miss representation

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.

I briefly considered writing an entire post about the SLA (State Liquor Authority) as if I had it confused with the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army). But that would prove technically complex, and likely not worth the payoff. Plus, the only thing I know about the SLA (the latter) is what I gleaned from Doonesbury collections about the Patty Hearst trial (in point of fact, only one panel that I recall, which was a joke that the defense attorney made the entire jury get in a closet so they could empathize with Hearst’s brainwashing, a joke that wouldn’t play as well since the SLA [the former] is only three members, who might actually fit comfortably in a closet, even if that visual accurately reflects what most bar owners would like to do them). So I’m using the ‘this is the joke I would have made’ gambit instead.

Whew, that was exciting. Maybe a little more than an actual SLA meeting (or reading a recap thereof), but not much. Since you aren’t obliged to read community newspapers or food blogs, what then is the big deal about the SLA? Well, they are currently in the hot seat of a strange nexus of competing interests that comprise the nebulous boundaries of ‘community’ in Manhattan neighborhoods.
Simply put, the SLA is the make or break hurdle for anyone who wants to sell alcohol. There are over a hundred types of licenses (covering retailers and wholesalers as well), but the general breakdown is for bars and restaurants, and full liquor (spirits) and beer/wine. I won’t claim to be an expert, so I can’t say for certain how restrictions apply (operating times, etc.) — either though rules or on a case-by-case basis, though it seems to be the latter.

Buying established properties is the safest bet for business owners. Leases aren’t granted conditionally, so signing a ten year lease and then spending three years (Boxcar on Avenue B) getting a full license can be a scary business proposition. And finding out the space downstairs that was supposed to be a restaurant but ends up morphing into Le Souk makes for anxious tenants and apartment owners.

Because suspension of a license or refusal to grant can drastically change the character of a place, the SLA has an outsized footprint in a process that also includes Community Board review as well as some city licensing, namely cabaret and sidewalk dining, all of it compounded by the imposition of the smoking ban. Zum Schneider, on Avenue C was embroiled in a particularly bruising court case (and the owner proved himself to be quite the modest victor), much of which stemmed from noise and congestion due to sidewalk seating.

In effect, the argument is about licensing taste. No one wants to be the cranky neighbor yelling at kids, but it’s also not unreasonable to make it through a weekend without someone puking on your stoop. The competing interests implicitly argue over whom gets to define the culture of a place. And like all New York turf arguments, people inflate the significance of precedent and persistence, not to mention the inevitable superiority of their own opinion.

The tropes are pretty tired: stroller-constrained aging hipsters who forget how to they used to party, tasteless interlopers who don’t respect community standards, indifferent policing, mercurial community boards and malicious bar owners trying to siphon the last dollar from that drunk braying loudly at harried cab drivers. Everyone accusing everyone else of not knowing how to have fun. Given the tenor of all these conversations, that may very well be true.

Pretty broad generalizations carry some legitimate weight. Problem locations tend to draw disproportionate numbers of non-local patrons, and owners with sketchy reputations oversee venues with sketchy manners. It would be hard to strictly define causation, but put a rope outside your door and trouble starts. There are plenty of examples proprietors who manage the most refined exclusivity through entirely different means (and still manage to have a hard time navigating the shoals of the SLA), and others who deal with large sidewalk crowds without the concomitant mayhem some residents would have you believe is inevitable. And simply telling everyone to not be an asshole pretty much counters every extant notion of New York culture.

The chicken-egg aspect of individual cases make it hard to argue for substantial overhaul. Death & Co. has proved to be an exceptional neighbor, and EU has even gotten approval for sidewalk seating. In both cases, you could argue they got the screws applied because Le Souk continues to be a zoo. That might be true, but you could also argue that effective regulation produced its intended result. The continuing troubles of Death & Co with licensing seem to stem from a disregard for, or misunderstanding, of the rules. EU suffered plenty of kitchen turnover, which took the wind out of the sails more than a little (though that turnover may have been directly the result of fears of financial viability). The latest effort from the AvroKO team (which designed EU), Double Crown, certainly skirted on the edge of officious neighbor the night I was there, so the fears of the residents on Fourth Street may be vindicated on that point.

Aside from Le Souk, which, until it closes, will be everything that is wrong with New York nightlife, the latest scourge is The Box, located on Chrystie Street, and is beset by everything from angry neighbors, a obstinate SLA and rather dramatic charges from former employees. The politics here are a little trickier, since by any measure, everything The Box is known for is exactly what it wants to be known for, alluding to various golden eras of New York, from vaudeville to Studio 54. Catering to a celebrity crowd underwritten by suckers ($1,000 plus two bottles for a six-top reservation on a Saturday), you can’t really blame the business model, only lament when someone suggests going there under such terms. The neighbors who are raising a fuss have their own cred: pioneers dating back into the early nineties on a stretch of street that still isn’t that apartment-friendly.

You could ask for a little more discretion on the part of the bouncers and managers, but keeping a lid on things via obscurity is no longer an option in the Internet (and Dodgeball) era. People went to Save the Robots if they knew where it was and if they were willing to brave the trip. Now, people will pile into a car service (themselves becoming bad neighbors) to the most remote parts of Ridgewood and Bushwick on a tip from a blog.

What’s tiresome is the repetition of the lobbying: nightlife is dead or living in the city is untenable, even though statistics on both fronts fail (more parents are staying put, and bars grow like mushrooms). Zoning as it pertains to dancing and the cabaret laws need to be reformed. The interconnection between the Community Boards and the SLA doesn’t seem as dysfunctional. The city finally has a local board member on the SLA, but if one constituency benefits disproportionately remains to be seen. We need drinking to be able to talk to strangers and we need to have something to talk about when we are drinking, so maybe it’s just the cycle of (night) life repeating itself.

These are not minor concerns. Given that drinking appears to be the go to refuge in times both good and bad with the economy (thankfully the swings are so dramatic we can justify nightly binges), we don’t want to imperil what will be the last viable sector of our local economy. And now, it’s time for a drink.

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.

Writing a post about the World Trade Center is appallingly easy, a gross natural resource of failure, seemingly malicious incompetence, an almost perverse effort by all those involved to identify perhaps the best — should we even admit just qualifiers — possible path, so that when they upend it and crawl inexorably down its inverse, we can be certain they are doing the worst possible job.

As a writer, it’s handy. It even provides an uncomfortably glee, the opportunity to conjure your most withering ire — the bon mot realized too late at a cocktail party, that particularly egregious episode of getting dumped, the quarter-long festering of hatred for a thesis advisor who had you by the short hairs and was making you write them a tenure recommendation — gather all that anger up and just start slapping one of any number of public figure names to whatever comes to mind:

Want remind everyone that Pataki was at best only a coat carrier? People applaud! Silverstein a heartless sot who wants to clamber over the graves of 2,000 people to prop up a futile edifice of immortality? Spot on, friend. Kevin Rampe a duplicitous macher concerned most with his next paycheck? Fine! Any one of them bordering on criminal? Likely true! I can’t even imagine what we would call that guy who actually designed the memorial. What was his name again?

So, yeah, there’s a regressive level of poisonous irony in the fact that writing angry screed about the abysmal pace of progress at the WTC site is in an of itself an act that wallows in the same filthy pile of almost unwatchable failings of humanism. Perhaps Dr. Phil could have a big Pop Psychology-In and figure out just when everyone involved has hit rock bottom (given the state of construction, it looks like we are a ways off). The sage advice would be to know leave your wallet unattended while they are around, but it’s too late for that: they don’t need your permission to take a dip now and again. And again, and again.

Marching right along with this bounty of ineptitude and wellspring of deadlines hastily assembled and just as quickly dismantled is an impressive body of treacly recollection. Maybe there is a fear that once the last bolt has been screwed into place such writing will be looked on as unseemly, and in a town where no one’s suffering is as acute or important as that split all over the back pages of the Sunday Times Magazine that would be viewed as a tragedy to which everyone could truly relate. After all, think of all those poor Dalton students just itching to put their 9/11 experience into a college application essay. Who will think of those children?

As I write this, the Tribute in Light is still aglow. The only response that evinced the least bit of elegance, now they stand like uncomfortable guests. What they say is still simple and direct, and their specificity to place admits any range of emotion. The worst is being reminded that from where they spring is a hollow that seems to regress in painful small steps. This is perhaps the finest example of what a memorial does, reminding that tragedy is not a neatly comestible nugget, and our continued complicity in belaboring the failure of imagination and wherewithal that marks every project there also besmirches even the most strident critique. Silence is the terminus, and still deafeningly inadequate.

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.

Hey, did the 9/11 fairy leave new renderings under your pillow too? So best. Splashed on the back cover of the Observer is a glorious testimony to the skill of the Dream Team of architects, the indomitable spirit of American can-do, and the awesome hardware capacity of dBox. It is also the first time we’ve seen anything that details the ground level conditions at the World Trade Center site.

Over the past couple months we’ve been seeing more details (albeit in a tertiary way) of what the actual streetscape would be, each seemingly a counter-argument for limitations we haven’t yet seen fully explicated. Just about this time last year (or was it the year before?), the last futile attempt of New York New Visions to impact the planning process made it pretty clear that security considerations were going to keep street life to a series of cordons leading to buildings wrapped in prison quality sheathing at the base. But no one wanted to say for sure. Excuses about ‘too early’ were offset with ‘we really are worried and working’ which no one took as a good sign.

The new renderings from last week, along with Childs’ most recent emanations, tout lots of glass, which is the sign universal symbol of powerful, elegant, affluent modernism. It also enables you to create nighttime renderings that shine like an Aldus lamp.

The most exciting thing I could find is sadly underreported: apparently rebuilding the World Trade Center not only requires moving heaven and earth – it is actually going to happen. With nary a dollar of funding from the state DOT, and defying all altimeters known to science, the new site is so incredibly flat. The sixteen to twenty foot elevation change running from Church to West Street is now a couple delicate steps at the corner of the Liberty and West Streets. See, this is what you get when you hire European architects. They must do their calculations in metric or something.

Lots of other things have gotten flatter as well. Bollards, for instance, are slim, or actually invisible now. As are control gates in the pavement and armed guards. Maybe that’s why everything is so expensive. Though the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets require physical interventions and personnel presence that make the security tighter than a joke about a nun’s sexual habits, the new WTC will be a gracious, flat esplanade that is so dignified that even Roberto Cavalli will only want signage facing Church Street (that’s an obscure one, I know: when doing speculative renderings, you usually get faux retailer logos, but either as a joke or because someone at dBox fancies Cavalli — a clothing line best summed up as ‘where Italian-Americans on gambling junkets in Vegas go with their winnings to upscale their personal appearance’ — it appears prominently in one of the street-level renderings).

So we are faced with one of two unpleasant options: one, the money shot, Numero Uno at Freedom Focus is either two years out of date from the current security technology and it’s too late to revise the designs again, or it is only a short truck (bomb) drive from the most secure office building ever built to three, nearly as large, that are some of the most insecurely designed since the dawn of the Age of Terror. Oh, or the renderings are lying. There’s always that.

It’s not an insignificant point, as always. We went through two rounds of substantial redesign after the NYPD wasn’t seeing turrets and water cannons at the Freedom Tower. Everyone at PANJNY has been as mealy-mouthed as possible about the actual street conditions. At this late stage, we still get delicate renderings of the PATH station resting on the plaza, even though it’s been said more than once that the first ten to twelve feet of the façade will be completely opaque. And what of all that extra ground that Calatrava needed for exhaust stacks and light monitors? It sure looks like it’s gonna be dark in the billion dollar concourse.

There’s no evident security or control at either end of the new Greenwich Street, and no controlled access to the Memorial. Silverstein’s gambit of rebranding the World Trade Center as TriBeCa South (hey! Never forget! Until it means we can get reservations more easily at Nobu, or something) is certainly in line with the new look. But they didn’t need to get all clever about the addresses — they just need to make sure the streets are empty after five and that Law and Order shoots there every other week. And some Maclaren strollers filled with kids named Tristan.

I’m not saying I think we need all that security – or, hell, even the cultural center, which doesn’t clutter up the renderings (if you are keeping score, it’s a net gain in office space from the previous incarnation, with a reduction in open space and no new programmed spaces exclusive of offices; I’m not counting the Memorial Foundation Remembrance Space, because for all we know, Debra Burlingame might not even let us in). And feds seem to foot the bill for a big chunk of the guns and butter showcase, so it’s no skin off our tax bill. But can we the get some realism injected into our planning? Do we need scary looking control gates and overweight, ex-football coach-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder security guards on every corner that doesn’t have a full-gear guardsman with an assault rifle or not? And if we do, how about we show that while drumming up support for our funding? That two billion dollar overrun could go a long way towards improving airport access.

Now is also about the time we should pause and give a shout out to the sad sacks at Beyer Blinder Belle. Even as the steaming teapot that is Rafael Vinoly continues to opine that he won the design competition, I suspect he will get little support or complaint from the Libeskinds at this point, though he might get a little guff from BBB. Because if anyone wants to dig out those renderings that made the entire city, or at least Michael Sorkin and the people who still return his calls, rise up indignantly and declaim that we couldn’t possibly begin to consider a memorial or rebuilding process, let alone one that seemed to roll over for both the most craven of commercially-driven design and the saddest aspects of no-account cross-border state bureaucracy, well, welcome to 2007, where we aren’t just capable of it, but enthusiastic. Of course, BBB didn’t presage the grandeur that is the PATH terminal, which now is so glorious it costs just a hair more than it would take to rebuild every school in the New York City education system. Oh, and boy, it surely isn’t as soary now that it’s hemmed in by Foster and Rodgers. They even did a special rendering to prove that our billion dollar spines will still be able to open and not hit a Forever 21 (okay, there isn’t a Forever 21 in the rendering; it’s Hot Topic).

Expect to hear muddy praise from what is left of the architectural commentariat, invoking Rockefeller Center and forgetting that the last vestiges of it was the Avenue of the Americas side. Sure, hire four top notch corporate lackeys and they produce top notch corporate lackeydom. After the abortions of Hudson and Atlantic Yards (I’m still crossing my fingers for a collapse in the CMBS market that will submarine this), you would think someone in the shitty New York real estate press would up and say ‘Hey, guys, is there a reason we are trying so hard to emulate Canary Wharf and La Défense? Cause those places, you know, suck.’ But we are New York; we’re going to make sure our Canary Wharf sucks bigger and better, longer and harder, etc.

I know that hed, or some version of it, has been written at least three or four times in the past two days. And it is certainly not to diminish the ill effects felt by the people that got hit by an actual weather “disaster”. Even so, that one photo of the black sedan with a branch on its roof seems be the sole signifier of ‘tornado’ we could muster.

I was reading one of those ‘what will happen to Manhattan in various catastrophes’ pieces (global warming, terrorist attack, one day closure of Magnolia, that sort of thing), and read this fascinating fact: aside from its inability to deal with a hard rain, the subway is incredibly porous — probably something about people needing oxygen — and the only thing stopping if from being completely inundated by the water that enrobes (makes it sound like a delicious éclair, no?) it are massive, continuous operating pumps. Not every tunnel, I’m sure, but if we lost power for an extended period of time (say, six to eight days), and diesel was hard to come by, most of our subway system would return to the water table from whence it was carved. This may be all hearsay, but isn’t it fascinating? They say the average American is two paychecks away from homelessness, but the MTA couldn’t even make it with a payday loan. The doom sayers then went on to say foundations would be undermined and buildings could collapse. Even I’m not that gullible. That would take a couple weeks or more.

The point being that ‘advanced’ culture, like the human body, is resilient yet terrifyingly delicate. Read the piece in this week’s New Yorker about how one wrong snippet of DNA (out of three billion) will make you chew off your fingers while yelling “No! Stop!” at yourself in horror if you want a more detailed explication on this point. The other problem is that Americans cling to a lottery/instant gratification culture. We invented it. As a consequence we think most everything can be fixed by an “all-nighter” montage accompanied by soft rock and interspersed with moments of levity though non-fatal accidents and the blossoming of at least one romance. Really, sneak in the EPA sometime. I bet John Hughes wrote our plan for global warming.

So people are bandying about ‘infrastructure’ a lot this week, and not just because it’s probably the biggest word they’ll use. And surely enough, the nominal powers-that-be — the ones, you know, who let things degrade into such a shoddy state — have demanded all nighters from the MTA and DOT’s nationwide. On the latter point, ours was refreshing direct and to the point: the Brooklyn Bridge rates very low on the extant safety scale. Sally forth tourists! Just don’t do anything terrorist-like. Given the recent pronouncements, this is likely to be expanded to include walking. Good times.

The MTA, a fascinating body at the center of two massive land use schemes that are going to forever blight big sections of our town, and likely to enshrine the name Peter Kalikow as the only New Yorker who manages to make Robert Moses look enlightened, was called on the carpet — an awfully damp one this week. Turns out the problems that befell the subway this week are exactly the same as the last “big” rain. Which was, um, three years ago. What happened in the interval? Well, they MTA didn’t upgrade their security, they didn’t develop a workable strategy for providing communications for rescue workers in the tunnels. Oh, and they didn’t get much money from anyone.

In the same vein as our get quick rich inanity, we Americans love to subscribe to lots of other contradictory and illogical myths: that we are a meritocracy, that we really can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, that governmental control over essential services is bad, and oh, that New York isn’t the center of our culture, economy and net benefit to the region, state and feds. The upshot of all this is that while massive subsidies are afforded to every jerk who moves to Westchester or Montclair or Litchfield Country (in the form of highway bills, artificially low gas taxes, regional transit subsidies and exemption from city income tax), no one thinks that state or fed should fund our transit system — the circulatory system of an economy that keeps Joe Bruno from having to work at 7-Eleven. We’re talking billions of dollars in tax revenues lost to people who keep lecturing us on how we can’t run our city. When is the last time that Rochester was a profitable enterprise?

So the MTA has been forced to issuing crippling debt obligations to pay for maintenance that was deferred for decades, leaving it in no position to upgrade the system (though the city shrank for a short while after the 70′s debacle, unlike all other large American cities, has grown non-stop since its founding), let alone address the systemic problems that result in fiascoes like this week. Paris and London have added lines at least once a decade, and are still expanding. Britain and France recognize the cultural and economic rewards of continuing to provide services to their most crucial metropolitan areas.

Now, the MTA doesn’t do much to create sympathy for itself. Water inundating the system (did you know that when a tunnel gets flooded, they dry off the third rail by hand? Aside from the lunacy of that as a system, imagine that being your job: “Is it off? Are you sure?”) is certainly a decent excuse for shutting down lines, but a web site? Yeah, the web site goes down when it rains. I mean, they aren’t hiring taxi drivers to develop buildings for them anymore, but the same stench that pervades the air of New York whenever Giuliani claims he saved us from WWIII is kicked up when someone is forced to type “MTA Chair Peter Kalikow”. Really, just as a matter of symbolic form that guy has to go. Given that there is no future in private funding the subway, why not put someone everyone already suspects is a socialist in charge? It’s time to ask Gene Russianoff to put his money where is mouth is. What’s the worst that can happen — he will run the MTA with his special interest in mind? A special interest that is, um, the riders. Now that there is a crazy idea. One a New York politician could never understand.

This is the first in a series of discussions of housing up and down (well, down and up) the income scale. Three projects will be discussed in detail, with posts separated by particular issues. The first project is Spring Creek Houses in East New York, the result of a public-private partnership that aims to provide home ownership to low- and moderate-income residents. Today’s discussion is about housing policy and funding, and the site. Later in the week will be a post about the proposed housing units.

The latest real estate bubble did not make New Yorkers more attuned to the significance of home ownership and value; it simply made the tone a bit more shrill. As a friend noted upon arriving, only two things are discussed in this town: where you live, and how you get there.

The recent trends indicate record home ownership in the city. Even though the prices in some areas make purchasing a seemingly irrational economic decision, the effects of this growth are being felt in the rental market, with rates being pushed (though the key indicator — ratio of income spent on housing — has grown more due to flat or falling real wages).

The latest numbers show, nonetheless, it is far better to own. And given our relatively low median wages (compared to the cost of living across the city), the percentage point changes that many of us look at as a step up or down in vacation plans are more keenly felt when trying to support a family on $36,000.

Recent data shows that the poorest neighborhoods pay the largest proportion of their monthly income for rent, even when public or Section 8 housing is available. A red-zone indicator is 50% or greater of income spent on housing. Across the board, a smaller number of homeowners spend over 50% on housing in all classes (except those is public housing and rent controlled tenants in Manhattan).

There are two reasonable conclusions: build more public housing, or get more poor residents into homeownership opportunities. Given the history of public housing, and urban ‘re-development’ (many of our most blighted neighborhoods used to be stable communities with a high proportion of resident ownership until Robert Moses decided that white people from Connecticut shouldn’t have to take the train to the city), home ownership seems far preferable.
Either one is a clear commitment to subsidy; given that unit construction is still part of any program, helping increase ownership doesn’t seem like a bad idea. But I’m not in possession of any particular knowledge to make this case. It just seems pretty rational.

The Bloomberg administration agrees, though less than the Ferrer administration planned to — Bloomberg is committed to creating 60,000 new units, whereas Ferrer was pushing for double that. Of course, in both instances, some numbers massaging upped those numbers, and regardless of real or inflated projects, Bloomberg is lagging a bit.

Are either that impressive? Well, the city has a current inventory of just over 3.2 million units, making 60,000 a 5% increase over 5 years. Overall additions to housing over the past ten years are considerably less, at 16,000 (meaning in increase, on average of one-half a percent between 1994 and 2004).

In terms of aiding the most needy, the increase is starker. Of the current inventory, just under 10% is public or Section 8 housing, meaning if Bloomberg hits his target, he will realize a 20% increase. What I couldn’t find were historic numbers, but my best recollections indicate that even this boom won’t bring the inventory back in line with numbers as recent as the early 80’s.

So how does it get made? In teensy increments, most of the time. Given the resources available (a half-dozen governmental agencies, several major research institutions, scores of NGO’s, community groups and churches, all whom have an interest in the issue), it’s amazing the more isn’t done. I’m not here to critique the will or assess the process (since I’m largely ignorant), but to talk about how a thousand homes get built.

Back in the 1980’s, a housing program grew out of the combined efforts of the Industrial Area Foundation (founded by legendary social antagonist Saul Alinsky) and local churches with the goal of building housing for ownership in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Known collectively as the Nehemiah Houses, over 3,000 houses have been built to date (part of a larger program sponsored by the city that added 13,000 units).

The current effort is bringing another 690 homes over the next several years to a former landfill in East New York. It’s a particularly brutal location. I don’t know East New York at all, so perhaps it doesn’t stand out as distinct, but relative to just about anywhere you or I have been is certainly is. Given the site prep has only begun, it’s hard to say what the final form will be. No doubt the immediate context will be just fine, but the views beyond are the issue — and they are fixed, and unfortunate. The view with the most potential — looking south to Jamaica Bay — is obscured by three immutable landmarks: the Belt Parkway, a Ratner Shopping Enterprise, and the remainder of the landfill, which rises enough in the sky to eliminate any sense that one is adjacent to water.

Working from the existing (mapped) grid — a revision would have been even more time consuming, an acute issue for a project that is over ten years in the making — a smaller scaled grid has been inserted, with a small amount of open space reserved. The best that could come of the relationship with the shopping complex would be the creation of an entrance fronting the development, but this is unlikely.

All told, it’s a solid, direct, planning exercise, marked both by a good set of principles and tempered by the strictest possible economic controls. There is little room for amenity because the public portion of this project is courtesy HPD (Housing Preservation and Development), which agreed to fund site work in exchange for the commitment to build the 700 units. The total cost will be upwards of $25 million (the expected investment is in the neighborhood of $250,000 per unit). The rather sizable figure is a result of the current condition. As a landfill, it requires topsoil remediation (digging, removal and re-grading), methane monitoring, streets and all the attendant infrastructure.

It’s this sort of investment that gets to the crux of the necessary commitment. That’s a big number for just about any governmental body. But it is also necessary to fairly measure opportunity cost for this versus other investments. As a comparator, Goldman Sachs received something on the order of 12 times this investment to retain an undisclosed number of jobs downtown (it’s questionable how many people they could have successfully relocated to Jersey City). And that cost is in line with construction costs for public housing units elsewhere (assuming nominal site prep). Considering the sad state of the lot now, the cost of bring high value real estate (owned homes bring far more stability to a blighted area, and almost always lead to overall economic expansion) makes this look like a pretty savvy investment. It has limited recurring costs and opens the possibility of spurring additional interest in an underdeveloped area (compare that to Goldman Sachs, which decided to build in horribly disadvantaged Battery Park City).

And if you were wondering about interest, well, the first stage lottery (about 120 units) resulted in twelve thousand applicants. That’s right: if the city could arrange to build infill housing in all the open lots of East New York, they would have thousands of qualified candidates ready and waiting. What’s stopping the city? Well, the obvious answer is money — but perhaps also willpower. After all, public spending is only a matter of priority. And as you try to measure that priority, bear in mind this is the largest subsidizing housing project current underway in the five boroughs.

NEXT UP: okay, everybody wants them, and they are getting built, at long last. But what do they look like?