Mayor Mike Bloomberg is stepping boldly into the Lower Manhattan development mess. The New York Times reports, and the lead local story in all papers is, that the Mayor has named 4 new people, all influential members of his administration, to the Lower Manhattan Development Board (LMDB). Governor George Pataki has responded in kind by naming two new directors of his own to the 16 member board. This is all shaping up as a pitched battle for the character of lower Manhattan with the Mayor arguing for mixed use with a strong residential component and the Governor backing the gigantic developers (read: Larry Silverstein) and the big corporate tenants they hope to woo back to the site.
The key issue here is whether lower Manhattan will be developed for business tenants almost exclusively or whether the area will become a new residential neighborhood. New York City needs more, better, and affordable housing. Will the Mayor’s strategy for the WTC site in itself make the city more livable? No. But it is a move in the right direction and is on track with earlier trends. Prior to 9/11 there was a natural movement afoot to make lower Manhattan more residential. In a city with an undeniable need for affordable housing, expanding residential neighborhoods or creating new residential neighborhoods is a critical municipal project. After 9/11 the question of how lower Manhattan will develop became a matter of planning. Now the urban planning fight is in the LMDB and this is likely to be the issue of Bloomberg’s second administration.
As NY1 reported recently, Bloomberg is coming late to the game and his plan has obstacles to overcome. Lower Manhattan is not going to become a residential village. But it still could have a lot more residential apartments and a lot more small retail space to serve those apartment dwellers. There is a master plan weighted toward business development, but it can be tinkered with. Pataki, Silverstein, and Senator Schumer should consider this.They should also reflect on the fact that it is one thing to build the commercial space and it is quite another to fill it.
One of Bloomberg’s new appointees to the LMDB is Daniel Doctoroff who forms an interesting bridge between the Mayor’s botched and ill-advised plans for the West Side stadium and his new vision for the World Trade Center site and the whole lower Manhattan neighborhood. If you recall, Doctoroff headed up the West Side stadium plan (for the New York Jets, but also the cherry atop the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games offered to the International Olympic Committee). That plan was killed in Albany by a regulating state authority. At the time, Bloomberg’s pubic approval rating was very low and he had slipped behind mayoral contender Fernando Ferrer in the polls. Since June, Bloomberg has recouped his standing in New York City in part by promising to devote attention to the World Trade Center site. Two weeks after a clear, 20-percentage-point victory in the mayoral election, Bloomberg has done as promised and has shown that he is willing to spend a lot of energy and political capital on the development of lower Manhattan. Now Doctoroff is back in the mix, this time backing the right plan.
It has been a long, strange trip from the West Side fiasco—Does this city need the Olympics? Does this city need a newly sited sports stadium?—and the Mayor has clearly wasted valuable time and overlooked critical opportunities. However, and thankfully, Bloomberg is now making an effort where it is needed and in a way that will benefit the city.
That whole situation reminds me of a larger version of the debate over Chicago Sun-Times. So after decades of debate, the city’s willingness to take a $20 million financial hit resulted in a plan for Block 37 that, to some people’s surprise/chagrin, does NOT include a casino (so far). Groundbreaking happened just this week for a development including a new building for CBS and a CTA station. I’m still not sure why we need another connection for “non-express” service to the airports. I thought Chicago’s public transportation system had the “non-express” market cornered. And while the new ice skating rink a few blocks away in Millennium Park is swank, I’ll still miss watching the Skate on State crowd that filled Block 37 during the winter and the Gallery 37 kids who made art there during the summer.
[...] Michael of the blog you-are.us predicts that the ââ¬Åurban planning fightââ¬? over how much of the rebuilt lower Manhattan will be commercial rather residential will be the biggest issue in Bloombergââ¬â¢s second term. He also points out that the appointment to the LMDC board of Doctoroff, who headed the efforts to bring the Olympics to NYC, ââ¬Åforms an interesting bridge between the mayorââ¬â¢s botched and ill-advised plans for the West Side stadium and his new vision [for] the World Trade Center site and the whole lower Manhattan neighborhood.ââ¬? [...]
The lingering, the expense, the pretense of public involvement–yes, there is a comparison between Block 37 in Chicago and the WTC site in NYC. Much has been written about how, since the demise of the likes of Robert Moses, urban planning is a mess of public and private interests where, because of series of compromises and ad hoc agreements (some barely legal, if legal at all), projects are realized that hardly suit anyone’s purpose. With no master plan and no urban vision, many current urban projects become a hodge podge of interests in which there is ample room for graft yet little chance that anyone beyond the contracted firms will be pleased with the end result. No one wants a second Robert Moses in NYC (or Chicago) and few would want to scrap the scrappy community boards who sometimes kill or mutate decent projects with their tenacious NIMBY attitude. But Block 37 and the WTC site are examples of how urban planning today often does not work.