space and transit make now-affordable neighborhoods more desirable places to live.
Equality, Opportunity, and Livable Neighborhoods
PlaNYC connects the dots of sustainability. It recognizes the synergies among disparate strategies. Congestion charging will fight gridlock, clean up our air and generate revenue for transit improvements. Planting trees will improve microclimate, air quality and property values and divert stormwater that would throw into sewers, creating overflows and eventually the need to more costly solutions.
PlaNYC now needs to connect the dots one step further - because the city's current growth is creating more inequality and segregation. Will the New York of 2030 be even more segregated than the one we know today? Will low-wage service workers face a choice between extreme commutes to work in a city they can't hope to live in, crowding into basements or paying nearly all of their income for rent? It is a gloomy possibility in an otherwise hopeful plan-and one we must take measures now to avoid.
PlaNYC offers us a chance to do something about growing inequality. Right now, the plan offers jobs for lawyers and investment bankers (underwriting bonds for the new SMART transportation authority) and even mollusks (cleaning the harbor). It could commit to a bold living wage and workforce development initiative that makes sure working class New Yorkers get good jobs creating the green city of tomorrow - but it won't happen without the mayor's leadership and follow-up.
Finally, as we build new housing and neighborhoods, we can do more to involve residents in planning for what will make their neighborhoods great. Yes, in many instances the City will need to insist on growth targets that many people won't like. But that's all the more reason to involve them in planning for the parks, transportation, schools, child care, community and cultural centers that will make growth work.
PlaNYC is bold start toward a more sustainable city, and we intend to be there to help make it happen. With an even bolder commitment, the New York City of 2030 can be not just a greener place, but also one of more opportunity, vibrant communities, and more fully shared prosperity.
Joan Byron, Alyssa Katz and Brad Lander are with the Pratt Center for Community Development.
By Ron Shiffman
Earth Day 2007 was a beautiful day and provided the perfect setting for Mayor Michael Bloomberg to unveil PlaNYC2030. It is the most important initiative undertaken by any mayor in my memory and I have been a practicing planner in New York for five decades. But, while the plan deserve the support of every New Yorker, it does have some significant omissions that must be addressed.
The detail contained in PlaNYC2030 to make New York the Greenest City and the array of proposals to address global warming deserve our attention and support whether or not we agree with every detail. It offers a base upon which community-based planning advocates, the environmental justice community and other progressives can build an equitable and just response to global warming.
Looking At The Big Picture
For decades, a holistic approach to achieving sustainability has evaded public officials and advocates alike. But now, we have a mayoral administration that is not afraid to look at the intricately woven cloth of our complex ecosystem and to put forth solutions to problems, even if the outcomes and benefits will not manifest themselves until future generations.
Achieving the objectives put forth by the mayor will conflict with the priorities and profits of many local and global interests. It will require a level of courage, competence and capacity that had generally been absent in our local elected leadership and in administrative agencies.
The knee-jerk negative reaction of some of local elected leaders to the proposal provides an early indication of this. They are blindly rejecting a well-thought out and reasoned approach to addressing traffic congestion, air quality and the health and the welfare of our communities, particularly the low and moderate income communities that for far to long have been victims of environmental injustices.
Adding In Equity
But while the plan addresses environmental justice, it needs to more explicitly address the goals of social and economic equity. Without that, decisions about where to site various facilities and land use could engender even greater economic disparities. An effective means of "fair share" needs to be established, so that both burdensome and beneficial uses of land are distributed equitably throughout the city.
The plan also need a sustainable housing agenda that explicitly mandates that development include affordable housing and that sets out strategies to achieve diversity and economically integrated neighborhoods. Proposals for decking our rail yards need to be carefully reviewed and informed by the communities that surround them. The cost of that decking should not create housing that is unaffordable for the average New Yorker or lead to densities that are too high for the social, economic and environmental infrastructure needed to sustain them. Proposals to create housing need to ensure that we do not displace jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs. We need to provide space for the existing manufacturing enterprises and for those that will emerge. We need to encourage green forms of production and the manufacture of new green products that will be needed to make the City more environmentally sustainable.
Given the overarching goals of equity, social and environmental justice, we have to learn to listen carefully to community residents. We need to enhance our participatory planning and environmental assessment processes. We must give legitimacy and support to those residents and community-based developers who, oblivious to risk, rebuilt our communities instead of subsidizing those risk-adverse developers who follow in their wake.
Creating A Better Plan
Let us listen to the transportation advocates and citywide organizations that have advocated that New York State and New Jersey look at how New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad could be merged. This would provide regional rail services and allow us to free up to 50 percent of the area of Sunnyside Yards for other forms of development -- without the need for decking. Instead of looking to rezone only manufacturing areas let us explore better ways to use the large swaths of land now consumed by "big box" stores, with their massive parking lots, and strip retailers so that we can build more efficiently and in more creative ways -- without displacing the existing retailers.
And let us work with the mayor to not only address global warming but also to adapt to the climate changes that are already taking place. We need to protect and upgrade our infrastructure so that we do not fall victim to catastrophic events, including those caused by climate change. Mayor Bloomberg and the mayors of the other financial capitals of the world could adopt a universal "Stock Transfer Tax" whose resources could be dedicated to protecting their own cities and addressing the needs of their poorest residents, as well as assisting other vulnerable cities and regions of the world that cannot afford to protect themselves from global warming created by the consumption of others. Such a global tax on the financial is both appropriate and just.
Most importantly let us challenge Mayor Bloomberg by helping him make his initiative a success and by working with his administration to make it better. Let's challenge him so that his administration practices the behavior sought and outlined by his plan, that, for example, it moves to preserve and adapt, rather than to demolish. Let us ensure that every planning and rezoning initiative is the result of a participatory planning process and is responsive to the goals outlined in PlaNYC rather than to the whims of powerful interests or to short term politically expedient goals.
Ron Shiffman is a professor at the Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment and a former New York City Planning commissioner.
By Tom Angotti
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2030 plan is nothing if not grand. But can even a fraction of it be implemented? Unless the mayor's office and his agencies start to truly engage the hundreds of neighborhoods and thousands of civic groups and community organizations, the 2030 plan may go down in history as one more City Hall laundry list.
Over the last year, the mayor's plan was cooked up in City Hall with the help of outside consultants. Consultations with community and civic groups were more like managed focus groups -- marketing techniques were tested, but concerned individuals were not allowed into the decision-making process. Now that the plan has been unveiled, there is no systematic way the public can engage in its implementation. Instead, the 2030 plan promises to continue the administration's top-down approach and ignore the scores of local plans.
It does not have to be that way. Section 197-a of the New York City Charter establishes a mechanism for developing and approving community-based plans. It includes public hearings, discussions and votes by community boards, the borough presidents, the City Planning Commission and the City Council. The 2030 Plan involves none of these forums. As a result, many of the noble goals outlined in the 2030 Plan are likely to run into local opposition, while others get buried by recalcitrant agency functionaries.
The only apparent area in which the plan promises community involvement is in brownfields development. In most other areas, the city has missed an opportunity to mine the rich collection of local talent, experience and planning ideas, many of which are consistent with and even more developed than those coming out of City Hall. If it were to go through the process mandated by the charter, the mayor's plan would invariably emerge as a much richer piece of work with better prospects for implementation. It could also serve as a much-needed framework for community-based planning, which should not be divorced from citywide needs and policy considerations.
Skeptics will scoff at the idea of review by all 59 community boards, pointing to their shortcomings and instances in which the board membership fails to truly reflect community residents. But this would be a good opportunity to strengthen the boards as foundations of local democracy, provide them with the resources needed to fulfill their mission, and insist that they be inclusive and representative of their constituencies. If the boards become partners in formulating the city's long-term goals, the administration will have a much better chance of achieving its goals.
Growth Above All
Underneath the green coating of the 2030 Plan lies an even more powerful growth agenda. The projection of one million more residents functions as a Holy Grail.
The plan envisions new megaprojects built on hugely expensive platforms over rail yards. Even with significant private financing, these developments will soak up enormous public subsidies and justify exorbitant rents and house prices. Modest new investments in surface mass transit will go to serve these giant projects, but like the inadequate light rail project in London's Canary Wharf mega development, the general public will end up footing the bill for the long-postponed expansions of subway capacity that are bound to follow.
The 2030 plan promises to make all neighborhoods greener with local parks and plazas. It will be easy to find locations for these facilities in the newly created megaprojects, but how are these and other promised amenities going to be placed in existing neighborhoods?
Instead of calling for planning in partnership with communities, the city insists on using its zoning powers as a club to hold over local residents and businesses. The plan calls for massive upzonings - allowing neighborhoods to become more densely developed -- to create new market-rate housing. But it fails to tell us how much public subsidies will be needed to support such development, and continues to offer programs yielding only token amounts of new affordable housing and open space in established neighborhoods. When it comes to preservation, the plan does not go the extra mile; for growth, it promises the moon.
Tom Angotti is director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development and writes the monthly Land Use column for Gotham Gazette.
By Eve Baron
There is a lot to like in the mayor's plaNYC 2030. It reflects the thoughts and practices of planners who realize that whatever you do in one realm of planning impacts another realm. And so the loose network of civic organizations organized around good, progressive planning, which include the Municipal Art Society Planning Center, can help to build support for plaNYC 2030 proposals in Albany, where it really will count.
The plan is also very ambitious and comprehensive. It will keep city agencies -- and people like us who closely watch what those city agencies do -- busy for a long time as we all try to reconcile all the plan's various parts and provisions. For example, the plan refers to decking over rail yards and highways. That is a good way to increase space for building, but it is also an expensive process that increases the price of whatever goes on top of the deck and so may not contribute to the production of affordable housing.
The plan makes note of "opportunity areas" that would allow further, more intensive development. Although the impact of development in these areas will have profound local consequences, there has not yet been coordination with the communities that will absorb the impacts - and ostensibly some of the benefits. We look forward to hearing more about how the administration will work with communities to develop consensus around these sites and what gets built on them -- before requests for bids go out and developers chosen.
New York City residents have already identified "opportunity areas" in their community-developed 197-a plans and other consensus-based plans. (See Planning for All New Yorkers: The Briefing Book of Community-Based Plans, developed by the Campaign for Community-Based Planning.) The administration couldn't ask for a better opportunity - socially, economically, and politically - to implement the goals of PlaNYC 2030 than to take community-generated plans, understand them as the creative and balanced blueprints for growth that they are and implement them.
Bringing New Yorkers closer to the planning process is one way to build concrete support for the goals of plaNYC. Another way is to create a new planning process that brings New Yorkers the tools and resources needed for them to create their own neighborhood-level, sustainability plans.
Eve Baron is director of the Municipal Art Society Planning Center.
Â
A crush of foreclosures in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx is raising alarms and leading many to call on city and state authorities to do more to go after the unscrupulous people at mortgage brokerage firms, at banks and on Wall Street who, they say, are fueling the problem.
“We’ve been predicting this for years,” said Oda Friedheim, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society in Queens. “Many lenders have developed really abusive loan practices that target communities of color and any vulnerable people.”
Through March, more than 1,200 foreclosures had been filed this year in Queens on one- to four-family properties, a 57 percent increase over the same period last year. About 3,600 were filed in all of 2006 in the borough, according to the www.nedap.org Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project. In Brooklyn, over 1,100 foreclosures had been filed from January to March compared to about 3,300 for all of last year.
Foreclosures have been increasing for the last several years. The city will likely see more than 10,000 foreclosures this year – almost twice what it saw as recently as 2004.
The surge in foreclosures is at least partly linked to predatory lending practices of brokers and lending institutions. For years, housing advocates in Queens particularly have been calling for tougher action against unscrupulous brokers who convince homeowners and first-time homebuyers to take loans on bad terms. When the borrowers can’t pay the loans, the lender can take the property. As a result, foreclosures lead to the loss of housing for senior citizens and other low-income people, pull wealth out of neighborhoods and rob the city of property tax revenue, at least temporarily.
The problem is nationwide. As many as 2.2 million Americans will face the loss of their homes over the next several years because they will not be able to repay the loans they have taken, according to a report by the Center for Responsible Lending.
The problems leading up to the rash of foreclosures are complicated, but subprime loans are at the root of the increase.
Subprime lending has been a critical part of the nation’s housing boom for over a decade, allowing a lot of people who would otherwise not be able to buy a home to do so. The loans charge higher rates of interest and, in their worst forms – referred to as predatory lending – the loans are foisted upon people in deceitful ways, have exorbitant hidden fees and apply significant penalties if the borrower tries to get out of them later. The rate of subprime lending in New York City has more than tripled since 2002, according to the Furman Center for Real Estate.
The rates of subprime lending here are higher than the national averages. About 23 percent of home purchase loans are subprime, up from just 6.5 percent in 2002. Nationally, the proportion of home purchase loans that are subprime is 17 percent.
Friedheim sees the city’s numbers as ominous. “The subprime market is going bust and so we will see more foreclosures,” she said.
There are two types of cases where someone gets a subprime loan. In the first of the two scenarios, a person who already owns a home wants to refinance the mortgage in order to, say, make significant repairs to the home. In the second scenario, someone is trying to buy a first home. Eager to achieve such a milestone, the buyer neglects to study carefully the conditions of the loan being offered. Unscrupulous mortgage brokers and the lending industry prey on both groups of people.
Kevin Squires, a loan officer at a Queens mortgage company, said the first scenario is common as homeowners are bombarded daily with offers to refinance their homes. The advertisements blare across virtually every medium: A man walking along a city street recently was wearing a bright orange street that declared in large letters, “We buy homes: 856-541-9000.” Late night ads promise “no fees, no hidden costs.”
The brokers are particularly interested in those who already own the home, Squires said. “If you have someone who owes $150,000 but their house is worth $450,000, then they have $300,000 equity in their home,” Squires explained. “The only way they can pull that out is by doing a refinance.” But if the borrower’s credit is not up to par, he or she must go to a mortgage broker and get a non-conventional loan. If the borrower cannot meet the terms of that loan, he or she could lose their home.
But homeowners and first-time homebuyers with good credit are becoming victims of predatory lending as well, said Cathy Mickens of Neighborhood Housing Services in Jamaica, Queens.
“It has spread throughout the community,” Mickens said, affecting middle-income and high-income people as well as those with lower incomes. Some people who could have gone to a conventional lender and qualified for a standard mortgage will instead go to a predatory lender who promises to provide the loan quickly and with no documents required. Often, Mickens said, the result is “a disaster.”
While some have suggested that borrowers are at fault because of their zeal to own a home or get quick money, unscrupulous mortgage brokers, lending institutions and Wall Street investors, motivated by greed and racism, are the driving force.
Brokers and banks have often “intentionally disregarded the facts of the income of the borrower,” Friedheim said. “Even when they see the income and it’s totally predictable that the person cannot afford it, they’ll give the loan anyway.”
Brokers are motivated to foist these loans on borrowers because the brokers get commissions and face no financial losses if the borrower defaults and a foreclosure is initiated.
Once the unscrupulous brokers find a willing homeowner, they effectively prevent the person from comparison shopping: They provide a home appraiser and attorney who help convince the homeowner or homebuyer to sign the loan.
“Eighty to 85 percent of [the subprime mortgage brokers working in low-income communities] operate unethically,” Squires said. “I don’t have anything concrete to prove that figure, but of all the loans I have seen, most people who end up going to these brokers become victims of predatory lending.”
A chain of incentives in the lending industry drives predatory lending. Unscrupulous mortgage brokers chase homeowners and first-time homebuyers because banks will pay the brokers commissions. The banks, in turn, are motivated by the profits they can make by packaging the loans and selling them to Wall Street investors. The investors, of course, are interested in the rates of return on these investments.
“One concern we’ve had is that the market incentives actually favor predatory lending,” said Mary Moore of the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization based in Durham, North Carolina, that studies lending issues. “There are a lot of strong reasons from a business perspective to do it.”
On the other hand, Moore said, “brokers have no obligation to give their borrowers the best deal. They get paid whether the loan gets foreclosed or not.”
Predatory lending is an acute problem in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. On the surface, that seems understandable: Subprime loans are meant for risky borrowers who must pay higher interest rates because they are, well, risky. But one study by the Center for Responsible Lending showed that African American and Latino borrowers who would qualify for loans from prime lending institutions are steered toward the subprime market.
Over half of African Americans who get a mortgage get subprime loans, the study showed. For Latinos, the rate was 42 percent. But for whites it was just 19 percent.
“We think there’s discrimination going on,” Moore said. “It’s well known that often brokers steer African Americans and Latinos to subprime loans even when they qualify for other loans.”
Data on subprime lending in the city from the Furman Institute showed the concentration of these types of loans in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. Brownsville and Jamaica, both largely African-American communities, were the highest ranking community districts for subprime lending. In both, roughly 52 percent of home purchase loans involved subprime loans. The top 15 districts include overwhelmingly African American and Latino communities in the city, including Highbridge in the Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
“It’s reverse redlining,” Friedheim said, referring to lending practices where banks refuse to loan money to people living in certain neighborhoods – neighborhoods where African Americans and Latinos live. “These neighborhoods don’t have banking services and predatory lenders target them.”
The City Council's committees on Consumer Affairs and Civil Rights will hold a joint meeting on predatory lending in the hearing room of 250 Broadway on April 30 at 10 a.m.
Advocates are urging elected officials to address the problem aggressively.
For starters, they want the city to expand the mayor’s 2005 initiative providing assistance to people purchasing or refinancing a home. The mayor’s “Preserve Assets and Community Equity” program has involved raising public awareness about predatory lending in the hardest hit communities and has included providing counseling to homeowners and community groups on the problem, referring victims to attorneys and helping homeowners find financial help.
Advocates said the city should also increase funding to legal service providers to deal with the problem. Advocates, including those at the organization I work for, want elected official to establish a right to counsel for low-income seniors who face foreclosure actions and housing court cases. They also are urging lawmakers to strengthen laws restricting high-cost loans.
“You need multiple strategies to deal with this problem,” Friedheim said. “The federal government and regulatory agencies have to develop tighter rules. There have to be strong legislative efforts to make sure lenders are accountable when they give an unaffordable loan.”
In 2003, the New York State Legislature passed an anti-predatory lending law. But it only applies to loans up to $300,000. Advocates say that, in light of increases in housing costs, the law should be amended to cover larger loans.
State legislators are currently considering a law on lending for home improvements. Among other things, it would prohibit mortgage brokers from also acting as home improvement contractors. But the bill has been introduced in the Assembly annually since 2003, and the Senate has yet to consider it formally.
Mandated to do so or not, banks should apply good loan-making rules, said Moore of the Center for Responsible Lending. The center applauded an announcement that Freddie Mac, the federally chartered mortgage finance company, would no longer buy subprime loans with terms and conditions that often lead to foreclosures.
“Something serious has got to happen,” Mickens said. “The neighborhoods are at risk now and it’s just going to tear the whole community apart.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â