Boom & Bust with Ed Koch
Sleeper, Jim
When the American Telephone and Telegraph Company announced on March 26th of this year that it would move 1,000 employees from its new Madison Avenue headquarters to Basking Ridge, New...
...All this is merely the story throughout history of the rise of cities and the response to that rise of those who were, or felt themselves to be, dispossessed .. . . . . The power of New York, contrary to its critics, comes from the brute economic strength they despise...
...Westway will never be built," vowed candidate Koch in 1977—before he flip-flopped a year later...
...just as they followed their immigrant sires, who were carpenters, house-painters, glaziers, and small-time developers...
...Finally, as Sol Stern argues in this issue's "Round-Table," these initiatives must be backed by the largest commitment of new resources in the budget—and, indeed, in the city's history...
...Penney's departure prompted Deputy Mayor Townsend to muse, "A year from now we'll still be here, and they'll be waking up in — yuck —Dallas...
...He even has his own equivalent of "national security" —fierce competition from New Jersey— to justify his giveaways to developers...
...Rent control may indeed be an unfair way to allocate scarce housing, because it's not means-tested...
...For one thing, it puts the industry's wailing about rent control in perspective...
...A new "inclusionary zoning" provision does expand the list of bonusable amenities—the things developers give for higher densities—to include low-income housing either in the building or within half a mile of it...
...New Yorkers should familiarize themselves with the agendas of the Association for Neighborhood Housing Development, 236 W. 27th Street, New York, N.Y...
...q 450 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS To Fulfill New York City's Promise The June 1987 report of the Commission on the Year 2000 proposes reforms and innovations to enhance New York as "a world city," "a city of neighborhoods," "a city of opportunity," and "a civil city...
...Yet the city could simply mandate their amenity contributions without even giving them extra floors...
...the incomes of New York's renters are so low in comparison to soaring housing costs that even were rent ceilings lifted, profits would not increase sufficiently to make most buildings attractive investments...
...Helping low-income communities establish themselves in properties the marketplace has abandoned—properties those communities have clung to and often saved—is a revolutionary expropriation only to those content with the parasitical economies of the slums...
...Nor has the notion that large, professional nonprofit entities—building societies, unions, churches, foundations, community organizations—can build or rehab low-income housing in volume ever really sat well with the Koch administration as a matter of policy—or politics...
...Much planning has smacked of elitism and produced its own failures...
...Bureaucratic protectionism too often pits the interests of the system's employees against those of its students and their parents...
...It also expedited environmental reviews as much as it could, trying to meet the demands for "reform" in at least this one demonstration...
...What about corruption itself as an explanation for Koch's failures...
...Instead, the city should embrace the changing structure of property relations implicit in the low-income tenant co-oping programs underway in its buildings thanks to community-based, nonprofit housing development corporations, many of which enjoy sophisticated foundation support...
...How many families making $25,000 a year could afford it...
...It is because Trump (that pushy WASP) broke the code with public criticisms of the mayor, as much as because his demands are outrageous, that Koch opposed him...
...What's sad is that these modest reforms require unbelievable exertion by civic-minded people who have better things to do...
...New York will remain the capital of cultural certification, marketing, and consumption, but its indigenous young white middle-class culture could approach the sterility Townsend attributes to Dallas...
...They are not original...
...And once cleanliness, convenience, and safety have become more important to a broad range of firms than anything New York has to offer, we're talking about problems that won't be solved by more tax breaks...
...If it succeeds, warns Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "the city will die a little...
...Three key issues here are tax incentives, which unnecessarily bleed essential service revenues...
...Those formative experiences made them liberal Democrats who believe in big growth, big government (big federal subsidies, anyway), even big FALL • 1987 • 449 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS unions— all sparked to excellence, of course, by capitalist visionaries like themselves...
...Indeed, 59 percent of New Yorkers living below the poverty line get no benefits...
...Always, the administration cites as proof of its prescience earlier reforms that had to be wrung out of it just as painfully at the time...
...In several large, poor neighborhoods, the city has foreclosed so much property that it controls the market...
...If you're really smart and can read the trends, you can move the development process about one percent toward the city's best interest," explains former City Planning Commission vice chairman Martin Gallent...
...It is for losing himself and his administration in that mirage, more than for the corruption scandals or his personal problems or style, that Ed Koch has worn out his welcome...
...City officials touted this line even when soaring housing costs and collapsing transportation and schools were cited in May and June, as Mobil Oil, United Brands' Chiquita division, Hoechst Celanese, Montgomery Ward, KLM, and TWA announced, in a continuing drum roll, their plans to move 3,800 more jobs from the city...
...for example, the New York Theater Studio quit the Upper West Side for Washington, where it's now the Potomac Theater...
...Obviously, somebody's able to brave New York's rigors, officials said, else demand for space wouldn't be keeping pace with construction, and we wouldn't be replacing jobs even faster than we lose them—a net gain of roughly 45,000 a year since 1983...
...And yet, for all the scandals, the charge that Koch is corrupt remains as unsatisfying as the assumption that he subscribes to lofty conservative notions about urban development...
...The "Metrotech" project, Morgan Stanley's pioneering back-office venture near Brooklyn Heights, and other projects won't need enough mailroom clerks, busboys, and janitors to compensate for neglect of indigenous economic development...
...Nor should anything in these pages be taken to imply that one city can shoulder the costs of economic redistribution through local housing and economic development programs...
...the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry's lobby, to which many city housing officials go next...
...Half a dozen Off- and Off-Off Broadway theater companies, which need Manhattan locations to cross-fertilize and draw audiences, FALL • 1987 441 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS either closed for good or left the city last year, according to New York Newsday...
...And the gap between incomes and housing costs widens every year...
...These arguments might be diverting if they didn't overlook corruption and suffering so deep that the fruits themselves are poisoned, leaving us only with the cultural "excellence" of the big deal, the fast inside trade, frivolous adornment, high consolation, and, ultimately, the escapism and decadence whose provision has become such a big business in the city...
...In that capacity the former commissioner was sent down to City Hall's Blue Room last spring to monitor his former boss's refusal to grant a 100-percent, twenty-year tax break on the hundred-acre West Side site to which Trump wants to lure NBC...
...In 1982, after nearly 100,000 SRO units had been converted, the state forced the city to withdraw the tax incentives it had been giving the converters...
...That New York has added as much office space since 1980 as there is in all of Dallas is precisely the problem: it's happening with such speed and indifference to future and past that the cost to the civic culture is registered not just in congestion and displacement, but also in the ascendancy of the "values" of the Big Deal...
...Even the city's campaign to capture corporate "back-office" operations for the boroughs—which has met with appropriate success in office parks in Staten Island and Queens and may well revive downtown Brooklyn—misconstrues the true sources of the boroughs' vitality...
...And because the Koch administration refuses to provide adequate resources to nonprofit community housing groups, preferring (despite recent mayoral claims of a policy change) to sell city-owned parcels to high private bidders and pour millions of dollars into middle-class projects like Tibbett Gardens, the bottom half of the income scale has little relief in sight...
...In 1961, when this current zoning framework was passed, Mumford predicted that greed and irrationality would destroy the American city...
...At best, Koch cooperates with the more impressive of these efforts—he could hardly reject them—when he should be out beating down the foundations' and philanthropists' doors...
...These tremors prompted Koch to offer new commercial and utility tax aid to firms willing to relocate north of 96th Street or in the other boroughs, which were now declared competitive with Jersey suburbs...
...out of an ideological preference for the market (except for low-income cooperators...
...Failure to accept that the private market can't provide low- and moderate-income housing or prevent homelessness...
...When Koch's housing commissioner Anthony Gliedman denied a $50-million tax break to the luxury Trump Tower, forcing the developer to win it in court, Trump didn't get mad...
...Abolition of rent regulations was impossible, so the developers declared that the units wouldn't be rentals...
...Officials conceded that a $44,000 income is the minimum required, with $52,000 more likely...
...Uprooting "Low" Culture Even if pols and developers want to whiten Manhattan and the waterfront, there is no such silver lining for them in the concomitant expulsion of cultural and other nonprofit institutions that are losing a game they didn't even want to play...
...2. Commit more city-owned property and other resources toward low- and moderate-income housing...
...With a few exceptions, this is not where the boroughs' promise lies...
...Most of these eminences—the Milsteins, Zeckendorfs, Silversteins, Kaufmans, Steyers, Fishers, Helmsleys, and others—are elderly Jews, a cohort shaken by the Great Depression and the War but buoyed by the possibilities of the New Deal and the unexpected resilience of the postwar boom...
...asked Bob Herbert, a Daily News columnist...
...Reasserting municipal power over zoning is not redistributive...
...Nothing came of Ravitch's suggestion...
...The results, Robbins and Hartman observe, are grim—and invisible to more fortunate New Yorkers: There are 200,000 families, most . . . in substandard dwellings, on the waiting list for public housing...
...But the mayor has failed utterly, out of what can only be described as an ideological commitment to the "free market," to hold the line against immediate causes of homelessness (itself the tip of an iceberg of "doubling up" and dislocation involving hundreds of thousands) and to support the many replicable models of nonprofit, community-based housing development that have emerged across the city...
...Plans for reconstruction of Times Square were "Disneyland," "ridiculous," he said—until a new set of actors more politically congenial presented their own version of Gotham...
...And Deputy Mayor for Policy and Physical Development Robert Esnard said government had done its part...
...Teachers should be empowered to work together, collegially, to set the content, methodology, and tone of their classroom work...
...Indeed, there is little in the Reagan administration's disingenuous pronouncements and disinformation that couldn't have been learned from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development or the City Planning Commission...
...SAMUEL LIPMAN, in "New York in the Eighties: A Symposium," the New Criterion, Summer 1986 its transfers and refrain from renting its building to outsiders before 1994 (when his fourth term would be over...
...One can only imagine how Koch felt, seeing Gliedman in the back of that room...
...Emphasis added.] The Tibbett Gardens debacle is important because it telescopes lots of debate...
...What's more, we'll do it without public subsidy, just to show how much could be done if only our reasonable reforms were granted...
...452 • DISSENT...
...Here is a power over people and their aspirations that transcends the reach of corruption statutes and conservative urban philosophy...
...Luxury residential and commercial developments sponsored by the city and the Port Authority on the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts are directly displacing thousands more manufacturing jobs and pricing out others nearby...
...As the market leaves more tenants stranded outside its threshold, the homeless shelter and welfare hotel system yawns forbiddingly below...
...When it was created in the 1930s under the inspiration of urban visionaries like Lewis Mumford, the City Planning Commission was a powerful fourth branch of government with significant powers over the city budget...
...What City Hall's circumlocutions showed last spring was that little had been done about the deterioration of municipal services, congestion, and crime, to say nothing of city planning itself, which affects all three...
...it has collaborated in urban renewal schemes that obliterate hundreds of firms with ten or fifteen years' life still in them...
...was this really the best way to raise it...
...A terrible admission of defeat by the real-estate industry," said George Sternlieb, its most consistent apologist...
...Their strength depends on small and medium-sized businesses founded mostly by the black, Hispanic, and immigrant and first-generation American families who live there...
...You let the developers exceed permissible densities and heights by 20 percent...
...Finer discriminations would have to be made by an impressively apolitical, professional board under clear guidelines, but no one is sure what those guidelines should be...
...These assumptions are problematic in New York's increasingly corporate economy and high-stakes real estate games...
...The great combines hatching these schemes are like herds of urban dinosaurs thrashing about in search of food...
...Since 1981, roughly forty-five million square feet of new commercial space have been built in Manhattan alone, an increment as large as the total space in Boston and San Francisco combined...
...The city itself should plan for plazas, parks, broad vistas, and sunlight, using the taxes it could be collecting, instead of dickering over a few shrubs and benches on a building-by-building basis...
...It was only poetic justice when Donald Trump turned those lavish precedents against the mayor to support his own demands for unprecedented tax concessions to keep NBC from crossing the Hudson...
...and principals should be evaluated by visiting accrediting panels composed of professionals and parents independent of the particular school and granted full access to its records and systems...
...Other industries and people occupying the buildings may come and go...
...No matter what coalition elected him, any New York mayor must move in tandem with this remarkable establishment, whose members sift the sites for new industries, classes, and modes of consumption, shaping New Yorkers' housing options and preferences in a speculative process whose tides are swift and unsparing...
...Undoubtedly, pessimism about the entrepreneurial proclivities of native American blacks and Puerto Ricans in the years before the new immigration eclipsed this truth...
...Demoralization and incompetence in the city's housing agency reflect the mayoral bias, compounding the crisis...
...and half a dozen other organizations, including, in a sense, the New York Times editorial board, whose pronouncements on local economic development and housing are written by the developer—friendly Roger Starr, Abe Beame's former housing administrator, and by Herbert Sturz, former Planning Commission chairman...
...Can any mayor deflect if not actually mobilize real estate energies toward better ends...
...Employment incentives should, of course, top that...
...More information is available from the Public Education Association, 39 W. 32nd St., New York, N.Y...
...Italian, Polish, Israeli, and Russian (200,000 whites have immigrated to New York since 1970...
...maybe the original commission was too strong...
...Citizens should familiarize themselves with the broader ethicsreform agenda of the New York Public Interest Research Group, 9 Murray Street, New York, N.Y...
...No single policy initiative would do more to improve the conditions and economic prospects of poor single-parent households than the provision of universal day care...
...A first site was selected in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx (suspiciously close to affluent Riverdale, critics noted), and work was begun on a 1015-unit complex to be called Tibbett Gardens...
...its $25 million subsidy, which developers had said they wouldn't need...
...Martin Gallent, whom the mayor declined to reappoint to the City Planning Commission because chairman Herbert Sturz asked him not to, recalls that he was always the lone dissenter on misguided ventures in the Bronx, even when principles as sacred as public waterfront access were being violated in the commission's approvals of projects Finally, he was given to understand that catering to Bronx Democratic party leader Stanley Friedman as broker for Bronx developers was the price Koch paid for support from Friedman's puppet borough president, Stanley Simon, on the Board of Estimate...
...Admittedly, political establishments are reactive...
...This is beyond the scope of this essay, but it has been sounded in part by the mayor's own Commission on the Year 2000, headed by Board of Education President Robert Wagner, Jr.: however many new jobs the city gets, its predominantly minority youth are inadequately prepared for them...
...Predominantly self-made men, they know about breaking with "the old neighborhood," though they keep up their folk-ways in the breakfast room of the Regency Hotel, which has replaced the table at the back of the local delicatessen...
...As in Washington, they do not lack for apologetics of the loftiest sort...
...More information can be obtained from the Welfare Research Institute, 11 Broadway, Room 832, New York, N.Y...
...Stronger linkages must be established between market-rate development and the production and rehabilitation of low-income housing, as is done effectively in other cities...
...yet too much is staked on the big corporate service boom, too little on a diversified economy capable of surviving a bust...
...He didn't mention that many of these people, who could not afford or manage apartments, functioned adequately in SRO hotels...
...It is that failure of nerve, as much as the surrender of specific taxing and zoning powers, for which he will be remembered...
...And nearly a quarter-437,000—of all city renters spend more than half their income on rent, making them likely candidates for future evictions...
...Or—perish the thought—the low-income cooperators might embrace the market themselves, selling out to reap "unearned" windfalls on the land and subsidies the city gave them...
...It has been a mighty convergence, indeed...
...But the trade-offs are universally agreed, even by city officials, to have been terrible...
...Little in Koch's commercial development policy has given that question a fair test...
...The developers formed a committee under the aegis of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and came back with a wish list and a promise...
...The Mayor obsesses about the number of units he's producing—not what kind...
...Even the recent 3.4 percent jump in subway ridership, to nearly 3.7 million passengers a day, has confounded the Metropolitan Transit Authority's projection of zero growth, which itself had been thought optimistic after twelve straight years of decline...
...The ill-fated Lincoln West luxury housing and Times Square "renewal" would have done this...
...The mayor must build a consensus about the funding of education more FALL • 1987 451 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS powerful—and more credible—than Ronald Reagan's consensus for a huge military buildup...
...increasing its availability would allow more women to work their way off welfare and reduce the pressures that lead to child abuse...
...New York is not Washington, D.C., or even Boston...
...had received $42 million in property tax abatements in exchange for a promise to keep jobs in the city...
...The only thing that's kept the number of homeless individuals under control is that so many can't abide the city's shelters," Kim Hopper of the Coalition for the Homeless told Tom Robbins and Chester Hartman in the Village Voice...
...It is in light of that discrepancy that we offer the following "short list" of reforms...
...Where, then, is the government...
...and CBS Magazines have withdrawn their support for school writing programs, while the banks charge—and the Board acknowledges—inadequate followthrough by the schools...
...Yet the fracas only reinforced his critics' complaint that the $1.3 billion in property tax breaks given big firms since 1978 have been wasteful, because irrelevant to their choosing Manhattan since at least 1981, when the current real estate boom began...
...Sigurd Grava, a professor of urban planning at Columbia, draws the inevitable conclusion in New York Affairs: . . . there are reasons to suggest that the free market forces that drive the overall activity are not equipped to address larger urbanization issues...
...The problem is that Board of Education support has been so poor that Time, Inc...
...Under Koch, too many roads lead to Manhattan, which sends out its young professionals, developers, and tax breaks...
...The world forces behind these developments include enormous foreign investment (the number of foreign banks here has tripled since 1970 to include ninety-four of the world's hundred largest...
...That Koch couldn't or wouldn't see this, grudgingly accepting only the most belated curbs on the giveaways even after mainstream studies supported his critics, reflects something important about his mayoralty that historians of the city will try to explain—its abdication of government's legitimate "police powers" over burgeoning development, and its abandonment of any civic mission broader than what "development" itself might define...
...massive immigration (around 2.4 million since 1970, helping boost the city's population from a thirty-year low of 7.1 million in 1980 to 7.5 million now...
...Let us hope we've learned at least that much from his stay...
...Nor will waterfront condos and marinas create enough entry-level jobs to offset those lost from the lumberyards and factories they displace...
...If, as nearly every informed observer outside city government agrees, the construction boom would have gone forward after 1981 even without most of the $1.3 billion in tax incentives, then that money would have been better spent planning for the congestion, or lowering the onerous occupancy tax that hits business tenants, not developers...
...As 750,000 such jobs, the mainstays of stable working-class families and neighborhoods, left the city largely for reasons beyond its control, newly arrived blacks and Hispanics filled more than 70 percent of the 300,000 remaining, while others became unemployed...
...None of the objections to city policy raised here rest on such assumptions...
...The city does not set the welfare grant level, but it imposes onerous, often capricious restrictions that force many to live in poverty without benefits...
...4. Debate about welfare reform must not be allowed to obscure two basic, urgent initiatives with potentially far-reaching consequences: increasing the level and availability of the welfare grant and providing day care to all who are eligible and who want it are matters of economic good sense and simple justice...
...Just as no mere mayor can claim credit for such growth, neither can he be blamed for the consequences of rising oil prices, strong dollars, international drug traffic, the federal deficit, housing and welfare costs, new technologies that disperse investment and employment, and an increasingly self-sufficient exurbia attractive to corporate planners who prefer the simulated vitality of "mall" environments to the real and unpredictable vitality of cities...
...It's especially true of cities, which are run by entrenched, often parochial interests, yet lie open to capital and human migrations that dwarf their limited powers...
...City Hall radiates mistrust out of greed...
...No matter...
...The Real Estate Fraternity Although there have been interesting newcomers in recent years, New York's lenders, developers, builders, brokers, and their lawyers and publicists remain a small world...
...In addition, the economic development of the four boroughs outside Manhattan has been mishandled by undue emphasis on capturing a "back-office" spillover from Midtown and Wall Street...
...Why These Defaults...
...Tourism is up from 3.3 million in 1975 to 17.5 million this year...
...Corporate turnstile-jumping," transit advocates dubbed the ploy, handing a campaign issue to Koch's 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary opponent, Mario Cuomo, who pledged to reinstate the levy...
...More and more of the housing market has disappeared from the private sector's spectrum," he noted...
...We will have fifty years of sunless congestion to ponder that question...
...For years, countless officials and activists pleaded with Koch to impose a moratorium on rampant upscale market conversions of the Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel units that a third of all homeless shelter users list as their last previous address...
...He is their man not so much because they've "bought" him as because he shares their beliefs (even about rent regulation, which they know he can't assault...
...As the exodus of casualties of the real-estate wars continues, the pyrrhic victors will be left with little more than what Kurt Vonnegut called "the illusion the city gives, to almost anybody, that he must be accomplishing something by talking or eating or drinking or reading a newspaper in such a busy, expensive place...
...Ultimately Brooklyn and the Bronx cannot disport themselves as suburbs or gussy themselves up to become Stamford or White Plains...
...Yet it's the new, homegrown firms—not Midtown and the financial district and their back-office spillovers — that will incubate a new middle class — Dominican, Jamaican, Korean, Chinese and Indian...
...Unscrupulous speculators are as happy to cash in on self-fulfilling prophecies of devastation as of revitalization, manipulating racial fears or ordering up brutal evictions to accelerate either process...
...Will the City Bust its Boom...
...its assumption of the development risks...
...is not redistributive...
...Housing for working people," the mayor called the effort...
...New York City's biggest homeless housing program, as Councilmember Ruth Messinger points out, is one it would rather not talk about: allowing some 50,000 families to illegally double up in the Housing Authority's 174,000 apartments...
...That the consequent staggering minority youth unemployment fuels violent crime and underground economies only reinforces the deep but seldom discussed racism of corporate planners...
...1. Establish public financing of primary and general election campaigns...
...10001, (212) 463-9600...
...New York's capacity for civic and cultural excellence depends on its brute economic strength, we're told...
...Need it be said that great boondoggles like Westway and the Times Square "renewal" plan represent the same sorry processes run riot, that they are feeding binges by developers, construction unions, and politicians...
...Westway has been aptly dubbed "a real-estate development project masquerading as a highway," an awesome plunder of the public treasury and a savaging of public priorities...
...But, even with a $25-million city capital subsidy, which will be incorporated into the plan to write down the price of each apartment by $25,000, the cheapest two-bedroom unit will cost $107,000 —that's roughly $15,000 down and $1,100 a month for mortgage, maintenance, and carrying...
...What isn't beyond the city's control is aggressive protection of the hardy survivors, whose number appears to have stabilized...
...On the Upper West Side, meanwhile, a very professional Community Board 7, led by John Kowal and Sally Goodgold, has helped institute "contextual zoning," which keeps new construction in character with the existing neighborhood's largely admirable play of density and light...
...The MTA came away with a cool $455 million for transit...
...It's hard to believe that celebrants of the "New Manhattan" would notice...
...Instead, many successful experiments are all but dying on the vine while the city auctions its foreclosed parcels to the highest (often unqualified) bidders or sells them to upscale developers...
...they renovate subway stations and build and maintain small public plazas and pedestrian passageways to help accommodate the congestion caused by their extra floors and people...
...Clearly the company could make more renting out its space at high prevailing rates— FALL • 1987 . 439 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS and needed to, after the breakup of its industry...
...zoning, or rather, the abandonment of responsible city planning in favor of selling off variances and publicly owned parcels to the highest bidders to replenish the treasury...
...Perhaps the most candid observation from City Hall in recent years was Deputy Mayor Robert Esnard's to the Times on the occasion of the Tibbett Gardens failure: "When the Federal Government pulled the money away from us, there was only us left...
...Simply, he discovered that the statutory "police power" of the zoning resolution, through which a city regulates building densities and heights—and hence light, air, and congestion—can be a money-maker for City Hall...
...Manufacturing Destroyed Nowhere has this folly been clearer than in the destruction—not just "natural" demise—of the light manufacturing companies, employing from ten to fifty people each, where more than a million New Yorkers, a third of the city's work force, found jobs in the 1950s...
...10001, (212) 868-1640...
...the Association for a Better New York, founded in the fiscal crisis by builder Jack Rudin...
...Written right into the specifications for new construction—to get the highest possible bid—was the requirement that the developer apply to the city to exceed permissible density by 20 percent (in towers of fifty-eight and sixty-eight stories, as FALL • 1987 • 443 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS it has turned out) in exchange for renovating the subway station and paying an extra $55 million to the MTA...
...What is clear is that, long after it was remotely necessary, the Koch administration kept shoveling money into the boom, against those who issued definitive, damning studies and cried, "Halt...
...And, "It will take a sea change in . . . zoning and the reduction of the influence of the community boards [the Kingsbridge community opposed the project] to create a market," a developer complained to Times reporter Alan Finder, blaming the government...
...The national headquarters of the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church announced that they, too, would go, though at this writing the former is reconsidering...
...Some corporations have reached out, only to discover, as did four major banks and New York Telephone this year, that a majority of high school graduates couldn't pass eighth-grade-level exams to qualify for jobs...
...as Sam Freedman noted in a Times article on the aberrant feud between Koch and Trump, "developers in New York have traditionally kept their grievances with the city to themselves, or have channeled them through their lawyers...
...No matter how loudly Koch claims credit for the recent expansion, its force has surprised him, just as the severity of the economic/fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s surprised his predecessors, themselves the products of an even larger, more precarious boom...
...Moreover, by their nature—in stimulating separate actions by individual decision makers in an internally competitive situation—these forces are likely to exacerbate the situation, even to the 442 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS detriment of those individuals who profit in the short term...
...White-collar housing is desperately needed, but it's not clear that traditional "filtering" and ladders of upward mobility will work even if such housing is built...
...Five hundred thousand of Brooklyn's 2.3 million people live below the poverty line...
...The nonprofit efforts are suspect because they alter the structure of property relations, taking what had been private, for-profit buildings and land and turning them into (minority) nonprofit coops, often in areas where the (white) market might someday revive...
...The short answer is, trying to play "real estate" with the best of them...
...While Midtown office space has jumped 9 percent since 1976, subway ridership there has gone up only 3 percent because people simply can't fit into the stations at rush hour, let alone onto the trains...
...Mainly, it shifted the dealing from the East Side—where developer and lender conservatism about "prestige" addresses would have continued shoehorning new buildings into overbuilt places until the area sank into the East River—to the West Side, where, as Gallent warns, "They're now going to do what they shouldn't have done on the East Side in the first place...
...And NBC considered crossing the Hudson...
...and, yes, American blacks and Puerto Ricans...
...As recently as two years ago, Representative Bill Green told a housing class at New York University that the chief cause of homelessness is the illness of people "deinstitutionalized" en masse from upstate mental hospitals...
...Just as we knew little about the city's economic decline while it was happening, we know less than we should about what's producing this boom," says Bowery Savings Bank chairman and former developer Richard Ravitch, who heads Koch's Charter Revision Commission...
...the city adopted them only because residents had already pioneered them without its permission...
...The project that emerged was "hailed by both developers and the city as a breakFALL • 1987 445 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS through," according to the Times, "a sign of serious commitment by all parties to clear the economic and administrative obstacles that for years have made it virtually impossible to make a profit by building middle-income housing on a large scale...
...Koch has said candidly: (a) he doesn't think long-range planning is possible and (b) government should get out of business's way...
...These booms have lives of their own, the critics said, and sensible taxation for sound public purposes won't kill them...
...But the city has done nothing to match New Jersey Governor Tom Kean's plans for a performing arts complex that would nurture the little theater companies streaming out of Manhattan...
...Colleagues have already decamped to Hoboken...
...Nor has rent control been the primary cause of housing abandonment...
...On another front, journalist Jim Smith contended that City Hall's refusal to help manufacturing jobs survive soaring rents reflected informed scrutiny, not of "natural" market trends, but of the mayor's campaign gifts, which "come overwhelmingly from those who [want] to displace manufacturing with luxury housing or commercial space...
...The city had been too busy throwing its resources into the boom, as if that would make it continue forever...
...What accounts for these policy defaults and their constant misrepresentations...
...A Times editorial last summer noted that fully half of the $9 million in 1985 campaign gifts to Koch and the other seven members of the powerful Board of Estimate (comptroller, city council president, and five borough presidents) came from 175 donors, most of them real-estate developers and brokerage houses and their law firms, and that, "one way or another, that kind of money inevitably purchases influence...
...But the industry's leaders, with some Faustian exceptions like Harry Macklowe, don't dirty their hands with such "scavenging," which they find beneath them and in any case less lucrative than deals cut on a main stage cleared by others...
...Though the development will loosen the market near Riverdale for people in that range, it certainly "will not provide a model for bringing the private sector back into housing production," wrote Times real-estate columnist Alan Oser...
...only a staff revolt has prompted a reconsideration...
...This, even with the city's free land...
...then the Citizens Housing and Planning Council produces an exhaustively documented middle position, which gains modest support from such "enlightened" representatives of the power elite as former City Planning Commission chairman and now developers' lawyer John Zuccotti...
...it is our only chance to free public policy making from the stranglehold of legal bribery...
...So Koch asked his friends in the fraternity what they needed from him to attack the housing crisis at its middle...
...The permanent legacy of sunless canyons and paralysis in the streets and subways reflects an even more fundamental default in the planning process under Koch...
...those standards must be pursued in the context of the structural reforms listed here...
...A typical embarrassment came at Columbus Circle, where the MTA, which owns the Coliseum site, decided to sell the property to the highest bidding developer...
...It certainly influences the borough presidents, most of whom have been characters out of Nast cartoons during Koch's reign and whose support he needs on the Board...
...It's not as if nobody saw this coming...
...Sidewalks designed for five-story buildings are so crowded that a stroller or someone in a hurry is forced into the gutter...
...and, riding both tides, the conspicuous consumption of affluent Latin Americans, Italians, and others who are here, they say (as CUNY professor Sidney Shanker reports), because they couldn't wear their fur coats in public in Lima and Rome...
...Relations range from cordial to courtly...
...So 440 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS argued the developers and the newcomers themselves, noting that many manufacturing spaces were already going begging as printers and garment manufacturers moved to Hackensack or Taiwan...
...Or, as Sternlieb put it, "the economics of housing, even if you perfect the process, defeats the market...
...Campaigns should cost less (electronic media are publicly licensed and should be made to serve the public...
...Then the issue became how area lines were drawn—one of them, running along Union Square East, takes a little jog to accommodate the Zeckendorf Towers' exemption— and whether the geographical approach didn't still give concessions to companies that didn't need them...
...Penney, the nation's third-largest retailer, announced that it would move 3,800 jobs from Sixth Avenue to Dallas: a boom is a boom, even if those who have to sell out of it include big, venerable firms...
...At least one can raise a family there...
...Can one take the new spring in one's step onto the sidewalks of New York...
...Always, FALL • 1987 • 447 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPS the city is dragged kicking and screaming into long overdue reforms of tax concessions, zoning provisions, boondoggles, contracting procedures, housing regulations, sales policies on city-owned properties, and anti-corruption statutes and codes...
...Thus there [is] every justification for government to step in and control the development business with the aim of achieving public objectives and protecting [Midtown] from an aggregation of negative impacts...
...The plight of nonprofits and artists and the special communities they sustain was underscored backhandedly when news of J.C...
...One would have thought that Friedman's access to the Parking Violations Bureau was concession enough...
...and out of a political desire to control...
...What he did not underestimate was the county leaders' power over borough presidents—especially when, as in Donald Manes's Queens and Howard Golden's Brooklyn, county leader and borough president are one and the same...
...Fury, because A.T.&T...
...he got even by hiring Gliedman away as a vice-president of his organization...
...or it's to find someplace clean, convenient, and safe, which the boroughs are not when compared to the suburbs where most corporate decision makers already live...
...His comments and policies have made this very clear...
...A few companies have found, however, that developing training programs with high schools pays off because it significantly improves youths' performance as it broadens their horizons...
...While Koch diddled, the conversions continued, often with arson and thuggery as the means of eviction...
...It's precisely the velocity and, in a new world economy, the contingency of the current expansion—which rests less on the city's past advantages of geography, technology, and homegrown wealth than on fickle notions and quick calculations about its "chemistry" and "quality of life" — that make all the more fateful those options a mayor does take at the margins of the great transformation...
...For example, the Board of Examiners, which certifies teachers' qualifications, is a destructive anachronism that must be abolished in favor of district-based screening procedures that meet certain system-wide minimum standards...
...The evictions have driven them over the edge...
...That Koch has never seriously joined the battle of corporate perception and commitment is a tragedy of unimaginable dimensions...
...Had the city assured the banks that they'd be first in line, the loans would have been made, and, given the boom's success, the taxes would have been collected, too...
...The explanation isn't so simple as "corruption by developers," "the trauma of the fiscal crisis," or "the spirit of the times on Wall Street and in the White House," though it is all these and more...
...What the city must do, as State Senator Franz Leichter has been saying for a decade, is shift its tax expenditures away from the big firms and into the basic city services and targeted aid that businesses in relatively low-rent areas like Flushing, Flatbush, and Fordham Road desperately need...
...Most corporations here "have committed themselves" to Manhattan's economies of agglomeration and "are much less likely than in previous years to move their headquarters out of town," wrote one urban planner in the fall of 1985...
...Other temples of high culture have had the wit to become big corporations themselves, with their own moneymaking condominium towers and boards of directors that interlock with the investment banking houses...
...The answer is none because the bank wouldn't even grant the loan...
...yet manufacturing and new indigenous small business there are all but ignored, or even pushed out...
...But City Hall hasn't just accepted these arguments...
...Even then, though, the lines of force have been clear...
...Challenging these perverse arrangements and the mythologies that sustain them has become the agenda, not of a few literary radicals with too precious a notion of urban vitality, but of thousands of dedicated New Yorkers who live exposed and vulnerable to one another and to degrading, oppressive conditions...
...the size of the complex drove up costs...
...448 • DISSENT DAYS OF TEE DEVELOPERS The real estate industry lobbied fiercely, and Koch caved in—artfully: he delayed the tax's starting date till October, prompting an unprecedented rush of 130 big sales in August and September...
...Instead of reaching out to such people in advance, the mayor writes letters to the real estate fraternity and pours millions into projects for people whose incomes are in the top fifth of the population—incomes, even at $50,000, that are four times the median rental household income...
...The latter can be found at the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a venerable developers' and planners' group from which have come many top city housing officials...
...The wish list included abolishing rent regulations, streamlining bureaucratic reviews, revising union rules, building codes, zoning constraints, and more...
...Charging the city with indifference to its pleas for more space, the museum is in court trying to overturn the provision and move to Washington...
...But let us assume that plenty of great music, Balanchine, and Broadway musicals are sufficient, that playing the real-estate game of musical chairs is bracing...
...The city has gained almost 375,000 jobs since 1976 for a total of 3.6 million, a sixteen-year high...
...but it donated the land and put up the construction capital, insulating the developers from risk...
...Today, though, the title of the Zoning Resolution, a book thick with dubious amendments negotiated with greedy developers, should be "Let's Make a Deal...
...Percival and Paul Goodman, who twenty-five years ago in Dissent argued for a ban on private autos in Manhattan, have been vindicated beyond their wildest nightmares...
...If it does revive, the city can make money selling its foreclosed properties to the high bidders and, thus spurring gentrification, increase its tax base...
...Koch's decision to abdicate even the modest "clearing house" functions of local government, as well as its broader city-building powers, undercuts both the current boom and the "New York Ascendant" envisioned by his own Commission on the Year 2000...
...Not many developers are expected to choose this option freely...
...But because of that strength, there is talent here, and the money to back it, to burn...
...No Housing Market In December 1985, the Mayor wrote to thirty-three of the city's major developers, asking how they and the city might construct 10,000 units of housing a year for people 444 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS making between $15,000 and $48,000— the "moderate" and "middle-income" New Yorkers...
...Naturally developers preferred exemptions...
...Which means, given the state of the market and federal funding, that he is not really comfortable with low-income rehab and construction at all...
...It is a document far more progressive than the mayoral administration that commissioned it—a discrepancy muted in the report's apolitical, consensus-oriented language, which juxtaposes reforms facing little opposition and already underway (stricter Midtown traffic enforcement) with proposals stoutly resisted by constituencies, interests, and often City Hall itself (committing more city-owned property for low- and moderate-income housing development...
...But we know now that Koch was either unaware of the plunder or awfully naïve about its value...
...and office-holders shouldn't enjoy perpetual incumbency that rests on huge warchests rather than accountable leadership...
...that would have reassured the lenders, who often retard development because they worry that high taxes will preclude loan repayments...
...Koch managed to time the announcement of a 1,500-job expansion downtown by the ShearsonLehman Brothers brokerage firm with news of TWA's departure...
...Even "low- and moderate-" income units to be constructed with some of the $4.2 billion announced by Koch are rising inexorably in price as the city jiggers with the income eligibility limits• the higher the tenant's income, the less public subsidy, and the more units Koch can construct with the money...
...Koch's infamous self-absorption is mentioned...
...There were excuses: soggy ground required concrete pilings...
...The city could have stoked the boom simply by subordinating its property tax bills to the corporations' or developers' mortgage payments, Richard Ravitch claims...
...It's only when the market already wants to be somewhere that you can get it there...
...Time and again, he has had to be confronted with virtual faits accomplis—with impeccable work plans, the clout of important men, and the activities of organized thousands of low-income people who've built powerful community organizations or simply ripped the tin seals off empty city-owned buildings and moved in...
...A little recouped tax incentive money would go a long way here...
...Then, when few such sales were made once the tax took effect, Koch announced that the measure was "defective" and got Albany to replace it with levies so modest they cut the city's take on a $340 million sale of the American Express building from $18 million to $3 million...
...Officials said much the same on April 29th, when J.C...
...If that's all it's about, why not pay less in Dallas...
...10004, (212) 344-5466...
...the real estate fraternity is forever...
...They scream, demonstrate, hire consultants, sit up at night crafting political strategy and testimony...
...Yet these developments and the new industries they serve aren't as vital to the city's economic and social underpinnings as the smaller firms upon which hundreds of thousands of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and nonEnglish-speaking immigrants depend...
...Other cities have made developers do that without granting higher densities— a policy that in Manhattan might have lowered astronomical land prices, as Columbia planning professor Peter Marcuse has noted...
...issue of the socialist journal Dissent to the current populist campaign against gentrification and new luxury condominiums...
...The school custodial system is similarly outmoded and subversive of intelligent district-based planning...
...No one examining the mayor's record can fail to note that his ever-shifting rationalizations for development and housing policies have been as duplicitous as the policies themselves have been inappropriate...
...At least 65,000 families need and are eligible for day care that doesn't exist...
...others say some kind of personal FALL • 1987 437 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS blackmail is at play...
...Indeed, this one, just now beginning to ebb, would have a longer life ahead had the city collected much of the forgone revenue and spent it on the infrastructure, transit, schools, and housing the firms and their workers need in order to function here...
...Koch's query reflected another problematic assumption—that only profitmaximizing developers can build housing in volume, and that, since they can't build low-income housing without massive subsidies the city doesn't have, there is no choice but to concentrate public initiatives on middle-income housing...
...The grant level should be increased by the state to at least poverty line and, potentially, to half the state median income...
...Koch is uneasy with low-income housing not run by the real estate fraternity or by government...
...REBNY president Steven Spinola, formerly president of the city's Public Development Corporation, and developer Fred Rose took overall charge...
...It's as if the politicians and developers wanted to "whiten" the complexion of Manhattan and, more broadly, to get rid of the wage-earning poor...
...3. Spectacular recent failures in Board of Education jobs and employment training programs underscore that the system has not kept faith with the energy and commitment of thousands of young, mostly minority New Yorkers —not the other way around...
...The median rental household income in the city is around $12,500 —nearly 70 percent of all New York City households are renters—and 27 percent of these tenant households live at or below the poverty line of $10,600...
...Even if that were true in dollars, it missed the point, as did celebration of the strong market and new industries: when firms leave Manhattan's special environment, it's either to go out of business, as have hundreds of manufacturing firms that needed proximity to competitors, customers, and suppliers but couldn't pay soaring rents...
...No one pretends that professional households making $50,000 or even $75,000 a year are accumulating great wealth in New York, or that the city can survive if it drives such people away...
...Too often, it has sold these properties to the highest bidders in hopes of enhancing its tax base, but the ensuing displacement of low-income people saddles the city with new shelter and social service costs that overwhelm the returns...
...Democracy is controversy, of course, but mayoral vision and initiative could save years—if a mayor more independent of the developers than Koch were there to provide it...
...Whatever measure of truth these explanations hold is best assessed in the context of a real estate industry that is bigger than both of them and that is to New York City what Big Oil is to Houston...
...those who would level the city's vast resources to pursue justice and equality would produce only mediocrity and stagnation...
...To a remarkable degree, these men's sons have followed in their footsteps—the new Zeckendorf Towers at Union Square are Bill, Jr.'s monument to Bill, Sr...
...The mediocrity reflects not "leveling" reforms, but profound inequities in resource distribution countenanced by Koch...
...The promise was a surprise: "Do these things for us," REBNY said, in effect, "and, to show our good faith, we'll put up 3,000 units for people in the income range you mentioned, and take no profit...
...When we start losing the industries of the future, we'll start to worry," said an aide...
...they are the ones most dependent upon a mayor's "heavy lifting" through vigorous political pressure and sustained public persuasion...
...When the American Telephone and Telegraph Company announced on March 26th of this year that it would move 1,000 employees from its new Madison Avenue headquarters to Basking Ridge, New Jersey, the Koch administration's fury was tempered only by its embarrassment...
...But the latter are poorly funded, tightly constrained...
...Naturally, Koch has bewailed the end of direct federal housing aid and tried to replace it with $4.2 billion in locally generated revenue (from the city's own capital budget, the World Trade Center, Battery Park City, and "Big MAC" surpluses) to rehabilitate city-owned apartments and construct new housing...
...Yet half-hearted zoning of manufacturing districts has been too cumbersome and seldom backed by enforcement...
...Of course the city runs low-income housing programs, from federally subsidized public housing (half a million people in 174,000 units) to "tenant management" and "homesteading" programs in 10,000 city-owned apartments "taken" from landlords who've in fact abandoned them...
...Similarly, . . . there is a straight line connecting Percival and Paul Goodman's impassioned plea for [a ban on private autos in Manhattan] in the very same issue of Dissent with the now-successful fight against the Westway super-highway project...
...Besides, for all the city's generosity to developers and corporations, A.T.&T.'s decision showed that you can't give any specific company enough to offset whatever other considerations prompt it to leave...
...And, enhancing the lot of the middle class would make the city more attractive to business, which generates taxes and jobs that benefit the poor...
...Either the city has become intolerably filthy, congested, and dangerous, or its economies of agglomeration and other allurements have dimmed for firms whose technologies and priorities are changing...
...It is also the only way for elected officials to regain the public respect they have lost as players in a bloated, perverse electoral system...
...There isn't enough money to send trains down the tracks two minutes apart, which might relieve the congestion...
...A perfect tax," Cuomo called it, noting that it covered transactions that no one could threaten to heist to New Jersey, and that it funded a transit system upon whose reliability the very value of Manhattan real estate depends...
...Having done well by the welfare state, which in effect capitalizes their ventures and subsidizes their corporate and residential tenants, they feel that, with pluck, persistence, and their own example in view, others can share in the feast...
...Whose Boom...
...That agenda could be even more broadly and effectively shared under the leadership of a LaGuardia, the predecessor Koch says he most admires...
...There is no learning curve...
...After embarrassing publicity in 1982 by Sydney Schanberg and others about big corporations which, though denied tax breaks, went ahead with construction anyway, the case-bycase decision process, which had led to charges of politicization, was replaced with "as of right," or automatic, grants in specified geographical areas...
...and the development professionals' own time and services at little or no cost...
...On April 10th, the American Cancer Society's executive committee voted to relocate its 300-employee national headquarters out of the city...
...At least 50,000 families are doubled up in privately owned apartments...
...All we can do here is sketch the capitulation in commercial and housing development and allude to it in other areas...
...Middle-class people now holding tight to rent-regulated apartments would loosen their grip, and the space would "filter" downward to lower-income people...
...The loser is Central Park and the surrounding neighborhood, which will be cast into shadow by a monstrosity which, with its 20 percent bonus, will bring 9,000 more people into and out of the subway station at rush hours...
...What the mayor assumed, as do the developers, is that increasing the supply of affordable housing for the middle class will also help the poor...
...The winner was Boston Properties, owned by publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, an ambitious newcomer to the New York development scene who for that very reason would have made lavish concessions...
...A mayoral blue-ribbon panel headed by Planning Commission Chairman Herb Sturz began work on the developers' wish list...
...Never mind the reasons, beyond our scope here, why this is unlikely to happen...
...Koch hasn't improved on this record...
...Or must he always put the best possible civic face on antisocial adventures...
...10007, (212) 349-6460...
...Government doesn't so much "get out of the way" as choose between competing approaches to property relations and housing development...
...It is a wonder that citizens can stop them, and a good question whether mayoral leadership might harness them...
...On some of these, the governor has an equally important political and educational leadership role to play...
...As it does, the bottom half of the rental market sinks out of reach even of the downward "filtering" of housing that projects like Tibbett Gardens are supposed to encourage: even if one thousand households earning $44,000 or more move to Tibbett Gardens, 446 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS depressing rents in the buildings they leave behind, so that one thousand moderate-income people can replace them and leave still other space vacant, this last group of apartments simply can't be rented more cheaply by a landlord seeking even a modest return...
...One cannot drive from the Port Authority Bus Terminal at Eighth Avenue to the United Nations at First Avenue in less than forty-five minutes during much of the day...
...City officials and developers planning the entombment of Times Square in a complex of office towers understand that Broadway musicals must be saved, if only as "loss leaders" that soften the big boom's rapacity into something like verve...
...So important has money become in the electoral process that this isn't just a "good government" reform...
...like generals, they're usually fighting the last war...
...The city had become as narrowly focused as some of the developers...
...The Board of Education itself should be appointed by and accountable to the mayor, subject to the approval of independent, professional screening panels...
...The notion that any New Yorker has a right—which is embodied neither in land ownership nor in leasehold tenure—to remain forever in the section of the city in which he currently lives cannot be made consistent with the economics of land and construction," Starr has written, explaining how cosmopolitan "excellence" gets a good, swift spur from the developers...
...Denying gratuitous tax abatements to SmithBarney or A.T.&T...
...Policy Defaults Three signal failures of the Koch administration deserve attention, though this article cannot give them equal space if it is to do minimal justice to any of them: 438 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS • Mismanagement of the Manhattan boom itself...
...and finally, after five or six years and plenty of damage, a tepid reform passes the Board of Estimate...
...A 1982 revision of Midtown zoning largely failed to reverse this abdication of municipal power...
...Whereupon The United States Life Insurance Company and Deloitte Haskins and Sells, the seventh-largest accounting firm in the country, announced they would take 1,100 jobs to Connecticut and New Jersey...
...As it happens, it was Dallas to which H. Ross Perot nearly lured the Museum of the American Indian from Manhattan, an offer he withdrew only because a provision of the museum's charter mandates that it stay in New York...
...If white-collar firms and young loft-seeking professionals could pay more per square foot than the ailing manufacturers, why should the city stop them...
...Failure to prepare the work force for investors, and vice-versa: the crisis in race relations and education...
...Tibbett Gardens's thirteen buildings and landscaped courtyards would be handsome...
...embarrassment, because no one had taken the trouble to get the promise in writing...
...then they're baited by apologists for current policy like Rutgers's George Sternlieb...
...The pity of it all is that the real resources of the city, so much greater than anything in the imagining of its present detractors, could be used to lead with excellence rather than level with mediocrity...
...Large nonprofit outfits like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and developer James Rouse's Enterprise Foundation are giving communitybased housing organizations resources to help bring the city's own programs to affordable levels for the target populations...
...So Koch's letter to the developers didn't even pretend that the market could actually build housing for nearly half the city's population, even with considerable public subsidy or other government support the developers might request...
...City Hall's strategy for the boroughs amounts to preparing them to catch this trickle, which is fine for a few Victorian brownstone neighborhoods and more harmful than helpful to areas beyond...
...But the record of "us" —our city government here in New York—is an intolerable municipal shame and a standing reproof to those who think that chasing big booms is the way to build great cities...
...Threatening to revoke the abatements anyway, the mayor convinced the company to limit A Straight Line . . . The malefactors held responsible for the mess in Gotham have always been corrupt politicians and newly enriched real estate interests . . . . The charge of speculative and unplanned overbuilding . . . is a constant theme, running from Daniel M. Friedenberg's piece in the 1961 "New York, N.Y...
...That Ed Koch is one of them in spirit goes almost without saying, though it's likely that these stolid, wealthy family men find him just a bit strange...
...For all his volubility and obvious intelligence, Koch will be remembered for derelictions of duty as awesome as Reagan's...
...That "somebody," of course, is the burgeoning financial industry and other corporate services from advertising to insurance...
...Dan Weaks, whose photography graces the cover and several pages of this issue, was forced to move from one Manhattan loft to another and finally to an apartment too small for his work, much of which is in storage, and whose rent forces him to devote most of his energy to commercial work...
...As it is, landlords in poor neighborhoods have had trouble finding tenants who can afford even controlled rents...
...the condos would still be priced for middle-income people...
...That was because the real estate market was so strong, explained Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Alair Townsend...
...The latter, trying as far back as 1961 to foist an urban renewal scheme on Jane Jacob's West Village, "acted with that stealth and dishonor which is possible only when men move from the highest of motives," as Murray Kempton put it twenty-six years before Oliver North became a man of "honor...
...So automatic is the 20-percent bonus trade-off that developers see it as simply a reward for building, according to city planner Gallent...
...That is why it makes special claims on local government through its lawyers, campaign gifts, and civic savants...
...To achieve both excellence and equality of access to educational opportunity, it is not enough just to set high standards...
...But activists won't soon forget how cleverly the mayor derailed a ten-percent capital gains tax on sales of buildings worth more than $1 million, a tax enacted in July 1981 to help fund the mass transit those buildings' employees and residents use to get to work...
...The mayor's misleadership in race relations has squandered the remarkable opportunity he had, as an elected official popular with those corporate planners, to alter their perceptions of the tens of thousands of minority youngsters struggling in good faith to make the most of pathetically limited resources...
...But the claim that removing it would unleash torrents of moderate- and middle-income construction is false...
...By February 1987, with plans, financing, and reviews complete and construction set to begin, the developers' promise had failed...
...Certainly no city government that's gone from being a nearly bankrupt object of national scorn in 1975 to running a $700 million budget "surplus" today, as host to what Business Week calls "The New York Colossus," can have done much more than play "catch up" with world forces and trends converging upon it in twelve short years...
...and wasteful, destructive boondoggles, publicly sponsored, privately driven, like Westway and the Times Square "renewal" project...
...Had AT&T's $42-million tax break failed to keep it in town...
...But the developers themselves had selected the site and the size...
...And yet, as Gallent would be first to insist, what looks like just "one percent" now can have big consequences later...
...City officials have pressing economic and political reasons to work with private developers to produce middle-income and market-rate housing, but public resources are too easily diverted into those efforts at the expense of low- and moderate-income eligibility and stabilization...
...Nor could the city revise its procedures systemically to meet the developers' demand on such short notice...
...This suggests that the mayor was "corrupted" less by developers' contributions to him directly than by the political impact of their contributions to others...
...Eventually a moratorium on conversions was imposed...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
