miss representation

It’s a plan so good, you have to wonder how it evolved within the leaden confines of City Hall. It’s a plan so absurdly elegant, you are probably aghast it’s taken years to evolve. The City’s Department of Transportation, demonstrating actual commitment to innovation and taking it on the chin for complacent union city workers everywhere, announced last week a pilot program to suspend individual car perks in favor a shared fleet.

You can save your disbelief that that the department charged with reducing congestion had a fleet of 57 vehicles for another time. Ignore that they distributed them for free to employees. And by all means think not of the parking placards that enabled them to park in an almost unregulated fashion in the densest city center nationwide.  Instead, just breathe a sigh of relief that someone finally said, ‘Um, is this really the best way?’

The answer to that was obvious, so the challenge was only to come up with workable, efficient alternate. The solution is a reduced (hybrid) fleet, all off-street parking, and, best of all, taking a page from the car sharing service Zipcar, the new fleet will be available during non-work hours for private rental.

Think about the potential there: Zipcar, which is a nominally profitable as a private concern, is facing growth limits in the city because they can’t find flexible storage situations. If the city could convert the majority of their fleet (and then some) to a vendor like Zipcar, they might actually be able to increase the quantity of vehicles available for legitimate city business as well as rapidly expand their fleet for private use. The outline wording of the RFP certainly looks like they have exactly one vendor in mind, and that is Zipcar, so we can all hope that car-sharing, an eminently reasonable solution for congestion, is about to quickly increase its footprint.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that even though this moves 57 cars from the downtown streets, it leaves in place the other 500+ placards that allow DOT employees to bring private vehicles into the city center. And that number is a pittance relative to the total number believed to be in circulation. Even if the city took a zero tolerance attitude regarding placards for its employees, that would only eliminate 22,000 or so of the estimated 142,000 out there. The preponderance of parking placards go to teachers, cops (and related court employees) and fire fighters.

Given that placards are tied up with contract negotiations, and that the department charged with enforcement is the one that also happens to receive the lion’s share of the perks, as idealistic as the shared car plan is, it also has the whiff of Bloomberg’s preferred model of civic management evolution: start a pilot program that is light years ahead of what has been proposed to date, hoover up all the laudatory press, and then allow the majority of bad habits trundle forward with little to no improvement.

The Brian Lehrer Show is taking an interesting tack in reporting: to accompany their 30 Issues in 30 Days series (a countdown about development leading up to the general election in November), they have created a Wiki to encourage dialog. It’s not terribly robust right now, but you can fix that! I’ve been meaning to, in the same way I’ve been meaning to be up in time to call in. The topics are pretty wide ranging and interesting. Like any good civic gesture, it requires time and effort and is none too sexy. Don’t let that dissuade you. Maybe instead of trooping through another pristine moderne loft renovation at Open House this weekend, spend some time with this and pat yourself on the back for fighting the good fight.

The bloom is really off the rose: the Times does a fairly nasty (in that effete “we probably were in a dining club with him” kind of way that is typical for them) take down of the compensation structure for the top two execs at the High Line Foundation. If this continues, we’re definitely going to have to graph the relative strength of “my park is 154 times larger than yours!” against the “well, mine is thirty feet higher” argument.

Fast fact: The amount of available commercial office space for lease in New York City has doubled in the past year. That means that NYC’s unoccupied, leasable office space is the 15th largest CBD in the country.

Okay, first off: I haven’t been to the High Line. I know, I know. The Most Important Park of Our Time. Or at least the most important park to Ed Norton. So yeah, I hear it’s great. I would hope so. With a construction cost of around $12M per acre (that’s $275/sf, which would build you a luxury house just about anywhere outside of the city), the costs are certainly great. And like the park, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The current estimate for upkeep is in the neighborhood of $500K per acre per annum. That compares to $5K on average citywide for parks. Other recent renovations that operate under the same private/public control structure, such as Bryant Park, requires $324K. They are roughly the same size, and though the High Line is a more complex site, the variety of programming at Bryant Park pushes costs a long way as well.

Further afield, Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is currently being planned, has a construction cost in the $4.25MM per acre cost (though that seems to go up every time someone looks the budget), and a maintenance projection of $188K  per acre, based on a total yearly budget of $16MM. Like the High Line, it’s based on some unstable calculations, basing revenue on ground rents — not unlike Battery Park City, but with a salient difference that BPC ground rents are based on existing, complete buildings, whereas the only potential income producing property for Brooklyn right now is looking mighty shaky.

The High Line didn’t even have that sort overly optimistic source of funding. The city has committed a $1MM (which is a solid $165K an acre), and the proposed BID, which has plenty of people pissed and was not even part of the original plan, would only generate equal the city’s end, leaving a half-filled hole. In year one.

Where was the planning for this? When you put up drawings with carazy plantings, outdoor film screenings need a bouncer for crowd control, one would think someone at least took a gander at how much plant food would be needed. And have you seen those benches? Ipe wood can be 40% more than cedar. Though it lasts longer, the issue is the wear and tear of New York and its eager masses of street artists, malcontents and other near vandals can short circuit long-term cost considerations.

Is it fair to be so churlish, or at least small minded, about cost, in the face of such a civic triumph? That’s a little sarcastic, surely, because it is an example of incredible effort and impressive design. I can’t say great design, because I haven’t been there, and because one of the qualification is not just the parade, but the clean up. And someone really didn’t plan well for the clean up. You can castigate the Brooklyn Bridge Park people for having eyes bigger than their stomach, but at least they measured pretty carefully.

I wasn’t overly impressed with the Diller, Scofidio & Renfro submission. Steven Holl, even back in the go-go days of 2004, was skeptical of the long-term prospect and costs. DS&R, with sexy renderings that better reflected the boundless delusion of everyone on the far west side, won in a walk. Probably worked better having exciting drawings and excitable architects when raising money. Holl, with all his experience, a whiff of cynicism about New York and civic development (and perhaps of cresting the hill of real estate nirvana) wasn’t the standard bearer you would design for such a situation.

I don’t know that it’s fair to say park development is experiencing an unprecedented ‘renaissance’. Like most capital improvements, as the city pulled out from the black hole that was the 70′s and got back on track with subway stations, streets and the like, parks certainly came along for the ride. One of the inadvertent benefits of the long gap in development was the Westway lawsuit which, even as it may have been an excellent plan — one can never really be sure if the best parts of a plan are embraced, as evidenced by the WTC development — it cemented environmental opposition and provided the organizing framework that birthed the greening of the waterfront movement that resulted in the Hudson River Park.

Over the past twenty years we’ve been the beneficiaries of two parallel developments: original compelling park spaces, and rather expensive park spaces. One certainly goes hand in hand with the other. And the results are impressive, as a design experience and a park user. But this increasing complexity comes at very real costs. And even though our per capita spending on parks lags compared to some other large cities, we have been offloading those costs to potentially conflict-laden deals. Witness the number of weeks a year you can’t get into Bryant Park, or the ‘controlled’ access to the High Line. As we come to expect more of our parks — more discrete programmed spaces, more exceptional visuals — the logic of private funding will be more intractable. This is not entirely a consequence of constituent demand. The renovation of Washington Square Park was hotly contested by many residents, near and far, most of whom seemed to embrace the notion of Park As It Was. The ‘improvements’ were largely cosmetic and served a set of interests that were considerably narrower than the vast melting pot we typically associate with a bustling metropolis.

People who are experienced with getting things done in the city are understandably skeptical of start simple and make better. Public projects like the Second Avenue subway and private ones like the Hearst Tower can take decades.

And maybe that is okay. Cities can take centuries to build. Instead of rushing into obligations that are difficult and expensive to unwind (Port Authority anyone?), modesty might be the best policy. As much as we — well some of us — stand in admiration of the accomplishment that the High Line is, not nearly as many are standing to ensure its longevity. When the very real spectre of admission fees may loom just weeks after the unveiling, it’s not hard to argue the plan as it lies is not only not a long-term model, it may not be a short-term one either.

Astroland is officially, officially closed as of last weekend, with the completion of its last lease. This is not quite the collapse of Chumley’s (which may actually return now that owning a landmark approaches being as lucrative as selling a couple studio apartments once again), since the notion of a “golden era” of Coney is a slippery proposition. Is it the days when it was a gambling destination? A rough and tumble but thriving amusement paradise? A wind — and trash — strewn ghost town, depressed enough that an absurd enough to be brilliant effort to revive a freak show would prove be the enduring symbol for resurgence for over a decade?

And would it surprise you to learn that the long, practically inevitable decline was set to rolling by names as reviled as they are familiar? That’s right: Robert Moses rezoned what he didn’t outright level, though his plans to eliminate amusement zoning altogether eventually failed. And decades later a developer named Trump stepped in with the tried and dull model of luxury housing being the solution to the problem of a vibrant and colorful seashore. He failed, but not before he amassed enough money to leave a pile of it to his officious son, teaching him the most valuable lesson of New York living: use someone else’s fortune and skill to promote yourself and then take all the credit.

Trump’s court battles set the stage for the next 30 years of Coney development: rapid valuation and devaluation of the land as various proposals were floated and folded, all of them highly speculative, all of them highly improbable. In that sense, gambling has returned to the peninsula, albeit at high stakes and with few seats at the table. And every wager was dependent on the panacea of “luxury” housing. If one silver lining has come from the Great Contraction (still coming soon to most of Manhattan) is that the simplistic notion that the relatively narrow, single-use notion of “luxury” (density higher than social housing, some upscale shops and eateries, with a precious, albeit tiny, greenspace touted as ‘amenity’. Oh, and a gym with three treadmills) is the most economically effective use of scare urban resources.

Regardless of the baubles attached to the renderings that ostensibly recall the amusement past, we cannot escape this mantra: Coney cannot be saved without overpriced condos. The best analogy would be shoving a person’s head underwater and then claiming the only way to save them is to sell them a scuba tank. And now that we have incontrovertible proof that real estate is beholden to the business cycle like any other industry, the spectre of looming, gleaming, Scarano-quality monoliths can be dismissed as the short-sighted, greedy over-reaches they are.

The developers will piece together documentation about land and construction costs, returns and carrying costs, all the while holding out the other hand for some type of tax break, claiming they have no other options. But if we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the brittle financing is but a short-term squeeze completely disconnected from urban reality. If you doubt this argument, take a quick review of the large, residential-driven development schemes proposed recently:

The Brooklyn Bridge Park: on hold because developers don’t feel confident they can sell condos that will steal views from Brooklyn Heights, the tabula rasa of gentrification. Pier 17, dunzo as General Growth slides from a legit stock to over the counter (hell, it might be under the counter by now). Governor’s Island: broke-ass. The WTC site: replacing two million square feet of office space with ‘stumps’. Atlantic Yards: now doubtful we will even see a Brooklyn Nets, let alone ‘Miss Brooklyn’ — even the Williamsburg Bank Building (excuse me, the Hanson) is going rental. Hudson Yards: next year — for reals, sayeth Related.

In short, are there any large-scale schemes moving forward? The High Line had a head start, and depends on a lot of private donations (which were generously extracted from the developers looking to secure an amenity of equal Tyler Brule-ishness to accompany their $50 million over-budget towers). Willet’s Point? 125th Street? The Williamsburg waterfront? Nondo city, and that’s only because the Toll Brothers didn’t have as much high-flying debt as GGP. Give it a couple more months. It will topple over the Edge, surely.

Do we have any counter-examples? Was it ever possible to set up a tax abatement program that would result in housing that could provide middle class families a decent existence? One that was cash flow positive for decades? One that was bought out with a massively leveraged house of cards notion of conversion to the very luxury that was claimed to be the only future? And that is now cratering under the weight of all that debt? Nope, nothing like that to be found in Manhattan.

Only when the deals turn sour do people wax poetic. To speak ill of the pyramid as it’s being constructed is to undermine the mojo. Once the majesty of its perverse uselessness is complete, and eroding, people wallow in the truth of the narrative. “No next time, no next time” is the chorus. Astroland wasn’t really done in by malice. The owners, after all, cashed out to the tune of $30 million dollars, a number that will seem princely and astute in the coming years as the weeds return again to Surf Avenue. Nathan’s will stand strong opposite the lovely new train station, and boardwalk will slowly become the plasticwalk. Do not fear: it might take a few years, or a decade or two, and some one will pop up, renderings in hand. First the housing. Then the accommodation of the amusement requirement. Then the request for a zoning variance and a subsidy. Then the outcry, petitions and activist organizing. This sort of dust up is the only renewable resource this city has; too bad we can’t mine it for rent.

So Randy Levine wanted a better television, and you (and I) ponied up another $370 million. I’ve heard of overcompensation, but even for an outfit that spends $240 million on new payroll in a week, this is still an impressive bit of mid-life crisis outlay. I want to meet the 20 year-old he’s trying to impress, because s/he must be fine.

If would be unfair to use the ‘hat in hand’ analogy to describe how the Yankees get money from anyone. Turning us upside down and shaking the every last bit of change is more accurate, provided they make pants that can hold a billion quarters.

The ‘value’ of sports stadia is no longer an open question. In the past ten years of data collection and number crunching, no one has provided any solid argument that the investment is a net gain for the region that funds a project. For the Yankees one component of this ‘privately’ funded sinkhole is a city-built parking garage, now estimated to cost $170 million (the city will lease it to an operator, so hard revenue from this investment is unclear — the new garages will create more parking inventory, but no one knows if more people will drive to the games, and it is unlikely any operator will opt for a fixed amount, since the garage will produce very little non-game day revenue), so the net cost is still murky. Beyond that, the city is touting that it will create 20 permanent jobs. That’s right: 20. The city is spending $425,000 a year (over 20 years) to create each position.

The failings of this sordid tale are well documented. Here are some of the highlights: Giuliani signed off on a rent credit of $5 million a year for each year the new stadium was under construction for ‘development costs’. Those monies paid for the lobbyists and lawyers required to structure this deal, which required a ruling by the one-time IRS (that was questioned by Congress), the patching together of a Bronx-specific special-entity ‘community benefit’ non-profit to qualify for the bonds (the sole member of which is a non-profit located outside the city that has done no business other than generate bonds for similar projects outside the state). The other direct investment elements (including a promise to replace parkland that has been unavailable to the community that was seized to start construction) are behind schedule, and over budget — one drastically so, since the initial estimate did not include costs for the interior.

Aside from the initial handout from Rudy, which the team did not utilize to their full extent, the Bloomberg administration (with lots of help from the Bronx machine and the state) has overseen all the successive backtracks and overruns. The incrementalism at play is depressingly familiar: push the available financing as far as you can and then backload the budget. Once the money runs out, blame everyone but yourself and plead ‘out of scope’. Some of the ‘revisions’ are upgrades to seating and enclosing the press box. This coming at a facility that already planned to include a Hard Rock Cafe and steakhouse.

What is important to note here is that the stadium is free to the Yankees, no matter what. The MLB has a revenue sharing agreement (that sounds like it would run afoul of anti-trust regulations, doesn’t it? Oh, right). The Yankees are the highest revenue team in the country, and their out-sized payroll also mandates a “luxury tax” be assessed, which also feeds into the sharing pool and all but insures they will always be on the contributing end of the spectrum. But capital expenses (such as a new stadium) are deducted from the revenue sharing contribution. As we sit and marvel at contracts such as were provided to C.C. Sabathia and Mark Teixeira maybe we shouldn’t be impressed with the front office gumption, but the back room deals, which get us coming — the best estimate at direct public investment is nearing half a billion dollars — and going: the Yankees will get to increase ticket prices, reduce eliminate rent payments and deduct any pesky bond payments from a revenue sharing number that would be fixed no matter who paid for the new jernt).

Or, put another way: the Yankees are using public money (see Page 38 of the PDF) — obtained via bond programs structured to increase public benefit — to artificially reduce its revenue sharing contribution and increase profitability. They literally can’t lose. Maybe Randy Levine should be coaching. Lord knows writing $200 million checks on the field hasn’t had any perceptible benefit.

Remember last year? When saying there was a fast approaching conflagration in housing and the financial markets drunk with the foolish optimism (or craven short-sightedness) that those same markets were a foolproof way to mint profits would get you mauled by brokers and their lapdogs like fresh venison covered in honey in a bear den? Housing goes up just like rocks fall down: always and anon. Never mind places like Amsterdam (where prices returned to their previous high — in 1736 — just last year; I bet they didn’t stay there long either). Everyone seemed to have forgot that any time someone tells you a financial instrument is a sure thing that your immediate reaction should be to reach for your wallet — to make sure it hasn’t been lifted.

The song and dance from the broker and broken community over the past year is that Europe — no Russia! — no, the super-rich who are insulated from day to day vagaries are going to save the Manhattan real estate market from the absolute implosion experienced everywhere else in the known universe. It recalls the scene at the end of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, where the Dorothy Provine character realizes the location of the treasure before everyone else, indulging in a short fantasy of wealth before concluding wistfully, “Well, it was a nice dream, while it lasted.”

Though the particulars are hard to parse, the sharp drops in the outer boroughs is telling, and anecdotes such as apartments being ‘flipped’ for a loss at the Plaza, the contraction in value of Stuy Town of 10% since Tishman bet $5 billion of your money (via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) they could evict rent stabilized tenants with more alacrity than the sorts of people who would invite crackheads into building lobbies (leading to such drastic measures such as charging tenants for their utilities) and what some would call anemic sales at trophy properties in TriBeCa point to a winds of change. Though it may be that sharply contracting values might not lead to foreclosures at 740 Park, it also means that the smart money will sit considerably tighter. After all, why race to drop $60 million on an apartment you don’t need if you are reasonably confident it can be had for $50 million in six months (expecting that you would lose less in real estate than in equities at this point)?

Historically, contractions hammer studio and one-bedroom owners. Even with the crazed pace of ultra-luxury housing developed that scoffs at the quaint notion of a one-bedroom, froth at the bottom end will have the same causal effect that credit squeezes and capital support requirements for CDOs have had on financial markets. Ripples will become tidal waves in no time.

So now that we have crowned our Mayor for Life (and, look, I’m voting for him again — in two years he will probably own the only going private concern in the city and manage all the public sector jobs to boot), it’s time to take a page from Nouriel Roubini’s book and declare the city is in an outright housing panic. Better still, that we have a real estate crisis across the board.

The reason we are in crisis that the many of the deals that enabled the buying and building frenzy are unwinding, meaning we may see more Macklowe-like fire sales of commercial properties, just as major building initiatives are pressing forward (WTC, anyone?) and the financial services titans that could normally be counted on to swallow up huge swaths of floor space are imploding into each other daily.

Thousands of condos are slated to come to market in the next year or two, all predicated on numbers that are looking more unsustainable each day. Tricks like rent-to-own, or straight rentals will work at the middle range of the market for a few more months, but even though it’s likely New York’s historically tight rental market will persist, those buildings will go wanting for tenants as people scramble to ratchet down their housing costs.

And this is where the Bloomberg promise of 160,000 units of affordable housing (the accounting for which was always dodgy) looks pathetic, and recent milestones — the rezoning of the Willamsburg waterfront, and the shunting of the 11,000 units of Stuy Town from Mitchell Lama to the aggressive attempt at ‘market rate’ pricing come immediately to mind — look terribly shortsighted. ‘Middle-income’ housing (to say nothing of stabilized rental units or creative programs to make ownership anything besides a vague dream for median income earners) was sorely needed before this crash, from a cultural or humanist perspective. Now we need it for purely economic reasons, since the people who will forestall savings or other types of economic advancement in pursuit of lives heavy on service and cultural spending, and will accept below median wages to live that dream were being priced into the Bronx and beyond for the past two decades with the glib argument that financial service lunkheads who supplanted them might not be the best substitute in the broadest sense, but their excess of dollars would, um, trickle-down, or prop up the shining Sodom on the Hill that is Manhattan. Those days have come to a grinding, nasty halt.

So the first step is admitting you have a problem, and it’s not clear that we’ve actually done that. Well some people have, they just aren’t people spending all their time getting reelected. When the manic expansion of real estate values, and the concomitant growth it brought (construction jobs, tax receipts, absurd growth in personal income at the upper echelons and the ridiculous luxury services sector that raced after the proceeds) was seemingly endless, the only evidence of a housing policy was restricted to softening the already spongy edges of regulation: the 421(a) mapping fiasco, the increasing allowance of developers to shift moderate and low income units off-site when applying for mortgage tax breaks, and tepid attempts to find ways to extend Mitchell Lama.

So the city lacks any tools to deal with the impending issue of systemic failure in the condo market, while the feds and state retreated from the business of social housing around the time people thought the Laffer Curve would make us all rich, in a trickly sort of way. The time it will take to kick start programs, shove through the necessary legislation and then actually start, you know, building things — provided there’s any money left in the coffers — it may well be too late to have any immediate benefit. Increasing affordable housing stock in always a good long term strategy. But since the government just poured $90BN in to a local company (and that might just be the beginning) to prop up the remnants of an easily identified real estate bubble, maybe we can argue for peeling off a couple billion for some local investment that can have a more tangible social benefit and operate within a reasonable expectation of return.

That old canard about being money not being worth the paper its printed on? Well, if three is a trend story, but your sample set maxes out at five, arguing that investment banks turned out to not be worth the buildings they are housed seems like a viable argument, even if that only turns out to be true of two of them.

Remember investment banks? Batting about the acronym IB to malign any boorish nonintellectual who was destroying wide swaths of Manhattan culture, with his evening at Scores followed by bottle service at Lotus and the unthinking embrace of ostensibly marquee quality architecture at positively obscene rates? That was so last week.

Really, let that sink in. FIRE, the term that has haunted New York and any other ‘intellectual capital’ center that has watched the traditional mix of light manufacturing, civil service and the arts get squeezed by an untenable (I think I get to use that term unreservedly now; if not, let me introduce you to a $700 billion bailout — which would pay for a shitload of theater companies and have a higher ROI on a job created/retained basis) market model, just lost one of its legs. Granted, the catch all ‘Finance’ embodied for better and worse by Jamie Dimon, who will cast a longer shadow over the next ten years of Manhattan more than any financier since his progenitor, Morgan, is still a heavy footprint, but rest easy, no one will ever tell you with a straight face that they are an ‘Investment Banker’ ever again. But if they do, be sure to have a good laugh.

In six months, a century of high finance, the center of a charlatan driven-engine of ‘compound interest’ spun out from 1929 to now as the absolute unstoppable force of western civilization, vanished. Really, allowing that Jimmy Cayne’s dope & bridge habit caused Bear Stearns to implode early, saying that investment banking died in seven days is a scenario the most exercised undergraduate Marxist sociology fantasy couldn’t have dreamed up, no matter how many Clash albums you own.

But this is an architecture blog, you say? Well, you say. I try to write about the culture of the city, and since the days of Milken, it’s hard to argue that any other culture mattered. Sure, those idiots who went to the kickball prom think they are the zeitgeist, but that is just part of a rapidly unwinding real estate scam, the rickety basis of which they are about to learn most painfully.

How will this abrupt change refashion the culture of the city? Well, aside from the glib, but still hoped for elimination of the term ‘bottle service’, the nasty effects will of course be felt some rungs further down.

Early signs are not good. Today it was reported that Starrett City bids will take a massive haircut. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but it will likely erode the almost infinitesimal gains in affordable housing, since little headway was made on 421 revisions and the Bloomberg administration has mostly paid lip service to developing new mechanisms to mandate affordability, we will see over-leveraged efforts on the part of organizations like the Toll Brothers simply whither. And once the likes of those people skip, there will be no modern day Sam LeFrak to take up the mantle.

The contagion may well move up and down the ladder. Debt servicing on Stuy Town blows up in about two years. Lacking a pliant Fannie Mae to bail out Tishman, who can say what happens when the largest rental complex in Manhattan becomes insolvent? In both cases, regulated tenants will have a modicum of protection, and are used to living under the tutelage of maliciously benign landlords, but what of the growing ranks of market-rate tenants who think that, you know, garbage should be picked up? Our knight in Shining Silver take another inch or two about the knees he already cut them off at, smiling and telling you he is all about constituent services, too late for you to realize his notion of constituency ends at about where his shoes go. And that is important information when the likes of Tishman start showing up in Albany hat in hand, demanding additional ‘reforms’ to rent stabilization.

Signature buildings only now just sprouting downtown, looking to remake the skyline of New York as more residential than commercial, will likely proceed apace. Sales may make completion a bit tricky. The Euro is losing ground — provided condos are willing to embrace all manner of sketchy Russians, it may be the hordes of ostensible discount shoppers from Europe drying up might not adversely effect things too much.

This is all just dithering about real estate. The vibrancy of this town should not depend on eyeing one’s burgeoning property investments, if only because this has proved to be futile just about everywhere else on earth at this point (though one should not discount the boundless egocentric focus of a New Yorker). What the past ten years have stripped is a thorough-going discussion of what it means to have land management. Now that value are plummeting to earth and far removed suburbs are reproducing the worst vestiges of urban decay (without the density that city services provide to offset the challenges), these questions are being tentatively raised. Here, the forever spiral upward squeezed out rational conversation about mixed use, about historical pricing patterns, about just about anything except the worst pimping of a Curbed comment thread.

So here we are, gazing at the interesting but intellectually bankrupt offerings of Herzog & de Meuron and Koolhaas, edifices that may prove compelling over time, but being touted on the verge of the nationalization of everything that made them possible, ring more than a little hollow.

On the commercial side, the outlook isn’t directly fatal, but leaking into territory where the conventional numbers don’t apply, since we are drowning in highly-leveraged debt. Lehmans’s commercial portfolio is positively absurd, as are some of the notable apartment complex deals in the Barron’s article (linked above), eye popping numbers such as writing $350 million in debt on a complex with $17 million in revenue (almost all rent-regulated) — this after the purchasers refinanced, cashing out almost the entirety of the purchase price.

As the Treasury gears up its printing press, driving our already absurd daily cost of living expenses higher, expect little relief in any way you can measure. The effects should start to become evident in a couple months. Charitable giving, already on the decline, will eviscerate arts organizations (how much was that new New Museum building next door?). Projects underway will slow and construction costs will abate. This will help in areas, such as the WTC, but the concomitant job loss (going all the way up the ladder) and shrinking tax base will offset any benefit. Though in place financing means many of the projects going up will finish, as things start to go sideways here and there, ripples such as construction firms going under and banks that finally start looking at their balance sheet mean the prospect of unfinished hulks in Williamsburg isn’t beyond the pale.

Sure doesn’t look any different outside. Yet. Nameplates haven’t been pulled down, and everyone is warily eyeing the market. The last days of the emperor are writ perfect. Denying the foolhardy greedy and myopic decision making of the last eight years means that doubling, trebling and more down is the only solution they can imagine. Stare at those numbers really hard and pretend. Change? We have no choice; no one has realized it yet.

I’m glad so much energy is being put into saving the high line. Even though it has little historical relevance to anything currently in the city, it serves as a cosmic thread knitting together the idealized vision of high art, high commerce and really fucking high real estate values. Plus it served briefly as the touchstone for white middle-class photo blogger urban adventuring. I can imagine the likes of Jason Kottke and Jake Dobkin wiping a poignant eye at some future SoHo Apple Store conference as they talk about the good old days. An aspiring media studies NYU student asks one of them about the odd doorway in the corner of one of their photos. “That, oh, that’s the entrance to Comme des Garçons; they opened a couple years before I moved to the city.” So, yeah, I want to get to one of those Highline Ballroom fund raisers toot sweet.

The city, via the MTA, is doing their part, by mandating the recent round of dissimulation on the Hudson Yards try really hard to preserve the last mile, which bends west and then circles around the western edge of the site. That will satisfy the hordes of people who want an uninterrupted — once you get around the movie screen, pool, and leaping clip art figures envisioned by Diller Scofido + The Other Guy — from the Spice Market to, um, the Javits Center (now looking to expand by re-roofing the place for $800 million).

But I didn’t start this post to carp about the facile just-add-water historicism that has pervaded the real estate development that is the High Line. And I didn’t want to spend any time at all on the Hudson Yards submissions because they aren’t legally binding, and I can’t imagine that a single person in Manhattan believes that any portion that even looks remotely interesting will be actually built (if Gary Extell was really cool, instead of sliding in with the high design spoiler option, he should just hire Scarano and Kondylis to do his proposals — a “going to war with the army you have” gambit), or to attack the shortsightedness of the entire conceit, the potential problems with a 7 line extension without other key transit improvements, or the fact that we are saddled with this cluster fuck because Pataki completely de-funded the state’s portion of capital improvements for the MTA, forcing them into hopeless debt and questionable fiscal decisions such as selling assets for one-time gains. No, I’m going to skip all that and talk about flatness.

Unless you run or ride in Manhattan, you can be forgiven for not noticing how drastically elevation changes occur. The reclamation of large areas of land (Turtle and Kips Bay, Alphabet City and Battery Park City) also adds to the myth of flatness. But in areas where natural landscape is reasonably close to its unadorned state, you encounter what might be expected from any pile of rock: the landscape drops steeply and quickly to the water’s edge.

There’s nothing wrong with this: it creates interesting vistas, and, assuming rational zoning, even helps with views and light — though in most cases the 15-20 feet differential isn’t that substantial — except at ground level, where vertical circulation is most evident, and often creates memorable vistas. The slight incline up Broad approaching Wall Street give a subtle monumentality (well, before the guns and fences distracted); as you head uptown, the changes are more drastic, as are the resulting views. Coming upon St John’s from the park side, at night, with looming darkened towers helps one truly understand why Gothic majesty persisted for so long as the go-to style for institutional might.

All this wondrous variation is the enemy of developers everywhere. Flat land is so… efficient. Cheap. Regular. Repetitive. Banal. So every time the city tries to jump start development and hands over the keys to the charlatan cabal that dutifully turns up (Related, Brookfield, Vornado, ad nauseum), the part of the solution that is hardest to parse is what happens on the ground.

There are many reasons for this: developers are trying to minimize promises of urban amenity (read: parks and plazas that must be maintained), while also shading just how much retail and advertising it to come (read: lots). In a couple cases it also helps paper over the difficult gap between concept and execution, often summarized in the distance, top to bottom, from one end of an idea to another.

At the WTC site, it’s about twenty feet east to west. The Hudson Yards gap is even larger, and even if the flat earth crew got creative, there’s only so much to be done, since the first thing they have to do is build a platform. A developer’s dream yes? Sort of; it seems that this might even be a parking lot a developer can’t love. That’s because some estimates put the gap at the west end (the part that is supposed to, you know, connect with that park — or garbage transfer station, if Andrew Berman gets his way) at over thirty feet.

And that’s not just the western edge. That’s a sheer wall that will run along 34th street as well. There is little hope for street level anything, since the other side of this wall will be the rail yard. It will top out higher than much of Javits (some previous plans for expansion included a second floor, but were scrapped for cost reasons). It will isolate the project from just about every direction, and it will look like nothing other than every bad large scale attempt as ‘revitalization’ from Albany to La Defense.
Take a look at this rendering. See that little squib dancing across the gap in the distance? That’s the “High” Line, below the horizon of the public space of the Brookfield proposal. That’s what developers are expected to spend an extra $130 million on: so the High Line can circle a big lawn straddled by even bigger towers festooned with the latest Karim Rashin gimcrackery. So, yeah, the Steven Holll renderings look sorta cool, if I ignore the fact that the massing is on the south side of the site, the most interesting feature, a monolithic low rise, would never get built without retail intrusion, and the entire thing will stand head and shoulders over the west side — in the worst way possible.