Building Power and a Livable New York
Sprayregen Brings Up Environmental Issues in Lawsuit Against Columbia (Columbia Spectator)
Proposed Move of Historic Grange Divides Residents, CB9 (Columbia Spectator)
MTA Votes to Sell West Side Land Rights to Tishman-Speyer (City Room)
As Builders’ Grand Visions Dissolve, So Does Our Faith (NY Times)
Atlantic Yards Stalled, but Arena Remains Goal (Brooklyn Downtown Star)
Desperate City Reconsiders Coney Builder (NY Post)
City Council will hold a public hearing on the 125th Street rezoning plan at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, April 1. The hearing will take place in the Council Chambers at City Hall.
Community Board 2 holds its general meetings the second Wednesday of each month.
The next meeting will take place April 9th at 6:00 p.m. in Room 122 of the Long Island University Library Learning Center (at Flatbush and DeKalb Avenue).
Call 718.596.5410 for more information.
The Municipal Art Society of New York, as part of its Campaign for Community Based Planning, will present a series of panel discussions to promote community-based planning in New York City.The series, titled “Creating the City We All Want: A Roadmap,” will be conducted in conjunction with the release of the Fifth Edition of Planning for All New Yorkers: the Atlas of Community-Based Plans, a resource that compiles all community-based plans undertaken in New York City since 1989. This series will explore the potential of neighborhood-led plans to shape equitable development and growth in the city, from the perspective of elected officials, community advocates, and planners.
Many observers opine that community-driven plans—official and approved through a city process or unofficial but widely recognized—are no real hedge against unwanted development. But in the cases of West Harlem, Midtown East, and Atlantic Yards, would developers have had carte blanche without community plans? How do community planners believe alternative plans can be more effective? How can alternative plans guarantee that future development will fit consensus-based neighborhood visions? We’ll look at some recent cases—West Harlem, Midtown East, and Prospect Heights/Fort Greene—where developer-driven plans threaten to undermine community vision, and examine the place of community-based planning in these struggles.
Panelists:
A year has passed since PlaNYC was announced with great fanfare. What has happened to the plan since? The APA NY Metro Chapter in partnership with NYU Wagner and the Urban Planning Students Association will sponsor a panel discussion that will address implementation and impacts as well as offer evaluations.
Participants will include:
April 23, 2008 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
NYU Wagner - Puck Building, 295 Lafayette St. (at E. Houston St.), Manhattan
Event is sponsored by the NY Metro Chapter of the APA in partnership with NYU Wagner and the Urban Planning Students Association/NYU Wagner.
The Municipal Art Society of New York, as part of its Campaign for Community Based Planning, will present a series of panel discussions to promote community-based planning in New York City.
The series, titled “Creating the City We All Want: A Roadmap,” will be conducted in conjunction with the release of the Fifth Edition of Planning for All New Yorkers: the Atlas of Community-Based Plans, a resource that compiles all community-based plans undertaken in New York City since 1989. This series will explore the potential of neighborhood-led plans to shape equitable development and growth in the city, from the perspective of elected officials, community advocates, and planners.
Mayor Bloomberg will leave office 20 years before his sustainability plan is fully realized. But there’s hope—many neighborhoods were planning for sustainability long before the Mayor even took office. Neighborhood plans typically recommend precisely those initiatives the Mayor supports: adding and improving parks and open space; securing affordable housing; improving neighborhood mobility; addressing inadequate infrastructure, etc. Implementing these plans will secure a sustainable future for all New Yorkers and will shore up community support for citywide sustainability goals. Neighborhood advocates and planners discuss their experiences working within a sustainability framework, both from within PlaNYC 2030 and outside of it.
Panelists:
The Furman Center at NYU Law School has just released an ambitious analysis of the impact of inclusionary zoning, focusing on the two most important (and difficult to answer) question about the affordable housing development policy. One, how effective is IZ in creating affordable housing units? And two, in doing so to what extent, if any, do these mandates or incentives for developers to create affordable housing increase the cost of housing overall or limit its production? These are important questions for New York City, where the official policy is to consider inclusionary zoning on a case-by-case basis for areas being rezoned.
The Furman Center is asking enormous questions, and by its own admission the report’s answers are far from conclusive. Researchers focused on IZ programs in suburbs of Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., a palette of dozens of local initiatives that each operate under their own rules and operate within extremely local market conditions. The indicators the study looks at are also rough, and not really applicable to New York City; for instance, the researchers looked at how IZ affected the production of single-family homes, not apartments. One of the study’s main conclusions is that we need much more data than we have now about the performance of inclusionary zoning (it recommends some helpful information-gathering measures cities can take, which NYC would do well to follow).
But here are the most important points to glean from the Furman Center study: The impact of IZ on overall housing production ranged from nonexistent to minor. And to the extent that developers are compelled to increase prices on their market-rate units to offset the loss they’re taking on the affordable housing they’re creating, density bonuses — essentially, permission to build bigger on their property than they would have been able to otherwise — are an effective way to make up for the hit.
[image courtesy of Runs With Scissors]
Related Wins Armory Rehab Project (NY Daily News)
With Polytechnic Deal, NYU to Gain Presence in DoBro (Brooklyn Downtown Star)
Slow Economy Likely to Stall Atlantic Yards (NY Times)
What Will Be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn? (NY Times)
For Troubled Coney Plan, City May Need to Backpedal (NY Observer)
A City by the Sea — or Under It? (Gotham Gazette)
Paterson Could Derail Development: Opposes Use of Eminent Domain (NY Sun)
StreetLevel: Schmerhorn Supermarket Deal Falls Through (Brownstoner)
Super Mart Highlights Fort Greene Condo Plan (NY Daily News)
Some Sort of Building Will Arise at Fulton, M.T.A. Says (Downtown Express)
Outcry as Harlem Rezone Plan Advances (NY Daily News)
New-Look Harlem Clears a Big Hurdle: Furor at Rezoning (NY Post)
Hello my peoples. My name is Eric Pugh and I am a resident of Ingersoll houses. It’s located in the heart of Brooklyn right downtown. Downtown Brooklyn, a place where you get all your affordable shopping goods. “My Downtown,” is what I used to call it when I was young. Downtown used to be a very beautiful area.
Well, at least it used to be before the rezoning. Now where there was a neighborhood super market, local drug store, laundramats, your favorite discount store and your friendly neighborhood grocery store there stands nothing but a vacant lot.
My community was ripped away from me. It not only has an effect on me but to the residents of my community. Like our elderly. It was more convenient for our elderly to shop right across the street from where they live. Now that our stores are torn down they now have to walk three blocks up a hill just to get a little bit of shopping goods. So now not only do they have to go further than what they were used to, they also have to deal with the pain of heavy pushing or lifting. It’s just too much labor for them. My neighborhood only has one store now, on Myrtle Avenue and Prince Street, and they charge much more than they should.
So now our residents have to walk three long blocks just to get one item and to me, that’s just crazy. It’s as if downtown had its very own Katrina and the only difference it that, instead of water we are drowning from developers and this is a current that’s just to hard to swim with. The effect that was left on “My Downtown” is just heart breaking. How can you take away what yesterday owned and destroy the giving promises of tomorrow?
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