Sink or swim. (David Shankbone)

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.

On October 29, the very night Sandy hit, Mr. Durst, the iconoclastic developer, was scheduled to appear before Community Board 2 to present a study he had recently paid for out of pocket on the dilapidated Pier 40, the earliest centerpiece of the park.

The 14-acre pier, built just off Spring Street in 1964 as the New York base for the Holland America Line, has more than  2,000 parking spaces along with two massive ball fields. Also home to a kayak launch, two harbor cruises and the New York Trapeze School, the pier is not only an asset for the community, but also for Hudson River Park itself, as it generates some $6 million a year in revenues for the park trust.

But the pier has slowly become a drag on the park, its roof starting to crumble—leading to the closing of a rooftop soccer field and a number of parking spots—and the nearly 4,000 pilings holding up the two-story structure starting to give.

While Ms. Wils and the trust estimate the price of repairing everything to be as much as $125 million, Mr. Durst had planned to go before the community board and argue that the repairs could be made for only $30 million, and that they should be paid for as soon as possible with the trust’s money.

The meeting was rained out, and now Mr. Durst pegs his plan at $44 million, because he believes the central ball fields, along with some other important pieces of the pier’s infrastructure, should be elevated out of the floodplain post-Sandy.

Mr. Durst has long been a staunch advocate for the park, serving since 2002as chairman of the board of Friends of Hudson River Park, an affiliated group that acts as both a fund-raiser and watchdog for the trust that operates the park. He was also its largest donor, giving a total of $2.3 million over that span and frequently buying the biggest tables at the annual fund-raising gala.

Since the summer, Mr. Durst began to float an idea that the pier should be fixed up as soon as possible, with the parking consolidated to the lower floor, and the upper areas turned into office space for tech firms and art galleries. The ball fields and other facilities would remain intact.

Meanwhile Ms. Wils and other Friends board members have been pushing for an approach in which a private developer would come in and pay for the repairs, along with what is expected to be a transformation of the pier. It would no doubt be a grander project, but also a more expensive one, and probably a more privatized one too.

Housing has been bandied about as a sort of panacea—ever since Richard Meier built his Perry Street “lofts,” who wouldn’t want to live on the Hudson River waterfront?—but locals also hate the idea of allowing the park to become some millionaire’s backyard.

That is why Mr. Durst has been pushing his plan for adaptive reuse on his own. It is also why Mr. Durst quit the Friends board last week. His name has already been wiped from the advocacy group's website, along with that of vice-chair Ben Korman, who used to run the parking at Pier 40 and also quit the board in protest.

“There was a difference of opinion of the direction that the park should go in,” Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Mr. Durst, told The Observer on Friday. “Douglas is still deeply committed to the park, but given his difference of opinion from the leadership of the park, it became impractical for him to continue with the trust and with Friends.”

One person close to the situation said this amounted to “a pissing match” between Mr. Durst and Ms. Wils, who was appointed president and CEO of the trust in June 2011. “He’s taking his ball and going home,” said the source.

But in many ways, the pair, who both share a passion for the park and its future, would not even be having this fight if Hudson River Park were not so desperate for funds, a conundrum that is at the very foundation of the park's creation.

It goes without saying that every open space needs money coming in, but for Hudson River Park, it is especially crucial. This is, after all, one of the first public-private, or “self-sustaining,” parks created in the city. Championed by Governor Pataki and launched through an act of the Legislature in 1998, Hudson River Park has become a popular model for fostering new parks, particularly for the Bloomberg administration.

The public-private model has taken hold everywhere from Governors Island to the High Line to Brooklyn Bridge Park, the idea being that the government pays the up-front costs of getting the parks built, but after that it is up to quasi-public agencies to keep them up and running, usually through a mix of commercial activities and fund-raising.

It is a controversial arrangement, since it can often mean that what was once public space must now be given over, at least in part, to private interests. But many supporters of the model, especially in this age of fiscal austerity, argue that without such arrangements, the parks would never get built at all. Those privatizers are winning for now.

On Monday, Brooklyn Bridge Park announced it was seeking developers for the third apartment complex to be built on public land on John Street, within the waterfront park, while a competition earlier this year to develop housing at Pier 1 attracted some of the city’s top builders. On Wednesday, prospective tenants for historic buildings on Governors Island, ranging from local chefs to national chains, will tour the island, hoping to open up shop in one of the 48 pre-Civil War structures. And when the third section of the High Line broke ground in September, nearly one-third of the construction funds came from the Related Companies and Oxford Properties, which are developing the Hudson Yards project the elevated park will surround. All of them are hoping to cash in on the parks, which will benefit the public too, but the question remains: who benefits more?

This is not how it always was. Look at the original urban park, Central Park, which was developed in part to buoy real estate values uptown, but was largely paid for and maintained by the public, as a public benefit that subsequently paid for itself through rising property values.

The Bloomberg administration last year touted the $2 billion boom that resulted from its $150 million investment in the High Line. But the city contributes almost nothing to the ongoing operations of the park—easily the most expensive for a park of its size, with a $9 million annual budget.

In 2008, The Regional Plan Association did a study that found the Greenwich Village segment of Hudson River Park had generated $200 million in economic development while only costing $75 million to build up to that point. Yet very little of that money was reinvested in the park. Meanwhile, capital funds from the city have fallen from a high of $42 million in 2008 to only $7 million this year, due to recessionary cuts at City Hall. Operating expenses for the park are roughly $14 million a year, almost all of it coming from the trust.

“The biggest thing that concerns me is that Hudson River Park was the first in this new, quote-unquote sustainable park model,” Holly Leicht, executive director of advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, said in an interview. “What we’re seeing right now is not very reassuring for this model.”

This debate is at the heart of the fight between Mr. Durst and the rest of the park’s leadership. He wanted up-front investments to protect the park, while other board members wanted the private sector to pay—perhaps rightly so, since the park could barely afford even the $30 million-to-$44 million tab Mr. Durst had touted.

“If it was up to me, not one more dime goes into Pier 40,” Diana Taylor declared at a recent board meeting. “Period.” (In addition to being a Friends board member, Ms. Taylor is, of course, Mayor Bloomberg’s girlfriend and in some ways his surrogate.)

The problem is that the legislation that created the park—by virtue of it being the first—is the most restrictive of the public-private parks in the city. It limits residential and certain other types of development and caps leases at 29 years. In comparison, more than 1,000 apartments will be built as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, with leases up to 99 years.

The trust has been lobbying Albany for years now to relax the restrictions, often to fierce outcry from locals, who oppose most forms of new development. (It’s the Village and Soho, after all.) So far, everything from an outpost of Cirque du Soleil to a Major League Soccer stadium has been proposed, but all have been sunk by neighbors.

The trust insists it does not favor housing, it simply wants that as one of the options on the table. “The community needs to understand that if they want a park, they need to be willing to do what it takes to maintain a park,” Ms. Wils told Crain’s in May, when she unveiled plans for a 115-room hotel and 800 apartments on the pier—but with expanded open space as well, a palliative to all that development.

“It’s never what you want to do, for sure,” said Rob Pirani, a vice president at the Regional Plan Association and member of the Governors Island Alliance, that park’s watchdog. “It’s the difference between a real estate project and building a neighborhood.” But he also conceded that without the public-private partnerships, public officials might not have agreed to underwrite these parks in the first place.

Meanwhile, the entertainment complex Chelsea Piers, the other big money-maker for the trust, has sued, alleging two decades of deferred maintenance on its piles. The repair costs have been estimated at $100 million, a price the trust could hardly afford. (The fact that there is an expensive place for people to rock climb, ice skate and drive golf balls on what is ostensibly public land, meanwhile, gets at the heart of the problems with this type of park. It’s a nice amenity for the neighborhood, but only for those who can afford it.)

There is some hope on the horizon, as the park’s third major commercial project, Pier 57, is finally getting underway after years of delays. Young Woo, a hip downtown developer, has teamed up with designers Lot-Ek, known for building with shipping containers, to transform the pier into an artisanal market. Cute, but again, commercial. There will be a public walkway around the pier and expansive open space on the 1.6-acre roof—but there would be even more public space without those stores. The proposal was just approved by the Community Board last week, the first step in the months-long public approval process.

“Despite these and other challenges, including the recent impact of Superstorm Sandy, the Friends and the trust remain wholly committed to working together to secure resources for the park and sustaining its future,” Ms. Wils and Friends executive director A.J. Pietrantone said in a statement released after Mr. Durst’s departure.

Ms. Leicht hopes they can pull it off. “I do think getting it right here is essential before we continue to forge ahead on these types of parks,” she said.

A Cuomo conundrum? (DCP)

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.

The Tri-Board Task Force on East Midtown, which is comprised of members of community boards 5, 6 and 8, is arguing that Hurricane Sandy has introduced great uncertainty into the city's future, particularly as far as infrastructure is concerned, and so the rezoning ought to be put off until the city figures out how to bolster itself against future disasters.

"The tragic events of the past few weeks have brought to light our city’s unique vulnerabilities in a world of climate change," states a letter the task force sent to Governor Cuomo (you can read the full text below). "Throughout the city, waterfront and low-lying areas, including Lower Manhattan and the far East and West sides of our borough, were devastated by storm surges while our transportation network ground to a halt as subway lines and tunnels were flooded. Incredibly, parts of North America’s largest central business district lost power for an extended period of time."

The irony here, of course, is that the sector of the city set to be rezoned was one of the refuges not impacted by the storm, beyond impacts to the subways and other ancillary problems caused to low-lying areas. It makes sense that planning resources might be put to better use working on emergency preparedness issues, rather than rezonings, but it also seems disingenuous to suggest that Midtown is somehow vulnerable to the next superstorm.

Then again, look at happened with the One57 crane. And who knows which ConEd plant might blow next time, leaving uptown or Midtown, rather than downtown, without power.

"We hope that in light of recent events, both the city and state will take a long, responsible, and critical look at how this East Midtown proposal, and other similar development proposals, can reflect altered circumstances, ensuring we build smarter," the letter concludes. "The current timetable does not allow for that."

Appealing to Governor Cuomo, who has taken a keen interest in how the city and state rebuilds after Sandy, is not a bad idea. But governors in general, and this one in particular, have a habit of deferring on local issues like this to the local authorities, in this case City Planning and City Hall. Still, it doesn't hurt to ask, and these are crazy times we're living in, what with Category 1 storms and 30 FAR towers buffeting the city. Anything could happen.

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

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.

Yet even as City Hall grappled with these concerns it continued to put substantial resources into major development projects on the waterfront, rezoning sites as manufacturing declined— including some in prime areas for flooding, the so-called Zone A evacuation areas. Just one month before Sandy struck the city, Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan by private developers to build a $500 million complex on city-owned land on Staten Island’s North Shore that would include the world’s largest Ferris wheel as well as a hotel and outlet mall. Part of the site sits in a floodplain.

An even larger development project is planned on the Coney Island waterfront, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Sandy. The city has rezoned the area to allow the development of hotels, housing, and a new amusement park, and has allocated more than $400 million for sewer upgrades, land acquisition, lighting, boardwalk and park improvements, and other projects to foster the redevelopment plan. On the Queens waterfront, the city is investing $147 million in the Hunters Point South project, which also sits in Zone A. Already under construction, Hunters Point South includes 5,000 apartments, a 1,100-seat school, and retail space.

To be fair, the Bloomberg Administration has taken steps to protect the city from the affects of rising sea levels and storm surges, following existing city building codes and Federal Emergency Management Agency guidelines. But these guidelines may not be adequate in the face of storms with the fury of Sandy.

So is this a sound policy, or a sinking one?

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.

Don't call them disaster dorms. (Jeff Shumaker/DCP)

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. Along with the city’s Office of Emergency Management and at least a dozen other city, state and federal agencies and private contractors, Mr. Burney has been trying to figure out how best to house the tens or even hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who could find themselves without a home following a major disaster.

Slideshow: Inside the city's secret disaster apartments. >>

Like Hurricane Sandy. Initial estimates of those forced into long-term homelessness—from months to years—are 20,000 in the five boroughs alone. Over the weekend, Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri told the Times that at least 400 homes would have to be demolished along the coast, with 500 more still to be evaluated.

“There’s nobody who wouldn’t like to see a deployable solution available now,” said Lance Jay Brown, an architecture professor at CUNY who has been advising the city on its plans. “But nobody has this, nobody. I think the Japanese are working on something, given all they’ve gone through, but I can tell you, New York is really ahead of the curve when it comes to long-term disaster housing.”

When the next storm of the century hits, thousands of shipping container apartments could begin arriving in the city within days. A playground or a parking lot of at least 10,000 square feet—somewhere accessible, safe and sizable—would serve as the site. The units, stacked four containers high and anywhere from six to 12 units wide, would form neat little apartment blocks.

The leading scheme calls for a 480-square-foot one-bedroom apartment carved out of a 40-foot-long shipping container. Each one would have a window and a door on each end, providing easy egress—the Fire Department insisted on that—as well as ample light.

On one end would be the bedroom, with a bed, dresser, nightstands, probably a lamp or two. On the other end is the living-dining room, with couch, table, maybe an easy chair, and a small kitchen complete with pots, pans, china and flatware. In between is the bathroom, stocked with clean towels, soap, toothbrushes, even toothpaste.

“When you’ve lost everything, you need everything, and it’s the little things that count,” said William Begley, the director of Sea Box, a container-modification company based outside of Trenton, N.J. The Bloomberg administration has been working closely with the firm on developing a system, and Sea Box has even created a prototype on its property it hopes the city will use, though no contracts have yet been issued.

“It’s just like moving into an extended-stay hotel, like a Homestead Suites or a StayAmerica,” Mr. Begley said.

For larger families, a modified container with two bedrooms and perhaps a second bathroom could be attached. The entire system can run on the grid or off, depending on the circumstances, with power from a generator and an independent septic system.

Nice as the accommodations may be on the inside, the city wants them to be attractive on the outside as well, and is currently considering ways to add some visual flair. There could also be retail and community spaces on the ground floor to help restore both convenience and neighborhood camaraderie. “In order to succeed, these have to be somewhere people actually want to live,” Mr. Burney said.

At the same time, the goal is to make the containers as inexpensive as possible, with each module projected to cost between $50,000 and $80,000. As the Bloomberg administration has shown over the past decade, cost-conscious civic infrastructure does not need to be ugly or skimp on design—it’s CB2 meets Motel 6. “Just because it’s prefab doesn’t mean it has to be an eyesore,” Mr. Burney said. But they also cannot be so comfortable people will want to move in for good.

The hope is that FEMA would cover most, if not all of the costs, and the agency would also have the units at its disposal across the country, if it chooses. FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are tentatively onboard.

To test its plan, the city is already preparing to build a 16-unit prototype in OEM’s backyard, on a plot of land behind headquarters at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Four units wide and four units high, the complex would show that the system is both structurally and socially sound.

The Sea Box prototype, hoping for the city's approval. (Sea Box)

It turns out that Hurricane Sandy, the very occasion when these units could have best been put to the test, actually interrupted their development. OEM, having secured $1 million in seed money from City Hall last year, was in the middle of drafting a public request for firms to build a prototype when the superstorm popped up on the radar. All resources have been dedicated to Sandy ever since. Even so, the administration still plans to have a prototype deployed by the second half of next year—and if anything, Sandy has made that goal more urgent, not less.

“It’s not the whole solution to a housing recovery program, but it’s a piece of it,” said OEM Commissioner Joseph Bruno. “It’s a good piece, too, one of the options that allows you to rebuild in a community that was devastated. You keep people in their neighborhood, and you don’t worry about losing them from your city.”

The ability to stack the units creates a level of density that is inherently, and necessarily, New York. In Galveston, Fort Lauderdale or Wilmington, FEMA would just roll its trailers into front yards and driveways. In New York, how many people do you know with a front yard?

“We’re not just restoring somebody’s apartment, we’re restoring somebody’s street,” Thaddeus Pawlowski, an urban planner at the Department of City Planning, said during a recent lecture about the city’s disaster housing program at the Center for Architecture. “New Yorkers love their streets. They love their neighborhoods. So it’s very important people feel connected again to their neighborhood.”

Mr. Pawlowski was actually delivering his remarks exactly one week before Hurricane Sandy hit the city. It was the night of Sunday, Oct. 21, and he, along with some colleagues from OEM and the group Architecture for Humanity, had come to debate the all-too-prescient topic “After Disaster: How Does NYC Plan to Recover?” Less than a week later, Mayor Bloomberg would be standing inside OEM headquarters, imploring nearly 300,000 New Yorkers to evacuate low-lying areas.

“The idea is that by providing temporary long-term housing, we can provide a pathway to the recovery of the neighborhood,” Mr. Pawlowski explained to the audience. “Probably the most important thing for a neighborhood to come back is that the people are there to rebuild it.”

Six years ago, Mr. Pawlowski helped launch an initiative to find an alternative to FEMA trailers, which weren’t built with New York City’s density in mind. At the time, he was working as a designer at OEM, updating the city’s disaster response plans, and Hurricane Katrina served as a wakeup call.

The following year, the city held a contest—called What If NYC—for long-term disaster housing ideas, with an emphasis on 10 criteria. The units must be able to house a high number of people, be rapidly deployable across a range of geographies, and have numerous configurations for different family sizes. They had to be reusable, comfortable, ADA-compliant, secure, and both cost- and energy-efficient. And the city wanted something recognizable, to “maximize the ability of New Yorkers to feel a sense of identity and even pride in where they live,” as the competition brief put it. All this from what is basically a glorified mobile home.

“If a storm were to hit, our immediate need for shelter would be met,” Mayor Bloomberg said at the time. “The greater challenge is to provide longer-term provisional housing for what could be thousands of displaced families while their communities are rebuilt.”

Sea Box village. (Sea Box)

It is a challenge that got a lot of people thinking. The city received 117 proposals from 52 different countries, providing the city with a wealth of ideas—some practical, some fanciful. Impromptu complexes of honeycomb hexagons, floating villages on piers, barges, even a requisitioned cruise ship. Flat-pack solutions (think an IKEA box) that blossom like an accordion or pop up like Transformers. Giant Erector sets, a few inflatable models like one of those carnival bouncy rides. There was even a fleet of flying dirigibles, each with an apartment inside, that could float above people’s homes. The city selected 10 winners and 10 runners-up in September 2008, that are featured on a site, whatifnyc.net. It is a blueprint for recovery.

“We hope this will serve as a guide for best practices, not only for New York but the entire nation, and the world,” Mr. Brown, the CUNY professor, said.

After much fanfare around the competition, the project seemed to go dormant, but only because it went underground. Mr. Burney explained it was best to work on the project in private, so as not to alarm the public about the possibilities of a disaster, and to have the freedom to let the design develop.

“Because of the broad range of entries, there was a lot of work for the city to do to turn it into something,” said Paul Freitag, a competition juror who is a managing director at the Jonathan Rose Companies, one of the city’s top affordable housing developers.

After briefly mulling barges, blimps and cruise ships, the city settled on the humble shipping container, which a number of entrants had proposed. “Logistically, it’s not as though you’ve got a bunch of cruise ships lying around that you can requisition,” Mr. Burney said. But he did point out that barges are not as ridiculous as they might sound, either. After all, the Department of Corrections operates the gigantic Vernon C. Bain prison barge, moored off Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, which houses up to 800 prisoners.

“We kept coming back to the shipping containers, because they’re a fairly known quantity in terms of technology and even design,” Mr. Burney continued. “It’s rather cool these days to have a house made out of a shipping container.”

In 2009, the city released a request for expressions of interest, to see who might be game to undertake such a project, or even if it was possible. Meanwhile, the agencies went about the regulatory work of getting such a system funded and executed, no easy process given the added layers posed by the Army Corps and FEMA. “We’ve had to submit things two and three times,” Sea Box’s Mr. Begley said. “We work with government a lot, so we know what it’s like, and it’s nobody’s fault. You get these commanders who come through for six months, and when they move on, you may have to start again. It’s just how the bureaucracy works.”

On the city side of things, everything had to be debated: Should there be sprinklers? Should it be compliant with the American’s Disabilities Act? What if it violates the zoning code, with the construction of a building larger than zoning would allow, which seems also assured were a five or six story building to be assembled on a parking lot near the beach in, say, Queens or Staten Island, where zoning calls almost exclusively for low-lying single family homes.

“There are certain codes for temporary structures, and certain codes for permanent structures, but this is really neither, so what do you do with it?” Mr. Burney said. "Exceptions have to be made, and figuring those out with all the agencies take times."

Time has even been spent on figuring out if and how to decorate the containers. They could be painted different colors, creating interesting patterns, an inviting kaleidoscope of corrugated steel. Decals or designs could be added to the exteriors, as well, creating makeshift murals. "We want these to be an attractive place to live, to help foster community," Mr. Pawlowski said.

The city has worked closely with Sea Box on the project, but it has not yet given the final go-ahead to the firm’s plan, which would involve producing about 15,000 units, dispersed around the country in clusters of 500 to 1,000 units. The way Sea Box sees it, the units would sit in a lot somewhere until they are needed, be that in New York or L.A. or Minneapolis or Sioux Falls. “An ISO container will last 35 years, and you can reuse it 20 times,” Mr. Begley boasted. “The old FEMA trailers, tie them up for a year or two and they’re through.”

Those 15,000 units would supply the city for a month or two while production ramped up if more were needed—the city expects to contract with numerous contractors to produce these units. Following the program, they would be broken down, retrofitted and put back into storage for the next disaster.

While the program has been built with New Yorkers in mind, City Hall believes it could serve as yet another model for cities around the country, just like the smoking ban has. “We’ve created a universal specification of what we believed anyone in the container industry could use,” Commissioner Bruno said. “It works in New York City, but it could probably work anywhere, so it has national implications.”

If only it had been ready a year ago. “Certainly I would have liked to have seen it happen sooner, but that’s just the process,” Commissioner Burney said. “As the mayor keeps saying, this isn’t going to be the last storm we see.”

Slideshow: Inside the city's secret disaster apartments. >>

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

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.

Some fear this might wreak havoc on their Thanksgiving travel plans—Wednesday will be the busiest travel day of the year, after all—but City Hall says it is taking this step because of, not in spite of, the rush for the (highway) exits.

"Because we are putting out the extension today, we're giving people the message they should plan ahead," a Bloomberg spokeswoman said. "This way, people won't be stuck in longer line waiting for gas when they're trying to leave the city."

The administration had been criticized for waiting 10 days to implement its gas rationing program, which New Jersey Governor Chris Christie started within days of the storm. Theirs was ending just as ours was starting, but since the New York City program went into effect, there has been almost no reports of lines outside stations. Still, with capacity limited, the administration does not want to risk a relapse by reopening the pumps to all.

Currently, drivers with license plates ending in even numbers can buy gas on even days, and those with odd numbers on odd days. Those with lettered vanity plays are, naturally, odd. Commercial vehicles, doctors license plates and cabs remain exempt from the restrictions.

Police officers remain stationed at gas station's throughout the five boroughs to maintain order.

Keep in mind, Wednesday is Nov. 21, so those with even plates should be sure to fill up the tank on Tuesday if they will be leaving town the next day, or at least save enough gas to make it to New Jersey.

Never thought we'd actually be looking forward to crossing the Hudson.

Wavy gravy, baby. (Wikimedia Commons)

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, "but development that is buttressed by strong building codes and is done in conjunction with a smart adaptability strategy. That was a major reason why we made adaptation to climate change a pillar of PlaNYC."

Not that there is any kind of causation here, but in spite of PlaNYC, the city still got clobbered yesterday. There is only so much New York City, big and important as we like to think we are, can do about something like global warming, which is, you know, global.

Furthermore, for all the mayor has done, he made it clear there are some things he is not willing to undertake to protect the city, telling us, “We cannot build a big barrier reef off the shore to stop the waves from coming in, we can’t build big bulkheads that cut people off from the water that they’re trying to do."

We asked Mr. Doctoroff that even if the buildings were secured, wouldn't there be additional issues pertaining to evacuations, that encouraging people to live in flood zones is always a risk? "As for people who refuse to leave when warned, they are just fools," he responded.

SPURA springs eternal. (NYC EDC)

The development sites. (NYC EDC)

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.

"The City has stated that they will give preference to a proposal that provides income bands that are at the lower income level on multiple tiers," local Councilwoman Margaret Chin announced in triumph. "All along there have been a lot of discussions of all the different items but because of the ULURP process, we were able to get it on record and get a firm commitment that this is what will be beneficial to the community, especially to the Lower East Side."

The Bloomberg administration also agreed to to create another affordable housing project off-site, at 21 Spring Street. Other modifications included the creation of a community task force to assist in the selection of developers, with the city agreeing to give preference to local development partners; to minority- and women-owned businesses in the conception and construction of the project; and to local hiring through HireNYC.

The city also made a commitment that if a new Essex Market is built, current tenants would be offered comparable rent and square footage and "reasonable" relocation costs. The administration also "affirmed their commitment in terms of diversity of retail and numbers of storefronts on the site to create more opportunity for small businesses," as language in the rezoning puts it.

Councilwoman Chin's modifications were approved first by three members of Subcommittee on Planning, Dispositions and Concessions, and then by the 16 present members of the Committee on Land Use, many of whom prefaced their "aye" votes with words of congratulation to Ms. Chin. Fellow downtown Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who worked closely with her colleague on the project, joked, "Let me see, I'm not sure how I'm gonna vote on this."

"I've seen the ongoing perseverance, and that's what it takes," said Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez of Brooklyn. "This is almost a town I think."

The project still awaits approval from the full City Council, but approval by the land-use committee almost certainly guarantees that will happen.

Housing, housing, everywhere, and not a room to rent. (Courtesy NYCHA)

Housing homies. (Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

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.

With more than 420,000 residents, NYCHA has a population that surpasses Atlanta. Factor in the 232,000 people who receive Section 8 vouchers, which NYCHA oversees, and it is larger than Denver, Seattle or Boston. The difference is that this mythical city would be made up of only the very worst neighborhoods—a world of Brownsvilles and Stapletons and Mott Havens without the Park Slopes and Upper East Sides to support them. This is both NYCHA’s biggest problem and its greatest virtue, a blessing and a curse passed down from Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt. Despite the eternal outcry over NYCHA’s shortcomings, most agree that the neighborhoods the projects inhabit would be even worse off without them. Who else is going to provide so many residents with affordable, if not always attractive, housing, in a city that has less and less?

Which is why the agency’s decline is so frustrating to so many. None more so than John Rhea, the man Mayor Bloomberg charged three years ago with fixing the problems—so many problems spread among so much real estate: 178,000 apartments in 334 complexes scattered across all five boroughs.

Of average height and trim build, Mr. Rhea still dresses like he’s headed to work at his last job, as a managing director at Barclays. On the morning of a two-hour interview with The Observer in the chairman’s conference room (as the sign outside the door said), his suit had a fine pinstripe. He wore a white shirt and red tie patterned with tiny Barrel of Monkey monkeys, hand-in-hand.

While he refuses to believe NYCHA’s troubles are intractable, he admits they are grave. “To me, the problem with NYCHA is gridlock. It’s no one actor but things piling up,” Mr. Rhea said. “It starts with an accident, then people are blocking the intersection, one truck is sticking out a little too far so one lane is jammed down. Everyone is trying to merge into fewer lanes. The traffic lights aren't changing.” Mr. Rhea sees himself as public housing’s traffic cop.

As if trapped in Bizarro World, NYCHA's story runs counter to the city's resurgence of the past two decades. When New York was in decline, the housing authority remained, thanks to federal largesse, a shining beacon of hope in the city even as everything around it was consumed. Now the situation has flipped. As the city swells, NYCHA has been suffering, thanks largely to neglect in Washington, where almost all of the authority's funds come from.

In many ways, the debate surrounding NYCHA mirrors those raging throughout the country over the role of government in society.

“It was the place to be, everyone was always hanging out at our place,” said City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who grew up in the Williamsburg Houses, New York’s second oldest housing development (the complex was even made a city landmark in 2003). "Even when the city started to get really bad in the '70s and '80s, NYCHA still had it all."

Now representing the East Village and the Lower East Side, Ms. Mendez has one of the largest tracts of public housing in her district. Since joining the council in 2006, she has chaired its public housing committee. She is a fierce advocate and frequent critic of NYCHA, but she is also quick to credit Mayor Bloomberg for supporting the authority when few others will.

“When John Rhea came in, I was skeptical,” she said. “I didn’t think we needed a banker, but I have to say, he’s done a good job. We’re seeing progress, but I don’t know if it’s enough. Given the situation we’re in, I don’t know if any one person could fix it.”

First Houses ground breaking. (La Guardia and Wagner Archives)

On December 3, 1935, Roosevelt, LaGuardia, Moses, Congressman Robert F. Wagner and what seemed like half the city crammed onto the corner of First Avenue and East Third Street to open First Houses. Thus began an era of American progress, a social experiment,  affordable housing for all, or at least those fortunate enough to win the housing lottery.

Before long, LaGuardia and his New Deal pals were on 105th Street for the East River Houses, and in Williamsburg, Red Hook, Queensbridge, ceremonial silver shovels in hand, breaking ground on dozens of new housing projects. By 1939, the mayor was regularly traveling around the country, advising cities like Newark, Providence and Philadelphia on how to follow suit. As important as affordable housing was, the construction was as much a jobs program as anything, a salve to the Depression. “In so many instances, it was a pioneering program,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, long-time director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The Great Migration, the Great Society and white flight, aided by discriminatory practices in the real estate industry, conspired to leave NYCHA’s developments with largely minority and lower-income tenants, rather than the economic mix that had been hoped for. Still, the projects gave birth to everyone from Lloyd Blankfein (Linden Houses, East New York) to Jay-Z (Marcy Houses, Bed-Stuy) and Sonia Sotomayor (Bronxdale Houses, Morisania, since renamed in her honor). Mr. Rhea’s goal, he said, “is to ensure that NYCHA can still foster these kinds of success stories.”

Like so many government programs from the era, the carefully planned social engineering did not always pan out. As Robert Caro and so many others have detailed, the new housing projects erased entire communities along the way. The new homes may have been affordable and modern, but they were not exactly inviting—especially as the technology progressed and the towers grew taller, more ominous and more dense.

Yet still they stand. NYCHA’s current repair bill systemwide tops $6 billion, and is expected to balloon to $14 billion in the next three years, many times the roughly $270 million NYCHA receives a year for capital expenditures.

One housing official marveled that some 10-year-old, privately developed low-income apartmentsare actually in worse shape than many 60-year-old public housing complexes. NYCHA, even with its massive portfolio, is held to a higher, perhaps impossible, standard. “Even in a perfect world, NYCHA would still have its problems,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association.

Starting in the Reagan era, federal funding, which makes up the vast majority of NYCHA’s non-rental income, began to diminish. Even during the Clinton administration, with welfare reform a national issue (and Andrew Cuomo running HUD), funding waned and talk of privatization was rampant. The situation deteriorated drastically during the Bush years, with federal funds falling to 69 cents on the dollar. NYCHA enjoyed full funding in President Obama’s first year in office, as well as $424 million in stimulus funds—the largest public housing grant awarded in the country. Since then, it has fallen by the wayside due to Congressional intransigence and presidential ambivalence.

“Obama has been hostile to public housing, which surprised a lot of people, since he came up working in it,” said John Arena, a professor at the College of Staten Island and housing expert.

“It is time for New York to realize we have to fight for what is ours, but we also have to be able to stand alone,” Mr. Rhea said. “We have too much at stake to rely on anyone but ourselves to make do.”

Williamsburg Houses, the city's second development (Skyscraper City)

Two thousand, six hundred apartment buildings—2,597 to be exact, built in neat little clusters in almost every corner of the city over the course of six decades. From a plane, or Google Maps, they are plainly visible from above, shocks of green and brown, big gaps in the city’s otherwise uniform street grid. They are pinwheels, crosses, long slabs of concrete and brick lined up like dominoes.

Such projects were once sprouting up across the country, but more and more, New York stands alone. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley demolished one notorious housing project after another, from Cabrini Green to Robert Taylor, names synonymous with urban blight and bureaucratic failure. He replaced them with new developments that lined the pockets of connected developers but housed half as many residents. In Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Newark, New Orleans, the story has been the same.

“It’s a battle that’s still being fought here in New York, whereas it’s been given up in most every other big city,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing analyst at Community Services Society of New York.

Mayor Bloomberg is typically viewed as out of touch with the needy. After all, he called the city’s homeless shelters “pleasurable” last month. Nonetheless, he has done more for public housing than almost any other mayor in the country. He has invested more than $100 million into the housing authority and spent political resources on NYCHA when necessary, including drafting John Rhea to run the agency. Granted, his predecessors still received ample federal funding and could basically ignore the housing authority.

Mr. Rhea’s job is not unlike that of other outsiders recruited by the mayor. “NYCHA needed a change agent, and I think I have experience in being an insurgent—you know, going into an organization to make substantial change happen,” he said. “I also didn’t come with a set of preconceived notions about what was right or wrong structurally or strategically at NYCHA.”

Mr. Rhea grew up in inner-city Detroit, in a mixed-income neighborhood where he walked by housing projects and rundown homes on a regular basis. His father ran his own office furniture supply business, his mother was a medical technician He came east for school, attending the honors program at Wesleyan, where he majored in social studies. While attending Harvard Business School, he became friends with Barack Obama, who was then at the law school. He then went to work for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago for three years, where the two remained friendly. He hosted the future president’s first fund-raiser in New York.

Mr. Rhea came to the city to work at JPMorgan Chase, where he arranged more than $50 billion in deals, and then went to Lehman Brothers, where he rose through the ranks to become head of global consumer retail group. He sees himself as a business facilitator, rather than a money-maker (though there was plenty of that too). It was this skill that attracted the Bloomberg administration, along with his management experience at both firms.

When Lehman collapsed, Mr. Rhea found himself with a job at Barclays when it bought up Lehman’s investment banking division. But he had long felt called to public service, and the moment seemed right. He considered heading to Washington, but when word got out he was in the market for a public-sector position, the Bloomberg administration approached him first.

He said that the banking crisis played no role in his decision to leave Wall Street, and someday he could even go back.

“Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t personally feel guilt. I wasn’t a real estate banker, I didn’t put together complicated derivatives, I didn’t sell subprime mortgages, I didn’t have any role at all in housing,” Mr. Rhea explained. “As an American, watching the financial debacle that had many culprits—the financial industry being one, but government policy being another, and just excess, sheer excess in the economy—I didn’t feel guilt but I certainly felt responsibility. I don't know how any American can watch what we went through and not feel some level of concern for the fellow citizens who were truly impacted.”

John Haynes Holmes Houses, Yorkville. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Mr. Rhea's financial experience experience has come in handy at the cash-strapped NYCHA. “Washington has been very clear in saying that there are $30 billion of unmet capital needs for public housing nationally and it doesn’t have the capacity to fund them,” Mr. Rhea said. “Therefore, housing authorities have to think about other ways of availing themselves if they want to maintain their buildings—other ways of attracting capital, and having conversations with residents and advocates about those options, and how we pursue them and what the risks are.”

One of the first projects Mr. Rhea tackled was creating an office of public-private partnerships, a controversial move. Public housing, the bedrock of the so-called safety net in New York, is considered sacrosanct in advocacy circles. Any private involvement, it is feared, will poison the well. How long until everything has been sold off?

Mr. Rhea insists the housing advocates have nothing to fear, and if they are serious about rebuilding NYCHA, they will have to be creative. When an idea was floated internally to possibly put billboards on some of the housing project’s towers, it was exposed in the Daily News and quickly shot down. The outcry was understandable, but what if it meant a new security system or money to reopen a community center or fix up a basketball court?

“What I find incredibly amazing is that the press can say NYCHA isn’t doing anything,” Mr. Rhea said. He said he has proposed “some of the most intransigent, kind of radioactive” ideas, about which NYCHA has been totally upfront. “We’ve put them out there, we’ve said, ‘Here’s what we plan to do about them,’ we’re fully transparent about it, and we’re willing to have a conversation about what are the implications of what’s being proposed.”

Mr. Rhea’s most impressive victory was the federalizationof thousands of units that had been cast off in the previous decade by the city and state. Completed at the end of 2009, it was a reminder that Washington was not the only political culprit. In the late 1990s, Gov. George Pataki offloaded some 21,000 units of public housing the state had built and maintained for decades. The city pulled the same trick in 2002 with a number of developments it controlled, following a devastating blow to the budget as a result of 9/11.

The vast majority of these units had no federal support, thousands of apartments drawing against the rest of NYCHA’s funds. Through a deal with HUD, federal matching funds, however insufficient, are now provided for the entire NYCHA portfolio. The federalization deal also brought in an injection of $400 million in public and private financing, a never-before-attempted partnership meant to modernize many of the most dilapidated developments. “Standing up at the podium with the secretary of HUD and the mayor, the federalization deal being announced and knowing what that meant, that was a huge victory,” Mr. Rhea said. “It shows we can get things done.”

Queens Bridge Houses, Long Island City. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Still, Mr. Rhea’s job has been far from easy. Another of his marquee achievements is Plan NYCHA, essentially a strategy outline subtitled “A Roadmap for Preservation.” At 45 pages, it took more than two years to create, drawing lukewarm reviews when it came out in 2011.

“It’s a scrapbook,” remarked Mr. Bach. “It mentions some important policies, but it doesn’t go into them at all. It devotes most of its space to pictures of resident participation.”

Mr. Rhea defends it as more of a vision statement than a detailed blueprint. “You can’t give people the thousands and thousands of pages of research and documentation that we’ve done and expect them to digest it,” he said. “This allows people to help us guide individual projects moving forward.”

The same goes for the Boston Consulting Group report commissioned by the chairman that has led to some of the harshest media attention on the authority in memory. Begun in March 2011, the report was due to be completed the following September at a cost of $5 million. The study was extended through the following April, and the price tag doubled. In part, this speaks to the complexity of NYCHA—it takes 12,000 employees to manage that city of half a million—but also to a lack of political awareness on the part of Mr. Rhea.BCG is known for its experience in advising government agencies, but it also happens to be where the chairman worked after business school. The Daily News got wind of the report in June and began to demanding its public release. Mr. Rhea demurred.

“If he had public-sector experience, John would have known the report was going to get out, whether or not he wanted it to,” said one City Hall housing expert. “He’s focused on the product, not the politics, and that has its perils.”

Smelling blood, the paper began digging around in the authority and came up with a damaging story. NYCHA had, in the words of the tab, been “sitting on” nearly $1 billion in federal money dating back to 2009.

As bad as that sounded, it was not exactly accurate. In fact, 90 percent of the $950 million had been allocated already, and while $485 million had yet to be spent, that was not unusual. Between appropriations, requests for proposals, and approvals at nearly a dozen different agencies in Washington and New York, it can take up to three years for HUD funds to make their way from Capitol Hill to the streets of Canarsie or Kingsbridge. Furthermore, $540 million the News was complaining about had only been announced in the past six months to a year. Never mind that those numbers had been provided directly to the paper by NYCHA’s public affairs office as a sign of progress.

“That kind of lack of detail leaves a reader with the impression that if you’re Mrs. Smith and your ceiling is falling in, that NYCHA’s not going to do what it’s supposed to do, when it has all of the resources it needs to do that,” Mr. Rhea complained. “When you don’t say you need 6 billion, and you only have a billion, you leave out the fact that even if we snapped our fingers tomorrow and spent it all in the most efficient way, you still have five out of six people still upset about the quality of their conditions.”

To make matters worse, the tab ran accompanying pieces showing apartments full of black mold and rat holes. As bad as that is, the argument was disingenuous. Small repairs come out of the operations budget, while the billion dollars at issue was in capital funds. It is the difference between fixing a leaky ceiling and repointing the bricks in an entire complex to protect against weather damage. Not that NYCHA could rob from capital funds to pay for regular maintenance anyway. It is forbidden to dip into one pot to fund the other, and doing so could actually lead to serious sanction in Washington. A number of council members had to hold a hearing on the steps of City Hall to praise Mr. Rhea, fearing the negative publicity would imperil NYCHA. “That is my gravest concern, the message this will send to Washington,” Ms. Mendez said. “They treat us badly enough as it is.”

At least a few housing advocates believe Daily News owner and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman is working on behalf of the real estate industry to cripple the authority and thereby open up its prime land (along the East River, in Chelsea, on the Upper West Side, in Williamsburg and Red Hook) to development. Nevermind that Mr. Zuckerman exclusively develops commercial real estate.

Another prominent example of the gotcha news involves $42 million the City Council allocated for security cameras in 2009. While desperate for more funding, Mr. Rhea decided to suspend the council contributions to determine exactly the best use for them. In his view, many developments had security systems in place, but they were not having an appreciable impact on crime. He created the Safety and Security Task Force to meet with residents and better understand the issue. “John Rhea decided to freeze our money,” Councilwoman Mendez said. “I didn’t like it, but it was the right thing to do, and now, hopefully, we’ll get the right cameras, the right security, for the right developments.” Instead, the News lamented a rise in crime while NYCHA was developing the new security plan.

While trying to have the BCG report released, the News complained that the 87-page document cost $124,000 a page. “That’s just stupid,” Mr. Rhea said. “How about we talk about how the report could save NYCHA $70 million a year. It pays for itself seven times over in the first year.”

Mr. Rhea’s favorite story was the one about the $325,000 he spent for a two-day conference at the Javits Center that brought every NYCHA employee together to share their thoughts about the agency—an event painted as a management-driven boondoggle. To Mr. Rhea, it was part of a necessary refocusing. “At $30 a person, I would say that wasn’t a waste of money, to be able to hear the ideas and concerns of every one of my employees,” Mr. Rhea said.

“You can worry about the optics or the politics, or if you look like you’re doing a good job,” he continued. “We don’t need that. We don’t need another person just going through the motions. We don’t need more pageantry. We’re looking to make a difference.”

This is what it's all about. (Courtesy Kars 4 Kids)

Is there enough time, resources or authority to make a difference? Despite widespread praise from housing advocates, many question whether or not Mr. Rhea can truly effect the change he speaks constantly of. After decades of disinvestment, no one person could turn around NYCHA in four years.

Still, there are advocates who argue the mayor could be doing more to support his chairman. Mr. Bach, the housing analyst at the Community Services Society, points to the billions of dollars the city funnels every years to private developers through the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the millions more given to parks, museums, even new stadiums. “There’s absolutely no comparison, and there’s no comparable attention and support to the New York City Housing Authority,” he said. How much time has the mayor spent promoting a ban on soft drinks this year? How much time has he spent on promoting NYCHA? It’s a question of political capital, Ms. Vitullo-Martin of the Regional Plan Association said.

Yet political capital does not always get results either. Consider education, an area on which the Bloomberg administration has focused tirelessly. “The solutions are not always easy, clear, or even possible,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said.

Perhaps the experience of another public authority might guide NYCHA back on the right track. “In the 1970s, the MTA was on the verge of collapse, and in the ’80s, it really executed an amazing turnaround,” said Fred Harris, NYCHA’s new director of development, who led the MTA’s real estate portfolio at the time before spending two decades in private development. “I think NYCHA is at a point where it needs to make the same transformation.”

The comparison may be apt for another reason. Despite all the improvements at the MTA, everybody still complains about it.

Last Thursday, without a cloud in the sky, John Rhea stepped out of his city-issued Toyota hybrid SUV and onto the leafy quad of Baisley Park Houses in Jamaica, Queens. He had on a navy suit, no pinstripe, light blue check shirt and matching tie. Local Councilman Reuven Willis, who grew up in the nearby South Jamaica Houses, had recruited Kars 4 Kids, a North Jersey Jewish charity, to hand out backpacks to families from the projects. “It is critically important these kids have the resources they need to succeed on the first day of school,” Mr. Rhea said, touting yet another of his public-private partnerships.

NYCHA had paid to rebuild the project’s community center three years ago, but it so far lacked the funds to open it. Instead, money would soon be spent on those new cameras, after two years of debate, and just in time—a police officer had been shot less than a month earlier. Mr. Willis went up the block to show off a basketball court that had been recently refurbished with a new coat of paint and a good weed whacking. It took 16 months, but it had been decades since anything had been done, and a totally new court was on the horizon, so he remained excited. "He came in, he met with my people, asked what we wanted, and he delivered," Mr. Willis said.

Scaffolding encircles many developments, suggesting repairs when there are none. It frustrates tenants, according to Mr. Willis, but he can live with it as long as more important problems are being tackled. Public housing, a work in progress.

“Growing up, did I know the NYCHA chairman? No. But everybody here does,” Mr. Willis said, gesturing around the quiet street. And it was true, he was getting hugs and fist bumps from many in the crowd, though also some tough questions about the community center. Mr. Rhea promised he was hard at work on the problem.

As Mr. Rhea rushed off to one more backpack giveaway, before a day of meetings in the city, he paused to consider the work he was doing. “I don’t want you to think I’m all pie in the sky,” he said. “I know we’ve got a lot left to do, and the challenges are huge in turning this around. We have another 15 months to run hard to put a bunch of runs on the board, to execute against the plan.”

He looked back at the kids holding their new backpacks aloft and smiled. “I wish this was the only part of my job.”

They want more to look at. (Getty)

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.

In an email statement (in full below, with highlights by us), the department argues that developers need time to to assemble their sites and start building when the restriction preventing new projects before 2017 lapses. Previously, the department had argued that it was not as though all these new buildings would be built overnight, but rather this was a long-term plan that would take decades to fully develop. This raises the question of whether waiting six more months to debate the plan, as Councilman Garodnick and the local community boards are asking for, would really hurt the plan.

"We want to make sure that there is certainty, and we also want to make sure this is done right," Councilman Garodnick said in a statement. "The proposal has merit, and allowing a few more months to what will be a decades-long process would help ensure that all issues are vetted and considered."

The department remains eager to finish this before the end of the Bloomberg administration, though it must also be careful not to anger the Council, which after all has final say on all rezonings.

The purpose of the East Midtown rezoning proposal is to secure the area’s future as a premier business district by encouraging the development of a small number of new, state-of-the art Class A office buildings over the next two decades. Recognizing the fundamental importance of East Midtown to the City’s economic future, the Mayor has made this rezoning a priority for the Administration.

Under the proposed timeline for this project, the first new buildings are not likely to come online until later this decade or next, but this can only happen if we set in place zoning mechanisms now. Adopting a predictable zoning framework in 2013 is a necessary prerequisite for the development of new high-end commercial buildings over the long term. In the near term, property owners need certainty and predictability to make significant financial commitments that will ultimately lead to these new developments. It takes many years to assemble sites, and yet more time to decant, demolish, and prep the site for development. Having the new zoning in place within 2013 will provide the certainty and predictability necessary.

With these new developments will come much needed improvements to both the on‐street and below ground pedestrian networks. We are proposing that major new office towers be required to contribute to a fund for specific and targeted transit and pedestrian improvements in and around Grand Central Terminal that will reduce subway congestion points, increase capacity on platforms and transform Vanderbilt Avenue into a signature pedestrian gateway

As with all of our projects, we have been carefully analyzing the area and meeting with area stakeholders, including the community boards, to discuss the issues and proposed policy solutions so that an appropriate long‐term zoning framework for East Midtown can be created. There is ample time to complete all the necessary review and analyses for this project, and we are committed to continue working closely with the community and other stakeholders as the process moves forward.

Some have compared East Midtown to Hudson Yards, saying that the Hudson Yards rezoning took years before it entered the public review process. East Midtown is a vastly different proposal than the Hudson Yards rezoning, which contemplated a complete transformation of the area equivalent to adding half of downtown Boston’s office space floor area. This was in addition to new streets, parks and open space, more than 14,000 apartments, an expanded Javits Center, a Sports and Convention Center and the extension of the #7 subway. In East Midtown, our proposal is much more targeted—it builds on the existing character of the area and is designed to facilitate a substantially smaller amount of new development.

Any delay of this proposal means uncertainty for East Midtown. Given the importance of East Midtown to the City—for its jobs, tax base, and its critical transportation role—we must put into place a new regulatory framework that strengthens, not stymies, East Midtown’s continued competitiveness on the global stage.