By Matt Chaban 12/18/12 7:53pm

on the waterfront

pier 40 - david shankbone

Parks and Wreck: The Fight for Pier 40 and the Myth of Public Parks

When Sandy swept into the town almost two months ago, Hudson River Park—as its name might suggest—was among the places inundated by the swelling sea under more than a dozen feet of water.

The surge washed over the historic piers and brand-new lawns, filling skate parks, swamping ball fields, submerging mini golf holes and surrounding the merry-go-round. Yet much of the park, in the traditional sense, came through fine.”I think we lost only five trees and a few plants,” Madelyn Wils, president and CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust, said at a post-Sandy conference last Thursday.

It was the more manmade features, the development that undergirds the park and pays for its upkeep, that struggled to weather the storm.“The buildings, however, did not fare quite as well,” Ms. Wils explains. “We’re still without power, because we are on our own grid, and we’ve had to work on our own to restore that.”

This is only the latest, and in some ways the least, of the troubles on the waterfront, where a bitter disagreement between Ms. Wils and the park’s biggest backer, developer Douglas Durst, reveals cracks in the public-private model by which the city’s parks are so often built and maintained these days. These partnerships are both sustainer and straightjacket, leading to the creation of more parks in a generation, but also limited means to keep them up and running. Call them libertarian parks. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/29/12 6:07pm

Best Laid Plans

A Cuomo conundrum? (DCP)

With Sandy as an Excuse, Community Boards Beg Governor Cuomo to Stop Midtown East Rezoning

Basically everybody but the Bloomberg administration and select landlords in the area wants to see the Midtown East Rezoning delayed. While there is a general consensus that creating room for bigger, more modern office buildings in the heart of the city’s central business district makes sense, many planners and community groups fear the administration is rushing the plan to get it done on the mayor’s watch, rather than taking the necessary time to figure out exactly what to build.

Now, the three community boards directly effected by the rezoning are calling on Governor Cuomo to intervene, and their rationale is an interesting, if desperate, one. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/21/12 1:50pm

on the waterfront

Battered and broken. (Mayor's Office/Flickr)

Zone A Zoning: Independent Budget Office Critical of Bloomberg’s Two-Faced Waterfront Developments

While the Bloomberg administration has largely come in for praise for its Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts, questions remain over whether City Hall made things worse by encouraging waterfront development. The Independent Budget Office certainly believes so in a critical analysis it has issued looking at the seemingly hypocritical policy initiatives Mayor Bloomberg had championed.

On the one hand, the city had taken pains to reduce its carbon footprint as it acknowledges the dangers posed by rising sea levels and superstorms. At the same time, the administration continues to encourage new residential and commercial projects in the very areas it is wringing its hands over. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/20/12 11:20am

recovery mode

13 Photos

Shipping Container Chic

Shipping Container Living Looks Pretty Nice: Inside NYC’s Secret Disaster Apartments

In this week’s Observer we go inside City Hall’s quiet program to create a new disaster housing model to house New Yorkers displaced by the next superstorm or some other unforeseen catastrophe. Because of New York’s dense urban environment, any disaster housing would have to be big, in order to accommodate lots of residents, but also compact, since there is not much room to build these things.

The city has so far hit upon the novel idea of using shipping containers to house the displaced, stacking prefabricated modules one on top of another. It is an innovative model the likes of which are untested worldwide, but already one company has built a prototype in South Jersey, and the city is prepared to test out some version of it as early as next year. So please, step inside what could be your apartment for a year or two after the next big one hits. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/19/12 8:14pm

recovery mode

Sea Box village. (Sea Box)

Home, Sweet Shipping Container: NYC’s Secret Plans for the Perfect Disaster Apartments

If another Sandy hits a year or three from now, few New Yorkers should have to call tent cities and high school gymnasiums home.

Instead, they will be living inside shipping containers.

For the past five years, the Bloomberg administration has been quietly developing a first-of-its-kind disaster housing program, creating modular apartments uniquely designed for the challenges of urban living. Carved out of shipping containers, these LEGO-like, stackable apartments offer all the amenities of home. Or more, since they are bigger, and brighter, than the typical Manhattan studio. It’s the FEMA trailer of the future, built with the Dwell reader in mind.

“It’s nicer than my apartment,” David Burney, commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction, said in a phone interview last week. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/18/12 2:12pm

recovery mode

The traffic is usually bad enough as it is around Thanksgiving—could gas rationing make it worse? (Getty)

With Busiest Travel Day of the Year Ahead, New York City Gas Rationing Will Continue Through Friday

Many New York City drivers were hoping that gas rationing might be over today, as it has already expired in New Jersey and out on Long Island following the fuel crisis sparked by Hurricane Sandy. But the Bloomberg administration has decided to extend the odd-even rationing system through Friday.

“The odd-even license plate system has worked well and helped to reduce wait times and lines at the pump,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a release. “With 30 percent of gas stations still closed and a major travel week coming, I am extending the successful odd-even system on gas and diesel fuel purchases to ensure we do not risk going back to the extreme lines we saw prior to the system being implemented.”

The rationing plan was set to expire today, but with the city only at two-thirds capacity, the administration believes it is better to keep the rationing in place, even if it inconveniences drivers. Read More

By Matt Chaban 10/30/12 4:19pm

Frankenstorm

Wavy gravy, baby. (Wikimedia Commons)

Dan Doctoroff Still Wants Waterfront Development—So Long As ‘Fools’ Evacuate Next Time

We already know Mayor Bloomberg favors waterfront development, come hell or high water—literally—and so, too, does his former development czar Dan Doctoroff, now head of Bloomberg LP.

It was Mr. Doctoroff, in his capacity as deputy mayor for economic development, who thought up many of the schemes that have led to new apartment towers on the waterfront in Williamsburg and Hunters Point. Thousands of units have been built, tens of thousands have been planned. Mr. Doctoroff still believes that is a good idea, so long as appropriate measures are taken.

“I am obviously a believer in waterfront development,” Mr. Doctoroff said Read More

By Jonah Wolf 9/27/12 3:08pm

In the Rezone

SPURA springs eternal. (NYC EDC)

Hip Hip SPURA! Land-Use Committee Approves LES Development After 40-Year Slog

It took 40 years, but the transformation of the Seward Park urban Renewal Area, better known as SPURA, may finally be here. While everyone seemed excited at the prospect of this finally happening, the opinions were far from unanimous about what the city came up with for its plan for the seven undeveloped acres south of Delancy Street on four forlorn parking lots.

But there was unanimity today, when the City Council’s land-use committee approved the 1.65 million-square-foot plan for SPURA by a vote of 16-0. Attendees of last week’s public hearing on the development south of the Williamsburg Bridge will be relieved to hear that 50 additional affordable housing units (offset by another 50 at market rate prices) have been added to the project, for a total of 1,000 units, half of which will be affordable, half not. The administration also agreed to that now de rigueur piece of rezoning negotiations, a new public school.

Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/04/12 8:15pm

Troubling Developments

Housing, housing everywhere. (Courtesy NYCHA)

With Public Housing Under Attack, Can An Ex-Lehman Banker Save New York’s Last Affordable Apartments?

Stepping off the elevator on the 12th floor of 250 Broadway, you pass by a dozen  photographs of idyllic, almost bucolic housing projects. The dogwoods are in bloom, matching the pink matting within the frames. That the pictures are a bit faded only adds to the utopianism of the scenes: families frolic in green grass courtyards, the sun is always shining.

These days, the picture is far less rosy: Apartments are overcome with toxic black mold, riven with cavernous leaks, overrun with rats, sometimes all three and then some. Repairs? Fuggetaboutit. Those will be years away. And that’s just inside; outside, it’s a war zone.

Or so the city’s tabloids would have you believe.

But the Housing Authority—or NYCHA, as almost everyone calls it, pronouncing it like some bureaucratic sneeze—represents much more than those run-down apartments we read about, of which there are fewer than the coverage suggests. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/23/12 5:12pm

Best Laid Plans

They want more to look at. (Getty)

City Planning Says It Is Not Rushing Midtown Rezoning, Though It Has Good Reason to Act Fast

Earlier this week, Councilman Dan Garodnick called on the Department of City Planning to slow down the planning for the new Midtown East rezoning that would add possible a dozen new skyscrapers to the Manhattan skyline. The argument was that with such an important rezoning—the city’s fate as a competitive marketplace hangs in the balance!—more time was needed to consult all the parties and get the plan right.

For essentially the same reasons, the department is now arguing that it cannot wait. Time is of the essence to get these new projects underway. Read More