NY Magazine decrying real estate development?? Puh-leeze!!

Also, the writer’s concern about “where to put all those trees” seems pathetically Manhattan-centric… even 3.4 Central Parks is a relatively small area compared to the five boroughs. There are plenty of neighborhoods in the city with no green for many blocks.

How can pricing not be for real? Even if B’s evil endgame is all of Manhattan looking like midtown, he can not get there with a car-choked transportation network. He is fighting back the automobile, and that is all that matters right now. We can chain ourselves to old buildings later (and be glad they aren’t underwater).

PlaNYC is just that: A Plan.

The proof that Bloomberg means it, is that he will continue to push this in the budget and with the new transportation commish.

The real risk is not that Bloomberg is insincere, it’s that he’s too much of a political oddity for his successor to carry much of this through…900 days is not a long time in politics.

“he’s deferring some relatively easy fixes”-There are plenty of leaders who will take on the easy fixes. I estimate there are about 49 out of 50 leaders who will tackle the easy problems. Let them. It takes a real leader to face difficult challenges.

I also don’t think Chris Smith supported his claim that the hidden agenda behind congestion charging is to benefit developers. But let’s say this is in fact the motive. Then I think it would be fair to say, “If there is congestion pricing, it will improve the quality of life in the city. This might lead to development. If nothing worthwhile is done about traffic, quality of life will be degraded and there will be less development because fewer people will want to live in NYC.” So what’s the problem?

The problem is the mayor has two more years of his lame duck term left. This is any mayor’s period of minimum influence. Yet Bloomberg is calling on the notoriously balky and territorial state legislature to pass radical (for them) legislation that would antagonize important voting blocs and create a development fund that gives the mayor more power and the legislature less.

The clock is ticking and the legislature is expert at killing time. For opponents of congestion pricing to win, they simply have to not lose (an Albany specialty is delaying votes) and the clock will run out on the mayor.

Savvy political reporters like Chris Smith (who has been on the beat for 20 years) understand this and are focused on the things in the plan the mayor has control over.

Everybody has there own 800 pound gorillas in PlaNYC. Mine is the absence of any sort of space in the plan for industry. Ignoring the cross-harbor freight tunnel and marginalizing maritime related industries doom future employment prospects for working class New Yorkers. That this constituency will rebel against the congestion price provisions is fairly predictable, and that politicians who want their vote will pander to them is as well. Bringing Ed Ott, the municipal workers and the building trades along will not necessarily sell blue collar NYC on this vision.

Oh come now, let’s not start capitalizing “Mainstream Media” here. It’s just New York magazine, and we don’t have to rally behind anyone who may have been right on unrelated issues. I was skeptical of the airy PlaNYC too–before it included congestion pricing. Now I am thrilled that the issue is up for serious debate years before we expected it to be.

What’s the easy alternative again? Add-ons to the byzantine city building code? That is not saving the world, or even improving our lives. That is progressive bullshit. Maybe next week Mr. Smith will demand more “affordable housing” to go with his regulations that make it more expensive to build. Meanwhile, we have a decent, unexpected shot at the most promising livable streets reform of our time. We see who is willing to make sacrifices for conservation, and for whom it’s never going to be exactly the right time, the right mayor, or the right set of progressive adjectives. May the doers win.

An official who works in the Mayor’s Office told me Bloomberg has privately been convinced of the need for congestion pricing for a long time and originally wanted to introduce it last fall. His political advisers were dead set against the idea and convinced him not to go through with it then.

This official, who has briefed Bloomberg several times on various policy proposals, says the mayor is chiefly concerned with two things on any given issue: the incentives a policy creates, and how stakeholders will respond to an initiative.

Bloomberg’s reputation as a pragmatic technocrat is well established. Rohit Aggarwala openly says PlaNYC began as a strategic planning exercise for longterm land use. A real estate agenda at work? Perhaps. Land use lead to considering transportation, which lead to considering air quality, which lead to considering energy, and thus PlaNYC was born.

The constituency supporting PlaNYC is a coalition of idealists and business. The idealists recognize in the plan many ways to finally address environmental injustice, end pro-auto transportation, improve air quality, etc. Business interests recognize it as vital to their longterm financial health.

Idealists (I’m one of them) are critical in ensuring the plan achieves its social promise. But idealists should not profess shock or cynicism that business is a driving interest in the plan, either. We know this about Bloomberg: he is market friendly and ultimately views government’s responsibility as one of configuring incentives so that business and other actors in society will produce a socially optimal result.

Eric: I am also against Atlantic Yards. I want pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods near transit, and Atlantic Yards is decidedly not pedestrian-oriented.

But, as I said originally, a NIMBY is “not just against badly designed development but against smart growth in general.”

Charles,

I re-read Chris’s piece after reading the comments, and I still think his point is being misconstrued. I think he’s saying: “Mr. Mayor, don’t let the Lew Fidlers get in the way of this.” I think he supports smart growth. And congestion pricing. But he’s hoping that when all is said and done, the score is: real estate developers 50, liveable streets idealists 50, not Trump and Ratner 95, the rest of us 5. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I read it.

As for Sam Schwartz, yikes. If he hadn’t already lost all credibility when he signed on as a consultant to “Atlantic Yards,” that surely was the final stake.

Labor and construction advocates are pro-development, period. They’re strongly in favor of Atlantic Yards and anything else that gets them jobs. Don’t look to them to differentiate between sustainable, neighborhood-oriented development and the kind of high-rise nightmare Ratner and Doctoroff are pushing on us.

He’s got himself a seminal fan base, that’s for sure. I don’t read New York, but Smith’s conspiratorial drive-by on PlaNYC is unimpressive on its own. What’s the take away? That fig leaves and trojan horses are catchy metaphors? I keep reading it to see what the point is, but the best I can come up with is a different cliche: sour grapes. I didn’t think much of B either until two weeks ago, but I’m happy to reevaluate under the new, vastly different circumstances.