6/21/04
Columbia University
Community Advisory Committee
CAC
MANHATTANVILLE IN WEST HARLEM CAMPUS PROJECT: COMMUNITY IMPACT &
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
June 21, 2004
Dorothy Désir and Dr. Joseph Wilson Editors
This document renders all previous CAC draft reports null and void.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Subcommittee Members..........................i
Acknowledgements...........................ii
Executive Summary...........................1
Subcommittee Reports
· Culture...............................4
Environmental...........................6
· Housing. ............................8
· Economic Development.......................10
· Employment.........................13
Conclusions & Recommendations.......................16
Appendices............................18a
References & Sources........................19a
CAC Subcommittee Members
Culture
Peter Arndtsen, Barbara Hohol, Joan Levine, Joan Morford, Norma Ramos Esq.,
Eric Washington
Chair Ms. Dorothy Désir
Environmental
Cecil Corbin-Mark, Nancy O'Hara, Norma Ramos Esq.
Chair Ms. Peggy Shepard
Housing
George Goodwill, Dr. Eliot Kahn, Dan Victor
Chair Dr. Joseph Wilson
Economic Development
Peter Arndtsen, Maritta Dunn, Hope Knight, Lucille McEwen Esq., Moises Perez,
Kerri Rogers
Chair Reverend Dr. Earl Kooperkamp
Employment
Fatima P. Fernandez-Torres, Debby Figueroa, Hortencia Gonzalez, Carolyn Kent, Barbara Lowry, Rev. Sixto Quezada, Ana Soler, Andrea Vaghy
Co-Chair Ms. Altagarcia Hiraldo Co-Chair Mr. Zead Ramadan
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Acknowledgments
We thank Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and the Board of Trustees for continuing to facilitate community input concerning the Manhattanville in West Harlem Campus Project, and the University's need to expand. The University is to be commended for its creation of the broadly based, Community Advisory Committee (CAC) to provide feedback and recommendations in this ongoing process.
Engaging the communities immediately impacted by the University's expansion plans in civil dialog reflects a measure of the University's sensitivity, progress, and leadership.
We recognize Emily Lloyd, EVP Government & Community Affairs for thoughtfully enabling through the CAC, community leaders to independently articulate the concerns of our constituents. Warren Whitlock, Director of Construction Coordination and liaison to the CAC is acknowledged for his commitment to the communities of Northern Manhattan and fostering campus-community dialogue.
Thanks also to Project Coordinator Claudia Huerta, for assistance throughout this process.
We thank the CAC's membership for their public service, diligent research and outreach to their constituents.
Subcommittee Chairs; Dorothy Désir, Altagracia Hiraldo, Reverend Dr. Earl Kooperkamp, Zead Ramadan, Peggy Shepard, and Dr. Joseph Wilson are acknowledged for their service in creating this document.
We are very grateful to CAC participants, University administrators, consultants, elected officials, civic, cultural and business leaders for sharing their expertise in this purposefully democratic exercise. Our collective efforts reflect a general consensus and proposed plan of action.
ii CAC Report
Executive Summary
The CAC was convened by Columbia University to provide feedback and guidance from a broad spectrum of community leaders concerning the Manhattanville in West Harlem Campus Project. This report is the summation of a multitude of meetings, discussions, documents and original research generated by the CAC as a whole. Presented are a set of principles, recommendations and guidelines for consideration and implementation by Columbia University's current and future administrations.
Columbia University, located in/adjacent to Community Boards 7, 9, 10, and 12 is situated in a city with one of the world's greatest concentrations of wealth. However, a majority of the local residents struggle daily with staggering poverty, limited resources and inadequate social services.
Local disparities between poverty and wealth underscore social, economic and culture tensions and the fragile nature of the communities adjacent to Columbia. Recognition of unique community characteristics and the endangered condition of the local populations will foster parity, equity and integrity by recognizing and strengthening the spirit of each resident.
To be a world-class 21st century urban university, Columbia must play a leading role in shaping the future of the metropolitan area in ways that are mutually beneficial to the campus and greater community.
Community engagement must continue to be embedded in University development plans, recognizing the University cannot be an island unto itself.
Sustaining the culture of our communities enables current and future generations to meet challenges in education, science, communication, housing, employment, and technology. A strategic collaborative partnership with Columbia University promotes a culture of empowerment that mutually enhances our collective body of shared knowledge and human possibilities.
Culture in its complexity and diversity is central to the economic development and sustainability of Columbia University's expansion plans.
Goals
The primary objective of the CAC's report is to provide a framework for Columbia and Upper Manhattan residents to generate dialog and create mechanisms for social engagement and mutually beneficial economic opportunities. This can be achieved through education, vocational skills training, employment, and economic participation. Its contents detail the impact of Columbia's objectives on our communities. An accord based on this document can and must create new opportunities for historically disenfranchised working
people, women, and people-of-color who live in proximity to the University.
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Our collective quality of life rests on the existence of affordable and low-income housing; human scale architecture; a safe, clean, green environment; and further cultivation of a culturally and economically diverse landscape.
We advocate community inclusion in the University's strategic economic development plans. This includes strengthening the capacity of existing businesses and community institutions as they prepare for the future. Columbia must continue to advance the kinds of economic development that creates opportunities for new ventures including non-profit organizations. We encourage Columbia to adhere to the principle of re-investment in the local economy, including access to capital, creation of businesses and service providers to meet the requirements of local residents, including University students, faculty and staff.
The CAC recognizes that housing is not a core University activity. Nor is the University responsible for the growing crisis of affordable and low-income housing in New York City. However, given Columbia's substantial real-estate holdings, planned development and range of current construction projects, the University will have a profound economic and social impact within the Manhattanville footprint, and in surrounding communities. Real-estate values, housing availability, community amenities and the quality of life for the residents of greater Upper Manhattan will all be affected. The housing crisis stemming from growing gentrification and displacement undermines the University in relation to the ideals of community and campus diversity.
Columbia has the historic opportunity to be an exemplary neighbor by setting a high standard. Columbia can symbolically and substantively enable development of affordable and mixed-use housing, helping to realize President Bollinger's goals and vision of economic and social diversity within and around the Columbia community. President Bollinger also has the opportunity to take bold and immediate steps to redress the historic disparity of under-representation of people-of-color on Columbia's staff, faculty and senior administration.
Conclusion
This document is the foundation for a social contract. In essence, it is a Memorandum of Understanding between Columbia University, diverse constituents and community interests represented by the CAC. While we do not expect Columbia to fulfill the letter of all that it demands, we do however expect the University to honor its spirit and process.
A holistic, integrated approach to development that meaningfully recognizes the human, ecological and material assets of the communities of Northern Manhattan, Manhattan Valley, Morningside Heights and West Harlem or Manhattanville in particular will enable the possibility for an honest, manageable, and sustainable collaboration between Columbia University and its neighbors.
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Divided in five sectors: Culture; Economic Development; Employment; Environmental; and Housing; the CAC's principles, priorities, suggestions and recommendations for the University's expansion must be given serious consideration. We recommend a negotiated Community Benefits Agreement and a concrete action plan memorializing the following:
· Community orientation and engagement
· Transparency and accountability
· Diversity, equity and fairness
· Accessibility and permeability
· Economic and cultural sustainability
· Community employment
· Green environment
· Mixed income housing and non-displacement.
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Culture
Objectives: Early in the CAC process, a cultural impact study was recommended. A formal investigation of Manhattanville's tangible and intangible assets is still warranted. This report serves as prelude to that exercise.
Connections between communities: academic and residential, transient and permanent from Heights to Heights, transcending ethnic, racial, linguistic, and class boundaries allows for a unique topographic and urban landscape that could be as much a cultural corridor as an academic one for Upper Manhattan. With the expansion of Columbia University's campus, and building a new home for the School of the Arts, the notion of cultivating a creative community within its immediate environs is essential to long term sustainability and growth, as is the willingness and ability of artists to live and work in Northern Manhattan.
By working in meaningful partnerships with existing and new cultural organizations and institutions, we foresee the development of culture as a tool for equitable development within our communities.
1. Programmatic
Multilayered collaboration to promote social engagement and animate democracy across racial, class, and other social barriers is a critical component of community viability. Cultural activities should be designed with the intent of creating intellectual and economic gains for campus and community residents.
· The University's new facilities and liaisons with key
organizations in the Greater Harlem and Washington Heights communities have the potential to expand the horizons of under-served, under-represented people by creating opportunities to work in broadcast, multimedia, technology and other industries under consideration. These must include area artists, technicians, producers and distributors. An arts film house and other cultural incubator efforts are called for;
· Campus-community multi-use facilities should house and
incubate non-profit organizations, especially cultural groups, allowing innovative administrative practices, increased resources and maintenance of Harlem's cultural and civic legacy;
· The new and old communities of West Harlem/
Manhattanville should have no physical or psychological barriers preventing social interaction. By fostering workshops, seminars and other public service activities Columbia can promote sustainability, human development and capacity building.
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These include:
- collecting oral histories from the Harlem community
- presenting oral narratives
- social rituals (block parties; outdoor concerts)
- walking tours
- providing access to information technology
- exhibitions organized by community residents, faculty, and students
- jointly sponsored theatre programs
- public art: temporary and permanent indoor and outdoor art projects
2. Built Environment
· Historic Preservation: The rehabilitation of
Manhattanville should be fashioned in a manner that reflects its historic prominence. The unique elements of the area's physical characteristics, i.e., the existing elements that give it a sense of place; that define it as a community; and inhabit memory should, when possible, be preserved and conserved. An inventory of community landmarks should be instigated. Pending its outcome, arrangements that permit the care and protection of these assets should be put in place. For example, local tourism would enhance economic development by employing local residents as tour guides;
· Basic Design Premise: The new urban design should
contain a healthy balance of human scale structures that incorporate multiple small green spaces in addition to the large plaza conceived by the architects. The streetscape program should include the following: art galleries, Internet café, information center, ethnic restaurants, boutiques and smaller shops.
3. Cultural Enterprise
Subsidized provisional or permanent live/work space for artisans involved in light industry such as carpentry, tile making, masonry, glass etching, industrial design and other crafts related to the housing industries is recommended. The example of the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in Brooklyn is noteworthy. An apprenticeship program borne out of this space can provide area residents with immediate job training and life long skills. A complex consisting of artisans especially in the home design industry might serve as a viable, affordable, creative alternative for homeowners and regional residents to the larger, more generic design building supply chain stores.
· Columbia should consider developing and funding a program that provides the facilities for and training of, local residents interested in entering the crafts industries or the building trades.
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Environmental
Objectives: To address the current and ongoing community environmental concerns, the Environmental Subcommittee offers the following recommendations:
1. Sustainable Development
· Newly constructed or renovated buildings should be energy-efficient and a world-class showcase for green building design, materials and feature high-performance components;
· Columbia should oppose the proposed reopening of the 135th Street Marine Transfer Station (MTS);
· The Earth Institute should dedicate some of its resources to assist Northern Manhattan communities achieve environmental justice;
· Columbia should utilize Leadership Energy and Environmental Design Standards (LEEDS) as advocated by the U.S. Green Building Council.
2.Transportation and Air Quality
· All off-road construction vehicles used by Columbia contractors should use lowest-sulfur fuel and particle traps on tailpipes to reduce the diesel emissions of fine particles that exacerbate respiratory and cardiac disease. Columbia should comply with the City Council's Local Law 110, which mandates diesel retrofits on all city-contracted construction;
· Require that all contractors adhere to and demand compliance with anti-idling laws;
· Explore the development of an off-site truck receiving facility to prevent diesel pollution;
· Mitigate traffic congestion;
· Promote pedestrian travel and parallel bike paths;
· Establish a policy of encouraging vendors to use
alternative fuel vehicles by stipulating desired outcomes in contracts fostering the establishment of "green truck zones" at delivery sites on the new campus;
· Enhance public transportation facilities, including train and bus stations;
· Encourage Metro North to develop a 125th Street and Hudson River station stop to re-invigorate the Harlem Corridor;
· Invest in electric, natural gas or other cleaner fueled vehicles for deployment into University fleet vehicles/shuttles, which will operate between campus centers;
· Support the community's waterfront park recommendations
for closing Marginal Way Street to increase open space and allow safe pedestrian access to the planned waterfront park. Exposure to diesel exhaust must be minimized exiting and entering the West Side Highway.
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3. Solid Waste Export and Reduction
· Columbia should oppose the City's Commercial Waste Study, which recommends that residential and commercial waste streams be combined for export. The consequence of
adopting this recommendation would mean the 135th Street MTS would again revert to being a 24-hour operation that could receive 400 garbage trucks per day. This is not a viable option from the communities' perspective;
· Columbia should study its waste stream and target ways to reduce, reuse and recycle;
· Require recycling and waste reduction in its leases with commercial tenants;
· Establish a zero-waste policy for the campus and encourage the location of a reuse center on the new campus; aggressively compost waste that is suitable for composting; · Columbia's successful campus initiatives on recycling should be continued and expanded to provide training to local commercial operations and local residential building maintenance staff on best recycling practices.
4. Streetscape Enhancements
· Utilize every opportunity to plant trees, shrubs and greenery throughout the Manhattanville area including rooftops (where possible) to enhance aesthetics and air quality;
· Work to create a people-oriented, safer, pedestrian friendly environment while mitigating vehicular traffic.
5. Extend Open Space and Waterfront Park
We envision the corridor as a destination point. The notion of the "campus as fortress" is unacceptable to the greater community. The CAC instead promotes seamless physical and social interaction between residents and Columbia students, faculty and staff. To that end, the University should reexamine its existing plans to build on the Southeast corner at 125th Street and Broadway (currently McDonald's venue) and instead create a green corridor at this site that will draw interest and activity towards the new campus and the Hudson River.
· Continue active support of the planned waterfront park
by any combination of the following: committing funds for
the support, maintenance, management and programming of the park;
· The design program of new buildings should not block views of the River from Manhattanville tenants and should not block sight lines at 125th and Broadway;
· Develop a community/academic partnership to create an environmental education center near the waterfront that benefits New York and neighborhood school children. This was a recommendation of the Harlem-on-the-River process that has not been fulfilled by the Economic Development Corporation
because they do not own space for the proposed center.
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Housing
Objective: To enable Columbia to attain the status of the world's preeminent urban university campus, internal University housing needs and expertise should be linked with community initiatives to insure the growth of a culturally diverse and intellectually dynamic shared community in Manhattanville and Upper Manhattan areas. President Bollinger's public commitment to racial justice should be a guiding principle implicit and explicit in all phases of the Manhattanville development. Social, cultural and economic diversity; and affordable housing were identified as areas of priority and overlapping University-community common interest.
Columbia is one of the largest real-estate-holding entities in New York. The University's regional expansion, particularly the proposed Manhattanville campus, increases its geographic preeminence in the City. Given Columbia's historic role and influence, the CAC urges the University to proactively support existing affordable and low income housing, as well as, create new affordable units. Affordable housing is in the best interest of community residents, Columbia's faculty, staff, students, and future generations.
Columbia currently estimates that about 150 housing units will be directly lost as a result of Manhattanville's development. The CAC is convinced that a far greater number of affordable and low-income housing units are at risk of being made unaffordable as an indirect result of the proposed Manhattanville campus. The issue of the University's use of eminent domain has also raised community concern.
1. Gentrification and Displacement
Columbia's Manhattanville expansion is bound-up with larger gentrification patterns, as exemplified by 3333 Broadway, an 1190 unit apartment complex whose owners recently opted out of the Mitchell-Lama program, and will begin charging marketrate rents in 2005. Columbia's campus development (just one block south of this complex) will contribute to increasing rent levels, thus moving apartments out of the reach of poor and working people in this and other local buildings, causing severe economic hardship and increasing the potential for homelessness.
· Columbia should identify and mobilize significant funding for major housing development from specifically targeted HUD, state, city, private and pension funds.
Numerous local organizations have built affordable units and should be viewed as potential partners and/or collaborators;
· Special housing legislation could also be sought, given the University's public stature. Columbia should foster a policy of long-term leases to stabilize the rental market.
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2. Community Stabilization
· Columbia University should replace the housing of people directly displaced by the proposed Manhattanville campus;
· Utilizing a range of potential funding sources, including federal, city and state financing, Columbia should build future housing approximating 1000 affordable, mixed income units (in addition to any specifically designated University housing), within or near the proposed Manhattanville campus. These affordable housing units should be open to non-Columbia affiliated, income-eligible members residing within Community Boards 7, 9, 10, and 12;
· Columbia should partner and work with community-based organizations, not-for-profits, government, and private entities to stabilize rents and develop affordable community owned housing within areas surrounding the Manhattanville footprint;
· CAC recommends creation of community owned not-for-
profit, commercial and public meeting spaces.
3. Land Trusts and Housing Models
Columbia should actively consider contributing towards and facilitating the establishment of a substantial Community Land Trust, enabling local home ownership, to preserve and develop affordable housing. Columbia should create a housing strategy based on public and private investment and mixed income housing programs. Some examples include:
-Limited-equity coops
-Assisted living facilities for moderate/low income residents
-Low income/rent stabilized apartments
-Mixed income housing with upper, middle and low-income units
-Housing stock preservation/landmark status
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Economic Development
Objectives: From the CAC's perspective, economic development must be first and foremost, the development of economic equity. All aspects of economic development must be designed to enhance the economic position of local residents in terms of employment, income generation, property ownership and investment opportunities.
Columbia's approach to local business should set specific targets and goals for community economic development. An essential goal is to insure that current businesses remain viable and grow where possible. CAC is concerned with the closing of small- and medium-size businesses that have operated in the community for decades due to ballooning rent and other fixed cost increases. If their operations are disrupted through Columbia's expansion, adequate provisions and compensation should be developed.
1. Anti-displacement Measures
· Columbia should implement anti-displacement programs and consider a range of options for local businesses including rent subsidies, negotiation with commercial landlords, short term credit and loan assistance. We recognize market forces affect local businesses surrounding Columbia University beyond its Manhattanville footprint. Thus anti-displacement programs for local businesses should include adjacent areas;
· Current businesses displaced by Columbia University's expansion into West Harlem must be given first priority in relocating into new retail spaces of the proposed development;
· In partnership with governmental and private initiatives, Columbia should identify and develop public and private funding sources to facilitate local business development. For example funds can be dedicated to securing lines of credit; local business expansion; micro-lending initiatives for small and mid-size businesses and local start-up companies.
2. Incubating New Businesses
· With economic self-sufficiency and equity as goals, developing community-owned cooperative businesses and working with local residents to become the owners of their firms is encouraged;
· Specific targets for developing locally owned
businesses should reflect the University's goals for women and minority owned firms in construction projects, vendors etc. These targets should be regularly reviewed to insure compliance and set higher rates as success is achieved in meeting the goals.
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3. Technology
· Columbia's technological infrastructure should be adapted for commercial and business uses and local, women and minority vendors. For example, wireless technologies that benefit academic research need to be accessible to the community.
4. Access to Capital
· Given Columbia's preliminary development plans, CAC recognizes that displacement and the creation of a competitive disadvantage for existing businesses, property owners and community partners is inevitable without University intervention. To mitigate the adverse economic impact, Columbia should work to align existing funding sources and stimulate the formation of new revenue streams to help sustain and bolster businesses, property owners, cultural institutions, community organizations and promote the development of low income and affordable housing. Columbia's capital access advocacy on behalf of community partnerships and participation in Manhattanville and surrounding neighborhoods will help make access to capital a reality;
· NYC's Controller's Office, the Empowerment Zone and private institutional investors have earmarked funds for similar types of investment. Business models for socially conscious investments already exist, and require further research to determine best practices and benchmarks for local application. The key is to provide equity for such investments and increase participation by community partners;
· A percentage of the gross value of the Manhattanville project (estimated at $5 billion dollars) should be clearly identified from a variety of sources and earmarked for community development purposes;
· Columbia should consider investing in or creating, a private offering that would focus on the community's impacted by Manhattanville. Equity investment on behalf of community partners is the proposed business model. Community partners have long been recognized as facilitators of cultural and economic development. However they have often been limited in their participation due to a lack of capital. By developing an equity pool that commands a fair return to investors and to community partners, Columbia would enable existing CAC members and their constituents to remain vested in Manhattanville, and bordering communities.
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5. Radial Impact
· Columbia's Manhattanville development is having a radial impact in the surrounding communities. The New York City Planning Commissions is currently studying the feasibility of up-zoning 125th Street. Manhattanville will become a catalyst for re-zoning. Business and property owners, residents, cultural institutions and community organizations, River to River on 125th Street will be affected. The ability to sustain existing businesses, cultural and community organizations and institutions, as well as, low- income and affordable housing along the 125th street corridor will hinge upon these existing entities being able to command the equity necessary to survive development in a rapidly changing community. Columbia's analysis of the Manhattanville project's impact should therefore extend to the entire 125th Street Corridor. Specific development proposals should be evaluated in concert with the community, given the scope and potential economic impact.
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Employment
Objectives: Given Columbia's status as New York City's 4th largest private employer, and its historic under representation of minority professionals and workers, it is imperative that the University engage in fair employment practices across the board. As we aim to prevent the formation of physical and psychological barriers from the urban design plan, we insist the University take immediate action to remove barriers to achieving a more representative workforce.
To achieve sustainable and credible goals, a two-fold analysis and approach that redresses issues found within the internal culture of the University and the resident
community hosting the University is proposed. The job creation and training called for must run concurrent with recommended vocational and academic educational
preparedness. At the heart of the success aimed for, are the human resources employed from the local community and institutional diversity, i.e., University educators and administrators.
Columbia must prioritize partnering with local non-profit employment organizations to fill University related job openings.
1. Hiring from the Community
Columbia should employ local residents and facilitate funding of and space for local employment, economic development and educational organizations for job training and job creation initiatives.
These initiatives should include classroom training, paid internships and on-site apprenticeships designed specifically to prepare Upper Manhattan residents to fill job openings at Columbia and its affiliated companies. Training and education may include, adult basic education, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), GED instruction, health care, construction trades, building maintenance, computer and data entry skills, administrative assistance, customer service, hospitality and security.
Columbia and labor unions associated with these jobs should provide guidance and technical assistance to ensure that local residents have the necessary skills for these job opportunities.
· Columbia should hire a community liaison to maintain and distribute an on-going, up-dated list of all job opportunities resulting directly and indirectly from its expansion projects and new job openings in Upper Manhattan. This list should be available to community residents, local employment, economic development and non-profit organizations and Community Planning Boards 7, 9, 10, and 12;
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· All contractors hired by Columbia should work with the University to ensure that local residents and businesses are informed of all employment opportunities. Outreach efforts may include a newsletter, the Internet, on-site recruitment through local community-based organizations, broad-based community announcements, job listings and advertisements in local community and Spanish-language newspapers and Community Board announcements;
· Columbia should make best efforts to require labor unions to appoint community liaisons to work directly with non-profit organizations in Community Boards 7, 9, 10, and 12 in order to facilitate union membership including women in the trades;
· Columbia should facilitate the bonding of minority contractors to enhance participation in construction projects.
2. Hiring Percentages
· To its credit, Columbia's use of goals and targets to achieve MWL participation in its construction program is acknowledged as being a good example of diversity participation targets. However, Columbia should strive to meet and exceed the following goals for Manhattanville: 30% minority-owned; 10% woman-owned; 30% local-owned businesses. From the general population, we recommend hiring at a target of:
1. 50% African American and Latino or Hispanic residents in Community Boards 7, 9, 10, and12.
2. 20% drawn from other residents in Community Boards 7, 9, 10, and 12.
3. Educational Institutions and Capacity-building Columbia should use its influence and academic reputation to work with the NYC's Department of Education to improve the quality of K-12 education in CBs 7, 9, 10, and 12. Efforts may include but should not be limited to:
-Participation in the establishment of a new high school in Upper Manhattan;
-Working with local schools by providing staff development and training for existing teachers, and loan forgiveness for Columbia University graduates who teach in public schools in CBs 7, 9, 10, and 12.
· In conjunction with other area colleges, institutions and agencies, Columbia is encouraged to establish, fund and staff a program to assist high school students preparing for college;
· Columbia should work with non-profit organizations to establish a community-based scholarship program;
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· A leadership institute (such as the Harlem Heritage Project proposed by Columbia Professor Manning Marable) that might be available for management and staff development in social work, public administration, public health, architecture, education, and urban planning.
4. Faculty and Administration
President Bollinger publicly acknowledges the .infrastructure of diversity. (is) less well-developed at Columbia than it should be. The CAC calls the following to the attention of the University:
· Columbia's undergraduate teaching staff consists approximately of 550 faculty members. Tenured academics of color number a mere 13, with only twelve tenured African Americans and one tenured Latino professor. Faculty diversity will promote and stimulate student diversity. Increasing the presence of tenure-tracked academics and securing their status in the professorate is an imperative the University should proactively employ;
· The University must substantially increase the presence
of people-of-color at mid- and senior administrative staff levels; and create opportunities for administrative leadership in areas not traditionally occupied by people-ofAfrican descent and Latinos such as architecture, engineering and technology management.
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Conclusion and Recommendations
The CAC deems it imperative that President Bollinger meets with the CAC and provide a preliminary response to the CAC's report and recommendations. CAC considers it essential for the University to maintain an ongoing dialog, providing a specific and detailed response to the proposals, recommendations, and principles outlined herein. The culmination of this dialog should result in a Community Benefits Agreement that is binding on future Columbia administrations.
Columbia should continue vetting the Manhattanville in West Harlem Campus Project with the CAC on a quarterly basis and provide regular progress reports. A core CAC group should convene regularly with senior members of Columbia's Manhattanville Campus Plan Design Team including the: Office of the President, Facilities Management, Government & Community Affairs, and the newly created Arts Initiatives among others. The CAC should also meet periodically with the University's Faculty Advisory Committee.
Columbia should provide the Upper Manhattan community with detailed quarterly reports on all articulated objectives. Reports should include:
- number and demographics of people hired
- community investment capitalization
- types of jobs filled at Columbia and in affiliated companies
- job training and education initiatives implemented
- development of technical assistance for local businesses and start -up's
- programmatic articulation with public schools in Upper Manhattan.
- square footage build-out
- data on minority and women's businesses utilized in construction, purchasing, and Manhattanville campus plan participation
- business replacement and retention
- monitoring of low-income and affordable housing
- consistent and regular environmental monitoring
CAC advocates formation of other Columbia committees to focus on campus-community interests. This underscores and complements the importance of the CAC's representative input reflective of the concerns and interests of the community at large. As we aim for a democratic and inclusive development process, the CAC also advocates meeting with community groups omitted from this initial process.
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President Bollinger recently stated:
Manhattanville in West Harlem promises room to grow not only in a coherent and thoughtful way but also in a way that is consistent with the economic and social needs of our neighbors.
More concretely, the Manhattanville project would also create approximately 9,000 permanent new jobs in an area where employment has fallen by more than 40 percent since 1984 and is now estimated at approximately 1,250 jobs. Today's modest warehouses, automotive services, and light industrial buildings would give way to vibrant, mixed-use development, including public and commercial spaces. The design and construction of the proposed facilities alone would provide an estimated $4 billion of economic stimulus to the economy of New York City.
Creating economic stimulus for the economy of New York City is formidable; however creating access to capital on behalf of the community within Columbia's immediate vicinity is a key component of economic and community development for existing local businesses, landowners, residents, and those in close proximity to Manhattanville.
The CAC's "Manhattanville in West Harlem Campus Project: Community Impact & Policy Recommendations" was carefully crafted by those very neighbors, President Bollinger references. This report offers principles, proposals, and recommendations for concrete, fair and feasible solutions to the complex challenges we face resulting from existing and future expansion plans. The CAC requests that the University recognize the concerns of residents of Community Boards 7, 9, 10, and 12, and their request for an agreement mitigating the adverse impact of change in our neighborhoods.
Columbia is in the position to make the paradigmatic shift in community development viable by formalizing a strategic and collaborative partnership between Columbia and the communities of Upper Manhattan. A mutually binding Memorandum of Understanding or Community Benefits Agreement between the various neighborhoods and the University will serve as a model for all communities and educational institutions who wish to make cultural citizenship, economic equity and environmental sustainability a tangible reality. En fin, the kinds of "capital" the CAC requests are not only economic but cultural, social, material, and political in nature.
We respectfully request a written response to our report from President Bollinger by September 15th 2004.
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Appendices
· CAC Membership List
· Executive Summary
-Thematic Highlights
-Integrated Development Plan (IDP) statement -Integrated Principles schematics
· Select Subcommittees:
-Culture
-Environmental
-Housing
-Employment
· Conclusions & Recommendations
· Columbia University Data, General and Background
Material
· Press Articles of Interest
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CAC MEMBERSHIP LIST
Title First Last Name Title Organization
1 Mr. Andrew Albert Executive The West Side Chamber of Commerce
Director
2 Mr. Peter Arndtsen Columbus/Amsterdam BID
3 Ms. Barbara Askins President & CEO 125th Street Business Improvement
District
4 Mr. Neal Clark Chairman Community Board 10
5 Ms. Dorothy Désir Principal The Cultural Assets Partnership -
Barnard College Alumnus
6 Ms. Sybil Dodson First Vice Pres Community Board 12
7 Ms. Maritta Dunn Harlem Valley Heights Community
Development Corp
8 Mr. Howard Glickberg Fairway Market
9 Mr. George Goodwill Chairman Community Board 9
10 Mr. Robert F. Herrmann President The Broadway Mall Association
11 Ms. Altagracia Hiraldo Dominican Sunday Community Service
12 Ms. Barbara Hohol The Broadway Mall Association
13 Mr. Larry Horowitz Chairman Community Board 7
14 Ms. Yasmine Hurston- Community Board 10
Cornelius
15 Mr. Charles Johnson Community Resident
16 Mr. Derek Q. Johnson Columbia University Alumnus - Harlem
resident
17 Mr. Eliot Kahn Old Broadway Synagogue
18 Ms. Rita Kardeman Washington Heights Chamber of Commerce
19 Ms. Carolyn Kent Morningside Heights Historic District
Committee
20 Ms. Hope Knight COO UMEZ
21 Reverend Earl Kooperkamp St. Mary's Church,
22 Ms. Joan S. Levine Morningside Gardens Community Relations
Committee
23 Ms. Barbara Lowry Executive Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp.
Director
24 Ms. Yvonne Matthews Manhattanville Houses Tenants
Organization
25 Ms. Lucille L. McEwen President & CEO Harlem Congregations for Community
Improvement
26 Ms. Nancy O'Hara Tiemann Coop
27 Mr. Moises Perez Executive Alianza Dominicana
Director
28 Ms. Diane Phillpotts President Harlem Community Development Corp.
29 Mr. Zead Ramadan Chairman Community Board 12
30 Ms. Norma Ramos EJ Attorney Community Resident
31 Mr. Voza Rivers Harlem Arts Alliance
32 Ms. Kerri Rogers President Harlem Commonwealth Council
33 Ms. Joe Searles President Harlem Commonwealth Council
34 Ms. Ethel Sheffer Community Board 7
35 Ms. Peggy Shepard Executive WEACT
Director
36 Ms. Yvonne Stennett Executive Community League of West 159 Street,
Director Inc.
37 Mr. Dan Victor Community Resident
38 Mr. Eric Washington Afoot Walking Tours & Author
39 Mr. Tim Westwig Executive American Youth Hostel
Director
40 Prof. Joseph Wilson Columbia University Alumnus - CB 7
Resident
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
· Thematic Highlights
· Integrated Development Plan (IDP) Statement
· Integrated Principles Schematics
THEMATIC HIGHLIGHTS
Major issues and objectives:
1.Process:
Transparency
Diversity: all
aspects/stages (construction/consultants/administrat ion/faculty/community)
Engagement and responsiveness: Community
Boards, elected officials, CBO's, residents, faculty, students, CAC
Meeting/dialogue with President Bollinger
2.Campus Design:
Open/porous/Green
Public amenities
Community feed-back
Community-friendly functionalities
3.Outcomes:
Mutually beneficial campus-community economic development/capacity building
Local employment/job training, pro-small business and artisan's environment
Affordable housing/non-displacement/relocation Cultural preservation Highest environmental standards
Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) University as model citizen/neighbor World's leading urban educational institution
An Integrated Development Plan
If the ULRP process approves the University's expansion agenda, our approach towards mitigation should be multitiered. If it is not yet the case, the University is encouraged to re-shape and consolidate its internal policy to better align itself with government regulations and address community directives. We advocate an Integrated Development Plan [IDP] and specific programmes that provide strategic guidance towards meeting mutually agreed economic and physical expansion goals, as other sector objectives are met. An IDP ensures the broad goals and objectives outlined in each sector can be incorporated consistently and
systematically at all tiers, i.e., university, government and community levels. Its success is contingent on conformity to the guiding principles enunciated in the CAC report.
Our IDP's three levels of operations include:
1. Intersectorial coordination and collaboration with development of institutional linkages among participating stake holders [University, cultural, spiritual, business, civic, educational, vocational, and environmental organizations or institutions]
2. Strategic guidance for design, integration and implementation of economic, cultural, housing, environmental, employment sectors with the spatial/physical plans and Columbia University's management team.
3. Preparation and implementation of the aforementioned sectors with the University's long term expansion plans and design programme.
See the schematics for "Integrated Principles."
Integrated Principles
An integrated development approach should maintain a balance between the values of the community, the new physical or spatial features of the urban plan and Columbia's managerial practices during the course of the expansion. The "Core Community Values" and "CU Managerial Competencies" speak to the ideal nature of relational dynamics. "Core Spatial Characteristics" are the design outcomes that reflect broader social, vocational and economic goals.
For example, the ideal streetscape should contain a cross section of retail shops, facades, interpretative signage, pedestrian-friendly spatial sensibilities and configurations reflecting the rich diversity of the newly mapped community, enabling economic and social growth. The built and green environment should facilitate the convening and interaction of individuals living cooperatively in a shared community. Columbia's managerial priority should create an inventory of anticipated job openings to facilitate and expedite training and hiring from the local community.
CULTURE
· Mapping New Terrain: Communities in Transition," LMCC brochure
· Darlow, Alison "Cultural Policy and Urban Sustainability: making a missing link?" Planning Practice and Research, Vol. 11, No. 3, 291-301, 1996
· Désir, Dorothy. "On Intellectual BS and Globalization" Manhattan Times, March 14, 2002
· Green, Penelope. "An Actress Balances Art, Illness and a New Home" New York Times April 4, 2004
· Reames, Benjamin. "From the Top-Down to the Grass Roots (Or Vice Versa): The Politics of Community Building," Metropolitics, Vol. 4 No. 1 Winter 2002
ENVIRONMENTAL
· Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design
HOUSING
· Ali, Tanveer. "Harlem Building Ends Low-Rent Program:
Owner of 3333 Broadway to Terminate Participation in Mitchell-Lama Program for Low Income Tenants" Columbia Daily Spectator April 28, 2004
· Chen, David W. "Bush Housing Plan Stirs Anxiety Over New York's Share of Aid" New York Times February 20, 2004
· Freeman, Lance and Frank Braconi. "Gentrification and Displacement" The Urban Prospect: Housing Planning and Economic Development in New York, Citizens Housing and Planning Council Vol. 8, Number 1, January/February 2002
· McCulloch, Heather and Lisa Robinson. "Sharing the Wealth: Resident Ownership Mechanisms," A Policy Link Report 2001
· Common Ground: Innovative Solutions to Homelessness, press packet and annual report 2003
· Harlem Congregation for Community Improvement (HCCI), brochure
· Institute for Community Economics, "Why Community Land Trusts?" brochure
· Manhattanville Valley Management Company, Inc, fact sheet
· Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, brochure and Annual Report 2002
· The West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing, Inc, fact sheets
EMPLOYMENT
· Marable, Manning. "Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH): The Harlem Heritage Project, Executive Summary"
· Sellars, Morgan. "Bollinger Answers Student Demands:
Bollinger Proposes Multicultural Office: Students Unsatisfied" Columbia Spectator March 2, 2004
CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS
· Bollinger, Lee C., To:CUALUMNI@CUVMC.AIS.COLUMBIA.EDU
Sent: May 13, 2004 Subject: Manhattanville Update
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY DATA, BACKGROUND AND GENERAL MATERIAL
· CAC minutes, notes, maps, correspondence from:
-April 14, 2003
-May 15, 2003
-June 26, 2003 -September 15, 2003
-December 22, 2003 includes maps and statistics for: i. Current Population and Development
ii. Existing Zoning and Development
iii. Existing Activity in Planning Area iv. Projected Economic Development
v. Planning Principles
-February 11, 2004
· Columbia University Campus Fact Sheets and Maps for:
-Health Sciences Campus
-Lamont -Doherty Earth Observatory
-Morningside Heights Campus
-Nevis Laboratories (Particle Physics)
PRESS ARTICLES OF INTEREST
· Bagli, Charles V. "Columbia, in a Growth Spurt, Is Buying a Swath of Harlem" The New York Times, July 30, 2003
· Corcoran, David. "David Truman, 90, Columbia Provost 1968 Unrest" New York Times September 1, 2003
· Lee, Denny. "On the Heights, A Chill Wind Begins to Blow" New York Times, September 14, 2003
· Watson, Jamal E. "Columbia Seek Community in Expansion Plans" April 22, 2004
References and Sources
Select Articles, Reports, and Publications
· "Developing a Creative Community in Manhattanville: A Preliminary Review of Commercial, Cultural, Retail and Community Uses," Appleseed AEA Consulting September 2003
· "The Impact of Columbia University's Proposed Manhattanville Development in West Harlem on the Economy of New York City," Appleseed November 2003
· "CUNY on the Job: The City's New Workforce Workhorse," by Center for an Urban Future, April 2004
· "Manhattanville in West Harlem: Information Open House Participant Guide," Columbia University in the City of New York, 2004
· "Manhattanville in West Harlem: Preliminary Traffic Impact Analysis," Columbia University, 2003
· "Manhattanville in West Harlem Development Proposal: Presentation to Community Board #9," Columbia University April 20, 2004
· U.S. Census Bureau of the Census 2002, various studies on the demographics of poverty in Upper Manhattan by Community Studies of New York, Inc./Infoshare
· "University-Community Partnerships in America: Current Practices" Volume III by HUD January 1999
· Morningside Heights Housing Corporation By-laws
· "20/20 Vision: Smart Growth for the New York Metropolitan Region," by the Revson Foundation and the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems, May 2003 CD Rom
*********
· Adams, Don and Arlene Goldbard. Community, Culture and Globalization, 2002
· Berry, Jeffrey; Kent Portney, and Ken Thomson. The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, 1993
· Davis, John Emmeus, "Options & Issues in Creating a Community Land Trust" by the Institute for Community Economics, 2001
19a
References and Sources continued
· Eade, Deborah. Capacity-Building: An Approach to People-Centred Development, 1997
· Eger, John M., "Envisioning a Civil Society" The San Diego Union-tribune June 3, 2004
· Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002
· Gross, Julian with Greg LeRoy and Madeline Janis-Aparicio. "Community Benefits Agreements: Making Development Projects Accountable" 2002
· Maurrasse, David J. Beyond the Campus: How College and Universities Form Partnerships with Their Communities, 2001
· McCann, Eugene. "The Cultural Politics of Local Economic Development: meaning-making, place-making, and the urban policy process," Geoforum 33, January 2002
· Strom, Elizabeth. Strengthening Communities through Culture, 2001
· Zukin, Sharon The Culture of Cities, 1995 Websites and CD ROMs
· Brooklyn Woods: the Woodworker Training Program www.brooklynwoods.org
· Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC) www.gmdconline.org and www.gmdconline.com
· www.huduser.org/publications/commdevl.html/
· www.neighbors.columbia.edu
· www.usgbc.org/leed
· William, Allan N., Companion Guide to IDP Final Report see:
Dr. Marilyn Morris, "An Integrated Approach to Development Planning in OECS Member States: Towards a Paradigm Shift." 2004 CD Rom
· Planning for All New Yorkers: Campaign for Community-base Planning: Briefing Book of Community-based Plans. The Municipal Art Society Planning Center, 2001
Friday, September 10, 2004
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Monday, August 02, 2004
Thinking about Inclusionary Zoning
Click here: Thinking about Inclusionary Zoning
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter08-04.html
Manhattan Institute’s
Center for Rethinking Development
Ideas that shape the city’s planning, housing, and development
A Monthly Newsletter by Julia Vitullo-Martin, MI Senior Fellow
Thinking about Inclusionary Zoning
Julia Vitullo-Martin, August 2004
Have housing advocates found the magic bullet that will produce affordable housing without overburdening taxpayers or enraging neighbors? Many think so. The land-use regulation called inclusionary zoning basically offers developers a deal: in exchange for supplying or rehabilitating some low- and moderate-income housing units a developer gets to put up a larger market-rate building than would be allowed under standard zoning. The rationale is that the profit of the additional space will subsidize the reduced rents on a few units. The term "inclusionary" was devised to contrast with the "exclusionary" impact of traditional zoning, which tends to exclude lower-income housing from upper-income areas.
Inclusionary zoning is thought to have worked successfully all over the country, including in strong urban markets like San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. But is it the right answer for New York? Brooklyn Councilmember David Yassky, who represents the booming neighborhoods of Greenpoint-Williamsburg, regards inclusionary zoning so highly that he wants to make it a requirement of new construction on the rezoned waterfront.
A large coalition of community groups, the NYC Campaign for Inclusionary Zoning, is lobbying the city to adopt a model of mandatory inclusionary zoning in all neighborhoods slated for rezoning and redevelopment. In other words, any developer putting up a market-rate apartment building would have to supply a proportionate amount of affordable housing.
Making inclusionary zoning mandatory would be a huge mistake - not because the program is bad, but because it's untried in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods. Even in prime neighborhoods only some 600 affordable (and some 2400 market-rate) units have been built - an achievement, but an inconclusive one.
HOW INCLUSIONARY ZONING HAS WORKED SO FAR
While inclusionary zoning has been available under the New York City Zoning code since 1969, its early version didn't work well. The original programs, which ignored market-place conditions, failed to produce any affordable housing at all, according to Richard Barth, executive director of the Department of City Planning. In 1987 the city updated and improved its inclusionary program, notes Barth, producing a fair number of units quickly before the market collapsed. But the real action has been in the last few years, when over 20 high-rise rental buildings with an inclusionary bonus have gone up in Manhattan.
The program is limited to Manhattan’s high-density neighborhoods - those zoned R10, where buildings can be constructed as-of-right to about ten times the lot size. The program allows a developer to increase a building's floor area by up to 20 percent in exchange for building or rehabilitating a proportionate amount of affordable housing.
In practice, though, this is a new construction program. Almost no units have been rehabilitated. Further, it has unpredictable neighborhood consequences, both because the increased bulk can come as quite a shock to residents who think R10 is as bulky as buildings will get and because the affordable housing component can be built off-site. As Hope Cohen, chairperson of Community Board 7 on the West Side, notes, "The upside of the program is that it builds real, permanent affordable housing, though there’s always the question of how you define affordable. The downside is that it gives an automatic bonus for the allowable zoning district. This makes it hard to plan for the neighborhood, which can get buildings 20% denser than anyone thought."
While the developer can provide the affordable units on-site or off, most developers have chosen off-site, because the bonus is slightly better and the long-run hassles are far fewer. Developer Ron Moelis, a principal in L&M Equity, says "Bottom line: it’s a good program that works so long as you let the developer build the affordable component off-site. If the developer wants to build on-site, fine, but don’t force it." Off-site still means theoretically close by, either in the same community board or within a half-mile of the market-rate building.
But is this geographic restriction a efficient use of scarce affordable housing dollars? For every unit that gets built on the Upper East Side, many more could be built for the same amount of money in the outer boroughs.
WHY BUILD ON THE MOST EXPENSIVE LAND IN THE CITY?
Nonprofit developer William Rapfogel, executive director of the Met Council on Jewish Poverty, has been urging city officials for years to permit the below-market units to be built in areas with lower land costs. "Instead of forcing the developer to acquire a very expensive parcel of land on 61st Street," says Rapfogel, talking about a project his group did with developer Izak Senbahar, "that same project could be built in Brooklyn or Queens, producing four to five times the number of units we could build in Manhattan. If the goal is to create affordable housing, why not create more? Why build on the most expensive land in the city?"
Why indeed? The answer is a bit of weird planners' double-think. Inclusionary zoning is an heir to the old planning concept of mitigation, by which a development that benefits from upzoning must in turn pay to mitigate the effects of increased density on the public infrastructure. Thus a development that is going to pour hundreds of new commuters into a subway station might pay to upgrade and expand the station's capacity. The somewhat stretched idea of mitigation applied to below-market units is that the new development increases the value of neighboring property - causing rents to rise and lower-income people to be displaced. Therefore, says the Department of City Planning, the developer's mitigating response of building below-market units must occur in the same neighborhood as the damage.
Still, says Michael Slattery, senior vice president for research at the Real Estate Board of New York, inclusionary zoning "has worked for what it's intended to do, which is be a neighborhood mix program, helping to integrate low-income households into high-income neighborhoods." The geographic restrictions have limited the program's use, he argues, because land costs are simply too high in R10 areas to make the program financially worthwhile for any developers except those few who can generate high enough rents to offset the production of affordable housing.
RETHINKING THE CURRENT PROGRAM
Certainly the geographic restrictions should be rethought, perhaps broadened to the same borough or perhaps the same councilmanic district, but something larger than the community board. After all, the community board itself is an expansive construction for assessing mitigation. The boundaries of Community Board 7, for example, on Manhattan's West Side, extend from Cathedral Parkway (110th Street) on the north, Central Park West on the east, the Hudson River on the west, and Columbus Circle on the south. One result is an often substantial geographic distance between the building being given a bonus and the affordable housing being provided. Hope Cohen cites the example of a market-rate building near Lincoln Center whose affordable component was built on 108th Street.
City Planning could stick to its principles while still broadening the area of so-called impact. The point would be to give the program more space to show what it can do.
Similarly, why not extend inclusionary zoning to other high density zoning categories, R7, R8, and R9? Let's open it up and see what happens. Some planners think the lower density won't be able to pay for affordable housing, but that's what markets are for - to pass on this kind of information.
The Department of City Planning is right to resist making it mandatory, however. When transferred to less dense, less wealthy neighborhoods, the program is going to change substantially - and no one can predict the consequences accurately enough to justify this. And as Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, says, "Doing any kind of development requires maximum flexibility. If you take away the developer's flexibility, you're going to halt some housing, which we just don't want to do."
Even many of the coalition members say they do not want to stop housing development - they just want to make sure that neighborhood residents are accommodated. Brad Lander, Director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, says, "Everyone understands that you could clearly dampen development if you imposed a mandate that was too large and you drove land prices too low. I don’t think that’s going to happen because expanded inclusionary zoning will only work if the administration comes through with a compromise. This isn't something the City Council can do on its own."
WHAT’S NEXT
Councilmember Yassky's proposal is now in front of the City Planning Commission, which has held dozens of informal meetings with advocates and community groups but has not yet responded officially. The NYC Coalition's report arguing for a greatly expanded and mandatory program will be released in mid-September. While City Planning would like to see inclusionary zoning extended to new neighborhoods, such as Hudson Yards, it has proposed only a modest, 10% bonus program for the Brooklyn waterfront, which remains the major battle ground for development issues. City Planning hopes the Environmental Impact Statement on its Greenpoint-Williamsburg plan will be ready at the end of September or early October - which will trigger a new round of discussion and debate.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter08-04.html
Manhattan Institute’s
Center for Rethinking Development
Ideas that shape the city’s planning, housing, and development
A Monthly Newsletter by Julia Vitullo-Martin, MI Senior Fellow
Thinking about Inclusionary Zoning
Julia Vitullo-Martin, August 2004
Have housing advocates found the magic bullet that will produce affordable housing without overburdening taxpayers or enraging neighbors? Many think so. The land-use regulation called inclusionary zoning basically offers developers a deal: in exchange for supplying or rehabilitating some low- and moderate-income housing units a developer gets to put up a larger market-rate building than would be allowed under standard zoning. The rationale is that the profit of the additional space will subsidize the reduced rents on a few units. The term "inclusionary" was devised to contrast with the "exclusionary" impact of traditional zoning, which tends to exclude lower-income housing from upper-income areas.
Inclusionary zoning is thought to have worked successfully all over the country, including in strong urban markets like San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. But is it the right answer for New York? Brooklyn Councilmember David Yassky, who represents the booming neighborhoods of Greenpoint-Williamsburg, regards inclusionary zoning so highly that he wants to make it a requirement of new construction on the rezoned waterfront.
A large coalition of community groups, the NYC Campaign for Inclusionary Zoning, is lobbying the city to adopt a model of mandatory inclusionary zoning in all neighborhoods slated for rezoning and redevelopment. In other words, any developer putting up a market-rate apartment building would have to supply a proportionate amount of affordable housing.
Making inclusionary zoning mandatory would be a huge mistake - not because the program is bad, but because it's untried in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods. Even in prime neighborhoods only some 600 affordable (and some 2400 market-rate) units have been built - an achievement, but an inconclusive one.
HOW INCLUSIONARY ZONING HAS WORKED SO FAR
While inclusionary zoning has been available under the New York City Zoning code since 1969, its early version didn't work well. The original programs, which ignored market-place conditions, failed to produce any affordable housing at all, according to Richard Barth, executive director of the Department of City Planning. In 1987 the city updated and improved its inclusionary program, notes Barth, producing a fair number of units quickly before the market collapsed. But the real action has been in the last few years, when over 20 high-rise rental buildings with an inclusionary bonus have gone up in Manhattan.
The program is limited to Manhattan’s high-density neighborhoods - those zoned R10, where buildings can be constructed as-of-right to about ten times the lot size. The program allows a developer to increase a building's floor area by up to 20 percent in exchange for building or rehabilitating a proportionate amount of affordable housing.
In practice, though, this is a new construction program. Almost no units have been rehabilitated. Further, it has unpredictable neighborhood consequences, both because the increased bulk can come as quite a shock to residents who think R10 is as bulky as buildings will get and because the affordable housing component can be built off-site. As Hope Cohen, chairperson of Community Board 7 on the West Side, notes, "The upside of the program is that it builds real, permanent affordable housing, though there’s always the question of how you define affordable. The downside is that it gives an automatic bonus for the allowable zoning district. This makes it hard to plan for the neighborhood, which can get buildings 20% denser than anyone thought."
While the developer can provide the affordable units on-site or off, most developers have chosen off-site, because the bonus is slightly better and the long-run hassles are far fewer. Developer Ron Moelis, a principal in L&M Equity, says "Bottom line: it’s a good program that works so long as you let the developer build the affordable component off-site. If the developer wants to build on-site, fine, but don’t force it." Off-site still means theoretically close by, either in the same community board or within a half-mile of the market-rate building.
But is this geographic restriction a efficient use of scarce affordable housing dollars? For every unit that gets built on the Upper East Side, many more could be built for the same amount of money in the outer boroughs.
WHY BUILD ON THE MOST EXPENSIVE LAND IN THE CITY?
Nonprofit developer William Rapfogel, executive director of the Met Council on Jewish Poverty, has been urging city officials for years to permit the below-market units to be built in areas with lower land costs. "Instead of forcing the developer to acquire a very expensive parcel of land on 61st Street," says Rapfogel, talking about a project his group did with developer Izak Senbahar, "that same project could be built in Brooklyn or Queens, producing four to five times the number of units we could build in Manhattan. If the goal is to create affordable housing, why not create more? Why build on the most expensive land in the city?"
Why indeed? The answer is a bit of weird planners' double-think. Inclusionary zoning is an heir to the old planning concept of mitigation, by which a development that benefits from upzoning must in turn pay to mitigate the effects of increased density on the public infrastructure. Thus a development that is going to pour hundreds of new commuters into a subway station might pay to upgrade and expand the station's capacity. The somewhat stretched idea of mitigation applied to below-market units is that the new development increases the value of neighboring property - causing rents to rise and lower-income people to be displaced. Therefore, says the Department of City Planning, the developer's mitigating response of building below-market units must occur in the same neighborhood as the damage.
Still, says Michael Slattery, senior vice president for research at the Real Estate Board of New York, inclusionary zoning "has worked for what it's intended to do, which is be a neighborhood mix program, helping to integrate low-income households into high-income neighborhoods." The geographic restrictions have limited the program's use, he argues, because land costs are simply too high in R10 areas to make the program financially worthwhile for any developers except those few who can generate high enough rents to offset the production of affordable housing.
RETHINKING THE CURRENT PROGRAM
Certainly the geographic restrictions should be rethought, perhaps broadened to the same borough or perhaps the same councilmanic district, but something larger than the community board. After all, the community board itself is an expansive construction for assessing mitigation. The boundaries of Community Board 7, for example, on Manhattan's West Side, extend from Cathedral Parkway (110th Street) on the north, Central Park West on the east, the Hudson River on the west, and Columbus Circle on the south. One result is an often substantial geographic distance between the building being given a bonus and the affordable housing being provided. Hope Cohen cites the example of a market-rate building near Lincoln Center whose affordable component was built on 108th Street.
City Planning could stick to its principles while still broadening the area of so-called impact. The point would be to give the program more space to show what it can do.
Similarly, why not extend inclusionary zoning to other high density zoning categories, R7, R8, and R9? Let's open it up and see what happens. Some planners think the lower density won't be able to pay for affordable housing, but that's what markets are for - to pass on this kind of information.
The Department of City Planning is right to resist making it mandatory, however. When transferred to less dense, less wealthy neighborhoods, the program is going to change substantially - and no one can predict the consequences accurately enough to justify this. And as Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, says, "Doing any kind of development requires maximum flexibility. If you take away the developer's flexibility, you're going to halt some housing, which we just don't want to do."
Even many of the coalition members say they do not want to stop housing development - they just want to make sure that neighborhood residents are accommodated. Brad Lander, Director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, says, "Everyone understands that you could clearly dampen development if you imposed a mandate that was too large and you drove land prices too low. I don’t think that’s going to happen because expanded inclusionary zoning will only work if the administration comes through with a compromise. This isn't something the City Council can do on its own."
WHAT’S NEXT
Councilmember Yassky's proposal is now in front of the City Planning Commission, which has held dozens of informal meetings with advocates and community groups but has not yet responded officially. The NYC Coalition's report arguing for a greatly expanded and mandatory program will be released in mid-September. While City Planning would like to see inclusionary zoning extended to new neighborhoods, such as Hudson Yards, it has proposed only a modest, 10% bonus program for the Brooklyn waterfront, which remains the major battle ground for development issues. City Planning hopes the Environmental Impact Statement on its Greenpoint-Williamsburg plan will be ready at the end of September or early October - which will trigger a new round of discussion and debate.
Friday, July 02, 2004
Rezoning Hunters Point
The Manhattan Institute’s
Center for Rethinking Development
Ideas that shape the city’s planning, housing, and development
A Monthly Newsletter by Julia Vitullo-Martin, MI Senior Fellow
Rezoning Hunters Point
Julia Vitullo-Martin, July 2004
Few neighborhoods do a better job of displaying to the naked eye the wreckage of New York's industrial past and the contradictions of New York's post-industrial future than Long Island City, Queens. The luxury towers, for example, rising on the Hunters Point waterfront, directly across from midtown Manhattan, stand in contrast to the decaying inland jumble of light industrial uses, contract office space, small wooden-frame houses, and converted lofts. The decay exists because the area has not been allowed to develop naturally - or even upgrade - since 1961, when city government revised the zoning code to mandate an industrial future for Hunters Point.
Nonetheless, New Yorkers in search of space are a determined lot, and many printers, bakers, small manufacturers, consultants, architects, and artists have moved into the old industrial buildings - some illegally. While hip new bars and restaurants have followed, Hunters Point remains distinctly "industrial in landscape and melancholy in personality," laments the Village Voice. City Planning is hoping to change that with its bold rezoning plan.
REZONING
Long Island City has long been heralded as New York’s next major central business district, and most of City Planning's current rezoning proposals for achieving this are good. Their idea is to "facilitate commercial development at increased densities and allow new residences to mix with commercial and light industrial businesses," while taking advantage of Long Island City's excellent mass transit (8 subway lines) and its "supply of large, underdeveloped properties." Existing low-density light manufacturing zones will be replaced by higher-density, mixed commercial and residential zones to allow as-of-right developments, including office buildings. (Click on the Department of City Planning map below to enlarge current land-use details.)
Large, undeveloped properties encompassing some 50,000 square feet exist in part because zoning had made them unmarketable. Zoning is one of local government's basic means of redistributing wealth, conferring riches on some property owners while withholding development rights from others. The favored few are permitted to develop their land to its highest and best use, while others are severely restricted. Property that is zoned incorrectly - confined to a use that is no longer economic - may become virtually useless, preventing owners from responding flexibly to market changes.
Rezoning underused land, which the Bloomberg administration has rightly made a priority in the boroughs, corrects some old injustices but nearly always introduces new ones. Property that can be developed to 10 stories becomes worth far more than adjacent property developable to only 4 stories. Even more serious from the point of view of the 4-story property owner, the smaller-scale blocks may well lose value as they become overwhelmed by their large neighbors. They end up with the worst of two worlds: less valuable property but without the charm and peace of the usual low-rise, residential neighborhood.
Almost everyone agrees that high-density, mixed-use development is appropriate for Hunters Point, which is well-served by mass transit and major roads - though poorly served by schools and completely lacking in supermarkets. The question is: how much density and on which blocks? And what happens to the midblocks that get left behind, engulfed by high-density but trapped in low-density zoning?
CITY PLANNING'S PROPOSALS
The 37-square-block area to be rezoned lies at the eastern end of the Queensboro Bridge, bordered roughly by 23rd Street on the west, 41st Avenue on the north, and the Sunnyside Yards on the east. The rezoning adds 34 blocks to the 3 blocks at Court Square that were rezoned for high-density development in 1986, allowing the construction of the 1.25 million square-foot Citibank office tower. Opened in 1989, Citibank (now Citicorp) stood as a 48-story beacon that failed, until very recently, to attract any other development. That's changing fast. While renovating its Manhattan space, the Museum of Modern Art, for example, has temporarily relocated nearby, joining P.S. 1, the Socrates Sculpture Garden, and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is erecting a 404,000-square-foot building to house some 2,000 employees now working in Manhattan. Citicorp is itself putting up a new building across the street from its first, which remains the largest New York building outside Manhattan.
Consisting of Hunters Point, Court Square, and Queens Plaza sub-districts, the new Special Long Island City Mixed Use District anticipates about 5 million square feet of new office development and 300 new housing units plus retail and institutional development. Residential districts will be paired with manufacturing districts in four areas, allowing development of 10 to 12 story buildings in some manufacturing areas, and 4 to 7 in others.
Much of this is based on admirable principles, including as-of-right development of most light manufacturing, commercial, and residential uses. Certainly City Planning is correct to urge high-density, tall residential development at Queens Plaza and Court Square, which are served by two transit hubs and are now marred by many large vacant or underused sites. And certainly John Young, the director of City Planning’s Queens office, is right to predict that rezoning will produce an “upturn” in the market. Richard Maltz, chairman of Griener-Maltz, an industrial and commercial broker active in Queens, told the New York Times that a typical 10,000-square-foot factory building in the area now sells for $120 to $140 a square foot, or $1.2 million to $1.4 million. But a builder who can put up a 30,000-square-foot residential tower on the same site will find that the value of his property has nearly doubled to between $2.1 million and $2.5 million.
What's troublesome, though, is City Planning's insistence that it is protecting the neighborhood by maintaining the low density of the mid-blocks that now have small row houses and factories. With the exception of the one tiny historic district of Italianate row houses on 45th Avenue, these low-density blocks have almost no economic future for their current character. Despite their funky appeal, the wood-frame houses tend to have old-fashioned lay-outs - often railroad flats - and inadequate plumbing. Many have been poorly maintained, in part because financing has been almost impossible to obtain to rehabilitate a house in a manufacturing zone.
John Malloy, a property owner and life-long resident of Hunters Point, is most worried about the fate of the midblocks on either side of Vernon Boulevard between 48th avenue and 47th avenue. "The only way to protect us is to allow us to equitably develop our own properties," he argues. "We've been given the lowest zoning in all of Long Island City, which permits us only to build to four stories. Yet in the name of saving industry, City Planning is permitting high-rise development in the areas that are primarily industrial." He emphasizes that he and his neighbors are not against development, "which is in the interest of everyone," but "we don't want stagnation." He also objects to the ban on midblock commercial use, since that means no restaurants or coffee shops.
It's hard to see what's wrong with his position. City Planning should agree to take another look at the restrictions imposed on midblock development. Malloy contends that in the near future "somebody will jump over the Fifth Street border," which divides Queens West’s luxury towers from the inland low-rise factories and houses, "and develop this property, after the city has long since forced us out."
MANUFACTURING JOBS
City Planning’s 2002 in-depth survey of all industrial uses and employment in Hunters Point found some 3,300 industrially classified jobs in 90 firms. But industry is clearly on the decline in Hunters Point itself, though Long Island City as a whole retains roughly 27,000 industrial jobs. Adam Friedman, director of the New York Industrial Retention Network, a citywide economic development organization that advocates for manufacturers, believes that while New York lost many jobs to lower production costs overseas, most of Long Island City's remaining industrial jobs are with firms that are committed to being in New York. "The city is right to want to increase housing and density in some areas, but the question is how to target that development without having a negative impact on jobs in adjacent areas. Yes, we need a new office district and we need to upzone in this area, but we also need to increase protections elsewhere. As one manufacturer told us: we want to stay in New York, so just tell us where to go, where there's some stability. We'll play by the rules, but we have to know what they are." Firms in Hunters Point include jewelry makers, wholesale bakers, theatrical equipment assemblers, woodworkers, and metal platers.
Friedman's group is urging the city to create an Industrial Employment District, much like Chicago's Planned Manufacturing Districts, which restrict as-of-right uses to those involving the production, assembly, storage or transportation of physical goods. Other uses would require special permits. This solution, however, might in practice be a return to the old, centrally planned zoning that so injured industrial districts to begin with. Government has not proved itself to be a good arbiter of which uses should be permitted and which forbidden.
WHAT’S NEXT
The City Planning Commission is in the midst of its public review process on the proposals. It approved the application for zoning map and text amendments on June 23, 2004, and sent the package to the City Council, which must respond in late August.
July 2004
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Department of City Planning
Community Gazette for District 26
Queens West Development Corporation
Queens West & Long Island City Community Portal
Wired New York on Queens West
NYPD’s 108th Precinct
New York Water Taxi - Hunters Point
Queens Olympic Village
Olympic Village design finalists
New York Magazine’s take on Long Island City
Greater Astoria Historical Society
Long Island City Business Development Corporation
Queens Courier
Queens Tribune
Queens Historical Society
Sen. Schumer’s Group of 35 Report on Commercial Development
New York Industrial Retention Network
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Big Bet on Waterfront
Why Queens Matters
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“With the exception of niche industries, the industrial base will be substantially made up of service, commercial, and distribution companies. While little will be manufactured in Queens, food products and consumables will continue to be distributed out of local warehouses. Service providers such as elevator maintenance companies and limo garages will continue to call Queens their home. However, Long Island City will come to resemble the West Side of Manhattan from the 20s through the 40s.”
John Maltz, Griener-Maltz Real Estate
“We want to be able to develop our property ourselves and secure our presence in this community by having moderate development rights.”
John Malloy, Hunters Point homeowner
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter07-04.html
Center for Rethinking Development
Ideas that shape the city’s planning, housing, and development
A Monthly Newsletter by Julia Vitullo-Martin, MI Senior Fellow
Rezoning Hunters Point
Julia Vitullo-Martin, July 2004
Few neighborhoods do a better job of displaying to the naked eye the wreckage of New York's industrial past and the contradictions of New York's post-industrial future than Long Island City, Queens. The luxury towers, for example, rising on the Hunters Point waterfront, directly across from midtown Manhattan, stand in contrast to the decaying inland jumble of light industrial uses, contract office space, small wooden-frame houses, and converted lofts. The decay exists because the area has not been allowed to develop naturally - or even upgrade - since 1961, when city government revised the zoning code to mandate an industrial future for Hunters Point.
Nonetheless, New Yorkers in search of space are a determined lot, and many printers, bakers, small manufacturers, consultants, architects, and artists have moved into the old industrial buildings - some illegally. While hip new bars and restaurants have followed, Hunters Point remains distinctly "industrial in landscape and melancholy in personality," laments the Village Voice. City Planning is hoping to change that with its bold rezoning plan.
REZONING
Long Island City has long been heralded as New York’s next major central business district, and most of City Planning's current rezoning proposals for achieving this are good. Their idea is to "facilitate commercial development at increased densities and allow new residences to mix with commercial and light industrial businesses," while taking advantage of Long Island City's excellent mass transit (8 subway lines) and its "supply of large, underdeveloped properties." Existing low-density light manufacturing zones will be replaced by higher-density, mixed commercial and residential zones to allow as-of-right developments, including office buildings. (Click on the Department of City Planning map below to enlarge current land-use details.)
Large, undeveloped properties encompassing some 50,000 square feet exist in part because zoning had made them unmarketable. Zoning is one of local government's basic means of redistributing wealth, conferring riches on some property owners while withholding development rights from others. The favored few are permitted to develop their land to its highest and best use, while others are severely restricted. Property that is zoned incorrectly - confined to a use that is no longer economic - may become virtually useless, preventing owners from responding flexibly to market changes.
Rezoning underused land, which the Bloomberg administration has rightly made a priority in the boroughs, corrects some old injustices but nearly always introduces new ones. Property that can be developed to 10 stories becomes worth far more than adjacent property developable to only 4 stories. Even more serious from the point of view of the 4-story property owner, the smaller-scale blocks may well lose value as they become overwhelmed by their large neighbors. They end up with the worst of two worlds: less valuable property but without the charm and peace of the usual low-rise, residential neighborhood.
Almost everyone agrees that high-density, mixed-use development is appropriate for Hunters Point, which is well-served by mass transit and major roads - though poorly served by schools and completely lacking in supermarkets. The question is: how much density and on which blocks? And what happens to the midblocks that get left behind, engulfed by high-density but trapped in low-density zoning?
CITY PLANNING'S PROPOSALS
The 37-square-block area to be rezoned lies at the eastern end of the Queensboro Bridge, bordered roughly by 23rd Street on the west, 41st Avenue on the north, and the Sunnyside Yards on the east. The rezoning adds 34 blocks to the 3 blocks at Court Square that were rezoned for high-density development in 1986, allowing the construction of the 1.25 million square-foot Citibank office tower. Opened in 1989, Citibank (now Citicorp) stood as a 48-story beacon that failed, until very recently, to attract any other development. That's changing fast. While renovating its Manhattan space, the Museum of Modern Art, for example, has temporarily relocated nearby, joining P.S. 1, the Socrates Sculpture Garden, and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is erecting a 404,000-square-foot building to house some 2,000 employees now working in Manhattan. Citicorp is itself putting up a new building across the street from its first, which remains the largest New York building outside Manhattan.
Consisting of Hunters Point, Court Square, and Queens Plaza sub-districts, the new Special Long Island City Mixed Use District anticipates about 5 million square feet of new office development and 300 new housing units plus retail and institutional development. Residential districts will be paired with manufacturing districts in four areas, allowing development of 10 to 12 story buildings in some manufacturing areas, and 4 to 7 in others.
Much of this is based on admirable principles, including as-of-right development of most light manufacturing, commercial, and residential uses. Certainly City Planning is correct to urge high-density, tall residential development at Queens Plaza and Court Square, which are served by two transit hubs and are now marred by many large vacant or underused sites. And certainly John Young, the director of City Planning’s Queens office, is right to predict that rezoning will produce an “upturn” in the market. Richard Maltz, chairman of Griener-Maltz, an industrial and commercial broker active in Queens, told the New York Times that a typical 10,000-square-foot factory building in the area now sells for $120 to $140 a square foot, or $1.2 million to $1.4 million. But a builder who can put up a 30,000-square-foot residential tower on the same site will find that the value of his property has nearly doubled to between $2.1 million and $2.5 million.
What's troublesome, though, is City Planning's insistence that it is protecting the neighborhood by maintaining the low density of the mid-blocks that now have small row houses and factories. With the exception of the one tiny historic district of Italianate row houses on 45th Avenue, these low-density blocks have almost no economic future for their current character. Despite their funky appeal, the wood-frame houses tend to have old-fashioned lay-outs - often railroad flats - and inadequate plumbing. Many have been poorly maintained, in part because financing has been almost impossible to obtain to rehabilitate a house in a manufacturing zone.
John Malloy, a property owner and life-long resident of Hunters Point, is most worried about the fate of the midblocks on either side of Vernon Boulevard between 48th avenue and 47th avenue. "The only way to protect us is to allow us to equitably develop our own properties," he argues. "We've been given the lowest zoning in all of Long Island City, which permits us only to build to four stories. Yet in the name of saving industry, City Planning is permitting high-rise development in the areas that are primarily industrial." He emphasizes that he and his neighbors are not against development, "which is in the interest of everyone," but "we don't want stagnation." He also objects to the ban on midblock commercial use, since that means no restaurants or coffee shops.
It's hard to see what's wrong with his position. City Planning should agree to take another look at the restrictions imposed on midblock development. Malloy contends that in the near future "somebody will jump over the Fifth Street border," which divides Queens West’s luxury towers from the inland low-rise factories and houses, "and develop this property, after the city has long since forced us out."
MANUFACTURING JOBS
City Planning’s 2002 in-depth survey of all industrial uses and employment in Hunters Point found some 3,300 industrially classified jobs in 90 firms. But industry is clearly on the decline in Hunters Point itself, though Long Island City as a whole retains roughly 27,000 industrial jobs. Adam Friedman, director of the New York Industrial Retention Network, a citywide economic development organization that advocates for manufacturers, believes that while New York lost many jobs to lower production costs overseas, most of Long Island City's remaining industrial jobs are with firms that are committed to being in New York. "The city is right to want to increase housing and density in some areas, but the question is how to target that development without having a negative impact on jobs in adjacent areas. Yes, we need a new office district and we need to upzone in this area, but we also need to increase protections elsewhere. As one manufacturer told us: we want to stay in New York, so just tell us where to go, where there's some stability. We'll play by the rules, but we have to know what they are." Firms in Hunters Point include jewelry makers, wholesale bakers, theatrical equipment assemblers, woodworkers, and metal platers.
Friedman's group is urging the city to create an Industrial Employment District, much like Chicago's Planned Manufacturing Districts, which restrict as-of-right uses to those involving the production, assembly, storage or transportation of physical goods. Other uses would require special permits. This solution, however, might in practice be a return to the old, centrally planned zoning that so injured industrial districts to begin with. Government has not proved itself to be a good arbiter of which uses should be permitted and which forbidden.
WHAT’S NEXT
The City Planning Commission is in the midst of its public review process on the proposals. It approved the application for zoning map and text amendments on June 23, 2004, and sent the package to the City Council, which must respond in late August.
July 2004
---------------------------------
PRINT THIS EMAIL THIS
---------------------------------
SUBSCRIBE
---------------------------------
NEWSLETTERS ARCHIVE
---------------------------------
LINKS OF THE MONTH
Department of City Planning
Community Gazette for District 26
Queens West Development Corporation
Queens West & Long Island City Community Portal
Wired New York on Queens West
NYPD’s 108th Precinct
New York Water Taxi - Hunters Point
Queens Olympic Village
Olympic Village design finalists
New York Magazine’s take on Long Island City
Greater Astoria Historical Society
Long Island City Business Development Corporation
Queens Courier
Queens Tribune
Queens Historical Society
Sen. Schumer’s Group of 35 Report on Commercial Development
New York Industrial Retention Network
---------------------------------
UPDATES
Big Bet on Waterfront
Why Queens Matters
Fiscal Impact of Forest City Ratner’s Arena
Mayor Bloomberg’s Accountability Report
---------------------------------
FEEDBACK
---------------------------------
UNSUBSCRIBE
---------------------------------
“With the exception of niche industries, the industrial base will be substantially made up of service, commercial, and distribution companies. While little will be manufactured in Queens, food products and consumables will continue to be distributed out of local warehouses. Service providers such as elevator maintenance companies and limo garages will continue to call Queens their home. However, Long Island City will come to resemble the West Side of Manhattan from the 20s through the 40s.”
John Maltz, Griener-Maltz Real Estate
“We want to be able to develop our property ourselves and secure our presence in this community by having moderate development rights.”
John Malloy, Hunters Point homeowner
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter07-04.html
Friday, June 18, 2004
Power Struggle
From the June 18, 2001 issue of New York Magazine
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/politics/newyork/features/4816/index.html
Feature
Power Struggle
The scramble to keep the lights on this summer has already cost a fortune and enraged environmentalists -- and it's only going to heat up when the mercury rises. If we don't get smarter about energy sources for the city, in two years it's California, here we come.
By Amanda Griscom
It's not the hottest day this summer that Jim Castle fears most. It's the third scorcher in a row. After three days over 90 degrees, New York City's brick and concrete buildings have soaked up so much heat that virtually every air conditioner in the city is running full-blast. That's when the city's energy consumption hits what Castle and his colleagues in Albany call "peak load." And compared with New York's needs on an average day, the amount of electricity required to keep the city running nearly doubles.
As the operations manager of the Independent Systems Operator, a not-for-profit Albany company that regulates the energy supply for New York State, Castle oversees a control room that rivals the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, eyeing the needles drawing spikes across the seismographlike chart recorders that track the city's electricity usage.
If a heat wave pushes the demand for electricity beyond the expected peak, Castle issues what's called
A "max gen pickup alert," ordering each of the ten active power plants and hundreds of smaller generators on the city's power grid to run at maximum capacity. This is when he starts to get nervous: The longer the plants run at full throttle, the likelier it is that he'll hear the alarm that indicates one of the generators has buckled under the strain.
"They're heavy mechanical devices, and when you run these facilities all-out for days, you're increasing the likelihood of equipment failure," says Castle. Many of New York's power plants are more than a half-century old, and tubes can rupture, pumps can fail.
"If we don't act fast, we could see ourselves in a California scenario in two years."
What happens next all depends on how lucky we are. In order to shore up diminished supply, Castle will try to increase the amount of energy flowing from upstate and New Jersey through the transmission lines that run into the city. If those cables max out, he'll initiate emergency operating procedures: First, he'll order previously designated office buildings to switch off some lights, elevators, and air conditioners; then he'll tell Con Ed to put out a news alert asking the public to turn off unneeded appliances; finally, he'll call for a "5 percent voltage reduction," a small-scale controlled brownout that cuts everyone's electricity by a barely noticeable amount. If all goes well, the crisis will fade with the heat.
If demand continues to outstrip supply, the transmission lines that run into New York City are at stake, and Castle will check the map at the ISO command center that displays their status. If he sees the blinking lights that signal an overload, he'll put in a call to Con Ed's West End Avenue control room and issue the command for rolling blackouts: "Time to shed load."
On July 13, 1977, 8 million New Yorkers were plunged into darkness when lightning struck transmission lines north of the city and fried every wire on the power grid. For 25 hours, New York was paralyzed: Thousands got trapped in subways, cars backed up in gridlock without traffic lights, and looters rampaged. By the time the lights went on, three people had died and police had made nearly 4,000 arrests. In the wake of that disaster, Con Ed added new lines, installed safety gauges to prevent overloads from cascading into neighboring networks, and maintained so much reserve energy that for the past two decades, New York's power system has seemed invincible.
By the time California began to implement rolling blackouts last fall, it didn't seem quite so invincible anymore. In November, ISO officials announced that our reserve capacity for this summer would be 5 percent below New York State's reliability requirements. In March, the mayor told a group of Wall Street executives that "no one can tell you we're not in serious danger this summer." And in May, President Bush announced that his team of energy-policy experts predicted the entire Northeast could be facing an energy crisis this summer.
As of now, the city's reserves are back up to state requirements -- but only because of controversial last-minute moves by Albany. These reserves should be sufficient for a normal summer, says Maureen Helmer, energy chairman of the Department of Public Service, but "if we have a very hot summer, the city could be facing difficulty." And it will likely be hotter than last year, meteorologists say, because La Niña has faded.
"I am confident, at this point, that the people of New York will not have to feel it the way the people of California have had to feel it," says Richard Sheirer, director of the mayor's Office of Emergency Management. Still, he's prepared: When hot weather hits, "for the first time, my watch commanders will be checking in every evening with Con Ed to get a projection of how much usage they expect for the next day, what reserves they have, and how close we are going to be to the cusp."
To forestall the crisis, state officials spent the past several months building emergency turbines and recommissioning every last scrap of energy-producing equipment that could be put to use in a heat wave -- including old, dirty plants and even privately owned backup diesel generators that can pump extra power back into the grid. "We're going to squeak through the summer," says Carol Murphy, executive director of governmental affairs and communications for the ISO. "But we have a razor-thin margin." And even this margin is based on a fleet of new emergency turbines the Pataki administration commissioned in November without going through the traditional environmental- and public-review process required for most power plants.
Unlike California's, our problems aren't simply the result of a convoluted deregulation process. Driven by population growth, a dramatic increase in the use of computer equipment, and Pataki's 1995 cutbacks in the state's energy-efficiency program, the demand for electricity in New York City has surged nearly 10 percent in the past five years. But no major new plants have been built here for decades. "It is more difficult to build power plants in the Con Ed grid than anywhere else, because of three things," says Steven Sullivan, a spokesman for the ISO. "There's extremely limited space, what space is available is extremely expensive, and the resistance groups within the communities are extremely sophisticated."
Since the majority of our current power plants run on oil and natural gas -- as opposed to coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric power -- the price of the energy they produce has risen dramatically along with the costs of those fuels. That's not a shock if you've looked at your Con Ed statement lately: New York City's electricity bills, traditionally among the highest in the country, rose almost 40 percent in the past two years. And the worst may not be over. Based on market activity in May, "I believe prices are going to be much higher this summer than they were last summer," says Bryan Kimmell, president of Strategic Energy Management, a consulting group for the energy industry in New England and New York.
California handled its energy crisis by importing electricity from bordering states -- albeit at exorbitant prices. But the Con Ed grid, which accounts for more than a third of the state's electricity load, can't rely on its neighbors: There are only three transmission hubs through which power can flow into the city. And there's only so much power those lines can carry. Picture a bottleneck in the Holland Tunnel and you'll get the idea: A heat wave this summer would fill transmission to capacity, like the tunnel on a Friday afternoon in August.
"Transmission is a huge issue," says Kimmell. "In terms of its ability to bring power in, New York City is more restricted than anywhere in the country."
In energy-industry terminology, New York is what's called a load pocket, a region where the design constraints of the electricity grid dictate that local generators must supply most of the power -- in our case, 80 percent. For at least the foreseeable future, it's likely to stay that way: Adding additional transmission lines to import more power is trickier than it seems. There are two kinds of transmission lines -- copper cables that run underground and aluminum cables that must be suspended from huge, hideous towers -- and the suburbs around New York City are too densely populated to make room for the former and too concerned about property values to tolerate the latter. Even if Con Ed could find a place to put such lines, New York State Public Service Commission officials estimate it would take at least five years just to get them approved.
"These guys go from boredom to sheer terror in about a second. The adrenal response is extraordinary."
The controversial new turbines cost the Pataki administration half a billion dollars, but they won't solve the problem for long: Based on relatively inefficient technology, each produces about one tenth the energy of a mid-size plant. And if demand continues to rise, they will no longer be sufficient to meet the city's needs within two years, experts say. In fact, ISO officials say New York City should increase its generating capacity by more than 40 percent over the next five years. To do that, we'd need to start building large-scale power plants -- and soon. "They take at least two to three years to build," says Sullivan. "We need to get our shovels in the ground now. If we don't act fast, we could see ourselves in a California scenario two years from now."
From the outside, the suburban Albany building where Jim Castle and his team manage New York State's power grid is nameless, windowless, and completely anonymous. "If Saddam Hussein showed up in town, we wouldn't want him to know which place to bomb!" explains one of Castle's employees. Inside, it's the nexus of every wire in New York. Five men, four of whom are wearing plaid short-sleeve shirts, sit at boomerang-shaped computer consoles, glancing back and forth between the hives of monitors in front of them and the "Big Board," a 30-foot-high, 80-foot-wide concave display with a map showing every major power plant and transmission line in New York State. On the base of the board is the all-important "enunciator panel," an LED screen with red numbers that track the state's electricity needs in megawatts.
Burly, bearded, and jocular, Castle spends twelve-hour shifts leading a team that makes sure that number matches the amount of energy the state's generators are putting out. Since electricity can't stay in the grid, the amount of energy coming into it must always match the amount being used. Too much and wires will melt; too little and a power surge will disrupt the flow of energy through the grid. Because all the grids are connected, a problem in New York could have consequences in Maryland.
To ensure that everything runs smoothly, the team holds conference calls throughout the day with generator operators to assess available supply and with Con Ed to forecast demand. Every hour, it reviews bids from various generators and matches them with wholesale buyers including Con Ed. Every six seconds, it makes last-minute adjustments to fine-tune the balance.
"There's never a moment when these consoles aren't manned," says Castle, peering down from the glassed-in gallery above the floor. "These guys can't go out to the local diner for dinner." If nature calls, he says, they have to make sure someone else is covering for them.
The excitement is sporadic but certainly intense. "These guys will go from boredom to sheer terror in about a second," Castle says. "I've been in there when things just start falling apart with no advance warning at all -- it could be a storm, or some equipment failure -- and the adrenal response is extraordinary." It needs to be. When a power plant blows a pump or a line "trips off" -- not uncommon occurrences -- Castle's team has to reroute the flow of energy or find an alternative supply. Within a matter of seconds.
Since the stakes are so high, Castle puts all of his operators through aptitude tests, simulated catastrophes, and then a psychological exam to see how they operate under pressure. He himself learned to handle the stress in the Navy, where he graduated from the advanced electronics program at 19 and rose to become the supervisor of electronic technicians on the U.S.S. Nimitz, a 1,100-foot aircraft carrier, by 21. After eight years in the military, he got a degree in electrical engineering at Syracuse and went to work for NY State Electric & Gas before helping to establish the ISO.
The control center runs with the precision of a military agency, but it has the geekish camaraderie of a Silicon Alley start-up. "Hey -- I betcha don't know what the difference is between a mho and an ohm!" jokes Castle, jabbing one of his colleagues in the side. He and one of the other operators furrow their brows. "Just like the words, they're opposites -- one's a measure of resistance, and one's a measure of conductivity!" Both of the operators slap their foreheads in mock exasperation.
"Even if I come in at 5:30 in the morning and leave at 7:30 at night, I'm not ready to go home," Castle confides later in the spare, corporate-looking lobby. "I just go out there and sit in the control room. Guys will ask me questions and I'll just sit there and sorta soak it in. And I'll just think, I can't believe it . . . what an awesome job!"
Before Pataki's New York State Power Authority announced that it was building eleven emergency turbines, Tony Gigantiello was a school custodian who ran high-pressure boilers. Before that, he was a city engineer who ran air-conditioner turbines in the basements of skyscrapers. With a Magnum, P.I., mustache and the square stance of a linebacker, he's an unlikely choice to become the Erin Brockovich of Astoria.
On a blustery morning in winter, Gigantiello climbs onto a plywood stage erected for the day just north of the Queensboro Bridge. As a small crowd of neighborhood residents cheer and half a dozen TV cameras focus in, he delivers a passionate screed about why the new NYPA turbines shouldn't be put in his neighborhood -- or anyone's. "This is not a nimby fight," he says, his husky voice rising to a yell. Albany is distorting statistics to underrepresent the state's energy supply, he says, so Pataki can keep electricity prices down and voters happy for the upcoming election. The turbines that will be polluting his neighborhood by June, he continues, aren't even necessary.
He's referring to research by Ashok Gupta, energy economist of the Natural Resources Defense Council, that shows that New York City will have more energy available this summer than the ISO has predicted. By calculating the supply of electricity on a plant-by-plant basis, he's come up with numbers that call into question Albany's official conclusions -- and even the predictions of a summer energy crisis that the Pataki administration used to make its case to build the emergency turbines. "They made the decision to build the plants," says Gail Suchman, an environmental lawyer. "Then they grasped for numbers that would enable them to justify it. NYPA circumvented the law."
"If customers are going to be able to pay their utility bills, they have to be breathing."
One by one, Astoria residents who belong to the community group Gigantiello leads, choke (Coalition Helping to Organize a Kleaner Environment), step onto the stage to argue that there's already too much pollution in their neighborhood because of existing power plants. A young woman born and raised next to the Poletti plant in Astoria says she was diagnosed with lung cancer at 27, having never smoked a cigarette in her life. A father who lives in a nearby housing project remembers a night last summer when he checked himself and each of his five children into the emergency room with asthma attacks. City Council chairman and mayoral candidate Peter Vallone takes the microphone to condemn "environmental racism." As he speaks, a hundred yards behind the stage, construction workers are putting up the cement walls that will surround the new turbine.
Besides blighting the landscape and lowering property values, power plants and turbines also spew particulate matter, microscopic soot made up of metals and carbon. When inhaled, the particles can become embedded in the lungs and pass into the bloodstream, causing and aggravating heart and respiratory illnesses. Whereas much of the environmental debate has traditionally focused on greenhouse gasses, particulate matter is becoming a major concern. In April, the EPA issued a report confirming studies that found strong links between the recent rise in levels of particulate matter and a rise in death rates.
New York City has one of the highest rates of particulate-matter concentration in the U.S., which is the main reason local emergency rooms treat 46,000 pollution-related asthma attacks a year, according to a 2000 study by the Clean Air Task Force. Already, New York has 2,290 deaths a year related to particulate-matter pollution. If the standard for particulate-matter pollution supported by Christine Whitman's EPA were enacted by the Bush White House, New York would already be well above it.
The problem is especially bad in areas zoned for industrial development, generally also home to minority and low-income communities. All eleven turbines are located in such neighborhoods, many of which already have other polluting facilities like bus depots and waste-transfer stations. choke is only one of the organizations that have protested NYPA's decision to build turbines without subjecting them to the normal environmental-review process. There's also Williamsburg's Stop the Barge and El Puente, the Bronx's Nos Quedamos, the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (uprose), and Communities United for Responsible Energy (cure), an umbrella organization that coordinates their efforts. In April, a dozen community groups represented by Gail Suchman of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest filed a lawsuit against NYPA to stop construction on the turbines. Although they lost -- they filed an appeal, which will be heard June 29 -- their case received endorsements from national environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Advocates.
One of their less likely allies was Silvercup Studios, the Queens filming location for The Sopranos and Sex and the City, which filed a separate suit arguing that the proposed turbines on the Queens waterfront would interfere with owners Stuart and Michael Suna's plan to make the area "the Hollywood of the East Coast." In April, the State Supreme Court ordered NYPA to halt construction on those two turbines, on the grounds that the agency had failed to consider whether they would interfere with business development and pose an environmental threat to the community. On the evidence of Gupta's numbers, the Judge ruled that NYPA and the ISO couldn't make a convincing case that New York was facing an imminent energy crisis in the first place. NYPA appealed the decision and was granted a temporary stay that allowed the agency to continue construction.
So how did we get into this mess, anyway? Although New York's energy problem is different from California's, both share some roots in an unanticipated demand for electricity. Like many other states, we simply didn't see it coming. With a healthy reserve margin and little political interest in conservation or increasing the power supply, New York hasn't built a major power plant in 30 years.
But there's plenty of blame to go around. When Governor Pataki took office in 1995, he took his cues from what Reagan did on a national level in the eighties. He shut down the New York State Energy Office, then charged with planning new plants, and reduced or eliminated many conservation and alternative-energy programs in preparation for his deregulation efforts.
In 1997, when he opened New York State's power market to competing energy suppliers, Pataki ended Con Ed's regulated monopoly on every aspect of the city's electricity-production-and-delivery process. Con Ed remains the owner and operator of the electricity grid, but it was forced to sell off its generators and allow other companies to pump energy into its wires. (In media terms, the grid would be Time Warner's cable system and the energy would be content from MTV or Showtime.) For the first time, New Yorkers could choose their energy provider the way they picked their long-distance carrier, and receive two separate bills: one from Con Ed for their use of the grid and another from an energy provider for the power they used. (Since there's no way to route electricity from a particular generator to a particular consumer, independent providers simply determine how much energy their customers are using and pump that amount into the grid.) Since then, New Yorkers who receive electricity bills from Con Ed have really been purchasing energy it buys from other companies.
In the wake of Pataki's decision, a new generation of energy companies scrambled to claim a slice of New York City's $8 billion energy market, buying up Con Ed's old plants and applying for licenses to build new ones. All the companies -- including KeySpan, Enron, Orion Power Holdings, and 1st Rochdale Cooperative -- control different parts of the process. Some own power plants; others purchase that power and distribute it to consumers.
The theory behind deregulation -- for New York, California, and about 30 other states -- was that a free market would encourage companies to build new power plants, which utilities never had an incentive to construct. With consumers free to choose energy providers -- known as energy-service companies, or escos for short -- companies would compete to supply electricity at the lowest possible rate.
So far, though, the deregulated market hasn't been very competitive here. Fewer than 2 percent of New Yorkers have switched from Con Ed to another energy provider -- many don't even know they have a choice -- and the anticipated price decreases haven't panned out.
Neither did the expected new plants -- new generating companies like Keyspan and Orion have been producing energy in plants they purchased from Con Ed -- partly because New York is such a difficult market to enter. "If you're a developer who wants to build a plant and you're deciding between Texas and New York, you have to consider that you're going to spend a lot more resources trying to get into New York," says Lance Brasher, a lawyer who represents power companies at Skadden, Arps in Washington, D.C. "The process is far more cumbersome in New York. The regulations are all the same, but you have to jump through a lot more hoops to get the same approval and you have a stronger element that is resisting."
As of yet, none of the generation companies that want to do business in New York have been able to get the necessary permits to build new plants. "There are proposals to build as much as 4,000 megawatts of additional capacity in the metropolitan area," says David Flanagan, a spokesman for the New York State Public Service Commission. "It can be frustrating," says Liam Baker, an asset manager at Orion, which is in the process of getting approvals to build a new plant on the site of an old Con Ed facility in Queens. "You have to deal with a cornucopia of agencies: the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Department of Health, the Economic Development Corporation, the Department of Transportation, and the ISO. It's a process that could definitely be streamlined."
But though deregulation is largely responsible for getting us into this mess, it may also be the best hope we have of getting out of it. As generation companies expand and upgrade existing Con Ed plants, they're learning how to cooperate with communities. At choke's request, for example, both Keyspan and Orion have agreed to "repowering programs" to clean up the existing plants as they add new capacity.
Deregulation gives companies an incentive to upgrade older, less efficient plants with modern technology that's also cleaner. Since new "combined cycle" generators operate with roughly twice the fuel efficiency of older "simple cycle" technology, all of the power plants in the development pipeline will use that system. "Think of power plants as if they were cars," says the ISO's Steven Sullivan. "If you had to drive upstate in a Honda Civic, it would be a reliable, relatively inexpensive trip. But what if you had to pull your grandfather's 1965 Mercury Marquis out of the garage? The Marquis is a gas guzzler, and if you run it pedal to the metal the whole trip, it'll be superexpensive and you'll have a breakdown."
Tommy Thompson pops the escape hatch on the top floor of a midtown co-op and dashes across a gusty stretch of rooftop with the frantic resolve of someone trying to catch a getaway chopper. He halts suddenly, cocks his head back, and scans the sky. Nothing. He peers into the canvas tote bag that dangles from his elbow, removes a black box the size of a toaster, and places it at his feet. Then he tilts his face into the sun and widens his iridescent blue eyes. It seems completely conceivable that he's trying to summon a flying saucer.
Thompson is a renewable-energy guru, and he's figuring out the proper placement for an array of solar panels he's going to install on the roof of this 800-unit apartment building. The black box is a device that helps him determine the angle of the sun. "The exposure up here is dy-no-mite," he shouts. "This is the highest building around, so we don't have to worry about shadow." His eyes dart toward the power plants that line the Queens side of the East River. "No Dark Side here!"
Thompson is one of the few energy experts in New York City thinking outside the grid. "The bottom line," he says, "is that if customers are going to be able to pay their utility bills, they have to be breathing!" A reedy jokester given to wearing a purple fanny pack, Thompson directs the sustainability division of 1st Rochdale Cooperative, a two-year-old not-for-profit esco focused on improving clients' energy efficiency and providing the cleanest energy possible.
In December, 1st Rochdale launched its "Green Apple Initiative," aimed at installing solar panels, microturbines, and emission-free fuel-cell generators onto 1,600 New York City businesses and residences over the next ten years. Metered by 1st Rochdale, such installations will pump electricity directly into buildings, bypassing the grid and its attendant pressures. While they won't meet all of a building's energy needs, 1st Rochdale provides electricity from traditional generators to make up the shortfall.
Though it requires a considerable investment, using diverse energy sources makes economic sense in the long run. Richard Perez, an energy researcher at suny Albany, found that New York's peak-load periods correspond to the days when the city gets maximum exposure to the sun. Since those are also the times when prices spike and supply gets scarce, solar panels are one obvious solution.
"We are at an energy crossroads," Gupta says. "Free-market forces, environmental regulations, and technological innovation are dramatically changing the landscape of the energy industry." Even the Pataki administration is beginning to catch on: Six years after eliminating the New York State Energy Office, the governor in January doubled his funding for subsidies to offset investments in clean technology and energy-efficient appliances; soon after, he proposed tax credits for energy-efficient buildings.
Two years ago, architect Robert Fox oversaw the completion of Condé Nast's 4 Times Square headquarters, the first building in New York to incorporate renewable-energy technology, in the form of fuel cells on the fourth floor and solar panels built into the upper part of the structure's façade. "A building that is environmentally smart is economically smart," says Fox, who predicts that by 2005, every new building that goes up in New York will incorporate energy-saving measures.
Since Fox paved the way, dozens of existing buildings, from the New School to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, have made plans to install rooftop solar panels. And the Building Congress recently launched an outreach program to educate real-estate owners and commercial tenants about conserving energy with insulated windows, efficient heating and cooling systems, and sensors that shut off unneeded lights and appliances.
But the most ambitious energy innovation could be a building Fox has planned with developer Douglas Durst, a proposed office complex that would occupy a full city block between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues and 57th and 58th Streets. It would include its own power plant -- six gas turbines with emissions filters -- with sufficient generation capacity to stand independent from the city's grid. "The Durst building is a model of the way we should build buildings in the future," says Thompson.
Many of the tenants will need the energy. The space not used for offices will serve as a telecom hotel, Fox explains, "one of the energy-guzzling buildings that's partly responsible for causing such a huge increase in energy demand."
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/politics/newyork/features/4816/index.html
Feature
Power Struggle
The scramble to keep the lights on this summer has already cost a fortune and enraged environmentalists -- and it's only going to heat up when the mercury rises. If we don't get smarter about energy sources for the city, in two years it's California, here we come.
By Amanda Griscom
It's not the hottest day this summer that Jim Castle fears most. It's the third scorcher in a row. After three days over 90 degrees, New York City's brick and concrete buildings have soaked up so much heat that virtually every air conditioner in the city is running full-blast. That's when the city's energy consumption hits what Castle and his colleagues in Albany call "peak load." And compared with New York's needs on an average day, the amount of electricity required to keep the city running nearly doubles.
As the operations manager of the Independent Systems Operator, a not-for-profit Albany company that regulates the energy supply for New York State, Castle oversees a control room that rivals the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, eyeing the needles drawing spikes across the seismographlike chart recorders that track the city's electricity usage.
If a heat wave pushes the demand for electricity beyond the expected peak, Castle issues what's called
A "max gen pickup alert," ordering each of the ten active power plants and hundreds of smaller generators on the city's power grid to run at maximum capacity. This is when he starts to get nervous: The longer the plants run at full throttle, the likelier it is that he'll hear the alarm that indicates one of the generators has buckled under the strain.
"They're heavy mechanical devices, and when you run these facilities all-out for days, you're increasing the likelihood of equipment failure," says Castle. Many of New York's power plants are more than a half-century old, and tubes can rupture, pumps can fail.
"If we don't act fast, we could see ourselves in a California scenario in two years."
What happens next all depends on how lucky we are. In order to shore up diminished supply, Castle will try to increase the amount of energy flowing from upstate and New Jersey through the transmission lines that run into the city. If those cables max out, he'll initiate emergency operating procedures: First, he'll order previously designated office buildings to switch off some lights, elevators, and air conditioners; then he'll tell Con Ed to put out a news alert asking the public to turn off unneeded appliances; finally, he'll call for a "5 percent voltage reduction," a small-scale controlled brownout that cuts everyone's electricity by a barely noticeable amount. If all goes well, the crisis will fade with the heat.
If demand continues to outstrip supply, the transmission lines that run into New York City are at stake, and Castle will check the map at the ISO command center that displays their status. If he sees the blinking lights that signal an overload, he'll put in a call to Con Ed's West End Avenue control room and issue the command for rolling blackouts: "Time to shed load."
On July 13, 1977, 8 million New Yorkers were plunged into darkness when lightning struck transmission lines north of the city and fried every wire on the power grid. For 25 hours, New York was paralyzed: Thousands got trapped in subways, cars backed up in gridlock without traffic lights, and looters rampaged. By the time the lights went on, three people had died and police had made nearly 4,000 arrests. In the wake of that disaster, Con Ed added new lines, installed safety gauges to prevent overloads from cascading into neighboring networks, and maintained so much reserve energy that for the past two decades, New York's power system has seemed invincible.
By the time California began to implement rolling blackouts last fall, it didn't seem quite so invincible anymore. In November, ISO officials announced that our reserve capacity for this summer would be 5 percent below New York State's reliability requirements. In March, the mayor told a group of Wall Street executives that "no one can tell you we're not in serious danger this summer." And in May, President Bush announced that his team of energy-policy experts predicted the entire Northeast could be facing an energy crisis this summer.
As of now, the city's reserves are back up to state requirements -- but only because of controversial last-minute moves by Albany. These reserves should be sufficient for a normal summer, says Maureen Helmer, energy chairman of the Department of Public Service, but "if we have a very hot summer, the city could be facing difficulty." And it will likely be hotter than last year, meteorologists say, because La Niña has faded.
"I am confident, at this point, that the people of New York will not have to feel it the way the people of California have had to feel it," says Richard Sheirer, director of the mayor's Office of Emergency Management. Still, he's prepared: When hot weather hits, "for the first time, my watch commanders will be checking in every evening with Con Ed to get a projection of how much usage they expect for the next day, what reserves they have, and how close we are going to be to the cusp."
To forestall the crisis, state officials spent the past several months building emergency turbines and recommissioning every last scrap of energy-producing equipment that could be put to use in a heat wave -- including old, dirty plants and even privately owned backup diesel generators that can pump extra power back into the grid. "We're going to squeak through the summer," says Carol Murphy, executive director of governmental affairs and communications for the ISO. "But we have a razor-thin margin." And even this margin is based on a fleet of new emergency turbines the Pataki administration commissioned in November without going through the traditional environmental- and public-review process required for most power plants.
Unlike California's, our problems aren't simply the result of a convoluted deregulation process. Driven by population growth, a dramatic increase in the use of computer equipment, and Pataki's 1995 cutbacks in the state's energy-efficiency program, the demand for electricity in New York City has surged nearly 10 percent in the past five years. But no major new plants have been built here for decades. "It is more difficult to build power plants in the Con Ed grid than anywhere else, because of three things," says Steven Sullivan, a spokesman for the ISO. "There's extremely limited space, what space is available is extremely expensive, and the resistance groups within the communities are extremely sophisticated."
Since the majority of our current power plants run on oil and natural gas -- as opposed to coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric power -- the price of the energy they produce has risen dramatically along with the costs of those fuels. That's not a shock if you've looked at your Con Ed statement lately: New York City's electricity bills, traditionally among the highest in the country, rose almost 40 percent in the past two years. And the worst may not be over. Based on market activity in May, "I believe prices are going to be much higher this summer than they were last summer," says Bryan Kimmell, president of Strategic Energy Management, a consulting group for the energy industry in New England and New York.
California handled its energy crisis by importing electricity from bordering states -- albeit at exorbitant prices. But the Con Ed grid, which accounts for more than a third of the state's electricity load, can't rely on its neighbors: There are only three transmission hubs through which power can flow into the city. And there's only so much power those lines can carry. Picture a bottleneck in the Holland Tunnel and you'll get the idea: A heat wave this summer would fill transmission to capacity, like the tunnel on a Friday afternoon in August.
"Transmission is a huge issue," says Kimmell. "In terms of its ability to bring power in, New York City is more restricted than anywhere in the country."
In energy-industry terminology, New York is what's called a load pocket, a region where the design constraints of the electricity grid dictate that local generators must supply most of the power -- in our case, 80 percent. For at least the foreseeable future, it's likely to stay that way: Adding additional transmission lines to import more power is trickier than it seems. There are two kinds of transmission lines -- copper cables that run underground and aluminum cables that must be suspended from huge, hideous towers -- and the suburbs around New York City are too densely populated to make room for the former and too concerned about property values to tolerate the latter. Even if Con Ed could find a place to put such lines, New York State Public Service Commission officials estimate it would take at least five years just to get them approved.
"These guys go from boredom to sheer terror in about a second. The adrenal response is extraordinary."
The controversial new turbines cost the Pataki administration half a billion dollars, but they won't solve the problem for long: Based on relatively inefficient technology, each produces about one tenth the energy of a mid-size plant. And if demand continues to rise, they will no longer be sufficient to meet the city's needs within two years, experts say. In fact, ISO officials say New York City should increase its generating capacity by more than 40 percent over the next five years. To do that, we'd need to start building large-scale power plants -- and soon. "They take at least two to three years to build," says Sullivan. "We need to get our shovels in the ground now. If we don't act fast, we could see ourselves in a California scenario two years from now."
From the outside, the suburban Albany building where Jim Castle and his team manage New York State's power grid is nameless, windowless, and completely anonymous. "If Saddam Hussein showed up in town, we wouldn't want him to know which place to bomb!" explains one of Castle's employees. Inside, it's the nexus of every wire in New York. Five men, four of whom are wearing plaid short-sleeve shirts, sit at boomerang-shaped computer consoles, glancing back and forth between the hives of monitors in front of them and the "Big Board," a 30-foot-high, 80-foot-wide concave display with a map showing every major power plant and transmission line in New York State. On the base of the board is the all-important "enunciator panel," an LED screen with red numbers that track the state's electricity needs in megawatts.
Burly, bearded, and jocular, Castle spends twelve-hour shifts leading a team that makes sure that number matches the amount of energy the state's generators are putting out. Since electricity can't stay in the grid, the amount of energy coming into it must always match the amount being used. Too much and wires will melt; too little and a power surge will disrupt the flow of energy through the grid. Because all the grids are connected, a problem in New York could have consequences in Maryland.
To ensure that everything runs smoothly, the team holds conference calls throughout the day with generator operators to assess available supply and with Con Ed to forecast demand. Every hour, it reviews bids from various generators and matches them with wholesale buyers including Con Ed. Every six seconds, it makes last-minute adjustments to fine-tune the balance.
"There's never a moment when these consoles aren't manned," says Castle, peering down from the glassed-in gallery above the floor. "These guys can't go out to the local diner for dinner." If nature calls, he says, they have to make sure someone else is covering for them.
The excitement is sporadic but certainly intense. "These guys will go from boredom to sheer terror in about a second," Castle says. "I've been in there when things just start falling apart with no advance warning at all -- it could be a storm, or some equipment failure -- and the adrenal response is extraordinary." It needs to be. When a power plant blows a pump or a line "trips off" -- not uncommon occurrences -- Castle's team has to reroute the flow of energy or find an alternative supply. Within a matter of seconds.
Since the stakes are so high, Castle puts all of his operators through aptitude tests, simulated catastrophes, and then a psychological exam to see how they operate under pressure. He himself learned to handle the stress in the Navy, where he graduated from the advanced electronics program at 19 and rose to become the supervisor of electronic technicians on the U.S.S. Nimitz, a 1,100-foot aircraft carrier, by 21. After eight years in the military, he got a degree in electrical engineering at Syracuse and went to work for NY State Electric & Gas before helping to establish the ISO.
The control center runs with the precision of a military agency, but it has the geekish camaraderie of a Silicon Alley start-up. "Hey -- I betcha don't know what the difference is between a mho and an ohm!" jokes Castle, jabbing one of his colleagues in the side. He and one of the other operators furrow their brows. "Just like the words, they're opposites -- one's a measure of resistance, and one's a measure of conductivity!" Both of the operators slap their foreheads in mock exasperation.
"Even if I come in at 5:30 in the morning and leave at 7:30 at night, I'm not ready to go home," Castle confides later in the spare, corporate-looking lobby. "I just go out there and sit in the control room. Guys will ask me questions and I'll just sit there and sorta soak it in. And I'll just think, I can't believe it . . . what an awesome job!"
Before Pataki's New York State Power Authority announced that it was building eleven emergency turbines, Tony Gigantiello was a school custodian who ran high-pressure boilers. Before that, he was a city engineer who ran air-conditioner turbines in the basements of skyscrapers. With a Magnum, P.I., mustache and the square stance of a linebacker, he's an unlikely choice to become the Erin Brockovich of Astoria.
On a blustery morning in winter, Gigantiello climbs onto a plywood stage erected for the day just north of the Queensboro Bridge. As a small crowd of neighborhood residents cheer and half a dozen TV cameras focus in, he delivers a passionate screed about why the new NYPA turbines shouldn't be put in his neighborhood -- or anyone's. "This is not a nimby fight," he says, his husky voice rising to a yell. Albany is distorting statistics to underrepresent the state's energy supply, he says, so Pataki can keep electricity prices down and voters happy for the upcoming election. The turbines that will be polluting his neighborhood by June, he continues, aren't even necessary.
He's referring to research by Ashok Gupta, energy economist of the Natural Resources Defense Council, that shows that New York City will have more energy available this summer than the ISO has predicted. By calculating the supply of electricity on a plant-by-plant basis, he's come up with numbers that call into question Albany's official conclusions -- and even the predictions of a summer energy crisis that the Pataki administration used to make its case to build the emergency turbines. "They made the decision to build the plants," says Gail Suchman, an environmental lawyer. "Then they grasped for numbers that would enable them to justify it. NYPA circumvented the law."
"If customers are going to be able to pay their utility bills, they have to be breathing."
One by one, Astoria residents who belong to the community group Gigantiello leads, choke (Coalition Helping to Organize a Kleaner Environment), step onto the stage to argue that there's already too much pollution in their neighborhood because of existing power plants. A young woman born and raised next to the Poletti plant in Astoria says she was diagnosed with lung cancer at 27, having never smoked a cigarette in her life. A father who lives in a nearby housing project remembers a night last summer when he checked himself and each of his five children into the emergency room with asthma attacks. City Council chairman and mayoral candidate Peter Vallone takes the microphone to condemn "environmental racism." As he speaks, a hundred yards behind the stage, construction workers are putting up the cement walls that will surround the new turbine.
Besides blighting the landscape and lowering property values, power plants and turbines also spew particulate matter, microscopic soot made up of metals and carbon. When inhaled, the particles can become embedded in the lungs and pass into the bloodstream, causing and aggravating heart and respiratory illnesses. Whereas much of the environmental debate has traditionally focused on greenhouse gasses, particulate matter is becoming a major concern. In April, the EPA issued a report confirming studies that found strong links between the recent rise in levels of particulate matter and a rise in death rates.
New York City has one of the highest rates of particulate-matter concentration in the U.S., which is the main reason local emergency rooms treat 46,000 pollution-related asthma attacks a year, according to a 2000 study by the Clean Air Task Force. Already, New York has 2,290 deaths a year related to particulate-matter pollution. If the standard for particulate-matter pollution supported by Christine Whitman's EPA were enacted by the Bush White House, New York would already be well above it.
The problem is especially bad in areas zoned for industrial development, generally also home to minority and low-income communities. All eleven turbines are located in such neighborhoods, many of which already have other polluting facilities like bus depots and waste-transfer stations. choke is only one of the organizations that have protested NYPA's decision to build turbines without subjecting them to the normal environmental-review process. There's also Williamsburg's Stop the Barge and El Puente, the Bronx's Nos Quedamos, the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (uprose), and Communities United for Responsible Energy (cure), an umbrella organization that coordinates their efforts. In April, a dozen community groups represented by Gail Suchman of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest filed a lawsuit against NYPA to stop construction on the turbines. Although they lost -- they filed an appeal, which will be heard June 29 -- their case received endorsements from national environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Advocates.
One of their less likely allies was Silvercup Studios, the Queens filming location for The Sopranos and Sex and the City, which filed a separate suit arguing that the proposed turbines on the Queens waterfront would interfere with owners Stuart and Michael Suna's plan to make the area "the Hollywood of the East Coast." In April, the State Supreme Court ordered NYPA to halt construction on those two turbines, on the grounds that the agency had failed to consider whether they would interfere with business development and pose an environmental threat to the community. On the evidence of Gupta's numbers, the Judge ruled that NYPA and the ISO couldn't make a convincing case that New York was facing an imminent energy crisis in the first place. NYPA appealed the decision and was granted a temporary stay that allowed the agency to continue construction.
So how did we get into this mess, anyway? Although New York's energy problem is different from California's, both share some roots in an unanticipated demand for electricity. Like many other states, we simply didn't see it coming. With a healthy reserve margin and little political interest in conservation or increasing the power supply, New York hasn't built a major power plant in 30 years.
But there's plenty of blame to go around. When Governor Pataki took office in 1995, he took his cues from what Reagan did on a national level in the eighties. He shut down the New York State Energy Office, then charged with planning new plants, and reduced or eliminated many conservation and alternative-energy programs in preparation for his deregulation efforts.
In 1997, when he opened New York State's power market to competing energy suppliers, Pataki ended Con Ed's regulated monopoly on every aspect of the city's electricity-production-and-delivery process. Con Ed remains the owner and operator of the electricity grid, but it was forced to sell off its generators and allow other companies to pump energy into its wires. (In media terms, the grid would be Time Warner's cable system and the energy would be content from MTV or Showtime.) For the first time, New Yorkers could choose their energy provider the way they picked their long-distance carrier, and receive two separate bills: one from Con Ed for their use of the grid and another from an energy provider for the power they used. (Since there's no way to route electricity from a particular generator to a particular consumer, independent providers simply determine how much energy their customers are using and pump that amount into the grid.) Since then, New Yorkers who receive electricity bills from Con Ed have really been purchasing energy it buys from other companies.
In the wake of Pataki's decision, a new generation of energy companies scrambled to claim a slice of New York City's $8 billion energy market, buying up Con Ed's old plants and applying for licenses to build new ones. All the companies -- including KeySpan, Enron, Orion Power Holdings, and 1st Rochdale Cooperative -- control different parts of the process. Some own power plants; others purchase that power and distribute it to consumers.
The theory behind deregulation -- for New York, California, and about 30 other states -- was that a free market would encourage companies to build new power plants, which utilities never had an incentive to construct. With consumers free to choose energy providers -- known as energy-service companies, or escos for short -- companies would compete to supply electricity at the lowest possible rate.
So far, though, the deregulated market hasn't been very competitive here. Fewer than 2 percent of New Yorkers have switched from Con Ed to another energy provider -- many don't even know they have a choice -- and the anticipated price decreases haven't panned out.
Neither did the expected new plants -- new generating companies like Keyspan and Orion have been producing energy in plants they purchased from Con Ed -- partly because New York is such a difficult market to enter. "If you're a developer who wants to build a plant and you're deciding between Texas and New York, you have to consider that you're going to spend a lot more resources trying to get into New York," says Lance Brasher, a lawyer who represents power companies at Skadden, Arps in Washington, D.C. "The process is far more cumbersome in New York. The regulations are all the same, but you have to jump through a lot more hoops to get the same approval and you have a stronger element that is resisting."
As of yet, none of the generation companies that want to do business in New York have been able to get the necessary permits to build new plants. "There are proposals to build as much as 4,000 megawatts of additional capacity in the metropolitan area," says David Flanagan, a spokesman for the New York State Public Service Commission. "It can be frustrating," says Liam Baker, an asset manager at Orion, which is in the process of getting approvals to build a new plant on the site of an old Con Ed facility in Queens. "You have to deal with a cornucopia of agencies: the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Department of Health, the Economic Development Corporation, the Department of Transportation, and the ISO. It's a process that could definitely be streamlined."
But though deregulation is largely responsible for getting us into this mess, it may also be the best hope we have of getting out of it. As generation companies expand and upgrade existing Con Ed plants, they're learning how to cooperate with communities. At choke's request, for example, both Keyspan and Orion have agreed to "repowering programs" to clean up the existing plants as they add new capacity.
Deregulation gives companies an incentive to upgrade older, less efficient plants with modern technology that's also cleaner. Since new "combined cycle" generators operate with roughly twice the fuel efficiency of older "simple cycle" technology, all of the power plants in the development pipeline will use that system. "Think of power plants as if they were cars," says the ISO's Steven Sullivan. "If you had to drive upstate in a Honda Civic, it would be a reliable, relatively inexpensive trip. But what if you had to pull your grandfather's 1965 Mercury Marquis out of the garage? The Marquis is a gas guzzler, and if you run it pedal to the metal the whole trip, it'll be superexpensive and you'll have a breakdown."
Tommy Thompson pops the escape hatch on the top floor of a midtown co-op and dashes across a gusty stretch of rooftop with the frantic resolve of someone trying to catch a getaway chopper. He halts suddenly, cocks his head back, and scans the sky. Nothing. He peers into the canvas tote bag that dangles from his elbow, removes a black box the size of a toaster, and places it at his feet. Then he tilts his face into the sun and widens his iridescent blue eyes. It seems completely conceivable that he's trying to summon a flying saucer.
Thompson is a renewable-energy guru, and he's figuring out the proper placement for an array of solar panels he's going to install on the roof of this 800-unit apartment building. The black box is a device that helps him determine the angle of the sun. "The exposure up here is dy-no-mite," he shouts. "This is the highest building around, so we don't have to worry about shadow." His eyes dart toward the power plants that line the Queens side of the East River. "No Dark Side here!"
Thompson is one of the few energy experts in New York City thinking outside the grid. "The bottom line," he says, "is that if customers are going to be able to pay their utility bills, they have to be breathing!" A reedy jokester given to wearing a purple fanny pack, Thompson directs the sustainability division of 1st Rochdale Cooperative, a two-year-old not-for-profit esco focused on improving clients' energy efficiency and providing the cleanest energy possible.
In December, 1st Rochdale launched its "Green Apple Initiative," aimed at installing solar panels, microturbines, and emission-free fuel-cell generators onto 1,600 New York City businesses and residences over the next ten years. Metered by 1st Rochdale, such installations will pump electricity directly into buildings, bypassing the grid and its attendant pressures. While they won't meet all of a building's energy needs, 1st Rochdale provides electricity from traditional generators to make up the shortfall.
Though it requires a considerable investment, using diverse energy sources makes economic sense in the long run. Richard Perez, an energy researcher at suny Albany, found that New York's peak-load periods correspond to the days when the city gets maximum exposure to the sun. Since those are also the times when prices spike and supply gets scarce, solar panels are one obvious solution.
"We are at an energy crossroads," Gupta says. "Free-market forces, environmental regulations, and technological innovation are dramatically changing the landscape of the energy industry." Even the Pataki administration is beginning to catch on: Six years after eliminating the New York State Energy Office, the governor in January doubled his funding for subsidies to offset investments in clean technology and energy-efficient appliances; soon after, he proposed tax credits for energy-efficient buildings.
Two years ago, architect Robert Fox oversaw the completion of Condé Nast's 4 Times Square headquarters, the first building in New York to incorporate renewable-energy technology, in the form of fuel cells on the fourth floor and solar panels built into the upper part of the structure's façade. "A building that is environmentally smart is economically smart," says Fox, who predicts that by 2005, every new building that goes up in New York will incorporate energy-saving measures.
Since Fox paved the way, dozens of existing buildings, from the New School to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, have made plans to install rooftop solar panels. And the Building Congress recently launched an outreach program to educate real-estate owners and commercial tenants about conserving energy with insulated windows, efficient heating and cooling systems, and sensors that shut off unneeded lights and appliances.
But the most ambitious energy innovation could be a building Fox has planned with developer Douglas Durst, a proposed office complex that would occupy a full city block between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues and 57th and 58th Streets. It would include its own power plant -- six gas turbines with emissions filters -- with sufficient generation capacity to stand independent from the city's grid. "The Durst building is a model of the way we should build buildings in the future," says Thompson.
Many of the tenants will need the energy. The space not used for offices will serve as a telecom hotel, Fox explains, "one of the energy-guzzling buildings that's partly responsible for causing such a huge increase in energy demand."
Friday, June 11, 2004
125th Street/River to River study - Advisory Committee comments
Subj: 125th Street/River to River study
Date: 6/11/2004 12:52:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: Reysmont
To: WestSideHtsNYC
125th Street/River to River study
Advisory Committee comments April 28, 2004
DevelopmentThere are many unrecognized historic resources in Harlem. Historic preservation should be a priority in this study, perhaps meriting its own specialized category.
New commercial construction tends to be aesthetically unattractive, lacks architectural innovation and does not reflect Harlem’s historic architectural character. 125th Street is a unique corridor and should be treated with architectural sensitivity. Several recent development proposals in the East Harlem Triangle area are happening without adequate community input.
125th Street has lots of one-story buildings. These are opportunities for new development. The critical mass of national chains has been reached. The city should emphasize preservation of local businesses to maintain a balanced diversity of retail uses.
However, a greater variety of retail (including some stores that are present downtown) may be appropriate on 125th Street so that residents do not have to travel downtown to shop.
There is a need for a comprehensive housing strategy to address the need for affordable housing. In addition, attention should be paid to NYCHA tenants’ associations if proposed developments would affect NYCHA residents.
The city seems purposely vague in describing development opportunities. Legitimate public participation must be part of this planning process. The study should include an analysis of upper-story vacancies on 125th Street (patterned after a similar study in the South Bronx). The private ULURP application for the rezoning of Harlem Hotel site should not take place separately from a potential corridor-wide rezoning.
The rezoning proposal should consider MX zones that allow a diversity of uses. The city should also consider zoning districts that have low retail square footage to preserve local businesses and also consider new opportunities for light industry.
Some new commercial signs are out-of-scale and detract from the corridor. The city should consider zoning bonuses and tax incentives to encourage local businesses and cultural organization in new developments In addition to 125th Street, the city should explore potential residential and retail opportunities along the intersecting avenues. The city should investigate other cities’ mechanisms for monitoring design.
TransportationPhase I of the proposed Second Avenue subway should serve East Harlem through 125th Street instead of stopping at 96th Street.
The study should evaluate the feasibility of light-rail service along 125th Street.
In addition to traffic congestion, the study should include specific recommendations to improve pedestrian mobility to create a more walkable community.
The 1967 Model Cities plan recommended transportation solutions on 124th and 126th streets.
These recommendations never came to fruition and should be revisited.
Culture
New culture-related activities are critical to the revitalization of 125th Street.
Cultural development activities should not necessarily target tourists, but should also attract NYC residents.
Culture-related uses enhance the demand for restaurants and related business activities.
Urban Design
The city should use caution in approaching the idea of a “24-hour” corridor. Noise pollution is an issue in the residential neighborhoods surrounding 125th Street during the day and night.
However, enhancing some night-time activities is important. Pests are a problem, perhaps more around 125th Street than other parts of the city.
Environment
The city should implement LEEDS standards in all new commercial construction
Waterfront
The west-side waterfront around 125th Street is inundated by city services including a salt pile, the bus depot, and the Marine Transfer Station facility. These items should be removed.
Salt piles should be covered to reduce impacts on surrounding uses.
Process/Timeline
The planning process should include binding requirements to ensure that community recommendations are integrated in a meaningful way over the long-term.
The Department of Sanitation should be included in the interagency team.
The planning process should ensure continued benefits to minority populations. Examples should be considered from other cities, including Atlanta and Washington DC.
The city should define the beneficiaries of the opportunities that are proposed. Establish a communications process to ensure clarity
The city should hire black and Latino participants for the interagency team. The interagency team should clarify its communication process with the Advisory Committee, especially for notifications of future meetings.
Make sure that all future venues have proper acoustics so that all comments can be heard.
Date: 6/11/2004 12:52:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: Reysmont
To: WestSideHtsNYC
125th Street/River to River study
Advisory Committee comments April 28, 2004
DevelopmentThere are many unrecognized historic resources in Harlem. Historic preservation should be a priority in this study, perhaps meriting its own specialized category.
New commercial construction tends to be aesthetically unattractive, lacks architectural innovation and does not reflect Harlem’s historic architectural character. 125th Street is a unique corridor and should be treated with architectural sensitivity. Several recent development proposals in the East Harlem Triangle area are happening without adequate community input.
125th Street has lots of one-story buildings. These are opportunities for new development. The critical mass of national chains has been reached. The city should emphasize preservation of local businesses to maintain a balanced diversity of retail uses.
However, a greater variety of retail (including some stores that are present downtown) may be appropriate on 125th Street so that residents do not have to travel downtown to shop.
There is a need for a comprehensive housing strategy to address the need for affordable housing. In addition, attention should be paid to NYCHA tenants’ associations if proposed developments would affect NYCHA residents.
The city seems purposely vague in describing development opportunities. Legitimate public participation must be part of this planning process. The study should include an analysis of upper-story vacancies on 125th Street (patterned after a similar study in the South Bronx). The private ULURP application for the rezoning of Harlem Hotel site should not take place separately from a potential corridor-wide rezoning.
The rezoning proposal should consider MX zones that allow a diversity of uses. The city should also consider zoning districts that have low retail square footage to preserve local businesses and also consider new opportunities for light industry.
Some new commercial signs are out-of-scale and detract from the corridor. The city should consider zoning bonuses and tax incentives to encourage local businesses and cultural organization in new developments In addition to 125th Street, the city should explore potential residential and retail opportunities along the intersecting avenues. The city should investigate other cities’ mechanisms for monitoring design.
TransportationPhase I of the proposed Second Avenue subway should serve East Harlem through 125th Street instead of stopping at 96th Street.
The study should evaluate the feasibility of light-rail service along 125th Street.
In addition to traffic congestion, the study should include specific recommendations to improve pedestrian mobility to create a more walkable community.
The 1967 Model Cities plan recommended transportation solutions on 124th and 126th streets.
These recommendations never came to fruition and should be revisited.
Culture
New culture-related activities are critical to the revitalization of 125th Street.
Cultural development activities should not necessarily target tourists, but should also attract NYC residents.
Culture-related uses enhance the demand for restaurants and related business activities.
Urban Design
The city should use caution in approaching the idea of a “24-hour” corridor. Noise pollution is an issue in the residential neighborhoods surrounding 125th Street during the day and night.
However, enhancing some night-time activities is important. Pests are a problem, perhaps more around 125th Street than other parts of the city.
Environment
The city should implement LEEDS standards in all new commercial construction
Waterfront
The west-side waterfront around 125th Street is inundated by city services including a salt pile, the bus depot, and the Marine Transfer Station facility. These items should be removed.
Salt piles should be covered to reduce impacts on surrounding uses.
Process/Timeline
The planning process should include binding requirements to ensure that community recommendations are integrated in a meaningful way over the long-term.
The Department of Sanitation should be included in the interagency team.
The planning process should ensure continued benefits to minority populations. Examples should be considered from other cities, including Atlanta and Washington DC.
The city should define the beneficiaries of the opportunities that are proposed. Establish a communications process to ensure clarity
The city should hire black and Latino participants for the interagency team. The interagency team should clarify its communication process with the Advisory Committee, especially for notifications of future meetings.
Make sure that all future venues have proper acoustics so that all comments can be heard.
Subj: Public Hearing Marine Transfer Station - Scoping Session
Date: 6/11/2004 12:47:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: Reysmont
To: WestSideHtsNYC
Publichearinginwo74.ZIP (172197 bytes) DL Time (TCP/IP): < 1 minute
Public Hearing Wednesday June 16 at 5:30 PM at Roberto Clemente IS 195 625 West 133rd Street between Broadway and 12th AvenueThis meeting was originally schedule to take place at CB9M offices but was changed by Sanitation without consultations or explanation.
We strongly encourage all community residents to attend and make your voices heard, with respect, facts and articulation of the community needs. All organizations receiving this mesage please pass it to your e-list and other organizations.
Regards
JRM
Jord (George) Reyes-Montblanc
e-mail: Reysmont@aol.com
Community Board 9 Manhattan
565 West 125th Street (off Broadway, corner of Old Broadway)
New York, NY 10027Tel: (212) 864-6200Fax: 212-662-7396
Date: 6/11/2004 12:47:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: Reysmont
To: WestSideHtsNYC
Publichearinginwo74.ZIP (172197 bytes) DL Time (TCP/IP): < 1 minute
Public Hearing Wednesday June 16 at 5:30 PM at Roberto Clemente IS 195 625 West 133rd Street between Broadway and 12th AvenueThis meeting was originally schedule to take place at CB9M offices but was changed by Sanitation without consultations or explanation.
We strongly encourage all community residents to attend and make your voices heard, with respect, facts and articulation of the community needs. All organizations receiving this mesage please pass it to your e-list and other organizations.
Regards
JRM
Jord (George) Reyes-Montblanc
e-mail: Reysmont@aol.com
Community Board 9 Manhattan
565 West 125th Street (off Broadway, corner of Old Broadway)
New York, NY 10027Tel: (212) 864-6200Fax: 212-662-7396
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Sugar Hill: Reclaiming a Place Where the Music Once Played
New York Times
June 6, 2004
nytimes.com/realestate
LIVING IN
Sugar Hill: Reclaiming a Place Where the Music Once Played
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
THEY TOOK THE `A' TRAIN Home buyers have made row houses, like these on St. Nicholas Avenue, some of the hottest properties in Sugar Hill.
By NANCY BETH JACKSON
Published: June 6, 2004
ARTICLE TOOLS
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Format
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Single-Page Format
COMMUNITY DETAILS
Sugar Hill
Population 7,178
Median Age 32.9
Median Income $24,012
Median Household Net Worth $24,130
Recent Sales in Sugar Hill
More Data on Sugar Hill
More Data on Manhattan
RELATED ARTICLE
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Homes for Rent
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Sponsored by:
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Restoration and Rehabilitation
HEN Duke Ellington made "Take the `A' Train" his theme song in 1942, he established forever in music what everyone already knew. Sugar Hill was the place to go, the place to be, in Harlem. He lived on Sugar Hill and so did his collaborator Billy Strayhorn, who scribbled down the tune when the homesick band was playing in Chicago.
Sugar Hill, a ritzy neighborhood for the black bourgeoisie. Sugar Hill, the mythic center of the Harlem Renaissance between the World Wars. Sugar Hill, the good life.
For decades, African-Americans all over the country dreamed of living on Sugar Hill, but throughout its history, it has drawn people of all hues and nationalities.
"The biggest misconception about Sugar Hill is that at any time it was all black," said Willie Kathryn Suggs, a former ABC television producer who became a realtor after buying a Sugar Hill town house two decades ago. "Of all the Harlem neighborhoods, it has always been the most diverse."
The word "hill," too, is misleading, because the neighborhood, part of Hamilton Heights, perches on a bluff high above the Harlem Plain. When affluent and influential African-Americans began moving in after World War I, the name "Sugar Hill" came into use, probably because "sugar" was said to signify money and the sweet life. David Levering Lewis, describing it in "When Harlem Was in Vogue," wrote that in 1929 "Sugar Hill, a citadel of stately apartment buildings and liveried doormen on a rock, soared above the Polo Grounds and the rest of Harlem like a city of the Incas."
In its broadest geographic definition, Sugar Hill extends westward from Edgecombe Avenue to Amsterdam Avenue. The southern boundary sometimes is placed at 145th Street, or into the West 130's where the topography starts climbing toward Coogan's Bluff. But the heart of Sugar Hill is in the Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill Historic District between 145th and 155th Streets, from Edgecombe Avenue to a border approaching Amsterdam and squiggling down to Convent Avenue.
In those few blocks lived pioneering civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr.; writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston; musicians like Paul Robeson and Cab Calloway; and professionals like Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to become a United States Supreme Court justice. Even into the late 1950's, Sugar Hill still delivered the good life, older residents recall, but by the 1970's, many of the row houses had been divided into rooming houses and heroin was sold on the streets.
Another renaissance is under way as Sugar Hill addresses regain some of their old cachet, pumped up by the hot real estate market and by the neighborhood's activist tradition. Prospective buyers come from downtown, Europe and Asia to bid on 19th-century town houses, some priced at considerably more than $2 million. African-American professionals have rediscovered the neighborhood. Actors by the dozens rent in historic apartment buildings.
The Hamilton Grange Public Library, which closed all but the first floor in the 1970's, recently completed a $1.2 million renovation. Jazz headliners downtown head uptown to jam at St. Nick's Pub. The Dance Theater of Harlem has its headquarters on West 152nd Street. When the 16th annual Hamilton Heights House and Garden Tour takes place today, half of the properties being shown will be in the heart of Sugar Hill.
The neighborhood has not fully returned to its old glory, however. The stately apartment buildings do not have the liveried doormen of days past, for instance. "It is the extremes right now," said Nora Cole, an actor, who on a Saturday morning was weeding one of two pocket parks maintained by volunteers on Edgecombe Avenue above Jackie Robinson Park, the old Colonial Park.
A SOLID core of well-to-do African-American families passes properties from generation to generation, yet other residents still toss disposable diapers into the Edgecombe pocket park, Ms. Cole said. Overall crime rates have dropped more than 60 percent in the last decade, according to statistics from the 30th Precinct, but drugs are still sold on some street corners.
Paula Hill, with three children under 8, says the attraction is space, which sometimes includes a backyard, and the parks in every direction. But most of all, it's the sense of community, she said. "In seven years in Greenwich Village nobody knew us, but here we have a parents' network to help each other out and address issues like schools," she said. Through it, more than 90 families keep in touch online.
While many children attend private schools in the city, a group of parents has established the Hamilton Heights Academy, an alternative school with a diverse socioeconomic mix and a progressive curriculum, within Public School 125. Ultimately to have kindergarten through eighth grade, the academy will enroll about 100 students next fall in kindergarten through second grade. Also in the neighborhood is Mott Hall (Intermediate School 223), with an academically rigorous program in math, science and technology for the fourth through eighth grades.
Until the Eighth Avenue elevated railroad reached 145th Street in 1879, the area was mostly rural, a country-home favorite because of its cool breezes. Alexander Hamilton's last home, the Grange, originally stood at what is now 143rd Street and Convent Avenue. The national memorial was moved to 287 Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights in 1889.
Residential development took off between the 1880's and World War I, spurred by subway construction in 1904. Many lots are only 16 feet wide, but architects like Henri Fouchaux and Frederick P. Dinkelberg designed block-long compositions for white upper-class clients.
Luxury apartment houses followed in the early 1900's. The Colonial Parkway Apartments at 409 Edgecombe became Sugar Hill's most desirable address with tenants like Jules Bledsoe, who sang "Ol' Man River" in "Show Boat." The six-story Garrison Apartments, originally named Emsworth Hall, built on Convent Avenue in 1910, opened as an African-American co-op in 1929. When an apartment becomes available, it is quickly snatched up, says Nancy Love, an agent with the Corcoran Group. A two-bedroom apartment listed at $300,000 was on the market less than a week this spring.
More recent construction includes the 1956 Hillview Apartments, which since 1999 has been popular among foreigners seeking pieds-à-terre in Harlem. A prewar building on Convent has just been converted into the 10-unit Sugar Hill Condominiums, which quickly sold out with prices ranging from $339,000 to $449,000. The Bradhurst Urban Renewal Area south of 143rd and east of Edgecombe is being developed for middle-income families, adding a chain supermarket and pharmacy within walking distance of Sugar Hill.
The biggest real estate activity is in row houses, many of which haven't been on the market in decades, if ever. More are on the market now because the owners are dying or becoming too infirm to climb the stairs.
Some properties are little more than shells. Lawrence Comroe, a vice president at Corcoran, said that a facade without a roof runs around $575,000 and up.
At the other end of the spectrum is a 114-year-old town house with well-maintained original details like basket-weave lattice, offered for $2.3 million.
In between are town houses in need of considerable renovation. Lorraine D. Gilbert of ReMax Upscale Properties sees more buyers restoring rooming houses to their original single-family status, but buildings "without issues" — claims from tenants — command higher prices.
But anyone planning to rent or buy in the neighborhood should consider more than real estate values, the people who live on Sugar Hill say. It's not just high ceilings, parquet floors and gracious space. It's involvement, beginning with the early N.A.A.C.P. leaders and continuing today among parents working for better neighborhood schools.
Even in the worst of times, Sugar Hill residents speak up. A small group of female volunteers in 1985 reclaimed an eyesore triangle plot at St. Nicholas and Convent Avenues. Led by Luana Robinson, the women created a Convent Garden, today a jewel of green space with lush grass, flower beds and a gazebo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/realestate/06LIVI.html?pagewanted=1
June 6, 2004
nytimes.com/realestate
LIVING IN
Sugar Hill: Reclaiming a Place Where the Music Once Played
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
THEY TOOK THE `A' TRAIN Home buyers have made row houses, like these on St. Nicholas Avenue, some of the hottest properties in Sugar Hill.
By NANCY BETH JACKSON
Published: June 6, 2004
ARTICLE TOOLS
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Format
Most E-Mailed Articles
Reprints & Permissions
Single-Page Format
COMMUNITY DETAILS
Sugar Hill
Population 7,178
Median Age 32.9
Median Income $24,012
Median Household Net Worth $24,130
Recent Sales in Sugar Hill
More Data on Sugar Hill
More Data on Manhattan
RELATED ARTICLE
Gazetteer
REAL ESTATE TOOLS
Homes for Sale
Homes for Rent
Open Houses
New Homes
Community Data
Moving Quotes
Mortgage Information
Sponsored by:
READERS' OPINIONS
Forum: Join a Discussion on Owning and Renting a Home
TIMES NEWS TRACKER
Topics
Alerts
Real Estate
Manhattan (NYC)
Blacks
Restoration and Rehabilitation
HEN Duke Ellington made "Take the `A' Train" his theme song in 1942, he established forever in music what everyone already knew. Sugar Hill was the place to go, the place to be, in Harlem. He lived on Sugar Hill and so did his collaborator Billy Strayhorn, who scribbled down the tune when the homesick band was playing in Chicago.
Sugar Hill, a ritzy neighborhood for the black bourgeoisie. Sugar Hill, the mythic center of the Harlem Renaissance between the World Wars. Sugar Hill, the good life.
For decades, African-Americans all over the country dreamed of living on Sugar Hill, but throughout its history, it has drawn people of all hues and nationalities.
"The biggest misconception about Sugar Hill is that at any time it was all black," said Willie Kathryn Suggs, a former ABC television producer who became a realtor after buying a Sugar Hill town house two decades ago. "Of all the Harlem neighborhoods, it has always been the most diverse."
The word "hill," too, is misleading, because the neighborhood, part of Hamilton Heights, perches on a bluff high above the Harlem Plain. When affluent and influential African-Americans began moving in after World War I, the name "Sugar Hill" came into use, probably because "sugar" was said to signify money and the sweet life. David Levering Lewis, describing it in "When Harlem Was in Vogue," wrote that in 1929 "Sugar Hill, a citadel of stately apartment buildings and liveried doormen on a rock, soared above the Polo Grounds and the rest of Harlem like a city of the Incas."
In its broadest geographic definition, Sugar Hill extends westward from Edgecombe Avenue to Amsterdam Avenue. The southern boundary sometimes is placed at 145th Street, or into the West 130's where the topography starts climbing toward Coogan's Bluff. But the heart of Sugar Hill is in the Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill Historic District between 145th and 155th Streets, from Edgecombe Avenue to a border approaching Amsterdam and squiggling down to Convent Avenue.
In those few blocks lived pioneering civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr.; writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston; musicians like Paul Robeson and Cab Calloway; and professionals like Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to become a United States Supreme Court justice. Even into the late 1950's, Sugar Hill still delivered the good life, older residents recall, but by the 1970's, many of the row houses had been divided into rooming houses and heroin was sold on the streets.
Another renaissance is under way as Sugar Hill addresses regain some of their old cachet, pumped up by the hot real estate market and by the neighborhood's activist tradition. Prospective buyers come from downtown, Europe and Asia to bid on 19th-century town houses, some priced at considerably more than $2 million. African-American professionals have rediscovered the neighborhood. Actors by the dozens rent in historic apartment buildings.
The Hamilton Grange Public Library, which closed all but the first floor in the 1970's, recently completed a $1.2 million renovation. Jazz headliners downtown head uptown to jam at St. Nick's Pub. The Dance Theater of Harlem has its headquarters on West 152nd Street. When the 16th annual Hamilton Heights House and Garden Tour takes place today, half of the properties being shown will be in the heart of Sugar Hill.
The neighborhood has not fully returned to its old glory, however. The stately apartment buildings do not have the liveried doormen of days past, for instance. "It is the extremes right now," said Nora Cole, an actor, who on a Saturday morning was weeding one of two pocket parks maintained by volunteers on Edgecombe Avenue above Jackie Robinson Park, the old Colonial Park.
A SOLID core of well-to-do African-American families passes properties from generation to generation, yet other residents still toss disposable diapers into the Edgecombe pocket park, Ms. Cole said. Overall crime rates have dropped more than 60 percent in the last decade, according to statistics from the 30th Precinct, but drugs are still sold on some street corners.
Paula Hill, with three children under 8, says the attraction is space, which sometimes includes a backyard, and the parks in every direction. But most of all, it's the sense of community, she said. "In seven years in Greenwich Village nobody knew us, but here we have a parents' network to help each other out and address issues like schools," she said. Through it, more than 90 families keep in touch online.
While many children attend private schools in the city, a group of parents has established the Hamilton Heights Academy, an alternative school with a diverse socioeconomic mix and a progressive curriculum, within Public School 125. Ultimately to have kindergarten through eighth grade, the academy will enroll about 100 students next fall in kindergarten through second grade. Also in the neighborhood is Mott Hall (Intermediate School 223), with an academically rigorous program in math, science and technology for the fourth through eighth grades.
Until the Eighth Avenue elevated railroad reached 145th Street in 1879, the area was mostly rural, a country-home favorite because of its cool breezes. Alexander Hamilton's last home, the Grange, originally stood at what is now 143rd Street and Convent Avenue. The national memorial was moved to 287 Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights in 1889.
Residential development took off between the 1880's and World War I, spurred by subway construction in 1904. Many lots are only 16 feet wide, but architects like Henri Fouchaux and Frederick P. Dinkelberg designed block-long compositions for white upper-class clients.
Luxury apartment houses followed in the early 1900's. The Colonial Parkway Apartments at 409 Edgecombe became Sugar Hill's most desirable address with tenants like Jules Bledsoe, who sang "Ol' Man River" in "Show Boat." The six-story Garrison Apartments, originally named Emsworth Hall, built on Convent Avenue in 1910, opened as an African-American co-op in 1929. When an apartment becomes available, it is quickly snatched up, says Nancy Love, an agent with the Corcoran Group. A two-bedroom apartment listed at $300,000 was on the market less than a week this spring.
More recent construction includes the 1956 Hillview Apartments, which since 1999 has been popular among foreigners seeking pieds-à-terre in Harlem. A prewar building on Convent has just been converted into the 10-unit Sugar Hill Condominiums, which quickly sold out with prices ranging from $339,000 to $449,000. The Bradhurst Urban Renewal Area south of 143rd and east of Edgecombe is being developed for middle-income families, adding a chain supermarket and pharmacy within walking distance of Sugar Hill.
The biggest real estate activity is in row houses, many of which haven't been on the market in decades, if ever. More are on the market now because the owners are dying or becoming too infirm to climb the stairs.
Some properties are little more than shells. Lawrence Comroe, a vice president at Corcoran, said that a facade without a roof runs around $575,000 and up.
At the other end of the spectrum is a 114-year-old town house with well-maintained original details like basket-weave lattice, offered for $2.3 million.
In between are town houses in need of considerable renovation. Lorraine D. Gilbert of ReMax Upscale Properties sees more buyers restoring rooming houses to their original single-family status, but buildings "without issues" — claims from tenants — command higher prices.
But anyone planning to rent or buy in the neighborhood should consider more than real estate values, the people who live on Sugar Hill say. It's not just high ceilings, parquet floors and gracious space. It's involvement, beginning with the early N.A.A.C.P. leaders and continuing today among parents working for better neighborhood schools.
Even in the worst of times, Sugar Hill residents speak up. A small group of female volunteers in 1985 reclaimed an eyesore triangle plot at St. Nicholas and Convent Avenues. Led by Luana Robinson, the women created a Convent Garden, today a jewel of green space with lush grass, flower beds and a gazebo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/realestate/06LIVI.html?pagewanted=1
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Thinking about Markets and the Mayor's Affordable Housing Plans
The Manhattan Institute’s
Center for Rethinking Development
Ideas that shape the city’s planning, housing, and development
A Monthly Newsletter by Julia Vitullo-Martin, MI Senior Fellow
Thinking about Markets and the Mayor's Affordable Housing Plans
Julia Vitullo-Martin, June 2004
Choose the one that doesn't fit among these three Bloomberg Administration promises to:
1. produce 65,000 units of affordable housing by building 27,000 new units and preserving 38,000 units
2. cure chronic homelessness once and for all
3. end overdevelopment in Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx
If the mayor really fulfills his third promise, to end overdevelopment, he's going to blunt any chance for success with his first two promises. What he calls "overdevelopment" is in fact the most direct route to affordable housing. For the truth is that the vast majority of "affordable" housing in New York always has been - and probably always will be - built by the private sector. Most of the housing in the boroughs that the mayor has reviled as "overdevelopment" is simply privately built affordable housing. In other words the townhouses selling for $250,000-400,000 and apartments renting for $1500 and below are targeted at households earning $50,000 to $85,000 - the households the mayor proposes to help with his $3 billion program called, without irony, "The New Marketplace."
Political difficulties arise - and voters become agitated - because this new housing is often cheaper and denser than what the neighborhood had before. But then that's the essence of "affordable" - the moderate-income household buys a smaller, more austere residence than preceding wealthier households. But it gets a residence that is usually better than the one it just left. Yet even as buyers have been snapping up the townhouses, the mayor has been denouncing them and proposing to have them outlawed through downzoning. "Each of these homes, they're probably 15 feet, 14 feet wide, they're going to sell for $400,000, people are going to be on top of each other," he said at a political rally in Staten Island last year. Well, yes, because the small townhouse is what moderate-income households can afford right now.
The mayor's top planners see the contradictions. City Planning Commission chair Amanda Burden noted at a public hearing in Staten Island, for example, that downzoning would conflict with the mayor's simultaneous push to create affordable housing. And don't we want these home owners to stay in New York, and therefore don't we want this housing? Otherwise the cops and teachers and firefighters who would buy these townhouses are going to cross the Goethals Bridge and just keep going to New Jersey.
THE HIGH COSTS OF BUILDING
The private sector contribution gets lost in today's acrimonious debates in part because the term "affordable" has become the handy euphemism for subsidized, non-market rate housing. But why should we relegate affordable housing to government? The private sector has always hugely outstripped the public sector in building and managing housing, including housing for moderate-income households. City government should only be turning to public funds as a last resort, when the private sector has failed. But the opposite is happening in booming New York: the private sector is succeeding wildly, building on every vacant and underused lot it can find in the five boroughs. We don't need the government building housing these days, when the private sector is doing such a good job.
But we do have a problem - which is that the costs of building in New York are about a third higher than in other cities, including high-cost cities like Boston and Los Angeles. The elevated costs of development may not matter so much for, say, luxury housing in Manhattan, but they make all the difference at the lower end of the market. The first step in making housing affordable is to bring down artificially high costs. Here the Bloomberg administration has been admirable, proposing extensive rezoning to permit residential development in formerly industrial areas, encouraging live-work development in blighted areas, analyzing and restructuring the building codes, and opposing the many destructive laws, such as the lead paint abatement law, coming out of the City Council. The administration is also aggressively using a revitalized Housing Development Corporation to attract private developers with low-cost financing. It is offering low-cost loans for renovating long-vacant apartments and is setting up a tax credit for building new housing in poor neighborhoods. But the administration will undermine these efforts if it insists on combating what it calls overdevelopment, which amounts to combating affordable housing. The mayor’s excellent programs will not work well unless they also bring down costs and encourage new construction.
THE EVEN HIGHER COSTS OF SHELTERING HOMELESS HOUSEHOLDS
As expensive as it is to build in New York, building government-sponsored new units is - as the mayor sees - the only solution (though a flawed one) to the city's ludicrously expensive system for housing homeless households. The city now pays $100 a night or $3000 per household per month for what is nearly always derelict housing. On virtually his first day in office, Mayor Bloomberg did the math and wondered why the city wasn't just building new housing rather than throwing money out the window in rent.
The numbers astonish. Over the last decade, the city spent $4.6 billion - or 10% of its entire fiscal 2005 operating budget - on building and maintaining shelters. The budget for the Department of Homeless Services alone exceeds $700 million, a 75% increase over 2000, according to the mayor. Despite the mayor's efforts, during his tenure the homeless population has increased by 27%,according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
He vowed this month to make "the condition of chronic homelessness effectively extinct in New York." His five-year plan is intended to decrease the roughly 38,000-person homeless population by two-thirds, build 12,000 units of supportive housing, and greatly reduce the time and number of people living in the shelter system. Taking his cue from the NYPD's successful crime-fighting system, the mayor intends to reconfigure outreach social services, tailor strategies to particular neighborhoods, and monitor progress neighborhood by neighborhood, so that trouble spots are identified early.
Surely the mayor is correct in assailing the city's reliance on shelters as its principal strategy for homelessness. The temporary safety net has become both expensive and semi-permanent, with a typical family spending 11 months in a shelter. And he is also surely correct in recognizing that the thousands of chronically homeless people who are substance abusers or mentally ill or both are not going to be able to live on their own in private housing. They need supportive services, which the mayor intends to continue with the many excellent agencies now working with the city.
But what about the other households? The mayor has several ideas for reducing both expenditures and homelessness. The city will work with landlords, tenant associations, and community groups to keep people from losing their homes in the first place by emphasizing mediation to stave off at least some evictions. Every household that can be kept in regular housing is a household not draining the city of $3000 per month for temporary shelter. The city will also work with government agencies to figure out non-shelter housing for former prisoners, probationers, substance abusers, mentally ill patients, and youngsters who have aged out of foster care. It's possible that intense management focus on individual problems will reduce the shelter population somewhat.
Reducing expenditures will require the Bloomberg administration to continue what's it's already been doing quietly: looking very closely at every applicant, and disqualifying as many as possible. The city shouldn't be in this business to begin with and certainly shouldn't be financially accountable for housing everyone who comes to New York. At least one in six families seeking housing is a recent arrival from elsewhere - out of town, out of state, or out of the country. The so-called "right to shelter" was established in a series of court rulings and unfortunate consent degrees in the Koch administration, making the city of New York uniquely responsible for anyone and everyone's homelessness. A household that has been in New York for 24 hours can insist that the city find them a place to sleep by midnight of the day they arrive at the intake center.
The Bloomberg administration needs to go back to court and get this destructive right-to-shelter rescinded. The city has spent billions of taxpayer dollars and tried many different approaches over 25 years. None has worked in the past, and we have no reason to think that billions of dollars more will work in the future. New York City needs to get itself out of the shelter business.
It also needs to normalize its housing markets, as scholar Peter Salins has been arguing for years. Mayor Bloomberg, a former businessman, well understands this. No one knows for sure how much of the homeless problem is attributable to non-housing problems like mental illness and substance abuse, but certainly at least one-third. But some important portion of the homeless problem is attributable to malfunctioning housing markets, which the administration is trying to address in several productive ways, including new construction.
WHAT’S NEXT
The Bloomberg administration has thrown down the gauntlet with its June 24 plan to end homelessness as we know it in New York. It has allocated $12 million to pay for tenant counseling and eviction prevention services in six targeted neighborhoods over the next year. It plans to pay for the rest of the plan by using savings achieved from reducing the shelter population.
Meanwhile, the Department of City Planning has been wrestling with the details of implementing the mayor's attack on overdevelopment. The signs are good so far. City Planning has been judicious in Staten Island, for example, suggesting some sensible reforms on parking and sidewalks without proposing anything too deleterious. But as the 2005 mayoral campaign heats up, the mayor will have to resolve the contradictions in his three promises. Let's hope he isn't swayed by his own rhetoric to halt housing construction in the boroughs.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter06-04.html
Center for Rethinking Development
Ideas that shape the city’s planning, housing, and development
A Monthly Newsletter by Julia Vitullo-Martin, MI Senior Fellow
Thinking about Markets and the Mayor's Affordable Housing Plans
Julia Vitullo-Martin, June 2004
Choose the one that doesn't fit among these three Bloomberg Administration promises to:
1. produce 65,000 units of affordable housing by building 27,000 new units and preserving 38,000 units
2. cure chronic homelessness once and for all
3. end overdevelopment in Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx
If the mayor really fulfills his third promise, to end overdevelopment, he's going to blunt any chance for success with his first two promises. What he calls "overdevelopment" is in fact the most direct route to affordable housing. For the truth is that the vast majority of "affordable" housing in New York always has been - and probably always will be - built by the private sector. Most of the housing in the boroughs that the mayor has reviled as "overdevelopment" is simply privately built affordable housing. In other words the townhouses selling for $250,000-400,000 and apartments renting for $1500 and below are targeted at households earning $50,000 to $85,000 - the households the mayor proposes to help with his $3 billion program called, without irony, "The New Marketplace."
Political difficulties arise - and voters become agitated - because this new housing is often cheaper and denser than what the neighborhood had before. But then that's the essence of "affordable" - the moderate-income household buys a smaller, more austere residence than preceding wealthier households. But it gets a residence that is usually better than the one it just left. Yet even as buyers have been snapping up the townhouses, the mayor has been denouncing them and proposing to have them outlawed through downzoning. "Each of these homes, they're probably 15 feet, 14 feet wide, they're going to sell for $400,000, people are going to be on top of each other," he said at a political rally in Staten Island last year. Well, yes, because the small townhouse is what moderate-income households can afford right now.
The mayor's top planners see the contradictions. City Planning Commission chair Amanda Burden noted at a public hearing in Staten Island, for example, that downzoning would conflict with the mayor's simultaneous push to create affordable housing. And don't we want these home owners to stay in New York, and therefore don't we want this housing? Otherwise the cops and teachers and firefighters who would buy these townhouses are going to cross the Goethals Bridge and just keep going to New Jersey.
THE HIGH COSTS OF BUILDING
The private sector contribution gets lost in today's acrimonious debates in part because the term "affordable" has become the handy euphemism for subsidized, non-market rate housing. But why should we relegate affordable housing to government? The private sector has always hugely outstripped the public sector in building and managing housing, including housing for moderate-income households. City government should only be turning to public funds as a last resort, when the private sector has failed. But the opposite is happening in booming New York: the private sector is succeeding wildly, building on every vacant and underused lot it can find in the five boroughs. We don't need the government building housing these days, when the private sector is doing such a good job.
But we do have a problem - which is that the costs of building in New York are about a third higher than in other cities, including high-cost cities like Boston and Los Angeles. The elevated costs of development may not matter so much for, say, luxury housing in Manhattan, but they make all the difference at the lower end of the market. The first step in making housing affordable is to bring down artificially high costs. Here the Bloomberg administration has been admirable, proposing extensive rezoning to permit residential development in formerly industrial areas, encouraging live-work development in blighted areas, analyzing and restructuring the building codes, and opposing the many destructive laws, such as the lead paint abatement law, coming out of the City Council. The administration is also aggressively using a revitalized Housing Development Corporation to attract private developers with low-cost financing. It is offering low-cost loans for renovating long-vacant apartments and is setting up a tax credit for building new housing in poor neighborhoods. But the administration will undermine these efforts if it insists on combating what it calls overdevelopment, which amounts to combating affordable housing. The mayor’s excellent programs will not work well unless they also bring down costs and encourage new construction.
THE EVEN HIGHER COSTS OF SHELTERING HOMELESS HOUSEHOLDS
As expensive as it is to build in New York, building government-sponsored new units is - as the mayor sees - the only solution (though a flawed one) to the city's ludicrously expensive system for housing homeless households. The city now pays $100 a night or $3000 per household per month for what is nearly always derelict housing. On virtually his first day in office, Mayor Bloomberg did the math and wondered why the city wasn't just building new housing rather than throwing money out the window in rent.
The numbers astonish. Over the last decade, the city spent $4.6 billion - or 10% of its entire fiscal 2005 operating budget - on building and maintaining shelters. The budget for the Department of Homeless Services alone exceeds $700 million, a 75% increase over 2000, according to the mayor. Despite the mayor's efforts, during his tenure the homeless population has increased by 27%,according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
He vowed this month to make "the condition of chronic homelessness effectively extinct in New York." His five-year plan is intended to decrease the roughly 38,000-person homeless population by two-thirds, build 12,000 units of supportive housing, and greatly reduce the time and number of people living in the shelter system. Taking his cue from the NYPD's successful crime-fighting system, the mayor intends to reconfigure outreach social services, tailor strategies to particular neighborhoods, and monitor progress neighborhood by neighborhood, so that trouble spots are identified early.
Surely the mayor is correct in assailing the city's reliance on shelters as its principal strategy for homelessness. The temporary safety net has become both expensive and semi-permanent, with a typical family spending 11 months in a shelter. And he is also surely correct in recognizing that the thousands of chronically homeless people who are substance abusers or mentally ill or both are not going to be able to live on their own in private housing. They need supportive services, which the mayor intends to continue with the many excellent agencies now working with the city.
But what about the other households? The mayor has several ideas for reducing both expenditures and homelessness. The city will work with landlords, tenant associations, and community groups to keep people from losing their homes in the first place by emphasizing mediation to stave off at least some evictions. Every household that can be kept in regular housing is a household not draining the city of $3000 per month for temporary shelter. The city will also work with government agencies to figure out non-shelter housing for former prisoners, probationers, substance abusers, mentally ill patients, and youngsters who have aged out of foster care. It's possible that intense management focus on individual problems will reduce the shelter population somewhat.
Reducing expenditures will require the Bloomberg administration to continue what's it's already been doing quietly: looking very closely at every applicant, and disqualifying as many as possible. The city shouldn't be in this business to begin with and certainly shouldn't be financially accountable for housing everyone who comes to New York. At least one in six families seeking housing is a recent arrival from elsewhere - out of town, out of state, or out of the country. The so-called "right to shelter" was established in a series of court rulings and unfortunate consent degrees in the Koch administration, making the city of New York uniquely responsible for anyone and everyone's homelessness. A household that has been in New York for 24 hours can insist that the city find them a place to sleep by midnight of the day they arrive at the intake center.
The Bloomberg administration needs to go back to court and get this destructive right-to-shelter rescinded. The city has spent billions of taxpayer dollars and tried many different approaches over 25 years. None has worked in the past, and we have no reason to think that billions of dollars more will work in the future. New York City needs to get itself out of the shelter business.
It also needs to normalize its housing markets, as scholar Peter Salins has been arguing for years. Mayor Bloomberg, a former businessman, well understands this. No one knows for sure how much of the homeless problem is attributable to non-housing problems like mental illness and substance abuse, but certainly at least one-third. But some important portion of the homeless problem is attributable to malfunctioning housing markets, which the administration is trying to address in several productive ways, including new construction.
WHAT’S NEXT
The Bloomberg administration has thrown down the gauntlet with its June 24 plan to end homelessness as we know it in New York. It has allocated $12 million to pay for tenant counseling and eviction prevention services in six targeted neighborhoods over the next year. It plans to pay for the rest of the plan by using savings achieved from reducing the shelter population.
Meanwhile, the Department of City Planning has been wrestling with the details of implementing the mayor's attack on overdevelopment. The signs are good so far. City Planning has been judicious in Staten Island, for example, suggesting some sensible reforms on parking and sidewalks without proposing anything too deleterious. But as the 2005 mayoral campaign heats up, the mayor will have to resolve the contradictions in his three promises. Let's hope he isn't swayed by his own rhetoric to halt housing construction in the boroughs.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter06-04.html
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