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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“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, July 02, 2004
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
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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
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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
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Beyond Submetering
Habitat Magazine
Beyond Submetering
By Gregory J. Carlson, Lewis M. Kwit, and J. Reyes Montblanc
Most of New York City’s cooperatives are individually metered, which means that each resident receives a bill directly from the utility. Many others are master-metered, distributing electric costs based on shares not on actual usage. Although boards of directors of these buildings recognize the benefits of electric submetering, they find submetering procedures – from approval to initial cost outlays to administration – to be daunting. Even those who accept the submetering challenge do so with trepidation.
Submetering is well worth the effort. It offers immediate savings to cooperative corporations, condominium associations, and their residents. There are further advantages. Submetering is a prerequisite to the benefits of time-sensitive pricing and load curtailment incentives. Submetered buildings can also help address the very real threat of blackouts now and in the future. New York State has launched a series of activities aimed at achieving these goals
Blackouts
Most New York blackouts occur because of transmission or distribution problems with the electric grid. When generated electricity cannot reach consumers in one neighborhood, the crisis spreads to surrounding areas. Major blackouts on November 9, 1965, and July 13, 1977, resulted from transmission problems. The 1999 blackout in Washington Heights was caused by a glitch in the local distribution system when a substation was overloaded. These issues have been vigorously addressed by Con Edison, which is solely responsible for getting power from generating facilities to consumers. Over the past two years, Con Ed has spent $1 billion to tighten the distribution system. It performed flawlessly last summer.
The growth of the national economy and our “tapeworm” appetites for electricity at home continue to strain electric supplies. Experts fear that we will not have enough power to meet the needs of a heat wave in summer 2002. The New York Independent System Operator (ISO), which safeguards the reliability of the state’s power supply, reports that the city avoided a blackout last summer by the skin of its teeth. On August 9, 2001, the ISO imposed a five percent voltage reduction to stretch power supplies. If an additional two percent reduction had been required, the ISO would have been forced to enact rolling blackouts such as those seen in California in summer 2000. Rather than risk massive system failure, California reduced power in one section at a time. Although it seems fair to share equally in the power cuts, no one would want to spend his or her share stuck in a crowded elevator or subway car, with no lights or air conditioning and temperatures hovering at 100 degrees.
Last year, Governor George Pataki instructed the New York Power Authority to install 10 small power plants around the city. The plants yielded 400 megawatts of power, approximately half the generating capacity of a large baseline power plants This sufficed for the summer's mild heat wave, but New Yorkers know that it wasn’t all that hot, at least not compared to the sweltering summer of 1999.
Some experts argue that the collapse of the World Trade Center will obviate the need for new electric supplies. In truth, the trade center accounted for only one tenth of one percent of summertime peak power needs. A series of three 90-degree days could easily wipe out this modest gain and place the system in jeopardy.
To help avoid a 2001 power emergency, the ISO targeted curtailment programs to large electric users and facilities with on-site emergency generators. Although large users responded positively to calls for curtailment, these efforts alone will not be enough to avert a power emergency in a really hot summer. The ISO realizes that smaller users, including apartment buildings that represent countless individual actions, would be a good secondary target for curtailment. And, of special import for cooperatives and condominiums, the ISO will pay for it, not only at the time of savings but in advance. In return, the building agrees to reduce electric use when the ISO foresees the threat of a blackout and calls a curtailment event.
Electric Competition (Deregulation) and Prices
Another determining factor in today’s electric environment is the emergence of a robust wholesale electric market. When New York State deregulated the electric industry to create a competitive market, it required utilities to sell off the majority of their power plants. Con Edison now purchases electricity on the wholesale market alongside new electric service company providers (ESCOs), including Con Ed Solutions, First Rochdale Cooperative Group, Keyspan, and AES NewEnergy, all of which purchase large amounts of power for resale. The ISO administers the wholesale market, which operates through a daily electric auction. Sellers feed available supplies into the system and buyers bid in hour-by-hour needs for the next day. Hourly prices fluctuate widely based on supply and demand.
The most critical component of electric demand in New York City is air conditioning. Prices skyrocket on hot days, especially in mid-afternoon and early evening hours of the workweek. There is, however, no direct connection between the wholesale and retail markets. Con Edison’s rate structure does not easily accommodate fluctuating prices of the wholesale market. Rather than charge consumers more during peak hours, they distribute higher energy costs evenly throughout the monthly billing period. We contend that this does not benefit consumers. Although residential consumers are insulated from high prices during the day, they pay more at night when wholesale prices are lower. Without actual price signals, consumers have little incentive to reduce usage when it counts most.
The ISO is concerned about the disparity between the wholesale and retail markets. If power were more expensive when scarce, it would encourage consumers to shift their usage to off-peak periods. This would help alleviate the strain on New York’s power supply system; it could also put money in our pockets. Federation of New York Housing Cooperatives and Condominiums Executive Director, Greg Carlson suggests that city residents can make simple adjustments at home by turning off lights when they leave a room, turning off nonessential appliances and operating appliances at off-peak hours. You could easily run your dishwasher after 11 PM. Of course, you would be a lot more likely to alter your habits if it cost more to wash dishes at 5 PM than at 11 PM. The ISO believes that if consumers can buy power at its immediate and fluctuating market price, what the industry terms “real time pricing (RTP),” we could stretch supplies and minimize blackouts.
We contend that reducing usage during peaks, when prices are highest, could help lower costs on the wholesale market. According to the ISO, a one percent reduction in power usage during peaks would effect a ten percent reduction in costs during the same period. When a system is strained to capacity, the industry must operate its least efficient generating plants to meet demand. The least efficient plants are the most expensive to operate. Energy buyers and consumers must pay for the privilege of having power available at the peaks. Regulatory attorney Peter Funk observes succinctly: “Markets are indifferent to issues of affordability.”
Interval Metering
What do these principles have to do with submetering? Only a submetered building can purchase its own power, install meters that measure usage in time increments and bill accordingly. Con Edison does not install individual apartment meters with the capacity to measure use in time intervals. The submetering configuration authorizes the building to act as a mini-utility, with ratemaking authority to charge residents different prices at different times. Although demand charges prevent cooperatives from purchasing electricity strictly on the hourly market, we are working with the New York Public Service Commission (PSC), the ISO, and the New York Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to effect necessary changes.
A cooperative can enhance opportunities for residents to save by billing based on time of use. New York City residents use 40 percent more electricity today than 20 years ago. Much of this usage is discretionary and could take place at other times. If electric charges corresponded to actual prices in the wholesale market, residents could consider the cost when scheduling activities, such as dishwashing, ironing clothes and automatic oven cleaning.
Submetered apartment buildings may reap benefits, however, before they can fully participate in an RTP market. This calls for reducing the “demand” charge that is assessed on all master-metered buildings in the Con Ed territory. To ensure that utilities have at the ready all the power that consumers conceivably need or want, they charge considerably more for the half-hour of greatest usage within a month. (It would certainly be disconcerting if we hit a light switch and nothing happened.) An unfortunate property of electricity is that it is difficult, expensive, and inefficient to store. Batteries must be charged with more electricity than they can emit. Power plants and onsite facilities must generate electricity continuously for distribution through electric lines. The cost of demand is high simply because power must be available whether you need it or not.
The demand charge may represent a third of an average electric bill and in the summer often climbs to half. Leveling peaks is a tried and true formula to reduce electric costs in commercial and institutional settings and manufacturing plants. Unfortunately, conventional building-wide meters do not identify the peak half-hour of usage within the month. New metering and billing technologies, however, have emerged to arm cooperatives with the knowledge they need to begin smoothing out the peaks.
It is not necessary for meter readers to troop around the building: Automatic meter-reading technologies send information to a central location for processing, analysis, and billing. Submetered consumers are provided with sophisticated information about how much and when they use electricity. This gives new meaning to the phrase, “information is power.”
Submetered cooperatives are then able to bill shareholders at slightly higher rates during the building peak, to encourage a shift in electric-powered activities and lower demand costs for the entire building. People who continue to concentrate usage during peaks could be charged more, while wise energy users are rewarded.
Load Controls and ISO Curtailment Incentives
Technologies are on the market that can automatically adjust air conditioner thermostats and disable electric-intensive equipment. A few utilities across the country have implemented these in single-family homes. Gulf Power of Pensacola, Florida, has developed a very sophisticated program that uses Comverge Technologies products. Closer to home, the Long Island Power Authority has offered an automatic thermostat control program for Nassau and Suffolk County homeowners. Con Ed has launched pilot demonstration programs, most recently in Staten Island and Westchester County. Only Gulf Power combines variable rates with an automatic load control system.
Gulf’s Pensacola model is quite comprehensive and has been approved by the Florida Public Service Commission for inclusion in the utility tariff for Gulf’s service areas. In this nationally recognized program, homeowners select the trigger point on the thermostat and the equipment to be affected in response to higher rates and power emergencies. Gulf maintains a four-rate system: low, medium, high, and critical. The extremely expensive critical rate is only put into effect, for no more than an hour at a time, when the utility anticipates a power emergency. The Florida Public Service Commission has limited critical rates to no more than 87 hours annually, or one percent a year. When critical rates go into effect, participating homeowners may opt to institute automatic curtailment measures. A flashing light on the thermostat notifies Pensacola residents when a critical period is approaching and in effect. Curtailment measures go into effect automatically, however, homeowners may bypass curtailment if they chose. Consumer control is the most important factor in the program's acceptance.
We are working with Gulf and Comverge to demonstrate the application of these concepts to multifamily buildings. At issue is the degree of flexibility or elasticity of consumers to shift usage in response to price signals, a concern to NYSERDA and the PSC. We contend that elasticity depends on the cost/benefit ratio and degree of difficulty or inconvenience of the action. We will survey residents of participating buildings to determine their receptivity to the concepts of variable pricing and load curtailment.
Given that the city narrowly averted rolling blackouts last summer, the ISO knows that residential consumers must be part of a comprehensive solution. It is not feasible for the Albany-based agency to administer a hands-on curtailment effort for individual apartments; however, most master-metered buildings are large enough to qualify for ISO incentive programs aimed at large users. The ISO understands that a kilowatt-hour saved in one location can be used in another and is willing to pay consumers to reduce usage when supplies are scarce.
Do not confuse this with conventional electric conservation through which consumers save by cutting their usage. Rather, curtailment initiatives pay consumers to free up power supplies to offset shortages in the electric grid. By not using power during a threatened emergency, shareholders contribute to the available power supply in the same manner as power generated in plants. Incentive payments reflect wholesale market prices and can be extremely high when supplies are scarce.
The ISO allows utility companies, new electric providers, and private companies to package large users in blocks, monitor their curtailment of kilowatt-hours and facilitate cash disbursements. Referred to as curtailment service providers, the companies may aggregate buildings to assure that electric loads comply with ISO programmatic thresholds.
The benefits of buildingwide curtailment can be significant, but they are only available if building-wide and individual apartment meters are capable of interval data collection. Incentives can only be awarded if the reductions can be measured.
Adjusting to Load Curtailment
The term curtailment is ubiquitous in today’s state and city energy communities. Yet despite the proliferation of curtailment programs, meetings, and conferences, it has not entered the everyday vocabulary or experiences of city residents. Few of us in this communications and technology capital consider blackouts be a remote possibility. Equally far-fetched is the notion that we, as individuals, can do anything about it.
Experts in the energy field know that the threat is real. They recognize that when the system is strained, very little is needed to trigger rolling blackouts. It's appropriate to mention the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our apartments and apartment buildings comprise many straws with the potential to cripple our electric system. Fortunately, we now have the tools to take preventative actions.
Most people would look with incredulity on a proposal to shut off air conditioning on the hottest day of the year. Yet if the entire electric grid were at risk, it seems a minor inconvenience to turn off the air conditioner when you leave the room. Some people leave their air conditioners on when they are out. Timers are readily available to switch the air-conditioner on in time for the resident’s return. Unless people are aware that a power emergency looms, however, they will not take these simple actions to avoid it.
We believe that the cooperative community can fuse public spirit and ingenuity to harness discretion and avert blackouts. Cooperative leaders have formed the Cooperative Coalition to Prevent Blackouts (CCPB) and are working with EIS to jump-start this campaign. The campaign opens by educating consumers about the need for load curtailment. It proposes to demonstrate the benefits of variable pricing and load controls in cooperatives and condominiums and document and disseminate the findings throughout the multifamily building community. Finally, we will promote government actions and incentives that support a user-friendly institutional and regulatory environment to promote advanced submetering applications and the initiatives they make possible.
Show Us the Money
New Yorkers know people are serious when they are willing to pay. Today, the ISO is prepared to pay for curtailment – and it is willing to pay in advance. These programs are primarily available to large customers, including master-metered buildings. The ISO web site (http://www.nyiso.com) provides names of authorized curtailment service providers who can determine if your building is a viable candidate for curtailment incentives.
The foremost way for multifamily buildings to take advantage of curtailment incentives and variable pricing structures is the implementation of interval metering and automatic load-controlling equipment. NYSERDA shares this vision and is, like the ISO, willing to put its money where its mouth is. NYSERDA’s Comprehensive Energy Management program will pay 50-75 percent of the cost of advanced metering technologies and defray $3,000-5,000 of study, research, and planning costs.
In July 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani signed a bill into law that permits buildings a real estate tax abatement to convert apartments from direct-metered electric service to submeters. The city council unanimously approved the bill, which enjoyed the support of all of the city’s cooperative organizations. Cooperatives are eligible for lower property taxes, which can help amortize the expense of an advanced meter installation. Another big chunk of the cost can be offset by the NYSERDA rebates. When savings are compared with net costs, the programs assure a prudent investment. Buildings that implement an advanced submetering program and pursue appropriate incentives will find that payback arrives “faster than a New York minute.”
Gregory J. Carlson is the executive director of the Federation of New York Housing Cooperatives. Lewis M. Kwit is the president of Energy Investment Systems. J. Reyes Montblanc is president of The HDFC Council. This report was prepared as part of a project sponsored by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority entitled “Submetering and Billing for Multifamily Buildings.”
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Beyond Submetering
By Gregory J. Carlson, Lewis M. Kwit, and J. Reyes Montblanc
Most of New York City’s cooperatives are individually metered, which means that each resident receives a bill directly from the utility. Many others are master-metered, distributing electric costs based on shares not on actual usage. Although boards of directors of these buildings recognize the benefits of electric submetering, they find submetering procedures – from approval to initial cost outlays to administration – to be daunting. Even those who accept the submetering challenge do so with trepidation.
Submetering is well worth the effort. It offers immediate savings to cooperative corporations, condominium associations, and their residents. There are further advantages. Submetering is a prerequisite to the benefits of time-sensitive pricing and load curtailment incentives. Submetered buildings can also help address the very real threat of blackouts now and in the future. New York State has launched a series of activities aimed at achieving these goals
Blackouts
Most New York blackouts occur because of transmission or distribution problems with the electric grid. When generated electricity cannot reach consumers in one neighborhood, the crisis spreads to surrounding areas. Major blackouts on November 9, 1965, and July 13, 1977, resulted from transmission problems. The 1999 blackout in Washington Heights was caused by a glitch in the local distribution system when a substation was overloaded. These issues have been vigorously addressed by Con Edison, which is solely responsible for getting power from generating facilities to consumers. Over the past two years, Con Ed has spent $1 billion to tighten the distribution system. It performed flawlessly last summer.
The growth of the national economy and our “tapeworm” appetites for electricity at home continue to strain electric supplies. Experts fear that we will not have enough power to meet the needs of a heat wave in summer 2002. The New York Independent System Operator (ISO), which safeguards the reliability of the state’s power supply, reports that the city avoided a blackout last summer by the skin of its teeth. On August 9, 2001, the ISO imposed a five percent voltage reduction to stretch power supplies. If an additional two percent reduction had been required, the ISO would have been forced to enact rolling blackouts such as those seen in California in summer 2000. Rather than risk massive system failure, California reduced power in one section at a time. Although it seems fair to share equally in the power cuts, no one would want to spend his or her share stuck in a crowded elevator or subway car, with no lights or air conditioning and temperatures hovering at 100 degrees.
Last year, Governor George Pataki instructed the New York Power Authority to install 10 small power plants around the city. The plants yielded 400 megawatts of power, approximately half the generating capacity of a large baseline power plants This sufficed for the summer's mild heat wave, but New Yorkers know that it wasn’t all that hot, at least not compared to the sweltering summer of 1999.
Some experts argue that the collapse of the World Trade Center will obviate the need for new electric supplies. In truth, the trade center accounted for only one tenth of one percent of summertime peak power needs. A series of three 90-degree days could easily wipe out this modest gain and place the system in jeopardy.
To help avoid a 2001 power emergency, the ISO targeted curtailment programs to large electric users and facilities with on-site emergency generators. Although large users responded positively to calls for curtailment, these efforts alone will not be enough to avert a power emergency in a really hot summer. The ISO realizes that smaller users, including apartment buildings that represent countless individual actions, would be a good secondary target for curtailment. And, of special import for cooperatives and condominiums, the ISO will pay for it, not only at the time of savings but in advance. In return, the building agrees to reduce electric use when the ISO foresees the threat of a blackout and calls a curtailment event.
Electric Competition (Deregulation) and Prices
Another determining factor in today’s electric environment is the emergence of a robust wholesale electric market. When New York State deregulated the electric industry to create a competitive market, it required utilities to sell off the majority of their power plants. Con Edison now purchases electricity on the wholesale market alongside new electric service company providers (ESCOs), including Con Ed Solutions, First Rochdale Cooperative Group, Keyspan, and AES NewEnergy, all of which purchase large amounts of power for resale. The ISO administers the wholesale market, which operates through a daily electric auction. Sellers feed available supplies into the system and buyers bid in hour-by-hour needs for the next day. Hourly prices fluctuate widely based on supply and demand.
The most critical component of electric demand in New York City is air conditioning. Prices skyrocket on hot days, especially in mid-afternoon and early evening hours of the workweek. There is, however, no direct connection between the wholesale and retail markets. Con Edison’s rate structure does not easily accommodate fluctuating prices of the wholesale market. Rather than charge consumers more during peak hours, they distribute higher energy costs evenly throughout the monthly billing period. We contend that this does not benefit consumers. Although residential consumers are insulated from high prices during the day, they pay more at night when wholesale prices are lower. Without actual price signals, consumers have little incentive to reduce usage when it counts most.
The ISO is concerned about the disparity between the wholesale and retail markets. If power were more expensive when scarce, it would encourage consumers to shift their usage to off-peak periods. This would help alleviate the strain on New York’s power supply system; it could also put money in our pockets. Federation of New York Housing Cooperatives and Condominiums Executive Director, Greg Carlson suggests that city residents can make simple adjustments at home by turning off lights when they leave a room, turning off nonessential appliances and operating appliances at off-peak hours. You could easily run your dishwasher after 11 PM. Of course, you would be a lot more likely to alter your habits if it cost more to wash dishes at 5 PM than at 11 PM. The ISO believes that if consumers can buy power at its immediate and fluctuating market price, what the industry terms “real time pricing (RTP),” we could stretch supplies and minimize blackouts.
We contend that reducing usage during peaks, when prices are highest, could help lower costs on the wholesale market. According to the ISO, a one percent reduction in power usage during peaks would effect a ten percent reduction in costs during the same period. When a system is strained to capacity, the industry must operate its least efficient generating plants to meet demand. The least efficient plants are the most expensive to operate. Energy buyers and consumers must pay for the privilege of having power available at the peaks. Regulatory attorney Peter Funk observes succinctly: “Markets are indifferent to issues of affordability.”
Interval Metering
What do these principles have to do with submetering? Only a submetered building can purchase its own power, install meters that measure usage in time increments and bill accordingly. Con Edison does not install individual apartment meters with the capacity to measure use in time intervals. The submetering configuration authorizes the building to act as a mini-utility, with ratemaking authority to charge residents different prices at different times. Although demand charges prevent cooperatives from purchasing electricity strictly on the hourly market, we are working with the New York Public Service Commission (PSC), the ISO, and the New York Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to effect necessary changes.
A cooperative can enhance opportunities for residents to save by billing based on time of use. New York City residents use 40 percent more electricity today than 20 years ago. Much of this usage is discretionary and could take place at other times. If electric charges corresponded to actual prices in the wholesale market, residents could consider the cost when scheduling activities, such as dishwashing, ironing clothes and automatic oven cleaning.
Submetered apartment buildings may reap benefits, however, before they can fully participate in an RTP market. This calls for reducing the “demand” charge that is assessed on all master-metered buildings in the Con Ed territory. To ensure that utilities have at the ready all the power that consumers conceivably need or want, they charge considerably more for the half-hour of greatest usage within a month. (It would certainly be disconcerting if we hit a light switch and nothing happened.) An unfortunate property of electricity is that it is difficult, expensive, and inefficient to store. Batteries must be charged with more electricity than they can emit. Power plants and onsite facilities must generate electricity continuously for distribution through electric lines. The cost of demand is high simply because power must be available whether you need it or not.
The demand charge may represent a third of an average electric bill and in the summer often climbs to half. Leveling peaks is a tried and true formula to reduce electric costs in commercial and institutional settings and manufacturing plants. Unfortunately, conventional building-wide meters do not identify the peak half-hour of usage within the month. New metering and billing technologies, however, have emerged to arm cooperatives with the knowledge they need to begin smoothing out the peaks.
It is not necessary for meter readers to troop around the building: Automatic meter-reading technologies send information to a central location for processing, analysis, and billing. Submetered consumers are provided with sophisticated information about how much and when they use electricity. This gives new meaning to the phrase, “information is power.”
Submetered cooperatives are then able to bill shareholders at slightly higher rates during the building peak, to encourage a shift in electric-powered activities and lower demand costs for the entire building. People who continue to concentrate usage during peaks could be charged more, while wise energy users are rewarded.
Load Controls and ISO Curtailment Incentives
Technologies are on the market that can automatically adjust air conditioner thermostats and disable electric-intensive equipment. A few utilities across the country have implemented these in single-family homes. Gulf Power of Pensacola, Florida, has developed a very sophisticated program that uses Comverge Technologies products. Closer to home, the Long Island Power Authority has offered an automatic thermostat control program for Nassau and Suffolk County homeowners. Con Ed has launched pilot demonstration programs, most recently in Staten Island and Westchester County. Only Gulf Power combines variable rates with an automatic load control system.
Gulf’s Pensacola model is quite comprehensive and has been approved by the Florida Public Service Commission for inclusion in the utility tariff for Gulf’s service areas. In this nationally recognized program, homeowners select the trigger point on the thermostat and the equipment to be affected in response to higher rates and power emergencies. Gulf maintains a four-rate system: low, medium, high, and critical. The extremely expensive critical rate is only put into effect, for no more than an hour at a time, when the utility anticipates a power emergency. The Florida Public Service Commission has limited critical rates to no more than 87 hours annually, or one percent a year. When critical rates go into effect, participating homeowners may opt to institute automatic curtailment measures. A flashing light on the thermostat notifies Pensacola residents when a critical period is approaching and in effect. Curtailment measures go into effect automatically, however, homeowners may bypass curtailment if they chose. Consumer control is the most important factor in the program's acceptance.
We are working with Gulf and Comverge to demonstrate the application of these concepts to multifamily buildings. At issue is the degree of flexibility or elasticity of consumers to shift usage in response to price signals, a concern to NYSERDA and the PSC. We contend that elasticity depends on the cost/benefit ratio and degree of difficulty or inconvenience of the action. We will survey residents of participating buildings to determine their receptivity to the concepts of variable pricing and load curtailment.
Given that the city narrowly averted rolling blackouts last summer, the ISO knows that residential consumers must be part of a comprehensive solution. It is not feasible for the Albany-based agency to administer a hands-on curtailment effort for individual apartments; however, most master-metered buildings are large enough to qualify for ISO incentive programs aimed at large users. The ISO understands that a kilowatt-hour saved in one location can be used in another and is willing to pay consumers to reduce usage when supplies are scarce.
Do not confuse this with conventional electric conservation through which consumers save by cutting their usage. Rather, curtailment initiatives pay consumers to free up power supplies to offset shortages in the electric grid. By not using power during a threatened emergency, shareholders contribute to the available power supply in the same manner as power generated in plants. Incentive payments reflect wholesale market prices and can be extremely high when supplies are scarce.
The ISO allows utility companies, new electric providers, and private companies to package large users in blocks, monitor their curtailment of kilowatt-hours and facilitate cash disbursements. Referred to as curtailment service providers, the companies may aggregate buildings to assure that electric loads comply with ISO programmatic thresholds.
The benefits of buildingwide curtailment can be significant, but they are only available if building-wide and individual apartment meters are capable of interval data collection. Incentives can only be awarded if the reductions can be measured.
Adjusting to Load Curtailment
The term curtailment is ubiquitous in today’s state and city energy communities. Yet despite the proliferation of curtailment programs, meetings, and conferences, it has not entered the everyday vocabulary or experiences of city residents. Few of us in this communications and technology capital consider blackouts be a remote possibility. Equally far-fetched is the notion that we, as individuals, can do anything about it.
Experts in the energy field know that the threat is real. They recognize that when the system is strained, very little is needed to trigger rolling blackouts. It's appropriate to mention the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our apartments and apartment buildings comprise many straws with the potential to cripple our electric system. Fortunately, we now have the tools to take preventative actions.
Most people would look with incredulity on a proposal to shut off air conditioning on the hottest day of the year. Yet if the entire electric grid were at risk, it seems a minor inconvenience to turn off the air conditioner when you leave the room. Some people leave their air conditioners on when they are out. Timers are readily available to switch the air-conditioner on in time for the resident’s return. Unless people are aware that a power emergency looms, however, they will not take these simple actions to avoid it.
We believe that the cooperative community can fuse public spirit and ingenuity to harness discretion and avert blackouts. Cooperative leaders have formed the Cooperative Coalition to Prevent Blackouts (CCPB) and are working with EIS to jump-start this campaign. The campaign opens by educating consumers about the need for load curtailment. It proposes to demonstrate the benefits of variable pricing and load controls in cooperatives and condominiums and document and disseminate the findings throughout the multifamily building community. Finally, we will promote government actions and incentives that support a user-friendly institutional and regulatory environment to promote advanced submetering applications and the initiatives they make possible.
Show Us the Money
New Yorkers know people are serious when they are willing to pay. Today, the ISO is prepared to pay for curtailment – and it is willing to pay in advance. These programs are primarily available to large customers, including master-metered buildings. The ISO web site (http://www.nyiso.com) provides names of authorized curtailment service providers who can determine if your building is a viable candidate for curtailment incentives.
The foremost way for multifamily buildings to take advantage of curtailment incentives and variable pricing structures is the implementation of interval metering and automatic load-controlling equipment. NYSERDA shares this vision and is, like the ISO, willing to put its money where its mouth is. NYSERDA’s Comprehensive Energy Management program will pay 50-75 percent of the cost of advanced metering technologies and defray $3,000-5,000 of study, research, and planning costs.
In July 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani signed a bill into law that permits buildings a real estate tax abatement to convert apartments from direct-metered electric service to submeters. The city council unanimously approved the bill, which enjoyed the support of all of the city’s cooperative organizations. Cooperatives are eligible for lower property taxes, which can help amortize the expense of an advanced meter installation. Another big chunk of the cost can be offset by the NYSERDA rebates. When savings are compared with net costs, the programs assure a prudent investment. Buildings that implement an advanced submetering program and pursue appropriate incentives will find that payback arrives “faster than a New York minute.”
Gregory J. Carlson is the executive director of the Federation of New York Housing Cooperatives. Lewis M. Kwit is the president of Energy Investment Systems. J. Reyes Montblanc is president of The HDFC Council. This report was prepared as part of a project sponsored by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority entitled “Submetering and Billing for Multifamily Buildings.”
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