When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a plan for New York City in the year 2030, he said it was needed because the city will be getting much bigger, the infrastructure will be getting older, and the environment will be at risk. Plan NYC 2030 (or, the way the Office of the Mayor actually writes it, plaNYC) is based on the prediction that in the coming decades there will be a million new residents requiring some 265,000 new housing units.
Only once before has there been something similar – a master plan known as The Plan For New York City, in 1969 – but it was never approved. For the first time in the city’s history, City Hall is focusing on:
• the long-term environmental and health effects of growth (both past and present)
• how the city’s energy and transportation systems can sustain quality of life and new growth
• the potential impacts of global warming.
It remains to be seen, however, whether this unique planning effort is itself sustainable, and will lead to policy changes that last beyond 2008, when voters will elect a new mayor. That will depend on the extent to which the process can include and engage people in the city’s diverse neighborhoods and reflect their needs and aspirations.
The basic premise of PlanNYC2030 is the prediction that there will be another one million residents by the year 2030. Who says so? How do we know? Well, demographers at the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP) say so. How did they figure it out? They did a pretty good job of detailing the way the population changed in recent census periods, breaking it down by age group and borough. They calculated birth, death and migration rates. But to establish the baseline trends – the rates of population change – they used the trends from 1980 to 2005. It just so happens that this period is one of relatively high growth rates, compared to prior decades for example. But they could have gotten the same result by taking a ruler and drawing a straight line on a graph; actually any one of us can do that.
DCP’s demographers may be right in projecting continuing growth at the same rate. Or they may be wrong. Global, national and regional trends could shift in unforeseen ways as they have in the past. Migration trends are the most subject to variation. But even if the city’s demographers are right, this is a questionable way of using population projections to do planning.
In the January 2007 issue of Planning Magazine, a publication of the American Planning Association, Chris Williamson notes, “A projection that assumes past development rates will stay on course is really a policy recommendation to continue developing at past rates….If a city plans to a projection, is it also implicitly recommending growth policies for future city councils?”
There is nothing wrong with doing plans to meet projected growth, but the public should know from the start not only what assumptions are made in doing the projections but that the projections would be different under other assumptions. For that reason many planning offices prefer to run several scenarios using different assumptions. Williamson notes, “Planners and others who create and use projections should be aware of the implied assumptions and should prominently list and discuss them rather than let them remain unstated or buried in a technical appendix.” The assumptions for NYC2030 are indeed buried in a technical report prepared by DCP.
The city’s growth scenario will appeal to the economic sectors that thrive on growth – real estate, finance, construction, and some services. By starting with this scenario and not exploring other possible scenarios, NYC2030 is silently making a major policy decision that favors what some have called “the growth machine.”
What if the population remains stable? This question would force planners to focus on the improvement of life in the city as we know it, and away from the task of accommodating new construction. Is it unthinkable that the population could even decline a bit? While the thought of a shrinking population base conjures up images of widespread neighborhood abandonment during the 1970s, that doesn’t have to happen in the 21st Century. Many European cities, for example, have lost population or remained stable without suffering abandonment. It all depends on public policy.
NYC2030’s projected growth rates by borough are also based on implicit policy decisions. The Bronx is projected to grow at the slowest rate and Staten Island the fastest. Staten Island, the borough with the most available land for development, would absorb much less growth than it could. That’s a decision that continues, without further discussion, a city-wide land use policy that concentrates density around a small number of downtown centers instead of building centers for neighborhood living throughout the city.
The Mayor’s decision to focus NYC2030 on sustainability is both unprecedented and bold. Other cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles are ahead of New York, but it’s never too late to raise the basic sustainability question as defined by the United Nations: how can we meet current needs without compromising the needs of future generations?
NYC2030 starts with reasonable assumptions that with or without growth the city faces ten daunting challenges:
1. affordable housing
2. traffic congestion
3. lack of open space
4. the need to maintain the existing water infrastructure…
5.…transportation infrastructure
6.…power infrastructure
7. the need to reduce greenhouse emissions
8. air quality improvement
9. brownfields reclamation
10. improved waterways.
Noticeably missing from the list, however, are things like education, city services (especially sanitation), public health, noise, and neighborhood preservation -- items that typically appear on the top of the lists of complaint by New Yorkers.
However, NYC2030 does put on the agenda issues that are of crucial concern to many community, advocacy and environmental justice groups but have often been left out of high-level policy discussions. These include the asthma epidemic, brownfields reclamation, power plant siting, and the lack of open space, all of which are of special concern to low-income communities.
The mayor’s office has launched a series of meetings for community leaders and civic groups in each of the five boroughs to discuss the plan. However, it is not at all clear whether this will lead to any changes in the plan, and if so who will make those decisions. NYC2030’s website makes it all sound like a harmonious process in which we all join arms and march into the future. New Yorkers can submit their comments on the website, but how do these get digested and acted upon?
This leads us to a bigger question of how the plan gets approved and implemented. Will it get submitted to the City Planning Commission, City Council, or the voters for approval? Will the plan be anything more than the Mayor’s swan song before he moves on to his next job? Will the next mayor care? Where is the city’s capital and expense budget process in all this? And the city’s 59 community boards?
NYC2030 evades entirely the mechanisms set up in Section 197-a of the City Charter to produce and approve plans. City Hall may not like those mechanisms but they are the only ones we have. Without them the Mayor’s plan could become just one chief executive’s boardroom strategy that provides some guidance but has no teeth.
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
Every two weeks the New York City Council holds its "Stated Meeting" to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Gotham Gazette covers these meetings.
The debate over how to reform a tax incentive program for developers, which once seemed likely to sharply divide the City Council, came to a relatively peaceful conclusion on December 20. In its final stated meeting of the year, the council overwhelmingly passed a compromise measure to reform this plan, called 421-a. The changes are intended to shift the plan away from simply encouraging real estate development –- as was its original intention –- and toward the creation of affordable housing.
Under the measure approved by the council, developers in many parts of Manhattan and the Brooklyn would get the property tax exemption only if one fifth of the apartments in a new project are affordable. It would also create a fund to finance affordable housing.
But the debate over 421-a has not ended. In order to remain in existence, the program, with or without changes, must be approved by the state legislature by the end of 2007. Assemblymember Vito Lopez, chair of the assembly housing committee, has indicated that he wants tighter restrictions on 421-a.
During a housing crisis in 1971, city officials worried that developers would not build in New York. To spark residential development, the city started the 421-a program, which offered property tax exemptions to those willing to construct apartment buildings. As the real estate market in certain neighborhoods heated up starting in the mid-1980s, the city began to tweak the program. The focus shifted away from encouraging all development, toward the need for affordable housing.
In 1985 the city decided that in much of Manhattan – the so-called exclusion zone – developers would have to build a certain amount of affordable housing in order to qualify for the tax benefit. More recently, this zone has been slightly expanded, and now includes Manhattan between Houston Street and 96th Street, as well as a small part of Brooklyn. Developers working inside the exclusion zone can meet the affordable housing requirement by either designating 20 percent of the new project as affordable housing, or by building a corresponding amount of affordable housing in other areas in the city.
Buildings elsewhere in the city – including all of Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island – have remained eligible for the original incentives, affordable housing or no.
The measure approved by council would expand the exclusion zone to upper and lower Manhattan, as well as to such Brooklyn neighborhoods as Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
The City Council bill would also:
And the council will also urge the state government to create a similar plan top encourage development of affordable one, two and three family homes and to create ways to ensure that buildings remain affordable for many years into the future.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who negotiated the council plan, called it “fair and balanced.” “It recognizes you can create housing through an abatement but you have to make that abatement something that developers will want to take,” she told council.
Earlier Annabel Palma and 22 other council members introduced had introduced a competing bill that would have put much more aggressive requirements on affordable housing. It called for requiring all developers throughout the city – not just in certain parts of it -- to build affordable housing in order to qualify for the 421-a benefit. The bill would have required that 30 percent of all units, not 20 percent, be affordable if developers were to qualify for the exemption.
Council members Alan Gerson, Letitia James, and Rosie Mendez proposed a separate bill that would require developers to set aside 35 percent of a development be for affordable housing in order to qualify for 421-a benefits.
But following long negotiations, many of these opponents accepted Quinn’s plans. “We need to look at this piece of legislations and look at the significant improvements,” Palma said. And David Yassky, who had cosponsored the Palma bill, said the measure approved by council “will result in more affordable housing and in eliminating some of the most egregious disparities in the property tax.”
But not all council members agreed.
Councilmember Charles Barron and Hiram Monserrate expressed concern that the affordable units would not be affordable enough for many New Yorkers. “The mayor and the council may be able to live with this bill, but poor and working class New Yorkers are not going to be able to live in New York City,” Barron said.
While saying the bill was indeed an improvement, Rosie Mendez said, “I still believe the bill could be better yet.” In particular, she said, developers should have to make 30 percent of the apartments in any development affordable.
Tony Avella faulted the whole notion of giving developers tax benefits in New Yorkâ€s booming real estate market. “I find troubling the fact that we are gong to give huge tax abatements to luxury developers who are making millions of dollars off each project,” he said.
Avella’s comments echo those of other critics of the 421-a system, who argue that developers don’t need expensive incentives to build in New York these days. The program costs the city money, they say, and benefits building owners and developers of luxury apartments far more than it encourages affordable housing.
According to a report released in April by Habitat for Humanity-New York City and the Pratt Center for Community Development:
• The program will cost the city $320 million in 2006, up from $130 million in 2002.
• The program has given tax breaks to more than 100,000 housing units since it began, but as of 2003, only about 8 percent are affordable housing.
• Developers only put a fraction of the money they saved on taxes toward affordable housing sites, which are mostly in the Bronx.
In response to criticisms of the incentive program and as part of a broader campaign to create affordable housing, Bloomberg created a task force in February to evaluate 421-a. It called for expanding the exclusion zone to include more of Lower Manhattan, parts of Harlem up to 110th Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights, and more of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront.
Many members of the City Council criticized Bloomberg’s plan, asking for more sweeping reform. Quinn developed her own plan, which she introduced, with 28 other council members as co-sponsors. Bloomberg endorsed the compromise.
Supporters of the competing plans spent weeks negotiating over specifics.
During the stated meeting, many council members praised the negotiations as a victory for democracy, applauding the speaker, various administration officials, council members and staff for long hours of consultation that derailed plans for Christmas shopping and watching football games.
They congratulated themselves themselves for disagreeing on an issue and working it out. Saying debate on substantive matters was laudable, Bill de Blasio said, “This is a very positive day…. A lot has been accomplished in these past weeks.”
Quinn herself acknowledged how unusual such debate was. “Some people commented that it was a little odd that there was more than one bill on this topic in City Council,” she said. “That indicated these has not been enough significant debate in the past on important topics.”
But debate or not, the final vote was lopsided, with 44 council members voting for Quinn’s housing measure and 5 (Barron, Avella, Monserrate, Mendez and Darlene Mealy) opposed.
Â
At each of the City Council's stated meetings, council members introduce bills, most of which will never become laws (for the process by which bills become laws, click here). As a regular feature, Gotham Gazette discusses some of the legislation proposed at each meeting.
City Hall is in the midst of a debate over how to reform a tax incentive program for developers. Members introduced competing bills to reform this plan – called 421-a – at the council's last stated meeting. The goal of the reform is to shift the plan away from simply encouraging real estate development – as was its original intention – and towards the creation of affordable housing. The Bloomberg administration recently released its own recommendations. Legislation concerning the bills is expected to come up for a vote on Wednesday, December 20.
During a housing crisis in 1971, city officials worried that developers would not build in New York. To spark residential development, the city started the 421-a program, which offered property tax exemptions to those willing to construct apartment buildings. As the real estate market in certain neighborhoods heated up starting in the mid-1980s, the city began to tweak the program. The focus shifted away from encouraging all development, toward the need for affordable housing.
In 1985 the city decided that in much of Manhattan – the so-called exclusion zone – developers would have to build a certain amount of affordable housing in order to qualify for the tax benefit. More recently, this zone has been slightly expanded, and now includes Manhattan between Houston Street and 96th Street, as well as a small part of Brooklyn. Developers working inside the exclusion zone can meet the affordable housing requirement by either designating 20 percent of the new project as affordable housing, or by building a corresponding amount of affordable housing in other areas in the city.
Elsewhere in the city – including all of Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island -- anyone building is still eligible for the original incentives, affordable housing or no. Also, developers building in certain neighborhoods with historically dire housing problems – known as“neighborhood preservation” areas -- qualify for extra incentives.
Critics have called for reform of the 421-a system, arguing that developers don’t need expensive incentives to build in New York's red-hot housing market. The program costs the city money, they say, and benefits building owners and developers of luxury apartments far more than it encourages affordable housing.
According to a report released in April by Habitat for Humanity-New York City and the Pratt Center for Community Development:
• The program will cost the city $320 million in 2006, up from $130 million in 2002.
• The program has given tax breaks to more than 100,000 housing units since it began, but as of 2003, only about 8 percent are affordable housing.
• Developers only put a fraction of the money they saved on taxes toward affordable housing sites, which are mostly in the Bronx.
The prospect of a overhaul concerns the real estate industry, which says too drastic of a change will stymie construction in certain areas.
Several plans have been floated that would increase the size of the exclusion zone, cap the total value of the incentives, and force developers to build affordable housing on the site of the development for which they are receiving the tax rebate. These changes are expected to save the city money, because fewer developers will be eligible, and both the mayor and the council want to use the savings to start an affordable housing fund.
In response to criticisms of the incentive program and as part of a broader campaign to create affordable housing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg created a task force in February to evaluate 421-a. In October, after several months in which administration officials consulted with the real estate community and advocacy groups, Bloomberg announced the recommendations of the task force.
It called for Expanding the exclusion zone. The new area would include more of Lower Manhattan, parts of Harlem up to 110th Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights, and more of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront.
The task force also wants to eliminate the special benefit that enables developers to qualify for the incentives without building affordable housing in the neighborhood preservation zones in historically underdeveloped areas. With many of the markets now recovering, this benefit would be reduced to the standard incentive in areas such as Williamsburg, Jackson Heights, and Kingsbridge.
Many members of the City Council criticized Bloomberg’s plan, asking for more sweeping reform. Speaker Christine Quinn developed her own plan, which she introduced on December 6. At the last stated meeting, Quinn introduced it as a bill to be considered by the council, with 28 other council members as co-sponsors.
Quinn said the bill, which is scheduled to come up for a vote on December 20, “strikes the right balance” and “reflects input from just about every member of the City Council.”
“This bill will create more affordable housing and encourage development, while also protecting our public dollars from over-subsidizing new luxury development,” Quinn said.
Bloomberg has endorsed the compromise.
The plan (Intro 486 ) proposes an even greater expansion of the exclusion zone. The new area would include Manhattan up to 136th Street on the West Side and 117th Street on the East Side, as well as many more areas in Brooklyn.
The bill also calls for a review every two years of the zone's borders in order to account for changes in the market.
Quinn’s bill would also effectively eliminate the program that allows developers inside the designated area to provide affordable housing at a separate location; those qualifying for the benefit would have to build 20 percent affordable housing on-site.
Annabel Palma and 22 other council members introduced a competing bill that would make much more aggressive requirement on affordable housing. Intro 490 calls for completely eliminating the area in which developers must build affordable housing in order to qualify for the 421-a benefit, instead making the requirement citywide. The bill would also raise the affordable housing requirement to 30 percent for developers to be eligible for the exemptions.
“A lot has changed since we had to give developers tax breaks to build here,” Palma said. “With the hundreds of millions of dollars the developers entering this program are saving, asking 30 percent is not too much.”
The bill also calls for the affordable housing units to be comparable in size to market-rate units and for them to remain affordable after the tax-break expires.
Council members Alan Gerson, Leitita James, and Rosie Mendez proposed a separate bill that would require developers to set aside 35 percent of a development be for affordable housing in order to qualify for 421-a benefits.
Supporters of the competing plans have spent the last two weeks negotiating over specifics. Quinn says her bill now has the support of over half of the council. Palma's office said its bill will probably not come up for a vote on December 20, but that its supporters are negotiating to get Quinn's bill to call for even more affordable housing.
But the action at City Hall is not seen as the end of the issue. Palma has said her bill was intended to influence the state legislature, which has the final say. Assembly Housing Chair Vito Lopez is preparing to take up the issue, from a point of view closer to Palma's than to Quinn's.
“I would assume that the bill that passes is going to be the Christine Quinn bill,” he told the New York Times. “That improves on the mayor’s bill, and the mayor’s bill improved on the law. I believe it does not go far enough."
Â
New York City is not alone in facing a housing crisis. It is a national problem, manifested in a range of problems, from the lack of affordable housing to predatory lending to discrimination. And a national problem deserves a federal solution.
That was the conclusion of some 20 housing policy experts and advocates at a recent roundtable discussion on housing problems in the city, organized by Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez . They agreed that the timing is right to bring the federal government back into the business of affordable housing: Democrats, who are considered more responsive to housing issues, will soon control both houses of Congress.
But it’s going to be tough, Velazquez said. There have been 12 years of “disinvestment” in affordable housing. “There is the will, the drive, the commitment and the passion. But these aren’t the only factors.”
Other factors include:
“A national organizing effort – that’s the missing key,” said Irene Baldwin, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. “You’ve seen organizing efforts have a real impact on city housing policy and you’ve seen it affect state housing policy.
“You can do what you can locally, but the problem is in Washington. You need strong national networks that I don’t see out there.”
“That’s an understatement,” agreed Barbara Sard, the director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “And it’s not just New York. There are many places where there’s real concern on the local level about affordable housing but it doesn’t translate to Washington.”
Grassroots support is critical if housing is to become a priority, Velazquez said, recalling her previous work to prevent cuts to other programs.
“We were able to activate groups nationwide to block” Bush administration cuts to other programs, she explained. “That’s what we need to do to this. We need to activate all the big advocates nationwide, so they talk to their members of Congress.
“We need to develop this list of emails, telephone numbers and fax numbers from the bottom up. The reality is affordable housing is an issue that is impacting every corner of America.”
Representative-elect Yvette Clarke agreed: “Every other interest group has found a way to communicate, to organize their folks effectively.”
While housing organizers and grassroots activists may be disconnected, however, networks of housing policy experts do exist, noted Victor Bach of the Community Service Society.
“The housing community is together, it has been together for years,” Bach said. “There has been a very strong group of advocates, but they have had little success.”
He listed a variety of groups that work on national housing policy: The National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
What is lacking, Bach said, is the will.
“The will to act on housing compared to other key issues needs to be intensified,” he said. “The question is how to get more capital and commitment to housing. Someone’s got to put it all together and say, â€Look, we have a national commitment here and we’ve been eroding it for decades.’”
That person, to many, is Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Already, Sard said, Frank has been speaking frequently about the affordable housing problems facing communities around the country. As the new chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which drafts housing policy legislation, Frank is set to turn his words into action.
But any effort will need people at the grassroots to push it, advocates said. To that end, housing policy groups are welcoming new voices calling for action on affordable housing.
“We would love to get more state partners involved, that’s part of our agenda,” said Nicole Letourneau, communication director at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “We’re always looking to make more connections.”
Advocates and organizers are already coming together, Baldwin said, even if only slowly: “That’s the missing piece. We can all do our separate piece but we really need a national organizing platform to move it forward.”
The affordable housing crisis is evoking more and more anger and frustration in neighborhoods around New York City. At a recent series of town hall meetings organized by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, New Yorkers made that plain. The trick for advocates is translating that frustration into pressure on Congress to draft comprehensive affordable housing legislation.
When organizers and advocates do come together and if they convince Congress that affordable housing is a top priority, they would still face a major obstacle: The federal deficit. It effectively limits the extent of any affordable housing programs Congress members might suggest, Bach said.
“Unless Congress is able to roll back the tax cuts and deal with the deficit, it’s going to be hard for the most powerful voices to address housing,” he said. “The deficit is a major negative in the picture.”
“It is definitely true that the overall budget is going to be a big constraint,” said Sard. “So the challenge then becomes can you find money in some ways that aren’t going to count.”
One way Congress could avoid having to deal with those budget issues is by establishing a national low-income housing trust fund using 5 percent of the profits from the congressionally chartered mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
(The city is also looking at setting up a $300 million affordable housing trust fund in legislation proposed as a compromise on the 421-a property tax exemption program. The Housing First! coalition said $300 million was too little and is pushing for a city trust fund of $1 billion.)
For a national program, advocates said about $5 billion would be needed to develop about 1.5 million affordable housing units, Letourneau said.
“We’ve been pushing for several years for a national housing trust fund that would create a dedicated source of revenue” for affordable housing development, she said. “We think the time is right for this to finally move forward.”
Rep. Frank will introduce the bill in the new Congress, she said./p>
When delegates for the Republican National Convention were helping to build a house at a Habitat for Humanity site, protestors showed up, reminding them, “Habitat is great, we still need Section 8!”
“But inside the message was basically the same, we need Section 8,” said Roland Lewis, executive director of Habitat for Humanity and co-chair of the Housing First! coalition that advocates for more affordable housing.
“It really brought home the point that housing is and can be a common ground issue that can cut across party lines and ideological lines,” Lewis said. “If you’re a Republican governor in New Hampshire and you can’t find places for your workforce to live – the teachers and police and firefighters – it’s the same problem we have here in New York City.”
Indeed, when the Bush administration has contemplated cutting Section 8, the federal rent subsidy program, the proposals have provoked an outcry across the country. Mayors – Democrats and Republicans alike – have urged the administration to leave Section 8 alone and the administration has backed down.
Nevertheless, bipartisan efforts often mean forging compromises, Velazquez reminded housing advocates at the roundtable discussion.
“We’re going to be in control, but also we are going to have to work in a bipartisan way,” Velazquez said. “We have to reach out to moderate Republicans.”
Lewis echoed that sentiment, saying affordable housing appeals to interests that cross party and ideological lines.
“You can appeal to people who believe in social justice … and to folks who want better and more business for the companies that drive our economy,” he said. “That’s how it’s a common ground issue.
“It’s not a Republican idea or a Democratic idea that people who play by the rules and work hard should have a decent place to live,” he continued. “That appeals to people across the aisles.”
“For the first time in a long time, the strong but small minority of members of Congress who were setting the agenda is now being replaced by some leadership where decisions will be made by a majority of the members,” Letournea said. “We sort of see this as a new day. That being said any affordable housing initiative that have move forward in the past have always been a bipartisan effort and that will continue.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â
The prospects for resolving New York City’s affordable housing crisis have suddenly brightened thanks to the recent election results. Housing advocates are excited that a Democratic Congress and Senate can address a long list of problems contributing to the crisis, a list that includes the loss of federally subsidized housing in Section 8 projects and the financial difficulties faced by the New York City Housing Authority.
“The election results are absolutely thrilling for those of us working on housing issues and the tenant movement,” said Patrick Coleman of Tenants and Neighbors, the statewide tenant lobby group.
Victor Bach, senior housing policy expert at Community Service Society, agreed.
“I think it’s a big opportunity,” Bach said. “It certainly changes what we expect in terms of housing initiatives coming from Washington.”
In Washington, the Democrats can now move forward with long-stalled plans for a national low-income housing trust fund and seek to repeal laws passed in 1998 that require some residents of public housing to do community service or face eviction, Bach said.
Democrats like Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who has long pushed for government intervention in housing, and New York Representative Charles Rangel will be able to use their new clout to address the financing of affordable housing and other federal housing policies. Frank is expected to become chair of the Financial Services Committee and Rangel chair of the Ways and Means Committee.
Coleman of Tenants and Neighbors recalled attending rallies where Frank's commitment to affordable housing was clear. "He has the background as a community activist and he is very knowledgeable about Section 8" and other housing issues, Coleman said.
The federal government has done very little to preserve and create affordable housing for years, according to advocates. They now hope that will change with the Democratic gains.
“We need allies in Congress (to work on housing issues) and now we’ve got that,” Coleman said. The federal department of Housing and Urban Development, he said, “has only listened to the Republicans for the last six years. It’s been a nightmare. Now HUD is going to have to respond to Democrats who will be in positions to oversee HUD.”
On the state level, housing advocates hope to counter 12 years of inaction on housing by outgoing Governor George Pataki. (A report from the Pratt Institute for Community Development released in June described in detail how little Pataki has done to create and preserve affordable housing, especially compared to his predecessors.)
Advocates look to Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer to reinvigorate the state’s efforts, but many are unsure what to expect. Spitzer comes from a real estate family, they note, and the real estate lobby is always powerful. Nevertheless, advocates hope Spitzer strengthens rent regulation laws and overhauls the agency charged with enforcing those laws, the Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Spitzer has already indicated he supports the use of administrative tribunals to address repair issues, one item on advocates’ agenda, but does not support repeal of the Urstadt Law, which restricts City Council’s ability to write rent regulation laws that are stricter than state laws.
Again, advocates are looking to Spitzer to put more resources into preserving and creating affordable housing.
“Spitzer has said some good words about preservation of Mitchell-Lama and other subsidized housing,” Bach said. The governor could also “restore operating subsidies” to public housing that Pataki cut in 1998. The New York City Housing Authority has significant budget deficits and this summer announced plans to hike rents and fees for repairs to address that deficit.
Noting the new governor has also “said some good words about that,” Bach said, “We expect to hold him to his words.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â
It is easy to miss the small plaque on the wall of the ferry honoring the people who died in a terrible accident on October 15, 2003. Repaired and back in service, the Andrew J. Barberi looks like the other eight Staten Island ferries, but it was the boat that failed to slide into its usual slip and instead crashed into a concrete pier. Eleven people died and 165 were injured. The captain on duty had been overmedicated and passed out as the boat charged full-speed into the pier.
Three years later, while the ferry trudges dutifully back and forth on its 25-minute journey from Lower Manhattan to Staten Island, it remains a continuing and costly drama for those involved – including City Hall.
The criminal cases have been settled. Federal prosecutors used an obscure 1838 maritime law known as seaman's manslaughter to charge both the pilot and the director of ferry operations. It is the same law that was used to prosecute executives when an excursion boat in the East River sank, killing more than 1,000 people. That happened in 1904, which was the last time a vessel in New York waters killed or maimed a large group of people – until the Andrew J. Barberi.
Richard Smith, the pilot who passed out at the helm that day, is incarcerated. Right after the accident, he had attempted suicide twice but failed. He pleaded guilty to 11 counts of seaman's manslaughter and making false statements. He is serving an 18-month sentence.
The ferryboat captain, Michael Gansas, was in the outbound wheelhouse doing paperwork during the crash. Prosecutors said that since the two-pilot rule was not enforced at the time of the crash, Gansas would not be charged with a crime. Since Gansas ducked investigators right after the accident, the city fired him. He sued the city for reinstatement but lost.
The director of ferry operations at that time was Patrick Ryan. He is in prison for not enforcing the rule requiring that two qualified pilots be in the wheelhouse at all times. He pleaded guilty to seaman's manslaughter and making a false statement to investigators and is serving a sentence of a year and a day at Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex.
Smith's physician, Dr. William Tursi, had hidden evidence of the pilot's medical problems and use of medication. He received probation, six months of home confinement and 300 hours of community service. His license to practice medicine was suspended.
The port captain, John Mauldin, who is Ryan's brother-in-law, received two years' probation for making false statements to investigators.
A crewmember, mate Robert Rush, was in the wheelhouse with the pilot, but didn't see the blackout. Officials suspended him from his job after he failed to show up for a meeting with investigators.
Rulings are still pending on some of the issues that will affect how outstanding victims' claims will be settled. City attorneys have tried some odd arguments in court to limit liability. The accident involved an act of God because of the captain's medical condition. That would absolve City Hall of responsibility for some damages. The city government’s court filings also present seemingly contradictory blame of "intentional misconduct of Captain Smith…and the negligence of Mate Rush." That would mean that the crew was responsible, not the city (in the form of supervisors).In addition, attorneys argued that maritime law limits the amount of compensation to the cost of the vessel. That would be $14 million (though settlements already made have exceeded that amount).
Victims argued that ferry rules mandate two licensed pilots in the wheelhouse during docking. Federal prosecutors found two printed rulebooks—from 1908 and 1958—that list the two-pilot rule. If the rule was clearly on the books, the city may have to pay out much more to victims.
The city even paid for the (unsuccessful) defense of Patrick Ryan, the director of ferry operations, saying he was unfairly prosecuted for seaman's manslaughter. Criminal conviction of the ferry official (not just the personnel on board) could mean the city will be held responsible in civil suits by victims.
The city also paid for lawyers for 52 other city employees.
The city has settled 110 claims with $16 million so far with widely varying amounts. The largest settlement so far, $8.9 million, has gone to Paul Esposito, a waiter who lost both legs in the accident. William Castro, whose 39-year-old wife Debra died of injuries two months after the accident, received $3 million. One injured passenger got more than $1 million, and another received $500.
Another 81 victims' claims are pending. All the claims together total $3.2 billion.
Another lawsuit demands $8 million from the city for a tugboat that assisted the ferry. Immediately after the crash, the Dorothy J chugged over to the ferry, helped get the boat into the slip and held her steady for 68 hours. Maritime law allows the operator of such a vessel to claim compensation.
Other expenses for the city include nearly $7 million to repair the ferry and $1.4 million to repair the damaged pier. The city has also paid almost $4 million to outside attorneys.
Some 30 accidents caused by carelessness or lapses in judgment have marred the generally reliable service in recent years, according to an examination of records by the New York Times.
The most damaging accident before the Barberi crash happened in 1978, when a ferry rammed a seawall, injuring 200 people. In 1963, a ferry sank. While those and other accidents were serious, none caused fatalities. Many incidents could have been prevented with more vigilance by the crew, investigators found. But few procedures changed over the years.
Now, because of the deaths in the Barberi accident, rules for running the ferries have been firmed up and are more likely to be taken more seriously. In 2004, new regulations mandated more staffing on the boats, background checks, a strict drug and alcohol policy, more stringent medical exams for employees, surveillance cameras on board, better signs, and communication with fellow crewmembers.
There were always supposed to be two people capable of driving the boat in the wheelhouse. In practice, few ferry operators had ever followed the rule. Now the rules are more explicit. Three people are required, two of them pilots.
The ferry operation had been criticized for cronyism and nepotism. A change in management is meant to change that culture. Less than a year after the crash, James DeSimone, a graduate of the State University of New York Maritime College and a former vice president of a tugboat company and of New York Water Taxi, became the new chief operating officer.
There are questions about why the ferries are run by the city Department of Transportation and not by the state-run Metropolitan Transit Authority, as all the other city public transportation is. "We think it needs to be integrated into the public transportation system as a whole," Carter Craft of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance told the Daily News.
The city took over ferry service in 1905. It was—and still is—the only direct way to get from Staten Island to Manhattan. It seems like an anachronism in such a big city, to rely on boats to carry vast numbers of commuters. But only the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge provides a faster direct method of getting from Staten Island to other boroughs (specifically to Brooklyn). Two bridges carry vehicles to New Jersey. After 9/11, motorized vehicles could no longer travel on the ferry. The ferries remain an essential service for commuters.
The service runs 110 times a day, transporting 65,000 people. That adds up to some 19 million people a year. That would be a massive public transportation system in most cities. In New York, where people take 7.1 million subway and bus rides in the city every day, the ferry represents a small program.
Since 1997, the service has been free. It was too complicated to integrate into the new Metro Card system, said Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at the time.
Today, rebuilding and remodeling of the terminals at both ends have made the trip more pleasant. Renovations replaced the grubby terminals with shiny new structures more welcoming to commuters and tourists.
The Manhattan side features a glass-fronted building with a big blue neon Staten Island Ferry sign. Inside, but still visible from the street, the words from the familiar Edna St. Vincent Millay poem unfold across the room: "We were very tired/We were very merry/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry."
With the long open wooden benches inside, the $2 beers and the magnificent views of the Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan and the boats in the harbor, the free ride is an appealing jaunt for tourists as well as an essential ride for commuters. Senator Charles Schumer found out just how appealing the ride is for visitors when he campaigned for reelection in 2004. He rode the ferry one day, shaking hands with everyone who was awake. "Hi, how are you? Where are you from?" he'd ask. England, France and Iowa were some of the answers that day. He chatted and quickly moved on, looking for constituents. After awhile, he turned to an aide, and sounding frustrated, said, "They're all tourists."
The tourists and the commuters (the commuters were probably the sleeping people that Schumer knew better than to wake up) know that despite the harrowing events just three years ago, and with more strict attention to safety, the Staten Island Ferry remains an integral part of the city's day.
Related Web Sites:
Staten Island Ferry, from the Department of Transportation Staten Island Ferry History, Facts
Â
However else New Yorkers reacted to the sale last month of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, and to the announcement the same week that the Bloomberg administration would develop a new community on the “Queens West” site, it was inevitable that in the ensuing discussion some people would invoke the spirits of two larger-than-life figures in the history of New York City’s built environment – author and urban planning pioneer Jane Jacobs (who died on April 25th) and the city’s “master builder” Robert Moses (who died 25 years ago, in 1981).
This was inevitable because these two names are invoked nearly every week in debates about the future of New York City. Just the week before, in fact, the Gotham Center for New York City History presented a well-attended forum entitled “Jane Jacobs Vs. Robert Moses: How Stands the Debate Today?” which featured speakers ranging from the head of the New York City Planning Commission to the architecture critic of the New York Times.
But the Moses/Jacobs debate seems especially well-suited to Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village, since Moses actually played a substantial role in the building of these housing complexes, and Jacobs felt they were the antithesis of the “life on the street” that she adored in New York City. And across the East River in Long Island City, the 5,000 mixed-income housing units planned for the “Queens West” site would replace what would have been Olympic Village (had New York City been chosen to play host to the Olympics), reminiscent of Moses’ large-scale projects in Queens; his career was book-ended by the two World’s Fairs held in Flushing Meadows Park.
A closer look at both Stuyvesant Town and Queens West suggests the complications in using the usual arguments in the debate over Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.
At the Gotham forum at CUNY Graduate Center, as throughout the city, Jacobs is generally praised and Moses is scorned. Neighborhood residents look at such projects as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and see the kind of imperial efforts used by Robert Moses to roll over communities (as detailed in the biography of him by Robert Caro, The Power Broker). They cite Jacobs for her love of the “ballet of neighborhood life” and her opposition to planning from the top down, memorialized in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
“Jacobs has won the debate,” New York City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden declared at the forum, presenting the traditional view. (See her essay) The Department of City Planning, she said, now develops finely-grained, nuanced plans that seek to incorporate neighborhood feedback. Even when she plans for large-scale developments, she said, she imagines Jacobs looking over her shoulder.
But perhaps things are more complicated than they seem. Most of the presenters on the panel disputed the idea that “we are all Jacobs-ians now.” Richard Kahan (development czar under Mario Cuomo) agreed that "we are trying to have a diversity of uses where Moses was encouraging monolithic super blocks." But he argued that "we are still talking about mega projects, not bad, not good necessarily … but they are hardly paying much attention to neighborhood scale."
Other panelists presented revisionist views of the Jacobs vs. Moses debate. Columbia University professor Hilary Ballon argued that Moses got some important things right that Jacobs missed – especially a city’s need for large-scale infrastructure and large institutions such as universities. Ballon is curating a retrospective exhibition on Moses next year at the Queens Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and Columbia. And two panelists (Samuel Zipp, a professor at the University of California-Irvine, and I) cited a paper by Damon Rich arguing that the image of “big plans and little people,” in which government planning is always seen to roll over neighborhood residents, has in many cases been used to give cover to conservative arguments that we ought to accept for our cities whatever the “free market” gives us.
At first, Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village might seem to follow the usual argument. The 11,500-unit development was created through eminent domain – pushed through by Moses – that displaced several thousand residents in a low-rise, tenement style, mixed-use neighborhood. It was planned from the top-down, built in “towers on the park” super-blocks, and has no street life. At the beginning, it was a segregated community; African-Americans were not allowed to live there.
And yet five decades later it is seen by most residents and planning observers as a supremely successful place. Community life thrives within its interiorized open spaces. And while it has not become the city’s most diverse community, it has become an enclave for the middle-class within a sea of far more expensive and socially homogeneous luxury housing.
From one angle, the recently-announced purchase of the property by Tishman Speyer from MetLife shows just how successful the property has become. The issue now, of course, is not about whether Stuyvesant Town is a planning affront, but how to save it as a middle class community. The purchase price of $5.4 billion can only be supported by substantial increases in the rents, by taking units out of rent regulation over time. The offering circular for the sale suggested that the complex could be converted from 75 percent rent regulated units now to only 30 percent rent regulated by 2018.
The same offering circular also proposed several ideas that might be seen as “bringing Jacobs back in” -- improving the retail mix along the streets, and perhaps the creation of new buildings that might better integrate with the grid -- as ways that potential buyers could bring in higher-paying tenants and increase the value of the property.
The threat to diversity in this case, then, comes not from top-down planning but from the marketplace. In fact, the only thing that has preserved a more diverse, more middle-income community at Stuyvesant Town is government action and regulation. The affordability requirements that came with the tax breaks MetLife received to build the property expired decades ago. Since then, it is only rent regulations that have kept the units affordable. And it is the weakening of those laws that has made the sale possible. In 1994, the New York State legislature began to allow “vacancy deregulation,” by which units can be taken out of the rent regulation system upon vacancy once their rents exceed $2,000 – and increasingly, landlords can deregulate units that rent for several hundred dollars less than this through major capital improvements.
The proposed development of Queens West is also more complicated than the traditional “Jacobs vs. Moses” debate frame would suggest. The development will likely be in high-rise towers with a master plan created by City Hall – the type that Jacobs would likely have scorned: In 2005, just a few months before her death, she wrote a scathing critique of the Bloomberg administration’s similar proposal for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront just to the south. Yet local residents, community board leaders, and elected officials all praised the proposed development of the site. The most popular element of the plan is that it would provide housing for the “middle class,” for households earning from $60,000 to $145,000 each year.
It is important to note that the proposed development hardly serves the diversity of Queens. More than 60 percent of Queens residents earn less than $60,000 – so most of Queens two million people will not be able to afford even one of the proposed 5,000 “affordable” units. A diverse set of Queens community organizations, known as Queens for Affordable Housing, is calling for a far better mix, with half of the units affordable to families earning less than the Queens median income of $48,000.
Here, as in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, it appears that what communities fear is less mega-projects imposed by the government than market-led development that creates luxury housing that only the wealthiest New Yorkers can afford.
It is not simply income and racial diversity that is in question. New York City’s growth and consequent market-led real estate pressures are putting strains on the quality of life of neighborhoods in every corner or the city – more traffic, more people using scarce open space, overcrowded schools in many growing neighborhoods, tear-downs of historic structures.
The answers will not be found in Moses’ style top-down mega-projects, which led to massive increases in traffic and were in many instance contemptuous of the very poor families they were serving (although he did create more open space that anyone before or since).
But the answers also won’t be found – as some who invoke Jacobs’ name today try to do – in seeking to prevent development altogether, nor in diminishing the role of government in city-building. New York City is expected to grow by one million people (mostly as a result of immigration) in the coming decades. We need thoughtful city planning and smart, activist government to make that growth work for New York’s communities.
To keep the city diverse and affordable, we’ll need not only more investments in affordable housing, but also strengthened rent regulations to enable those who are here already to stay. To preserve mixed-use communities, we need stronger zoning provisions that allow manufacturers to survive in the city. To make the new jobs created by all this growth and development pay enough for a family to live in the city, we’ll need “living wage” regulations that make sure we aren’t using our tax dollars and public planning to subsidize poverty wages.
To address ever-increasing traffic – in a region that already has the longest commute times in the nation – we are going to need both “congestion pricing” (charging people something when they drive in Lower/Midtown Manhattan) and investments in more transit infrastructure. To truly improve quality of life and create more green space, we will need to de-map some of the area we now give to streets, to let pedestrians have more room in their neighborhoods.
Many of these issues will be at stake over the next few months as the Bloomberg administration begins to reveal more about the work of its newly created Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability (profiled in Gotham Gazette’s land use column).
As the new office begins its work, it might take heart in looking neither to Jacobs nor to Moses – but instead to two efforts in the Bronx. At the Kingsbridge Armory – after many years of organizing by the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition – the New York City Department of Economic Development recently sought proposals for a 575,000 square foot redevelopment to include a mix of retail, entertainment, recreational, and community uses. Several schools will be developed in an adjacent campus. For the first time, City Hall agreed to favor developers who commit to pay a living wage to workers. Unlike the displacement of the Bronx Terminal Market last year for a large-scale retail mall, when many community groups and small business advocates criticized the administration, in this case there was praise from all side.
Two miles to the southeast, residents of Soundview, Hunts Point, and West Farms are open to an even larger development. The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance – a coalition of four community organizations and three citywide groups – have proposed the demolition of the Sheridan Expressway, an unnecessary blight on the neighborhood built, of course, by Robert Moses. This summer, through a series of community planning sessions, they developed a plan for something far grander in its place: a mixed-use, mixed-income development that would include thousands of units of housing; new commercial, retail, and community facilities; and new open spaces.
The (hopeful) lesson: we don’t have to choose between top-down Moses mega-projects (that accommodate growth but undermine communities) and the natural evolution of markets in places like Jacobs’ West Village that may preserve neighborhood character but results in a neighborhood that very few can afford. When people are truly included in the planning, when development comes with real and more fairly-shared benefits, and when smart public policy helps shape growth to make it work for neighborhoods, communities can be willing to accept large-scale development and shoulder their share of the city’s growth.
Brad Lander is the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development.
Â
The opposing visions of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses towards city building resonate with many New Yorkers today. It is certainly clear to me that Jane Jacobs is now the prevailing force. While no one person changed the physical landscape of New York as much as Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs’ legacy and her influence is much more deeply rooted and felt widely by urbanists, planners and elected officials.
That legacy embraces:
Moses may have gotten a lot done, built a great deal in the name of “the people”, but the truth is that he wanted little to do with the people who would live in the city he created. Their voices were dispensable, their homes were dispensable. And that is why he couldn’t conceive of the importance of neighborhoods.
Jacobs, on the other hand, knew that if you neglect neighborhoods, you do so at the city’s peril. People who no longer have faith in the future of the place in which they were brought up or where they are raising a family, will, if they can afford it, leave for a more predictable, safer place.
So understanding and appreciating the integral character of diverse neighborhoods has to be a primary requirement for any planning initiative. The goal of city planners, or how we are looking at the city’s challenges today, is no longer the broad brush, the bold strokes, the big plan.
Make no mistake about it, we have an enormous need to build thousands of units of affordable housing; we must create a broad spectrum of jobs for a rapidly expanding population; we need to reclaim and revitalize our waterfront; and we must lay the foundations to support the growth that is to come and that we welcome.
But it is just not acceptable, or wise, or even possible to undertake these challenges without espousing Jacobs principles of city diversity, of the rich detail of urban life, to build in a way that nourishes complexity.
That is not an easy goal with the limited and somewhat crude tools that planners have at hand. We are rapidly trying to diversify the contents of the tool box to respond to community needs and community concerns.
And that brings me to one legacy that Jacobs left which has a daily influence on city policy today. And that is her role as a fearless civic advocate. She gave community activists the confidence that they indeed can make a difference and prevail.
She inspired individuals – inspired them to join community boards and advocacy organizations, to speak out at public hearings, and to lobby their elected officials.
Planning has changed because of Jane Jacobs. Robert Moses’ centralized planning is a thing of the past.
Planning today is noisy, combative, iterative and reliant on community involvement. Any initiative that does not build consensus -- that is not shaped by the give-and-take of the public review process -- will be an inferior plan and, deservedly, will be voted down by the City Council, and die.
Where we do, or some of us might, have nostalgia for Moses is in the realization that it is very very difficult to get very complex and expensive projects built that are critical to our city’s future such as the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access, a one seat ride to the airport from Lower Manhattan and the #7 line.
With the limitation of a two-term mayoralty, it is an enormous challenge to get great new open spaces such as Fresh Kills, the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan, the High Line and the Greenpoint Williamsburg waterfront approved, designed and built so that the initiative cannot be undone by subsequent administrations.
These are great projects that need the kind of sustained, focused leadership and a guaranteed funding stream that Robert Moses was so ingenious -- indeed diabolical -- in securing.
Big cities need big projects. Big projects are a necessary part of the diversity, competition and growth that both Jacobs and Moses fought for. But today’s big projects must have a human scale; must be designed, from idea to construction, to fit into the city. Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacob’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.
It is to the great credit of the mayor that we are building and rezoning today, once again, like Moses, on an unprecedented scale, but, with Jacobs firmly in mind, invigorated by the belief that the process matters and that great things can be built through a focus on the details, on the street, for the people who live in this great city.
Amanda Burden is the chair of the New York City Planning Commission and director of the Department of City Planning. This essay was adapted from remarks presented at a forum entitled "Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses: How Stands the Debate Today?", presented by the Gotham Center Of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Â
If sheer animosity from one’s opponents is any gauge of one’s effectiveness, then Michael McKee may be the most effective tenant organizer in New York City: The landlords I talked to flat out refused to comment about him, not even anonymously.
Whether or not he is the most effective, McKee is certainly the longest-serving. It has been 36 years since he first became an advocate for rent regulation.
“If you go through the list of tenant victories, there isn’t one that doesn’t have Michael as its leader,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn told about 150 people who gathered recently to honor him. “Whether faced with bad speakers, bad governors, bad Rent Guidelines Boards, I’ve never seen Michael give up faith in the tenants movement.”
The tenant movement has faced rough times over the last few years. I thought it a good time to ask one opinionated man his opinion of tenant organizing, and the housing picture in the city:
How did you get involved in housing?
I stumbled into community organizing by organizing a rent strike in the building I was living in at the time.
What would you list as some achievements?
1. The warranty of habitability, which was a bill we drafted. We put a remarkable coalition together that supported that bill and it was one of the few times we got a bill through without having to water it down. And the landlords lobby at the time predicted that if it became law it would lead to another wave of abandonment, which of course did not happen.
2. The 1977 fight to renew the Emergency Tenant Protection Act when there was a danger it was going to be gutted.
3. The 1997 rent law fight, where Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno basically said he would not renew the rent laws and meant it, which I don’t think a lot of people understood. If only Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver hadn’t gone in the last weekend and given everything away, it would have been a great victory.
Why do elected representatives seem to discount housing as an issue?
I think the reason elected officials don’t take tenants seriously is because tenants don’t vote as tenants when they go into the voting booth. They vote pro-choice or anti-war or whatever. It’s much more difficult to organize tenants than it is to organize workers.
How do you explain your staying power?
Organizing is very difficult work, there are more defeats than victories. You have to be prepared to deal with that and roll with the punches.
In your opinion, what is the housing situation like today?
While we’ve always had too many people chasing too few housing units, it’s getting worse all the time. The rent laws were weakened at exactly the wrong moment, allowing landlords to take apartments out from under rent regulation. We don’t have an emergency anymore, we have a crisis, objectively speaking, and I think it’s going to get worse.
What do you mean objectively?
The number of people spending 50 percent or more of their income on rent has gone up dramatically. Overcrowding has gone up: Twenty years ago, overcrowding was six or seven percent of households; in 2002 it was 11 percent of households. I mean any objective measure you want to use, including the fact that homelessness is at an all-time high. If you look at the overall picture – rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments – we lost probably 57,000 units between 2002 and 2005. There’s virtually no measure that would show you that the housing situation is better.
And how would you say politicians are dealing with it?
I think it’s deplorable. The smart thing the real estate lobby did this time, unlike 1971, is they figured out that a gradual decontrol mechanism would not stir things up. People got totally up in arms between 1971 and 1974, resulting in the repeal of vacancy decontrol.
Do you think some form of rent regulation in New York City will always be necessary?
Absolutely. I think rent regulation should be universal…covering all buildings of, say, four units or more, regardless of when they were constructed or regardless of when people moved in or moved out.
We can’t sit around and wait for 2011 [when the legislature will decide whether to renew the rent laws]. It’ll be too late by then. There won’t be anything left. I think in two or three years it’ll be too late to turn it around. The real estate strategy is to have the laws come up in five more years and have many, many fewer rent regulated apartments so that we will be politically weaker.
What are the major areas you’ll spend your energy on over the next few years?
I don’t think anything is going to change until the Democrats take control of the State Senate. Not that the Democrats are so wonderful, but they are certainly better than the Republicans. And certainly there are more Democrats that will fight for us than there are Republicans who will fight for us. There are no Republicans who will fight for us. So even though some Democrats are not so pro-tenant or pro-rent regulation they are offset by people who are.
In NYC, does it all come down to money? Is that the root of the problem?
No question. The NYC real estate industry funnels money to state elected officials and state parties – they basically buy what they want in Albany. In my view it’s a form of corruption. They basically are buying deregulation by paying off legislators from upstate New York who do not have a single rent regulated unit in their districts. And yet who are the ones who make the decisions?
Knowing what you do about incremental changes, what can be achieved for tenants over the next few years?
I don’t think anything can be achieved legislatively until the Democrats take control of the senate. And that’s why I have not gone to Albany since June of 2003. There’s no point in doing any lobbying right now. Next year there will be a point in that there is a new governor.
Is there any hope that Spitzer will be more progressive with housing?
I think he’s going to be better than Pataki, but that’s not saying much. And who knows – we don’t know what Eliott Spitzer really thinks of rent regulation. He hasn’t said. I think he would not veto a bill passed by both houses, for example. The question is will he fight for anything? We know he’s opposed to home rule, although they’ve never told us that. Every meeting we had with him, they never would say what his position was. But now it’s official” He told the Times he opposed the repeal of the Urstadt Law.
Once there is a change in Albany, what can be done?
We can get a lot. We can get vacancy decontrol repealed, and I think we can get the Urstadt Law repealed. I think it would be very hard for the Senate Democrats not to do that when they’re the majority.
Housing advocates in Los Angeles told me once that that city got cyclical inspections of buildings to make sure they are up to code and that landlords love that system, that they say it helps them maintain their buildings. But the idea of housing advocates and landlords working together in New York City seems laughable. What do you think explains the housing climate in this city?
You have some of the richest people on the planet owning real property here. Literally, some of the richest people in the world own residential real estate in New York City. One difference between us and Los Angeles is we can’t spread out horizontally. Or the way Dallas can. We don’t have a sixth borough lying fallow waiting to be developed the way the Bronx was 100 years ago.
The real estate lobby has a ton of money and they use it.
What would you give as your strongest arguments for people to care about housing and get involved?
Well, you can’t do anything really without a roof over your head. There are people living in shelters who go to work every day, there are kids living in shelters who go to school every day. But it’s very difficult.
Housing is not, in my view, a luxury item. People need a place to live. Some people think the market should take care of it. There will never be a perfect tango between supply and demand the way the marketers think there will be. You will never have enough housing in a place like New York City to go around for everyone who needs it. You will always have an imbalance. The only way you would have that is if there were a national depression and people started moving out of the city. God forbid.
People want to live here. They come here and they want to live here. They come here from all over the country, they come here from all over the world. And in some cases they come here with a lot of money and in other cases they come here with no money and they end up eight to a room in a basement in Queens. So, you know, that’s not going to change. We’re going to be a magnet.
And as good as it is that the Bloomberg administration is embarking on a plan to build new housing, they’re being very shortsighted in the need to preserve the affordable housing that we have. The mayor is never going to build as much as we are losing. It’s not that the housing disappears, it just becomes unaffordable.
Is it just politics to them?
I think the mayor fundamentally believes that the city would be better off without rent regulation. I think he really thinks that the market would do a better job. I think he’s fooling himself but I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s what the man believes.
How would you rate the tenant movement today?
I think the tenant movement is amazing for hanging on in extraordinarily difficult circumstances….
This last year for the first time we succeeded in making a lot of new groups, that had never ever dealt with the Rent Guidelines Board before, ever, understand why they should pay attention to this board [which determines how much rents will go up in rent regulated apartments]. And they did.
The board had a historical practice of having daytime hearings in Manhattan. Who goes to daytime hearings? Elderly people. Younger people can’t go as a rule because they’re working somewhere. So consequently you’d have reporters writing, “A crowd of mostly elderly tenants blah blah blah.” We succeeded in bludgeoning the RGB into having nighttime meetings somewhere outside of Manhattan in a neighborhood like Harlem.
It’s a very different crowd and it’s a very different dynamic. I think some of the members of the RGB actually appreciated that and they were able to see a bigger picture by going to the Brooklyn hearing, the Bronx hearing.
You’re working on new things and still thinking about the fights. You’ve got a new group – Tenants PAC. You’re going to continue working on this stuff?
I haven’t really retired. It’s not a new group – we started Tenants PAC in 1997. But it was clear to me that if we were going to have a chance of having an impact on elections I had to free myself up to devote more time to Tenants PAC because I was essentially doing Tenants PAC in my spare time, of which I had none because my job at Tenants & Neighbors was like having two-and-a-half full time jobs. And I’m still doing things for Tenants & Neighbors as a volunteer, but I can pick and choose what I do. It has freed me up to concentrate more time on Tenants PAC to raise more money, to open an office and to really concentrate on a campaign in a way that we haven’t been able to do in the past because we didn’t have any staff. And I believe, and I’ve convinced a number of people in the tenant movement, that until such time that there is a change in Albany in terms of the political line-up there’s not going to be any chance of getting legislation.
The housing movement doesn’t seem to have high energy.
It’s a lot better than it was a couple years ago. People are much more motivated, I think. And there’s new people coming into the movement all the time.
Would you say you’re optimistic?
If I weren’t an optimist, I couldn’t do this work.
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â
City Hall recently unveiled two new efforts to look at the long-term future of the city. On September 21, the Mayor’s Office announced the creation of a new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, with a 16-person Advisory Board. Rolled out during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s visit with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the initiative is billed as part of “an ambitious environmental agenda for New York City.”
The other effort, unceremoniously leaked to the press in recent weeks, proves to be no less ambitious. “Visions for New York City: Housing and the Public Realm” is a report to New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, dated May 2006, by former City Planning Commissioner Alex Garvin (best known for his role in the beginning of the effort to rebuild Lower Manhattan.) The report proposes 400,000 new units of private housing by 2030 by building platforms over rail yards and highway cuts, converting industrial waterfront property, and building new surface mass transit lines to spur private housing development. The report also calls for green boulevards, protected bicycle lanes, Sunday street closings, and new pedestrian streets to “improve the quality of life” and support higher density development.
The new office and the Garvin report are about one and the same objective: opening up opportunities for future growth. The city’s growth advocates and powerful real estate industry seem to be coming around to the view that ambitious development goals like those set out in the Garvin report will never be achieved unless they’re part of a bigger, long-term planning strategy that pays attention to the environment.
For years now community leaders have been after city officials to plan for the long-term future and not just rezone their neighborhoods for new development. The Task Force on Community-based Planning, a coalition of some 40 community organizations, community boards and professionals created five years ago, has stood behind the scores of neighborhood-based planning efforts. It asked city officials to support them, prompting the city government to do both city-wide and neighborhood-level planning.
But the main impetus for Alex Garvin’s visions report, and City Hall’s newfound interest in long-range planning, seems to be a realization among real estate developers that the city’s infrastructure, especially mass transit, can’t support a lot more growth in Manhattan and at existing transit hubs. While the number of riders of mass transit continues to grow, the system hasn’t added any major new lines since the 1930s; New Yorkers have among the longest average commute times in the nation. As a result, Garvin proposes new “transit-oriented development.” This would entail building new light rail, streetcar and bus rapid transit lines in areas that would be rezoned to spur private housing development. Two priority areas are identified: 3rd Avenue and 161st St. in the Bronx and 21st Street in Queens (with the possibility of continuing the line south to Red Hook in Brooklyn). The report gives no indication that existing community-based plans were consulted in the search for future development sites.
Garvin found that many of the lower-density areas of the city with available land for development lack mass transit and are not likely to attract investment in new housing. Instead, he believes investors will go to more centrally-located areas where developable parcels can be created by incentives and changes in land use policy. This would include, for example, building on platforms over the Sunnyside Rail Yards in Queens and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Waterfronts targeted for redevelopment are the Bronx River, Harlem River, and the North Shore of Staten Island. These are the strategic areas that would absorb most of future development, according to Garvin’s study.
But this top-down approach to planning is bound to raise questions in the neighborhoods. Garvin rejects starting from an analysis of “needs,” as most community-based plans do, and instead talks about “opportunities,” basically investment opportunities. He ignores the environmental consequences of building over highways. He claims there will be no displacement, but ignores the effects that increasing property values and rents will have on surrounding areas – that is, secondary or indirect displacement. And he neglects the issue of housing affordability. It is the kind of planning that is likely to produce instant resistance at the grass roots level. Neighborhood planning involving local residents and businesses (who also tend to be pro-development, as any survey of neighborhood plans will show) is more likely to find development opportunities that fit better with the existing urban context and also help to address needs.
To its credit, the Garvin report puts forth a bold set of recommendations about public space and transportation that will resonate with many community planning advocates. The section on “the public realm” says that “a fundamental shift needs to occur in planning and capital investment for streets.” The city should rely less on cars and develop “a more balanced public realm.” This includes greening boulevards so they are friendlier to pedestrians. Bicycle lanes would be upgraded from stripes painted on the pavement to safer, physically separated rights-of-way. Following the example of cities in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, selected avenues would be closed to traffic on Sundays, creating giant public spaces. Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, Broadway in Manhattan, Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and Kent Avenue/Vernon Boulevard in Brooklyn and Queens are some examples given. Finally, active neighborhood retail streets like Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, would be reclaimed as pedestrian streets.
While the Garvin report only sketches out broad proposals and it is not clear what the current administration will embrace or reject, the huge leap in housing growth that it foresees inevitably leads to many bigger questions. How will the city’s already-strained transit, water, sewer and utility infrastructure handle all the new growth? What about the schools, libraries, and health facilities? While part of the transportation problem would be solved by improving the public realm and reducing traffic, it is bound to take a great deal of public investment and many more strategies to improve energy efficiency and environmental quality. And is anyone trying to insure that the costs and benefits of development are equitably distributed?
The new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability promises to grapple with some of these hard questions. Paraphrasing the classical United Nations definition, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated: “Sustainability is all about ensuring that economic growth and development today is compatible with the ability of our children and grandchildren to meet their needs in the future.”
If the new office is true to the sustainability mandate, they must take the “needs-based” approach that the Garvin report rejected. The ambitious agenda of the new office includes reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and exploring new strategies for energy efficiency in government and the private sector. Moving beyond City Hall’s successful High Performance Housing Initiative, the office proposes to make “green building” more widespread.
But while conserving energy and cleaning up the environment will create more opportunities for housing development, it remains to be seen how much the long-range planners will be looking at existing neighborhoods and the enormous environmental and public health crises they face, including asthma, lead poisoning, obesity and diabetes. To what extent will they be clearing the way for the pristine new housing enclaves foreseen in the Garvin report without addressing the profound deficiencies and inequalities in the quality of life that already divide the city? And with only a few years left in this administration’s mandate, to what extent can the long-range planners engage the city’s hundreds of diverse neighborhoods in the planning process so that whatever gets decided actually has a chance to be implemented in the decades to come? Will the new office have the time to change the deeply imbedded agency cultures that resist sustainable development strategies – for example, a Department of Transportation that resists traffic reduction and a Department of Sanitation that opposes waste reduction? While doing its share in the war against global warming, City Hall could also make peace with its own neighborhood planners.
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