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The 2006 Blackout - “ Too Easy Just To Blame Con Edison


Though the mayor’s aides saw them as rude, the Queens politicians who rolled their eyes behind the mayor’s back in the middle of last month’s blackout may actually have been reacting more civilly than most people from western Queens would have done, given the circumstances. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was holding a press conference in which he said that Con Edison and its chief executive officer, Kevin Burke, deserve our thanks.

It would be difficult to find any New Yorker who has been feeling that way lately. (Even the mayor has changed the way he talks about the utility.) First, there was the 10-day blackout in Western Queens – which is home to some of the city’s largest power plants -- that shut electrical power for perhaps 100,000 people. Then, as soon as power was restored in Queens, a series of substantial power outages began on Staten Island.

A few days later, Bloomberg declared a heat emergency for New York City, and on the third day of 100-degree weather, the strains on the electrical system were clear. There were scattered outages in all five boroughs (as well as throughout the region) and Con Edison reduced electrical loads in particular in Midtown and the East Side, sending workers door to door to encourage area businesses to conserve energy. Con Ed also reduced voltage in all of Brooklyn and Queens, and began to power its own headquarters with a generator rather than from the grid.

As of this writing, assuming that no widespread blackouts occur in the next few days, it is clear that Con Edison did a much better job of mitigating risks to the power supply in August than it did in July.

What is less easy for sweltering New Yorkers to admit is that Con Edison can only shoulder part of the blame for what’s been happening.

Why the July Blackout Happened, and Why August Was Better

Although residents of western Queens may not agree with this assessment, New York City has one of the nation’s best electrical systems. Indeed, Con Ed won an award in 2002 for being one of the eight most reliable utilities in North America.

Approximately 70 percent of the system’s wiring is underground, and thus is less vulnerable to many severe weather conditions. The system is designed so that other cables can pick up the slackwhenever a cable fails.

The 2006 blackout is not easily compared to the 2003 blackout, which was a cascading international event that affected the entire city. A closer parallel to the 2006 Queens blackout is the 1999 blackout that affected Inwood and Washington Heights in Manhattan. That only went on for about 30 hours –- enough time for then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to sue Con Ed.

During the 1999 blackout, Con Ed realized that so many cables had failed that there were not enough left to handle the load. The utility decided to shut down the entire system for Inwood and Washington Heights temporarily, reasoning that this would lead to less disruption in the long run. Con Ed did not make the same decision in Queens, and the result was much misery. Once the August heat emergency hit—-particularly on August 3—-Con Ed took preventative measures just as it had in 1999, and again avoided widespread blackouts.

The lesson seems clear, but Con Ed is hesitant to acknowledge it. On August 2 the utility released its first report about the Queens blackout. It offers the most detailed chronology to date of what occurred during those days, but does not address the underlying causes. Con Ed’s CEO, president and chairman Kevin M. Burke says that that analysis will take a “couple of months” to complete.

Political Fallout of Queens Blackout

Charitably put, Burke’s refusal to provide a definitive cause for what happened in Queens reflects his deliberative nature as an electrical engineer. Even granting this, it is another sign of Con Ed’s tone deafness about this entire event.

In addition to the frustration of being without power, the extremely low initial estimate of affected residents infuriated people in Queens. Con Ed originally claimed that around 2,000 customers (or 8,000 people) lost power. The more than ten-fold increase offered later, coupled with a refusal by Burke to state definitively when power would be restored, only stoked the outrage. Con Ed did expedite the process for claiming reimbursement for food spoilage, which can be up to $350 for households and $7,000 for businesses. But otherwise, their public relations has been disastrous.

It strains credulity that only around 2,000 customers would be affected by a blackout that hindered a major airport. Although it is possible that Con Edison deliberately deflated the estimate—-thereby risking the scorn it now faces—-the more likely explanation is that it simply does not know how to measure its customers.

The “rule of thumb” that 1 customer = 4 people is merely a guess. There does not appear to be any scientific technique for measuring how many people utilize particular portions of the electrical grid. Because Con Edison insists on framing estimates in terms of the number of customers rather than of the total population affected, it inevitably looks disingenuous.

Another flaw in Con Ed’s approach is relying on the complaints it receives by phone as its primary measurement of the extent of damage. What about the people whose only phone is powered by electricity? What about the fact that many people probably did not call because they assumed somebody else had called already? When Con Ed conducted a block-by-block canvas on day four of the blackout--something that could have happened on day two or even day one—-it finally recognized the extent of the problem.

The comments of City Council member Eric N. Gioia effectively convey the outrage. During the crisis Gioia stated of Burke, “I think he has put lives at risk and potentially cost lives.” Both Gioia and state Assemblymember Michael N. Gianaris have called for Burke’s resignation, and grilled him during City Council and Assembly hearings on July 31 and August 3. US Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has called for Con Edison to offer much greater compensation than $7,000 for affected businesses. Finally, William M. Flynn, chairman of the State of New York’s Public Service Commission, has come close to accusing Con Edison of lying during their investigation of what happened. At the Assembly hearing, Flynn stated, “With every word that they give us from now on, we’re going to go back and verify for its veracity.”

Mayor Bloomberg was the one prominent defender of Con Edison during the crisis, to the great anger of Queens residents and politicians. He defended the utility against a chorus of complaints, and at one point even proclaimed, “I don’t think that I could have gone in and done any better.” It now appears that this was a strategic move to smooth relations with Con Ed while the crisis unfolded. Following Con Ed’s release of the chronology on August 2, Bloomberg said, “Am I satisfied? Of course not…we are going to find out what happened and what steps we can take to make sure it does not happen in the future.”

Long-Term Implications of the Blackout

Mayor Bloomberg should want to prevent any repeats of the Queens 2006 blackout. But the sobering reality is that this prolonged blackout may not be our last.

Con Edison deserves criticism for its decision not to temporarily halt power and prevent a prolonged power outage, and especially for its absurdly low estimate of affected New Yorkers. But the larger forces that brought about the blackout are beyond the control of any utility.

The months of January through June of 2006 were the warmest first half of the year in the continental United States since 1895. On July 17, the day the blackout began, New Yorkers joined many other Americans in coping with oppressive heat.

Add to the rising temperatures the fact that New York will experience significant population growth over the next 20 years. The extent of the growth is up for debate, but our population will definitely increase. More people and hotter days will inevitably lead to more blackouts, and also cause greater strains on other parts of the city’s aging infrastructure.

The long-term solution to maintaining a thriving city will require modernizing our infrastructure and reducing global warming. The first part of this equation is more directly within the control of New Yorkers, but we can act on both fronts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

City's New Waste Plan and the Neighborhoods


Four years after the Bloomberg administration outlined a new strategy for disposing of the city’s garbage, the City Council, on July 19, 2006, approved the mayor’s plan. The new Solid Waste Management Plan (referred to by officials as SWMP) looks ahead to the next 20 years, and promises big long-term savings and better air quality for the city. But perhaps its greatest impact will be in the waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx.

 

The new plan would funnel most waste to eight transfer stations located on the waterfront in each of the boroughs. Barges and trains would then take the waste out of the city, avoiding the use of thousands of tractor trailers and the significant traffic and environmental impacts they give birth to. Over time the plan would save the city money by streamlining operations, though in the short term costs will go up. The plan would also move responsibility for recycling into a separate office, sheltering it from the Department of Sanitation’s institutional distaste for recycling that has in the past led to the abolition of the entire program. Recycling will now expand and greater emphasis will be placed on the education of residents and businesses.

 

The Role of Neighborhoods

 

Most news reports failed to recognize the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods (OWN) as one of the intellectual authors of the new strategy. This group, a coalition of 26 community organizations that got together over a decade ago to fight the concentration of private waste transfer stations in their neighborhoods, came up with the idea of retrofitting some of the city’s existing marine transfer stations, combining both household and commercial waste in a single plan, and insuring that no one borough had to bear the burden for the rest of the city. OWN’s members include neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx that take some 70 percent of all waste (excluding construction waste). OWN’s plan, prepared with the help of the Consumer’s Union and released in 2000, has three major components:

  1. retrofit the marine transfer stations,=
  2. boost recycling
  3. reduce waste.

 

In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, facing a rising budget for the Department of Sanitation and cries from impacted neighborhoods, announced a new city strategy that followed the main lines of the OWN plan. The OWN plan is the first city-wide plan generated by neighborhood groups.

 

Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE (United Puerto Ricans of Sunset Park), a member of OWN, was elated at the City Council action. “We were delighted that the mayor pushed for this plan and the Speaker had the wisdom to work with him.” Yeampierre, who also chairs the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance , was quick to note that Brooklyn’s Sunset Park “is one of the city’s environmentally burdened communities” yet it “has accepted its responsibility” since one of the large marine transfer stations is located there. “We’re still trying to get the capacity of this facility reduced,” she said. When asked what she thought about the continuing opposition of Upper East Side (Manhattan) residents to a smaller facility in their neighborhood, Yeampierre replied that “environmental burdens have to be shared.”

 

Waste Export vs. Sustainability

 

The concept of “sustainability” mentioned by Yeampierre deserves some careful consideration and could point the way towards greater progress on waste. Sustainability generally means planning to meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. Up to now, solid waste policy has been driven by short-term pragmatic steps that failed to look at long-term consequences. For about a century, the Department of Sanitation’s role has been literally to take out the trash. First it was stuffed into landfills and when landfill space ran out, it was exported. In 1987, the city increased the fees at its last remaining landfill, Fresh Kills in Staten Island, without planning for the rash of new privately-owned waste transfer stations that sprung up, principally in low-income communities of color. Most of the city’s waste wound up going through these neighborhoods.

 

The assault on these neighborhoods by trash dealers was combated by a nascent environmental justice movement, which claimed that these communities were getting a grossly disproportionate share of the waste. Many of these neighborhoods were already burdened with polluting facilities and had exceptionally high levels of asthma that could be related to diesel truck fumes, traffic, and poorly managed waste facilities. They pressured City Hall to adopt strict regulations governing private waste transfer stations, as required under Local Law 40. When local activists went into battle, they soon linked arms.

 

When Mayor Rudolph Giuliani closed the city’s last landfill in 2001, the city’s sanitation agency kept on doing what it had been doing in the past, taking out the trash. Once all of the city’s waste was exported the Department of Sanitation budget grew rapidly, nearly doubling in amount.

 

The one part of OWN’s agenda that advanced very little with the new solid waste management plan was waste reduction. While city government has taken some important steps to reduce its own waste, legislation will be required to tackle the enormous trash flow resulting from unnecessary product packaging, the outdated bottle return law, and the low cost to manufacturers for making rapidly obsolescent products that can’t easily be recycled. Groups like INFORM and the NYC Waste Reduction Coalition have been in the forefront of proposing methods to reduce the total volume of waste. Looking forward, their efforts need to be linked with the efforts of the neighborhoods and government to deal with the more fundamental issues of sustainability. A lot more can be done to reduce the sheer volume of waste that’s exported. New technology may allow for decentralized systems to compost organic waste from kitchens, including the restaurants that produce most of Manhattan’s commercial waste, but it may take legislation and more innovation in government to make this happen.

 

Related Articles, Reports And Sites

Taking Out the Trash, OWN/Consumers Union

UPROSE

 

Newly Approved Trash Plan Puts Emphasis on Recycling by Winnie Hu, 7/21/06 NY Times

 

City Council Backs Mayor’s Trash Disposal Plan by Winnie Hu, 7/20/06 NY Times

 

New York City Environmental Justice Alliance

 

INFORM

 

NYC Waste Prevention Coalition

 

 

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. 

Creating a Healthy Future for Harlem and New York City




Kids Playing Baseball in Harlem

That which ails society as a whole is usually at crisis level in the poorest neighborhoods and communities of color. This is particularly true when dealing with issues of health. Ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke and AIDS occur at alarming rates in Harlem, the area I represent in the New York City Council.

A 2004 report by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene illustrates the significant correlation between income and health. For instance, those who live in low-income neighborhoods are more than six times more likely to contract AIDS than those who reside in higher income neighborhoods. Likewise, low-income residents are more than three times more likely to have diabetes and suffer from a stroke.

The relationship between an individual's income level and their physical condition exists for a number of reasons.

First and probably most importantly, the overwhelming majority of low-income families have poor or no access to preventive health care. Annual visits to the doctor can often prevent serious illness or deteriorating health conditions.

Poor eating habits also play a key role. Many neighborhoods in New York City are in desperate need of grocery

Public School Yards Should Be Open to the Public

By Gale Brewer

On weekdays, the schoolyard at PS 9 on West 84 Street in Manhattan buzzes with students climbing on the jungle gym, skipping rope, and playing basketball. But on the weekends, the scene is different; the playground is empty and the gate to the yard is locked.

It was not always this way. In years past, the schoolyard was open on evenings and over the weekends and neighbors used the area as a place to play with their children and to meet with one another.

This is also the case in more than 700 other schoolyards across the city. All of the underutilized schoolyards occupy approximately 948 acres of public land - an area greater than that of Central Park.

Despite a clear lack of recreational open space for residents, the Department of Education has closed most of its schoolyards to the public during the evenings and on weekends. In fact, 73 percent of all Department of Education schoolyards lie empty when school is not in session.

The citywide closure of playgrounds has occurred only in the last ten years. The exact rationale for closing schoolyards to the public seems to be unclear, but in most cases, the policy has persisted with little resistance.

And although the majority of schoolyards are closed to the public outside of school hours, roughly 300 schoolyards across the city do remain available to the public when children are not in the building. The majority of these are operated by the Department of Parks and Recreation, although additionally almost 25 have been “adopted” for operation by the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit land conservation organization.

As more and more families are denied access to outdoor recreational spaces, it has become increasingly challenging for parents to promote their children's physical health.

Designating or creating new public space in New York City is an enormous challenge, requiring us to be creative in our effort to provide residents of all neighborhoods with access to adequate recreational facilities.

Let's open our public spaces to the public and give New Yorkers the space they need.

Gale Brewer represents the Upper West Side district 6 in the New York City Council

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

stores that offer more quality foods. Unfortunately, some residents only can shop at smaller stores that do not offer many fruits, vegetables, or other healthy foods. Likewise, nutritious food is often more expensive, which is why many parents purchase items with little nutritional value, such sugar-filled fruit drinks, rather than real juice.

Finally, too many New Yorkers ignore the benefits of exercise, particularly for children who are forming the habits that they will carry into adulthood. Physical fitness classes in our schools have become more lax, and we have simultaneously allowed our children to spend more and more free time on the Internet, playing video games, or watching television. There is little green space in many of our neighborhoods and what we have is often not maintained.

The only solution to this growing health crisis is to educate and engage our communities in healthy practices, beginning with young people.

HEALTHY EATING

Studies have shown that 27 percent of New York City's kindergarteners are obese and 15 percent are overweight. It is likely that these children will grow into adults who continue these unhealthy practices, causing harm to their own bodies and risking the well-being of those who depend upon them.

City agencies and various community-based groups have been gradually developing and implementing programs that will hopefully help us put our community on the track to good health. And fortunately, we are beginning to see these initiatives take shape.

Dr. Gregory Hodge, who is the principal of the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, has created an evening cooking class for both parents and students. This class is geared toward teaching how to cook healthy and fulfilling meals while also increasing the interaction between the parents and the school itself.

The world-famous Sylvia's Restaurant and North General Hospital have taken a similar course of action. These two local establishments have joined forces to create a cooking curriculum that will be implemented in public schools. This program also has the goal of teaching high school students how to diet properly, which can affect one's performance in the classroom. The curriculum will teach children how to tweak familiar foods and recipes in order to make them healthier. The program is still in the planning stages, but when it is complete it will act as a model, giving students the ability to prepare savory foods that are also healthy.

A coalition of health organizations and philanthropists have also created the Healthy Schools Program, designed to improve the nutritional value of food served in cafeterias, increase physical activity during the school day and after school, and implement classroom lessons on healthy lifestyles.

City agencies have created innovative ways to promote healthy living. For example, the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene recently encouraged the owners of small grocery stores in Harlem to sell low-fat milk. Historically, stores in Harlem have been reluctant to sell low-fat milk because they felt that it was not in demand. City officials helped with the promotion and even gave out free samples to children and their parents. The response was very positive and a number of small grocery store owners have recently committed to buying low-fat milk in the future.

PROMOTING PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

We must also make a push to increase physical activity in our schools.

As a City Council member, I have received numerous complaints about the shortcomings of gym classes in our public schools. Overcrowding, lack of gym or classroom space, poor equipment and inadequate lesson planning have created an environment in which physical activity is no longer emphasized. Schools must begin to implement physical education programs that are more demanding, and it is essential that these classes take place five times a week.

Programs such as S.P.A.R.K. (Sports, Play and Active Recreation for Kids), a school based program that promotes physical activity, should be used as the model in engaging our children, parents and teachers in different types of physical activity that will strengthen both their body and mind.

HIV EDUCATION

HIV/AIDS continues to be a problem in the New York City, particularly in low-income neighborhoods.

The mayor’s office has taken a tremendous step by setting in place a curriculumthat seeks to educate young children on this particular topic. It is well documented that prior to this initiative the city was falling far short of its mandated responsibility to educate students in grades K through 8 on health, particularly HIV and AIDS awareness. Moving forward, we hope that this new initiative will make children more aware of their bodies and the responsibility that comes with having sex.

I hope we will continue to create innovative ways to encourage New Yorkers, both young and old, to take proactive health measures that increase their chances of living a long and productive life.

A COMMITMENT TO THE FUTURE

With all of the negative things that are taking place in our nation and New York City, we must work to correct things over which we have direct control. Preventive health programs are a necessity for all New York City residents, and we must encourage proactive health initiatives in low-income communities.

We must not allow socioeconomic level be a deterrent from healthy living. Healthy schools and parents create mentally and physically sound children that will one day affect the path of our beloved city and great nation.

Inez Dickens represents district 9 in the New York City Council.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Counting The Empty Buildings


Not long ago, 240 Manhattan Avenue, a six-story apartment building at 110th Street, would have fit right into its Harlem neighborhood. Nearby vacant lots served as dumping grounds for garbage and meeting places for rats. Morningside Park across the streets was a popular place to smoke crack.

But the vacant lots are gone, replaced by gleaming new residential buildings, the rats are gone, and in the park, people are lighting charcoal for family barbecues.

While many other buildings have been rehabilitated, somehow 240 Manhattan Avenue has been left out of the transformation. The building has been vacant since 1999, according to the city housing department's Web site. (Its owner, Baruch Singer, could not be reached for comment.)

Its boarded-up windows, peeling and fading paint and locked-up entryways seem to defy logic: How could anyone leave vacant such a building in such a "hot" area? How could anyone abandon it? More generally, with all the talk about a housing crisis in the city, why is any available space not being utilized?

Those are the kinds of questions that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's office is hoping to answer with a survey of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, the first survey of its type in decades. Stringer's office has organized over 100 volunteers to walk block-by-block through neighborhoods on the Lower East Side and Harlem, among other areas, where abandoned or vacant buildings are not uncommon.

"We want to do this count to see how far we've come in the last 35 years and better understand why the abandoned buildings still exist despite the hot real estate market," Stringer explained.

Abandoned, Or Just Vacant?

Certainly, the city has come a long way. In the 1980s, the city controlled over 100,000 apartments; today, it controls a little over 2,000. Little by little, the city has shed the buildings it seized from landlords who did not pay their real estate taxes. Some were turned over to the tenants themselves, others were turned over to non-profit organizations.

The distressed buildings remaining today such as 240 Manhattan Avenue -- abandoned or neglected by their owners -- are knottier problems. Few are probably abandoned, said Mark Alexander of Urban Builders Collaborative and a long-time developer.

"Often times, what looks like an abandoned building is not an abandoned building," Alexander said. "They are buildings with vacant apartments above occupied stores."

The buildings are vacant for two general reasons, Alexander said.

"In lower Manhattan and selected parts of northern Manhattan, these are potential development sites," he said. But conflicts between multiple owners or financial difficulties owners would face if they actually tried to rehabilitate a vacant building effectively prevent development of the vacant building, he said.

"In the northern part of Manhattan and outer boroughs, [vacant buildings are] largely a result of the neighborhood distress of the 1970s and 1980s," Alexander said. "Landlords could not afford to maintain the apartments above the storefronts. It was not economic to maintain the apartments. They vacated them because they couldn't make money off of them."

In other cases, however, the city owns buildings that landlords abandoned. Elaine Toribio of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council said those cases are perhaps easier to understand.

"The reasons those sites might not be developed is the city hasn't gotten its act together on which agency should develop the property," Toribio said. "And even once they have a plan, it could be an issue of money."

"It's easier to understand why they're vacant and boarded up when the city owns them," Toribio said. "But when it's a privately owned building, you can just kind of shrug and say, ‘Who knows what the person is thinking?'"

Forced Vacancy

But some advocates said in some cases what the person is thinking is, ‘Let's keep this building vacant in order to make apartments scarce and consequently drive up rents.'

"I think that's part of the issue because of the fact you're dealing with supply and demand," said Roosevelt Orphee of Picture the Homeless, which has organized the survey with Stringer's office. "Leaving the supply down, you up the ante, so some people just can't get in the game and you change the dynamics of the market.

"The landlords are keeping them off line and losing money, so what's going on?" Orphee added. "They are not stupid. They're speculating."

In other cases, Orphee said landlords had admitted to him that they simply do not want the hassle of dealing with tenants.

"Landlords are finding ways to make money without dealing with tenants," he said.

It would not surprise some, too, if landlords were hoping to get a building deregulated by leaving it vacant for years.

Next Steps

Doing the survey will be easier than devising ways to address the problem of distressed buildings, Stringer admitted.

“We want to really put this information into a database and figure out what to do about it,” he said. “You can’t just go out and say let’s build affordable housing when there is no vacant land. When we do talk to developers and building owners we want to have an intelligent discussion.”

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drowning and Rescue in New York


Surrounded by waters with treacherous currents New York City offers up plenty of ways -- intentional and unintentional -- of getting in too deep. Yet, even with all the water surrounding the city, there are surprisingly few deaths each year.

The police department's Harbor Unithas 28 divers whose duties include rescuing people and recovering bodies from the 146 square miles of New York waters. They work from helicopters or boats, and must deal with low visibility in the sometimes murky water.

Drowning Accidents

Most at risk for unintentional drowning are teenage boys. "The most common drowning victims are males in their teen years through their mid-20s," reports New York Department of Health.

Their stories are poignant. An adventuresome 14-year-old boy, Joseph Johnson, exploring the Bronx River on a raft made of found objects along the shoreline, drowned when his raft sank in June 2005. Johnson, who had climbed through a hole in the fence along the river, couldn't swim.

That same month, a group of teenage boys got in trouble swimming too close to a rocky jetty in Long Beach. The waves battered them against the rocks, and one, Yuhang Gao, 15, of Flushing, Queens, drowned. It was the day before the beaches officially opened, so no lifeguards were patrolling.

Young men at risk are not just a New York phenomenon. Nationwide, 80 percent of all drowning victims are male, and drowning is the second-leading cause of death from injury for children from 1 to 14 years of age. African American children from age 5 to 19 drowned at 2.3 times the rate of white children. That is because African Americans are less likely to know how to swim, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

But overall drownings are relatively uncommon in New York City. In fact, if you want to avoid accidental drowning, New York City is one of the best places to live – despite all the water. The rate of drownings here is less than a quarter of the national rate (1.14 per 100,000 people nationally, .28 for the city). Of the 1,078 accidental deaths in New York City in 2004 ( latest statisticavailable from the New York City Department of Health), there were 22 drownings. That includes deaths such as babies drowning in bathtubs as well as kids getting in trouble playing in rivers and beaches.

Accidents

Not just daredevil kids perish in the waters around New York. Aircraft, boats and construction projects can also cause danger in the water.

The year 2005 was a particularly rough one for aircraft over New York waterways. A small airplane crashed off of Coney Island last May and killed three tourists from West Virginia along with the pilot from Queens. Two helicopters crashed into the East River last June. One was loaded with sightseers and the other with executives from MBNA. All survived with the help of police divers and other rescuers.

In the city, lethal boating accidents are also rare. A powerboat ran into a rowing shell with four men at the oars in the Harlem River in October 2005. The men were out for their regular early-morning exercise. One, Jim Runsdorf, a real estate developer, 41, lost his life in the accident. Another rower was injured. The crash was judged an accident because of low visibility in the pre-dawn.

Ocean waters are particularly treacherous for boats. In June, postal worker Jeremiah Swinton died after the fishing boat he was in capsized off of Breezy Point.

Construction workers can also be the victims of accidents in the water. Last October, Kervin Collado, who was working on the Third Avenue Bridge, fell into the Harlem River. A Fire Department diver could not get to him before he died.

Suicide

The city offers tempting methods of self-destruction in the water. Despite that, of the 493 people claimed by suicide in 2004, only 15 died by drowning. The most notorious such suicide in recent years was that of storyteller Spalding Gray, who jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in January 2004. Causing additional distress to his family and fans, his body didn't surface for two months. It finally washed up near Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

In March, a 14-year-old boy, Sidney Hatchett, climbed over the railing along the promenade under the FDR Drive. His 6-year-old sister ran for help, but by the time rescuers arrived, the teenager had drowned. He was depressed over being bullied at school, his mother later said.

People wishing to end their lives may also seek out bridges although the bridges are designed to prevent falls and jumps. Guardrails and tall fences along bridge walkways deflect most potential suicides.

Some try and fail. Jumping off a bridge provides a more likely method of self-destruction, but it's not a sure means of demise. In May 2005, a 20-year-old woman survived the 135-foot fall from the Brooklyn Bridge. She was taken to the hospital where she was in critical condition. A 24-year-old Bronx man, Hector Amid, also survived his leap from the Brooklyn Bridge in March 2004.

Surviving such a leap is called "taking a Brodie." The phrase originated with a man named Brodie who survived after leaping from the bridge on a bet in 1886.

While the police maintain jurisdiction over most water rescues, the Fire Department sometimes comes to the rescue. A ladder company resounded to a 911 call when a suicidal man jumped off the Triborough Bridge in December 2005. Rescuers lowered their ladder from the bridge to rescue the man, who clung to a wall (evidently having changed his mind about wanting to die).

It's not always possible to determine how someone entered the water to commit suicide - or if their death was in fact a suicide. Mystery still surrounds the death of 34-year-old jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, whose body was pulled from the East River in Brooklyn in 1970 after missing for 20 days. The death was ruled accident or suicide, and talk swirled of a more nefarious end to the brilliant musician's career.

A police spokesperson says that the department does not track how many people attempt to jump off of New York City bridges-or how many succeed.

No Escape

Not everyone who gets pulled out of the waters wants to be rescued. In April, a car thief being pursued by police jumped out of his car and right into the East River at the Madison Avenue Bridge at 135th Street. Police helicopters and boats continued the chase. Even in the dark, they could see his shiny bald head, and though he continued to try to get away, police pulled the uninjured suspect from the water in less than 20 minutes.

After a man in his 30s who was holding a baby, jumped in the water off of Edgewater Street in Staten Island in March, a police officer in uniform jumped in and rescued the baby. Rescuers also grabbed the man.

Safety

Railings and police vigilance will only help some of those who get in deep waters. The Red Cross says the best method of surviving is learning to swim. Swimmers should never go in the water alone and should only swim where there are lifeguards. The New York Red Cross website lists swimming classes: http://www.nyredcross.org/takeaclass.php

While New York beaches do have lifeguards in the summertime, none of the city's rivers have beaches or lifeguards. So even in the dog days of summer, when a dip in the Hudson or East River is most tempting, it's not a good idea to dive in.

Boaters should wear life jackets and avoid alcohol. The NYPD Harbor Unit recommends a boating safety course (888-FOR-USPS).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zoning Versus Planning in Manhattanville


The New York press is flooded with stories and editorials about the fight over Columbia University’s expansion plans, but most accounts ignore a key part of the story. Unlike the opponents who successfully fought Columbia’s 1968 plan to build a gym in Morningside Heights, today’s community residents and students, while they too protest Columbia’s proposals, have their own plan for the area.

Columbia proposes to build 17 acres worth of campus in the Manhattanville area of West Harlem. The university would develop about seven million square feet of building space. The $7.4 billion project would take 25 to 30 years to complete and, according to Columbia, result in 2,000 construction jobs and another 9,000 permanent jobs. The project includes rezoning 35 acres and displacing some 400 people and 1,600 jobs.

Columbia has made much of its willingness to listen to and meet with community residents and businesses, to help relocate those displaced, and to mobilize their signature architect, Renzo Piano, to design a new campus that is more inviting to the community. Piano’s designs purport to open up the new campus to the street grid, promote ground floor retail, and generally create quality urban space instead of a campus enclave.

But other people – in the community, on campus and elsewhere – see a future for the area that includes a different kind of Columbia expansion – and much more than the university’s plan to rezone the area to spur new growth.

The Community Plan

After scores of community meetings, Manhattan Community Board 9, which includes West Harlem, put together their own vision of the future. Drawn up with the help of the Pratt Institute Center for Community Development and the Department of City Planning, the plan was submitted to the City Planning Commission in the fall of 2005, at the same time the commission saw Columbia’s proposals to rezone the area. The commission ruled that the community plan met minimal requirements for consideration under Section 197-a of the City Charter. This provision allows community boards to do their own plans and submit them for official approval by the borough president, planning commission and City Council.

The community’s broad-ranging 197-a plan differs from Columbia’s rezoning scheme in several ways. The community plan includes, but is not limited to, rezoning the area so that Columbia can expand. The plan calls for preservation of existing housing and businesses as well as new development in keeping with the existing built environment. It would protect and expand low cost housing. Instead of eliminating industrial and auto-related activities, the mixed-use character of the neighborhood would be expanded. Redevelopment would be achieved without the use of eminent domain to force existing owners and tenants to leave. And any rezoning would be done to help implement the community plan, whereas Columbia's rezoning proposal reflects mainly its own development needs.

While Columbia’s proposals for rezoning leaves the future of the neighborhood to the vagaries of the real estate market, the community plan calls for a different kind of development that would shape instead of succumb to the market. This would include limiting the amount and scale of new residential development. The community plan favors the use of innovative green or environmentally friendly building technology, zero waste development, and proposes specific measures to improve the quality of the environment. This responds, in part, to community concerns about Columbia’s plans to build a biotech facility that could pose risks to community health. The plan also calls for expanded social services for those in the community so that neighborhood residents get services on a par with Columbia’s student services.

Columbia’s rezoning plan would allow the university to pursue its expansion plans, but create uncertainty for the rest of the neighborhood. The proposed rezoning from manufacturing to residential and institutional uses will increase land prices and rents, feeding neighborhood concerns about displacement and gentrification. The phenomenon has already had effects in other parts of Harlem, creating concern among people with modest incomes about whether they will be being able to stay in their neighborhoods.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger has been adamant that his vision of the university’s future requires that Columbia build on the entire tract of land between 125th and 133rd Streets. Nearby residents have a role he said – but should not be all powerful. “We are trying to do things that help the world more broadly. The community is not everything," he told the Times

Meanwhile, the City Planning Commission, the city’s main decision-making body on planning and zoning, has looked at both the community plan and Columbia’s zoning proposal and told both parties to “enter into a dialogue and make good faith efforts to achieve consensus.” Some discussions are taking place but so far no one seems to have budged very much. Community representatives recently created a local development corporation that will negotiate a legally binding “community benefits agreement” with Columbia. Agreements like this can be useful when consensus can’t be reached, but once those discussions start it is hard to imagine where the consensus will come from.

While the city’s planning department worked closely with Columbia and the community to devise their respective proposals, the planning department and commission have stayed on the sidelines. This poses the risk that the planning commission could act hastily and without adequate information when the plans finally get submitted for their approval.

Columbia’s Iron Fist and Velvet Glove

According to some community activists, Columbia’s relations with its neighbors had improved substantially until a few years ago. A decade ago, the university put together a working group involving a number of community representatives to explore options for the school’s expansion. The university’s administration worked quietly to develop trust and partnerships with local groups and activists.

Then a couple of years ago the velvet gloves came off. As if to remind everyone that, in any partnership, Columbia would always be the senior partner, the school’s administration floated the idea that, if they had to, they would get the Empire State Development Corporation to condemn the property needed for the university expansion. This provided a sharp reminder to all that Columbia had access to the pinnacles of government.

The threat of condemnation has often been called “planner’s blight” because it can force owners to sell and businesses to close decades before anything new goes up on the site. Under Governor George Pataki, the state development corporation has let developers use the threat of eminent domain to force deals with local property owners and create the impression that nothing can be done to stop the development bulldozer (as in Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, for example).

Despite the relatively good years of the 1990s, some community activists think Columbia never took community participation seriously. According to Nellie Bailey of the Coalition to Preserve Community, “Columbia created an image of engagement and their dialogue was not of substance. For years they have worked behind the scenes to push their agenda. They pressured business owners to sell and the city’s housing agency to get rid of tenants.”

Now, with the threat of condemnation facing them, residents worry they cannot be equal partners in the University’s Community Advisory Committee. And it is not only residents: Columbia’s own students have formed the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification and neighborhood residents and businesses have come together in the Coalition to Preserve Community. According to the student coalition, “we are unified in our commitment to continue to work and stand in solidarity with those most affected by the process of gentrification, and in our commitment to educate and mobilize the student body towards a goal of greater university accountability.”

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. 

Rent Hikes Create Need for Special Housing


While the city's Rent Guidelines Board deliberated on rent increases for almost one million apartments in the city, the Supportive Housing Network of New York held a conference celebrating new money and interest in building housing for particularly vulnerable populations. The two issues - rent increases and building supportive housing - are not unrelated: As rents go up, people are forced to move and the government needs to step in to provide more affordable housing.

For the first time in its history, the Rent Guidelines Board held a public hearing in the Bronx as part of its 2006 deliberations on how much to increase rents. It was a fitting place to hear painful testimony: Most Bronx tenants live in rent stabilized apartments. The Bronx Housing Court has the highest number of cases filed for non-payment of rent and issues more warrants for eviction than any other housing court in the city.

As the board's chair, Marvin Markus, learned, the packed Hostos College Main Hall was no place to sneer at tenants. When he told boisterous tenants who crowded to "shut up," a tenant at the public microphone shouted back at him, "Don't you talk to them like that! Show some respect!"

The sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to the range of increases -- 3 to 6.5 percent on one-year leases and 5 to 8.5 percent on two-year leases -- the board approved in a preliminary vote May 8. One man, speaking with a tone of dread, said times were happier when the city had no rent regulation. But he was roundly hissed, along with a landlord, and left quickly after he spoke.

"You need to know the suffering these people are going through," Reverend John Powis of the Bushwick Housing Independence Project told the board. "More and more people are moving out of New York City because they cannot afford to pay the rent.... Everybody is afraid."

But privately Powis said he was not expecting much. "It's a sham," he said of the board's deliberation.

The board has always voted to increase rents.

In the past, Markus and the landlords' representatives on the board have conceded that the city has an affordable housing crisis. But, they have said, that problem needs to be addressed by government, not landlords.

As for the government, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has embarked on a 10-year plan to build and preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing. But reports continue to show a severe shortage of affordable apartments. A New York University studysaid the number of apartments affordable for moderate income households in the city dropped by more than 200,000 - or 17 percent - between 2002 and 2005. And more and more New Yorkers spend more and more of their incomes on rent.

For those who are most disadvantaged, much attention lately has focused on supportive housing. This interest arises partly from a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, "Million Dollar Murray" and partly from the third New York/New York agreement to finance construction of more supportive housing.

Supportive housing is a catchall term that has referred to facilities that provide an array of services to people suffering persistent mental illnesses. Many of these people might always need some sort of supportive housing, said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.

Targeting chronically homeless people and devoting significant resources to help them - psychiatric services and substance abuse counseling, for example - has, when made available, correlated with a decline in the homeless shelter population, Markee added.

But providing those services is not easy, said some workers who attended the June conference.

"A lot of the people [placed in the facilities] don't utilize the services," said Michele Hall, a social worker in one Manhattan facility, who said many of the resident have debilitating diseases. "They really have to have the motivation to change."

The New York/New York III agreement will provide financing for the construction and operation of 9,000 supportive housing units over 10 years in New York City. There are currently about 25,000 supportive housing units located in about 360 projects in New York City.

Advocates for the homeless were happy to get a third agreement - it took seven years - but disappointed that much of the housing actually will not be ready until after 2010.

Unlike the past New York/New York agreements, this one aims to expand the "target populations" for the housing to foster children aging out of foster care and homeless families with other "special needs."

"We had to broaden our scope significantly ... and make family supportive housing more significant," explained George Nashak of the city's homeless services department. Previous New York/New York agreements focused on housing for seriously and persistently mentally ill people.

Expanding the targets poses challenges, experts at the conference said. "This is not business as usual," said Tim O'Hanlon of the city's Administration for Children's Services. "In fact, this is targeted at very different populations."

Serving "different populations" means the non-profit organizations that run supportive housing facilities will have to hire people qualified to work with those populations. At least one person at the conference pointed out that at salaries as low as $22,000 annually, finding those people is difficult.

"If you have lots of housing, that's great," he said. "But without competent staff, you're not going to do the job."

The experts at the conference also said that organizations would have to try to obtain new funding assistance and increase their capacities. In other states, Medicaid funding, for example, has been used to pay for supportive housing services.

Finding places to build supportive housing is also an issue in the city, O'Hanlon said. Community opposition to supportive housing is a frequent issue at community board meetings wherever projects are proposed. But the development of successful facilities have been has made finding sites easier, O'Hanlon added. "There wasn't ever a concept of supportive housing when we started," he said. "The success of what we did ... has changed their minds." Perhaps. In some areas of the city, board members have complained that their neighborhoods are dumping grounds for this type of housing. The "success" of local facilities is not always so convincing, particularly when critics point out that richer and whiter neighborhoods never get picked for such developments.

So how is supportive housing related to the deliberations of the Rent Guidelines Board? Well, supportive housing is certainly a unique type of housing - and could not exist without government subsidies. Many of the people, maybe most, living in supportive housing might never be able to move out. But when I asked one worker what prevented those who could move on she said it all: "They can't afford to move."

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rent Regulation and The Division Of Housing and Community Renewal


For many New Yorkers, the words “rent regulation" immediately conjure up the boisterous annual deliberations of the Rent Guidelines Board. The board's deliberations this year, now ongoing, promise to be more boisterous than last year, when political pressure from the mayor's office kept the board from giving landlords a huge spike in rents on the almost one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city.

The board's June 19 hearing, which will take place for the first time in the Bronx, could be the most intense yet. Tenant organizers are working to bring out as many tenants as possible in the borough that has the highest number of tenants hauled to court for non-payment of rent.

The rent spike this year could set a record. Its public members, appointed by the mayor, largely determine the final outcome of the board's deliberations. It does not bode well for tenants that last month the mayor dumped the one public member, Martin Zelnick, an architect, who showed the greatest concern for tenants in recent years.

The board's annual deliberations, however, are just one piece of the rent regulation system, albeit the piece that generally gets the most attention. Of equal or greater significance is the work of the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), the agency charged with enforcing the laws that apply to rent-regulated apartments.

Some tenant advocates are hopeful that with the election of a new governor next year, the state agency would do a better job of protecting tenant rights. Critics charge that the agency has gotten so bad under Governor George Pataki that the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, which the agency enforces, should be renamed the Emergency Landlord Protection Act.

The Division of Housing and Community Renewal is also the state's main housing development agency and its efforts on that front, too, have drawn complaints from housing advocates.

The agency is adamant in its own defense, releasing a statement that said in part: "This agency has a very strong and distinguished record supporting affordable housing and tenants' rights across this state, and we take that role very seriously."

Pro-Landlord Or Pro-Common Sense?

State Senator Liz Krueger is one of those who is disappointed in the agency’s performance. "It's not a surprise that people have a high frustration level" with the state's housing agency, Krueger said. "Dramatic problems have been growing in DHCR over the years. Some of their interpretations [of housing laws] raise red flags."

Tenant advocates charge that on virtually every type of complaint tenants can file and every type of request to increase rents landlords can file, the agency comes out on the side of landlords.

Take the case of "preferential rents." Wherever landlords have trouble renting apartments or where they have sought to keep a tenant, landlords have offered to rent apartments for less than the rent registered with the agency. For years, the agency considered preferential rents the base rent for that tenant. But following a change in the law in 2003, when a lease renews on a rent stabilized apartment, the landlord can now charge an increase based on the (higher) legal registered rent. The agency's interpretation of this change show its favoritism,say some critics.

"Even when the lease says the preferential rent will last the length of the tenancy, (DHCR) is ignoring it and allowing landlords to charge the legal registered rent upon renewal," said Kenny Schaeffer of the Met Council on Housing. "It's a terrible idea" for tenants to complain to DHCR about preferential rents, he added. Instead, they should seek to address the matter at housing court, he said.

The decisions on preferential rents are not unfair, replied Mitch Posilkin, general counsel of the Rent Stabilization Association, a trade group that represents property owners across the city.

"We think it's common sense," Posilkin said. "When a landlord is willing to accept less, and then at some point down the road the landlord says he wants to collect what he's allowed to collect, tenants view that as the end of the world."

Major Capital Improvements

Tenant advocates said another example of pro-landlord bias is Major Capital Improvements. Landlords who make big repairs or improvements to their buildings - say, installing a new boiler or replacing the elevator - can pass along the costs of such improvements to tenants. These costs are added to tenants' rents -- permanently. Landlords who make such improvements will get reimbursed for much more than the actual cost of the work.

Over the years, the state agency has decided that costs associated with MCIs can also be passed along. These "enhanced MCIs" stretch the rules, said Bob Katz, general counsel to the Queens League of United Tenants.

"They included the costs of pruning trees and seeding lawns -- in order to put in a boiler," Katz said of one MCI request made by a Queens landlord.

Pushing Towards Deregulation Or Toward More Evenhandedness?

Advocates believe that one motivation pushes every request landlords make to increase rents: Deregulating rent stabilized apartments.

"All of this happens because landlords want to deregulate apartments," said Katz, who added that he overheard a state official telling landlords’ attorneys ten years ago that by the time Governor Pataki is out of office, “most of the apartments will be deregulated.”

"It's coming to pass. They're going down very, very quickly."

Others agreed that deregulation of rent regulated apartments - which can occur when a rent reaches $2,000 and becomes vacant - is the force pushing interpretations favoring landlords on MCIs, among other examples.

"Since George Pataki has been governor, there has been a shift toward landlords in the state legislature, the appellate courts and the housing court," said Sam Himmelstein, a tenant attorney.

But landlords see the agency as finally emerging from years of bias toward tenants.

"There's no question that historically DHCR was notoriously biased in favor of tenants," said Posilkin of the Rent Stabilization Association. "We would view it as a more evenhanded organization today. In the past, there were two possible results: no determination, where the case would languish, or a ruling against the owner."

Whether it is "evenhandedness" or "pro-landlord bias," the state housing agency's interpretations can be traced to its leadership, which changed significantly when George Pataki became governor, said Michael McKee of the Tenants Political Action Committee.

"As soon as Pataki was elected, he brought in top people from the real estate industry and turned the office of rent administration over to them," McKee said. An attorney who represented slumlords in Harlem, Marcia Hirsch, became the agency's general counsel, McKee said.

A former employee who worked at the agency for over 15 years agreed.

"Four or five people were hired to run the show," explained the former employee, who requested anonymity because he says he is still in the field and fears retaliation. "They basically swung the agency 180 degrees. (Agency staff) just assumed the top people wanted it interpreted in a pro-landlord way and they would, on their own, issue orders in favor of the landlords.

"Most of the people who were hired had worked as landlord representatives before. That certainly was a total change under Pataki."

And the agency came under pressure from attorneys representing landlords with cases before the agency, the former employee charged.

"There were certain landlords' attorneys who knew these few key people in the agency and could find a way to get a ruling in favor of their clients," the former employee said. "Eventually the exceptions they created would swallow the rule.... I think that went on a lot and probably still goes on to some extent."

The agency denied that allegation.

"These assertions are obviously the work of an unidentified former and disgruntled state employee," the agency said in a statement. "And we cannot say in stronger terms that the charges are false, inflammatory and wholly without merit or truth."

A Change In The Next Adminstration?

Would a Spitzer administration hire people to make the agency over? Housing advocates are not counting on it.

"My fear is that Mr. Spitzer comes from real estate money," said Himmelstein. "His father's a big landlord in New York.... He's been very good at going after Wall Street, but I bet you can't name one real estate person he's gone after."

"I am not aware of the attorney general's position on any of these issues," Posilkin said.

Spitzer could help everyone if he were to indicate more clearly how he views critical housing issues, McKee said.

"We don't know if Eliot Spitzer is going to be pro-rent regulation," he said. "He's carefully avoiding any mention of it. We've asked him. He hasn't said a word about being in favor of rent regulation, repealing home rule, or repealing high-rent decontrol.”

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

Greenpoint Waterfront Fire


People fighting for the character of Brooklyn's waterfront see a tragedy -- and suspect a crime -- in the spectacular fire that engulfed 15 abandoned industrial buildings on Greenpoint's waterfront May 2. "I'm in a state of mourning over the loss in Greenpoint," says industrial archeologist Mary Habstritt.

The buildings were likely to obtain landmark status, she says. The character and history of the industrial waterfront could have been maintained while transforming the site into a residential and business area befitting the burgeoning residential character of Greenpoint.

That isn't what the developer wanted. He planned to raze the old buildings to put up 2.6 million square feet of residential towers, townhouses and retail. The 10-alarm fire that ravaged the 21-acre site and took days to put out will probably make it more convenient, less complicated and less expensive for him to proceed as he had wished.

Suspected Arson

A day after the blaze, the Daily News reported that Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta immediately suspected arson. A tell-tale sign was that the fire began in the quiet pre-dawn. Another indication of suspicious origin was that many buildings quickly went up in fierce flames, even before the first fire trucks arrived.

Based on her knowledge of construction methods in the past, Mary Habstritt, who is president of the Roebling Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology, had additional reasons to see an arsonist's hand. She says that in the 1890s, when some of the buildings on the site went up, there weren't sophisticated methods, as there are today, for preventing and fighting fires. Giant timbers, heavy and dense enough to withstand all but the hottest fire, spanned the floors and were set into holes in the brick walls. If a fire did rage through, the timbers should have fallen out of the walls, leaving the outside structure intact. But in this fire, Habstritt says, walls collapsed.

These buildings had resisted flames for more than a hundred years, says Habstritt. "They were constructed to resist fire. You couldn't get those timbers burning without help."

She dismisses the idea reported in some media that rope left over from the old rope factory was in the buildings and contributed to the flames. She has been inside of one of the old rope factory buildings, and it was completely bare.

A former tenant of one of Guttman's Brooklyn loft buildings, Anne McDonald, also harbored suspicions as soon as she learned of the fire, she says. The Guttman building she had lived in at 247 Water Street in the DUMBO area of Brooklyn (whose troubled history has been recounted in the Village Voice)had burned in 2004. The fire was investigated but evidence as to arson was inconclusive. Four other Brooklyn buildings owned by Guttman have burned since 1991, according to the New York Times, all of them judged as arson.

Guttman, who owns properties all over Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens, has never faced arson charges. Gotham Gazette's calls for comment to Guttman's home in Lawrence on Long Island and to his Brooklyn real estate office were not returned. His attorneys have told the media that he had nothing to do with the fires. They speculated that squatters or vagrants started the fire. One of his attorneys noted that Guttman did not have property damage insurance on the buildings.

Brooklyn Lofts

Some 20,000 people live in a state of legal limbo in lofts on the waterfront in Brooklyn, says McDonald. In SoHo in the 1980s, when artists moved into the lofts abandoned by light industry in the neighborhood, the legislature legalized residential use by artists. That led to the transformation of the neighborhood. No such legal dispensation aids Brooklyn loft tenants. Not everyone would want the law amended to include Brooklyn. That would lead to an even faster-paced change to the neighborhood with higher rents.

"Usually, the landlord and tenant are complicit" in the illegal residential use of loft spaces, says McDonald. "It's a little bit of a gray zone."

After leaving Guttman's building, McDonald found a new loft space in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park. The landlord there upgraded the property and recently received a certificate of occupancy, allowing residential living.

Landmark Worthy

Residential living in industrial property is the kind of thing that should have happened to the Greenpoint Terminal Market, say preservationists. The Municipal Art Society, a preservation group, had applied for landmark status. At least some of the buildings would have been preserved. There would have been accomodation for new high rises as well.

City Councilmember David Yassky supported landmarking of the buildings, which were in his district. He's not a knee-jerk preservationist. He favored substantial changes to the Austin-Nichols warehouse last year, even though the Landmarks Commission recommended landmarking the building. He persuaded the City Council to support the changes. The mayor supported landmarking, but the council overrode his veto. (Read my article on this, Old Industrial Buildings on the East River)

Habstritt and other preservationists see the loss of irreplaceable landmarks that convey the vital hurly burly of New York's industrial past. The value of the Greenpoint Terminal Market was in unique features, such as the dramatic bridges from building to building over West Street. There was the historical value, too. The buildings once held the largest rope and twine factory in the world. The waterfront location was practical. Materials to make rope came from imported materials unloaded from ships right by the factory. The place showed how it was the working waterways that made it possible for New York to become the great city it is. "We were really convinced that we were on the way to saving it," says Habstritt.

 

Jane Jacobs and New York


Jane Jacobs left New York City in 1968 and went into self-imposed exile in Canada. Yet when she died April 25 at the age of 89 in Toronto, she was remembered as one of the greatest advocates of New York City’s urbanism. While the rest of the country thought of New York as too densely developed, overcrowded, and dangerous, Jane Jacobs wrote passionately about how its density and diversity made the city livable and exciting.

In a nation that was mostly rural in 1898 when the City of New York was created, the American Dream was small town America and the big city was its nightmare. Jane Jacobs helped retire the myths of the big city.

Jacobs didn’t just wake up one morning in 1961 and write her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – today, required reading for architects, urban planners and everyone who study cities. Her ideas arose from her lived experience on Hudson Street, in Manhattan’s West Village, and from her years of active struggle to protect her neighborhood from the city’s grandiose urban renewal plans. A nemesis of Robert Moses, the city’s development czar, she saw the city’s planners call lively human-scale neighborhoods “slums” and “blighted,” then bulldoze them. They were replaced by dull high rises set in wide-open wastelands without a street life – the modernist model of the “tower in the park.” She fought and helped kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway and an urban renewal plan for her own neighborhood. Her book, released in 1961, resonated with the thousands of activists who were fighting battles against urban renewal, highways that cut through the hearts of cities, and grandiose megaprojects. Thus, her brilliant insights are best understood in their historical context, as contributions to the struggles to save neighborhoods from orthodox urban planning.

Jacobs saw incredible richness and diversity in neighborhoods that development-hungry planners disqualified as chaotic and dysfunctional. Of course, she had no financial stake in seeing her neighborhood leveled, and perhaps because of that there was a fundamental difference in the way she perceived the city. Cities aren’t just physical forms but rich landscapes for social and economic relations among people. How do people use the streets and sidewalks? How do the people who work in industries, retail customers, tenants and homeowners interact and coexist with one another? By asking these questions she came upon principles of physical planning that were embedded in the built environment. These relations, which at one point she likened to a “symphony,” and not the abstract visions of planners and developers, were for her the starting point for planning.

Jane Jacobs’ remarkable catalog of urban treasures has inspired generations of urban professionals searching for alternatives to the modernistic bombast and monumentalism that created sterile downtowns, isolated public housing, and sprawled suburban enclaves. Her work contributed to the flourishing of the neighborhood preservation movements, and influenced many other progressive New York urbanists including City Planning commissioners from Beverly Moss Spatt in the 1960s to Ron Shiffman in the 1990s, both advocates of decentralized planning involving neighborhoods. Author Roberta Gratz (The Livable City) and William Whyte, founder of Project for Public Spaces, carried forward many of her ideas. Indeed, there aren’t too many professional planners of all stripes who don’t acknowledge in some way her important contributions.

The city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and the federal government’s withdrawal of funds for large urban renewal and public works projects created fertile ground for Jacobs’ alternative way of seeing the city. After Robert Moses retired, government austerity left no money for ambitious public projects or for aggressive urban planners that would reincarnate the master builder. With widespread neighborhood abandonment, professionals had to search for ways to improve communities using the resources that were already there. Organizers and activists in community-based organizations, consciously or not, followed Jacobs’ approach of strengthening the human bonds in neighborhoods and building on existing assets. The city’s housing agency created neighborhood preservation programs. The city created a Landmarks Commission in 1965 that would help protect historic buildings and districts. And the City Planning Department later initiated contextual zoning to encourage new development in context with the existing built form. While all of these initiatives have their limitations, and some of them are used mostly to protect exclusive enclaves, they are part of a toolkit of measures that can be used to protect everything valuable in neighborhoods.

One area in which Jacobs’ admonitions have been mostly ignored is in planning for streets and sidewalks. She showed how mixing pedestrians, cars and bicycles and encouraging an active street life was important to livable neighborhoods. The city’s Department of Transportation, however, is mostly dedicated to moving as many vehicles as quickly as possible through streets. For the most part, the same logic applies to sidewalks. Jacobs felt that having many “eyes on the street” contributed to a lively and safe environment. That means encouraging people to move slowly, stop, talk, and “hang out,” and slowing vehicular traffic.

As happens with many great thinkers, Jane Jacobs is cited by real estate developers and planners who interpret her work in ways she might well question. For example, Alexander Garvin, influential urban planner in New York City, was quoted in the April 27 New York Times as saying The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “changed my life.” Yet Garvin’s reputation is as a pragmatic planner who tries to find better ways to accommodate new development, not community preservation. For example, he was the author of the city’s ambitious Olympics 2012 plan that created sports venues sharply disconnected from neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs on many occasions spoke up against such megaprojects in Toronto.

The New Urbanism is a recent trend in urban planning and architecture that proposes re-creating traditional, walkable communities following the model of 19th Century small-town America. But contrary to many of her critics, Jacobs wasn’t a nostalgic looking to idealize the old. The sterile New Urbanist experiments like Seaside and Celebration in Florida are a far cry from the bustling diversity that Jacobs saw in her West Village.

Jane Jacobs was hardly a traditionalist. She was truly a rebel. She dared to look lovingly and with care at her neighborhood. She stood up to the powerful Robert Moses. She criticized racial discrimination in housing and employment (for example, in her book The Economy of Cities, she cites W.E.B. DuBois and goes on to criticize the inadequacy of programs to aid minority contractors). Her family’s opposition to the war in Vietnam drove her to self-exile in Canada. And ever since then she supported progressive planning, and good hearty urban protest, throughout North America. She most recently sent a message of solidarity to community groups in Greenpoint/Williamsburg (Brooklyn) fighting the city’s massive waterfront rezoning project. Jane Jacobs was a true New Yorker.

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. 



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