The Battle for Gotham (5 page)

In a similar vein, Spec-It-Green is NYIRN’s (New York Industrial Retention Network) effort to get city manufacturers to produce green products and get builders to buy them, thereby infusing the whole supply stream with new made-in-New York green products.

David Sweeney, with his Greenpoint Manufacturing Development Corporation, is profitably converting underused industrial buildings into incubators of small businesses and light manufacturers, while city planning policies continue to undermine industrial neighborhoods by upzoning policies that escalate real estate values. His waiting list for space only gets longer as the city loses industrial space. Although he started rescuing old factories through this nonprofit organization, he has since continued to preserve industrial space in old buildings with the use of private investment money. Venture capital has recognized what official policy denies, that manufacturing not only has a future in the city but is critical to maintaining diversity in the city economy.

Assorted community-based development groups spread around the South Bronx led the revival of that borough, starting in the 1970s with the rescue and renovation of abandoned housing, the building of new infill housing, and community-based housing management.
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But in the 1990s, a new wave of groups—the Point, Sustainable South Bronx, Mothers on the Move, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice—emerged there and around the city, integrating youth, environment, criminal justice, and antiviolence. They have become the true nurturers of what Jacobs described as “adaptations, ameliorations, and densifications” that add up to enduring, positive change.

The Bronx River Alliance is a public-private partnership of more than sixty-one grassroots organizations, institutions, and public agencies that first came together as the Bronx River Working Group in the late 1990s in a real example of community-initiated healing of an area torn asunder by urban renewal. The alliance, with the help of the city’s Department of Parks, is working to restore the Bronx River, construct the Bronx River Greenway, build not-so-small parks, initiate boating programs on the river, and use the river for student and community environmental education. Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, the Point, and Sustainable South Bronx were among the founders of the Bronx River Alliance.

With some overlap in member organizations, the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance is composed of a smaller number of local and citywide organizations that came together specifically to advocate for the community plan to eliminate the Sheridan Expressway and redevelop its footprint for affordable housing, community and commercial space, and parks.
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The Sheridan Expressway is a little-used, never-completed 1.25-mile Moses road that runs parallel to the river and separates a huge community from it. Despite the road’s minimum transportation value and maximum community damage, the State Department of Transportation has been trying for years to maintain and finish it.
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The community plan to demolish it would instead reclaim twenty-eight acres and reconnect existing neighborhoods—West Farms, Longwood, Bronx River, Hunts Point, and more—to each other and to the Bronx River (and the new greenway parks).
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Local streets would be extended to connect the community to the river, wetlands would be restored, and land would be reclaimed on which to build affordable housing.

It is hard to overstate the impact, especially on the Bronx, of the proliferation of citizen efforts since the earliest ones in the 1970s. What occurred between then, when the South Bronx looked like Berlin after World War II, and now, when finding empty land to build on is difficult, is a story with more lessons than experts can absorb. A cleaned-up Bronx River, new parks, youth programs, cultural venues, community-planned new development, environmental improvements, and community events—the list is endless but all part of the regeneration process that evolved from the bottom up to repair the damage of the Moses era. Various agencies under Mayor Bloomberg have been clearly responsive, leading to partnerships that have strengthened and advanced the momentum of positive change. This is the same Bronx that Robert Moses and housing commissioner Roger Starr (Planned Shrinkage)
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declared hopeless and wanted to only clear and rebuild or landbank.

Private efforts in upscale Manhattan neighborhoods also have had enormous impact. One of the most celebrated, and internationally emulated, new public spaces is the High Line on the Lower West Side, six blocks of hulking elevated rail track once used to carry goods from Hudson River piers to warehouses in Lower Manhattan. The effort to transform it into a linear park, designed by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, is the result of two citizens, Josh David and Robert Hammond,
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who fought the demolition plan of former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and found a sympathetic administration with the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The High Line cause paralleled the rising appeal of the neighboring Gansevoort Market Historic District, a once-gritty, truck-filled area now dominated by upscale fashion retailers, art galleries, and restaurants. All of these efforts demonstrate clearly the enormous positive change possible from assorted modest citizen-led initiatives.

BIG CITY CHANGE IN INCREMENTAL STEPS

The city administration as well is making big changes with small strides even while it more aggressively promotes and overvalues controversial large projects. Individuals within the administration have a mandate to find new creative ways to make positive changes, especially in the area of reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. The Housing and Preservation Department under Shawn Donovan, now head of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., created 81,500 new low-income units scattered around the city, out of a goal of 165,000 over five years, less than they hoped for but considerable nonetheless.
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The Housing Authority is making possible needed infill development on long-underused and unnecessary open space left from the tower-in-the-park era of misguided development. For years the Housing Authority has been replacing windows, upgrading water-conserving plumbing, and installing low-energy-consuming appliances in public housing, increasing efficiency and lowering energy costs. None of these are individually big projects in one place but are large overall, with positive effects nonetheless.

The Transportation Department, under director Janette Sadik-Khan, is achieving enormous citywide change with small-scale initiatives that wrest traffic lanes from vehicles and expand the bicycle path network. Sadik-Khan created new plazas on street space where cars were once the sole occupants. Tables and chairs proliferate. More than two hundred miles of bike lanes have been added across the city in three years, with more planned. Bus stops are more welcoming. In the process, Sadik-Khan has reminded us of the multiple purposes of city streets. Nibble by nibble she is reclaiming city space eroded during the more-cars era—she calls it the “attrition of automobiles.”
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But she’s done something equally significant in demonstrating that a department of transportation has a greater responsibility than just moving traffic and that streets belong as much to pedestrians and bikers as to cars. This is part of the mayor’s ambitious vision to reduce pollution and traffic congestion.

PlaNYC is a shrewd planning document that includes many of the big development schemes that would have been included in a traditional master plan. However, this is not a traditional plan. What is unique are dozens of farsighted environmental initiatives that have never been seen in a city plan, including citywide storm-water drainage upgrades, making city buildings energy efficient, eliminating thousands of parking permits for city employees, the planting of 1 million trees (200,000 so far), and providing incentives to get 15 percent of the city’s taxi fleet converted to hybrids. This “long-term vision for a sustainable New York City” is based on a somewhat mysterious prediction that by 2030, the city population is expected to rise to 9.1 million, from its current 8.36 million. Such predictions are always tricky, like the one in the 1970s when the City Planning Commission predicted the population would go down to the 5 million range. The PlaNYC prediction, of course, did not anticipate an economic collapse or the exodus of some immigrants returning to their home countries as opportunities in the United States diminished. Futurist predictions are always risky and often wrong. Nevertheless, many of the modest accomplishments of city agencies already mentioned are enumerated worthwhile goals in this plan, regardless of population changes.

It is well known that the city’s communities of color and low-income residents carry the heaviest burden in pollution and traffic, from garbage handling, incinerators, and power plants. For years, environmental justice groups had been pushing for equity in the handling of the city’s solid waste, both commercial and residential. The goal was to shift waste export to rail and barge from thousands of trucks and to equitably redevelop the city’s dormant network of marine waste-transfer stations. Progress here has been made on several fronts. Instead of just building new big power plants, some existing plants have been retrofitted to increase megawatt production, while simultaneously decreasing pollution emissions. Two new marine transfer stations were approved for Manhattan, one on the Upper East Side and one on the Lower West Side, to reduce the truck traffic having a negative impact on the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Recycling efforts have increased to reduce the volume of garbage. Again, it’s big change in small increments.

Perhaps most significantly, a long-term solid-waste management plan proposed by Mayor Bloomberg and adopted by the New York City Council in 2006 is revolutionizing garbage removal for the city. This plan had been championed by environmental justice activists for a decade. All Bronx residential and municipal waste—about 2,100 tons per day—was shifted from truck to rail. The Staten Island Railroad was reactivated, and household waste in that borough now travels by rail. In 2009, residential waste generated in the North Brooklyn waste shed was shifted to rail from trucks. This Brooklyn operation represents up to 950 tons of waste per day. Eliminated are an estimated forty long-haul tractor trailer trips a day and about thirteen thousand trips a year. Permits to construct new marine transfer stations are also being sought so more containerized waste can be transported by barge to rail loading points or out-of-state receiving sites. Reducing large vehicular traffic on a big scale is no small feat. At present, more than one-third of the city’s residential and solid waste is now being transported out of the city by rail.

Mayor Bloomberg not only agreed to the environmental justice civic coalition’s longtime proposals but also brought into the administration one of the leaders of that fight. Eddie Bautista was the lead organizer for the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods before he was appointed director of the Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs to oversee the Bloomberg administration’s local legislative agenda. Bautista also continues to work with administration officials on the implementation of the landmark 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan.

The extraordinary success at the three-hundred-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard—between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges—under Andrew Kimball is the clearest evidence any city official should need to understand that New York City is still a perfectly viable site for light industry and that not enough space for it exists, as more than one hundred neighborhoods are upzoned, squeezing out existing manufacturing. In five years, the Navy Yard has gone from 3,500 to 5,000 jobs in forty or more buildings. The 230 companies vary remarkably in size, with many having grown exponentially in recent years. New buildings are in construction. The waiting list continues to grow. Only one company failed during the economic collapse, and as soon as one moves out, another moves in, all this while Wall Street, tourism, and retail hemorrhage jobs.

The Parks Department’s two-billion-dollar ten-year capital plan to build new and repair old facilities is the largest ever, and its impact is incremental citywide. In 2008 alone, four hundred million dollars was spent, clearly a stimulus package of the best kind. The restoration of the historic Highbridge, a substantial new park in Elmhurst; replacement of gas tanks, an indoor pool, and a skating rink in Flushing Meadow; restoration of McCarren Pool (a beneficial Moses legacy); creation of a huge new park on the former landfill of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills; and renovation and upgrades of small parks all over town are significant quality-of-life and neighborhood investments that have nothing to do with real estate or conventional economic development projects. In themselves, however, these investments function as magnets for economic and social improvement of an area, the kind that really works. Most significantly, many of the city’s best park investments (Hunts Point, Bronx River, High Line, community gardens) followed grassroots proposals. Responding to local ideas is the highest form of government leadership.

After years of debate and indecision, the mayor also began installing 3,300 bus-stop shelters made in New York City, 20 public toilets, and 330 replacement newsstands; converted more of the city’s car fleet to hybrids; and drastically reduced parking privileges for city employees who unnecessarily added to traffic congestion.
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These are not insignificant quality-of-life and environmental issues, either; they will have citywide social and economic impacts rather than the big-bang impact of one big development project in one place.

All these governmental efforts dovetail nicely with local, private, and nonprofit initiatives. These are big efforts in modest doses spread all over town, adding up to big change. This is building on and adding to existing assets, appropriate in scale and context—Urban Husbandry at its best.