Mr. Pinsky

Imagine, if you will, the landscape of New York City 15 years hence. A drive to Citi Field in Willets Point takes you past a pleasant if overpriced cluster of residential buildings, rather than seedy chop-shops. Roosevelt Island is home to a sprawling $2 billion applied-sciences campus spinning out an army of developers to populate ping-pong-table-clad start-up clusters from Dumbo to Union Square. On Manhattan’s far West Side, the rezoned stretch of Hudson Yards offers millions of square feet for office space, housing and retail and 14 acres of open public space. You can already see traces of a more built-up, scrubbed-down New York in Luna Park’s freshly-painted Scream Zone, the first new roller-coasters Coney Island has seen in 80 years, and the rapidly-metastasizing arena at Atlantic Yards, which will soon play home court to the rebranded Brooklyn Nets.

It’s hardly a scenario Seth Pinsky could have imagined in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed just seven months into his tenure as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a not-for-profit arm of the Mayor's office charged with fostering economic growth across the five boroughs.

At the time, Mr. Pinsky was a 36-year-old former lawyer and investment analyst, only a few years removed from a private sector gig refinancing real estate deals for the big banks as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb. He had one big win under his belt—jump-starting the World Trade Center redevelopment project—but he didn’t have “a political bone in his body,” as one insider put it. “People kept saying to me, ‘Wow, you’re the head of the Economic Development Corporation? We’re in an economic meltdown!’’ Mr. Pinsky told The Observer.

“At the time it meant, ‘You must be really crazy.’”

Under Mr. Pinsky’s leadership, however, observers say the EDC has transformed itself from a real estate matchmaker for companies seeking office space into a policy-setting organization, spearheading diversification away from the finance, insurance, real estate economy (also known by the unofficial acronym, FIRE, which had rarely seemed more apt). Thanks to what one former employee called Mr. Pinsky’s “savant”-like facility with financing and structuring deals, a number of projects first proposed in the ambitious early years of the Bloomberg administration have begun making real progress. Some of the projects, like Willets Point, have “bedeviled administrations for decades,” noted Mr. Pinsky. And then there’s the EDC’s ultimate sleight of hand: convincing Cornell and Stanford to engage in a bitter rivalry to build a $2 billion tech campus, all by waving a $100 million grant and a swath of land on a sleepy East River isle.

All told, these projects will be the tent poles on which Mayor Bloomberg hangs the legacy of his 12 years in office. As careful chroniclers of the Bloomberg administration note, many of these large-scale development projects were first pitched by former deputy mayor for economic development Daniel Doctoroff as part of his grandiose PlaNYC bid for the 2012 Olympics, which drew comparisons to Robert Moses at the time, but didn’t come to fruition in the six years before he was tapped to lead Bloomberg LP.

“Dan in many ways set the agenda, set the vision,” said Robert Lieber, Mr. Doctoroff’s successor as deputy mayor. “And then Seth has been, in no small part, responsible for the execution and getting stuff done.”

In fact, Mr. Pinsky was a protégée of Mr. Doctoroff—part of a group of promising young civil servants he cultivated, which included Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Mathew Wambua, Andrew Kimball, head of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Mr. Pinsky’s wife, Angela Pinsky (née Sung), now a senior vice president at the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mr. Pinsky’s successes have not come easily. Over the years, he has acquired a reputation in the city’s development community as a fearsome negotiator. Detractors complain about overzealous demands. “There’s a widespread belief that Seth tries to get every friggin’ nickel off ya,” said one source. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Narrowly built with a long face, Mr. Pinsky gives off something like a young Woody Allen vibe.

“When one says ‘tough guy,’ it’s not like he’s threatening or anything,” said James Whelan, senior vice president of public affairs for the Real Estate Board of New York, who worked under Mr. Doctoroff at the time. “He’s quite affable, nice guy and everything. Analytically, he's brilliant.”

“His personality can be a little grating on people sometimes,” noted Mr. Lieber. “He’s very picky and argumentative, but I think that has evolved as he’s been there.”

“There are no permanent obstacles with Seth,” said Mr. Doctoroff. Mr. Lieber put it more bluntly: “He wears the other guy out.”

Some blame that stance for the chaotic denouement of the tech campus competition. “There’s a line that Stanford left because Seth was too difficult to deal with,” the source said. Those privy to negotiations say Stanford was taken aback by the binding legal penalties involving factors outside of their control.

“I’m not sure anyone really knows what happened there,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I think developers are used to dealing with cities that just write a check and say, ‘Will you just swear on a Bible that you’ll do this?’”

Meanwhile, community advocates and urban planners decry the EDC’s corporate structure and lack of transparency. “They pass for being a government agency, and in fact they have more power than many of the line agencies under the mayor,” said Tom Angotti, director of the Center for Community Planning and Development at Hunter College and the author of New York for Sale, who noted that by the time neighborhoods are consulted, the EDC has typically already made up its mind.

“If [closing deals] is the only criterion, he’s been a success. But for me that’s not the only criteria, nor should it be for the public. The question is what’s the quality of the deals,” added Mr. Angotti, a technical advisor to the alternative plans for the arena at Atlantic Yards. He cited the Brooklyn stadium as an example of selecting a more suburbanized approach over a plan that would benefit locals. “It divides three neighborhoods instead of uniting them and it just creates another giant super block in the middle of Brooklyn."

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“When I was in middle school I used to design cities,” Mr. Pinsky told The Observer. We were sitting down for lunch at the Stone Street Tavern, an old-school City Hall favorite, with shamrocks on the menu and Louie Prima in high rotation.

“I had a city that I designed on four big pieces of tag board, where I kind of mapped everything out,” he explained, removing his ’50s-style Browline glasses. The elaborate maps used color coding to show the business district, the residential districts, subway lines. “I made up the companies that were based there,” Mr. Pinsky added of his pre-SimCity urban dreamscapes.

Zoning fantasies don’t often rank among a 13-year-old boy’s after-school activities, but Mr. Pinsky, who tucked his diamond-patterned purple tie into his dress shirt once the food arrived, comes across as a guy who, even as a kid, was more comfortable around adults.

Which isn’t to say he’s without his youthful indulgences. “I have—this is an embarrassing admission—I eat American cheese almost every day,” he said admiringly of The Observer’s grilled cheese. “I actually think I’ve had American cheese for one meal almost every day since I was about six-years-old.” The routine involves some bread and often a condiment. “Not mayo, Miracle Whip. Big difference,” he elaborated.

Mr. Pinsky grew up in the suburbs of New York until he was 10, when his father, a Reform rabbi, moved the family to Minnesota. “I like to tell people I grew up in the New York area and I just lived in Minnesota,” he said. “I was fully formed by the time I moved there.”

After earning a history degree from Columbia, Mr. Pinsky took a job as a financial analyst in M&A at Wolfensohn Inc., the investment firm launched by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, albeit with some reservations. He made a bargain with himself to take the LSATs to decrease the likelihood of “going into finance for the rest of my life.”

From there he went on to Harvard Law, eventually working as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb, where partners, aware of interest in New York, would try to steer local cases his way. The company’s office was at 1 Liberty Plaza, but the day the towers fell, Mr. Pinsky happened to be on a business trip in Washington, D.C. Months later, when employees were allowed back in the building, he would monitor the recovery and cleanup efforts, watching as workers searched for remains and stopped to salute as bodies were driven out of the site covered in an American flag.

As he gazed out from his office window, Mr. Pinsky thought, “If I’m ever going to do it, now is the time.”

On paper, Mr. Pinsky’s résumé doesn’t necessarily read like that of a closer. Indeed, his ascent still mystifies some City Hall insiders. One former official sent us snippets of Mr. Pinsky’s bio via instant message. “Like WTF,” the source commented, still baffled by Mr. Pinsky’s appointment. “There are 500 people in the NYC McKinsey office with more experience than that.”

After he was hired “sort of into the bowels of EDC,” as Mr. Doctoroff put it, Mr. Pinsky distinguished himself with uncommon financial prowess. “You know, in city government there is not a wide range of those sort of skills that are available, particularly when you’re dealing with commercial parties on the other side,” he said. In other words, you can’t go up against Larry Silverstein with a bleeding-heart nonprofit type. Thus, Mr. Doctoroff decided to appoint Mr. Pinsky the “quarterback” of WTC negotiations launched in 2005.

WTC site in 2006 (inset) and 2012.

“Seth was instrumental in helping break that Rubik’s Cube of what it was Larry really wanted,” Mr. Lieber recalled. The city offered Mr. Silverstein an ultimatum: Take $300 million for his interest in the site or sign an alternative deal that offered financing with Liberty Bonds while allowing the Port Authority to take back the Freedom Tower. The offer involved intense backroom finagling with Governor George Pataki and Port Authority chairman Anthony Coscia.

“Not a lot of people have ever focused on that deal,” said Mr. Doctoroff, but it “essentially unlocked the site and allowed it move forward, and Seth really did a lot of the work.”

Mr. Pinsky described his approach to dealmaking as “empathetic”—trying to get into the other party’s head. “I think most people would probably not agree with that,” he admitted. “But I mean it in a very specific way.”

After the WTC deal, Mr. Doctoroff said he saw to it that Mr. Pinsky was promoted to head the EDC’s Real Estate Transactional Group. He was tapped to lead the EDC in 2008.

When the housing bubble started to collapse, Mr. Pinsky was on vacation in Uzbekistan (hardly an unusual choice for someone who picked Sudan and Egypt as his honeymoon spot), keeping up with the news on his BlackBerry. Layoffs in FIRE were imminent, and the city needed to figure out a way to counter the loss.

Sometime that winter, Mr. Pinsky took a walk around Brooklyn and ended up in East New York. “Again, it’s a little bit embarrassing to admit, but what hit me was that we’re called ‘the Economic Development Corporation,’ but what we really are is the ‘real estate development corporation.’ And we really didn’t do that much with the underlying economy itself.” Spending months luring a company to Lower Manhattan with an incentive package to secure just 300 jobs wouldn't cut it.

Earlier that year, Mr. Pinsky had brought in more “strategically minded” hires from the private sector. “Nobody really knew what do with them and I’m not sure they knew what to do with themselves,” he recalled. That group became the Center for Economic Transformation, tasked with reaching out to individual industries, like the tech community—an approach that’s garnered copycat interest from London to Austin.

Mr. Doctoroff pointed out that the EDC has been behind big strides toward diversification before. Under interim president Andy Alper, for example, the EDC helped bring about the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences. There was also an effort to incentivize the film and television industries to shoot in New York.

Mr. Doctoroff characterized initiatives toward growing the tech sector as an unprecedented shift. “We really are on the cusp of a paradigm change. We can gain extraordinary leverage at a unique moment.”

Sources close to Mr. Pinsky insist he has no interest in parlaying his newfound visibility into public office, predicting instead a policy-related track in the real estate field. “I don’t like politics,” Mr. Pinsky concurred. “That’s not my thing.”

In the meantime, however, there’s a lot of work to be done before the mayor’s third term ends next year. “He has a countdown clock in the bullpen,” Mr. Pinsky said. “We’re all very conscious of the deadline. I don’t think he likes unfinished business.”

-ntiku@observer.com

Yes, really.

Bob Lieber, the deputy mayor for economic development and a former Lehman Brothers executive himself (he left when times were still good), was asked at a New York Building Congress forum on Tuesday morning what the Bloomberg administration was doing to look past the financial industry as the main driver of the city’s economy.

His response: “I’m very bullish about financial services."

“We’ve seen boom and bust cycles around this industry before,” he added. “Simplistically, I think the model for financial services is sound. I think the model of a publicly owned propriety trading firm taking huge bets with incredible leverage is not a good model.”

This seems to be a common line these days among city officials, who often repeat a refrain that goes something like this: downturns have hit New York many times before, and every single time, New York has rebounded, stronger than ever each time. 

This was the main focus of a speech at the start of the month by Dan Doctoroff, Mr. Lieber’s predecessor in City Hall. Now the president of Bloomberg LP (and therefore manager of much of Mayor Bloomberg’s wealth), Mr. Doctoroff compared the financial industry to a forest, filled with large trees. “Some may topple,” he said, “some may wither, but from them come dozens of new offshoots—new saplings pushing up a groundswell of new life.”

Those “saplings” are the small private capital firms that have apparently been springing up via traders who have left large financial firms.

More generally, while mayor after mayor has talked about diversifying the local economy beyond Wall Street, the sector offers a temptingly large contribution to the city’s tax base. Speaking at the Building Congress, Mr. Lieber rattled off some stats about the sector: 9 percent of the residents of New York City generated 35 percent of the payroll tax.

“It’s going to be hard to replicate that kind of revenue,” he said. “But we’re very bullish about replicating those kinds of jobs.”

Yesterday Mr. Doctoroff, the former deputy mayor and current president of Bloomberg LP, gave a speech at the Citizens Housing and Planning Council luncheon in which he painted a highly optimistic picture of the city’s—and the financial sector’s—future, saying New York would emerge stronger than ever before. (He called himself the “last optimist.”)

Of course, that’s not an uncommon line from those who stand to gain a lot of money if the economy were to turn around; however, he seems to be putting his (or Mike Bloomberg’s) money where his mouth is, saying he was expanding Bloomberg LP through the downturn.

“At Bloomberg,” he said, “we’ve made a decision this year to sacrifice short-term profits to invest aggressively to build new products, invest in new businesses, bring on new talent, all to increase our market share, so that when the recovery does occur, we’re better positioned.”

“We are actually adding 1,000 people this year, the majority in New York City,” he said to applause.

It would be interesting to see how Mr. Doctoroff feels about the approach to New York City’s fiscal calamities these days, as the Bloomberg administration is looking to cut billions from the budget and slash the capital spending budget by a third. Always more of a spender than a saver, he’s criticized government as it cuts just at the time that its services are needed most, in downturns.

Indeed, many of the expensive initiatives of the Bloomberg administration (like the mayor’s affordable housing plan) were undertaken during the early part of the mayor’s first term, in the downturn after September 11. With that said, today is a bit different as the city’s debt load has risen dramatically, in large part as a result of those initiatives. And now—without Mr. Doctoroff around; he left in late ’07—the administration is seeking to trim back that load.

He gave the housing-focused crowd (CHPC is an affordable-housing organization led by his former HPD commissioner, Jerilyn Perine) a lesson in history, recounting all the various crises of the past 200 years.

“By my count, New York has endured 11 financial panics, crashes or busts since New York became a financial center in the early 1800s,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “If you go back—and I’ve done this—and look at the newspaper accounts, you will read exactly the same things: ‘The Wall Street model is dead,’ and more ominously, ‘New York will never recover.’”

Then he got somewhat poetic:

“The financial sector is like a forest, and the largest trees are like the major institutions. Some may topple ... some may whither, but from them come dozens of new offshoots—new saplings pushing up a groundswell of new life.”

His prescription for how to actually recover was not quite so clear, and more or less amounted to: be innovative. “Time after time, after destruction comes the creative regeneration,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “We have to be creative.”

Speaking at Columbia University to a lecture hall filled with graduate students from the School of Architecture, the takeaway message of the city’s former economic development architect-in-chief was little he hasn’t said before—government is tremendously slow, controversy marks every step one takes, and the Bloomberg administration discovered the key to public sector success—but his look back was at times refreshingly candid. Speaking to the shortcomings of government, he lacked the careful and respectful language he formerly used—cautious language that is still employed by officials working on the projects he pushed.

“In government, everything is about conflict,” he said, pulling up a PowerPoint slide that showed circles for all the forces that push and pull at an administration's initiatives, with a tagline that described each of those forces’ motivations.

“Unions, what do they want? They want to keep their jobs, they want better wages,” he said. “Community groups? What do they want? Frequently, what they don’t want is anything in their own back yard.

“Businesses—well, businesses want to make money.

“A City Council person basically wants to get his or her name in the newspaper.

“City agencies—they all want their own turf to be protected.”

His brief assessment of why the World Trade Center redevelopment is taking so long was similar—a multitude of players means a lengthy process.

“Think about all of those different parties, literally at war with one another, in part because the turf is so small, and the stakes are so great,” he said. “Multiple city agencies; a state that was desperate to retain control; the Port Authority, which actually owned the site, which is effectively beholden to no one.”

To sort through this tangle, in the thinking of Dan Doctoroff, one needs to take the management techniques, strategy, organization, and other skills that work best in the private sector. Taken with an approach that encourages innovation deep within the administration's ranks, he said, management style is much of the reason why he views Mr. Bloomberg as being so successful in his governance of the city, claiming victory on issues and projects that left prior mayors stumbling.

He hailed the Bloomberg administration's methodical approach to putting money into projects that ultimately bring returns (financial and in quality of life), the cornerstone of Mr. Doctoroff's economic development strategy. From HR&A to McKinsey & Company, he seemed to put much significance in the administration's reliance on quantitative data and private sector projections to make strategic decision. (Specifically, Mr. Doctoroff highlighted seven key factors in the business-style approach to government leadership: independence, strategy, investment, management, innovation, communication and accountability).

His example of an individual who would have benefited from the organizational discipline of the Bloomberg administration? Eliot Spitzer.

“One of the failures of the Spitzer administration that was very evident before his other problems was his administration was a chaotic mess,” he said. “We would have meetings where there were literally nine people who were in effect my counterpart … there was no one in charge except for him.”

Such is the under-told story of the Spitzer administration, as numerous other people who dealt with the state under the former governor have told of similar experiences. Infighting was common among state officials, though the governor was apparently unable, or unwilling, to sort through such differences, leaving many crucial decisions unmade for weeks or months.

Mr. Doctoroff tried to illustrate to the students that he had learned how to better navigate through the often-inclement bureaucracy and approvals process. Over time, the administration better listened to the community through rezonings, he said.

He applied the same storyline to the two big, ultimately failed initiatives of his time that needed approval in Albany: the proposed West Side stadium, which then educated his approach to congestion pricing.

“In secret, we crafted a magnificent, fully hatched plan, and then what we did was we attempted to end-run the Legislature,” he said.

“PlaNYC—we learned, completely,” he said, listing the various meetings and forums that went into the crafting of the administration’s sustainability plan. “Rather than trying to do the end-run around the Legislature, we sought legislative approval."

So why did congestion pricing fail? (Critics of the mayor’s approach have a long list of answers to this question.)

“I still am somewhat at a loss to explain,” Mr. Doctoroff said.

He paused.

“That said, I do believe that in some form, congestion pricing will come back.”

Mr. Francis, who resigned from the Paterson administration in June, worked in a number of the same areas in government as Mr. Doctoroff. Both men, for instance, attempted to bring about a deal on the Moynihan Station project.

Mr. Francis will report to Tom Secunda, head of the Financial Products group, according to a Bloomberg spokeswoman. Mr. Francis' job is considered similar in scope to that of a chief operating officer. [Corrected].

The answer to those questions, it turns out, is not public information.

Back in May, we did a Freedom of Information request that normally allows the public access to e-mails and other correspondence between public officials and outside parties. But now the city's counsel has denied our FOIL request, saying that every e-mail we requested (between Mr. Doctoroff and Mayor Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber, Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler, and a set of other city officials) has been withheld under one of two exemptions: the e-mails represent an invasion of privacy, or are "inter-agency and intra-agency materials."

Mr. Doctoroff still serves as an appointee on a set of governing boards of city- or state-controlled agencies, including the Hudson River Park Trust and Governors Island Development Corporation.

[For more on our failed attempts at gaining info through the Freedom of Information Law, see our post from December.]

Mr. Doctoroff, the architect of the city’s development strategy under Mayor Bloomberg, left the administration in January to serve as the president of Bloomberg LP. The COIB determined it was not a violation of the city’s interest to have him remain involved in projects that include Hudson River Park, the development of Governors Island, Moynihan Station, the PlaNYC sustainability plan, and others.

The board’s letter to the Bloomberg administration, dated March 20, did not include any mention of the West Side rail yards, for which Mr. Doctoroff serves on the selection committee.

But Mr. Doctoroff is still around until Friday, according to mayoral spokesman John Gallagher, finishing up his last days as a public servant before becoming president of Bloomberg LP.

We have more on Bob Lieber’s new role in this week’s print edition.