Too Little Information And Perhaps No Good Explanation: Can Anyone Say Why Methodist Hospital Should Be Expanding When Nearby LICH Is Closing?

Preserve Park Slope's flyer announcing the Thursday Community Board 6 meeting about the LICH expansion

I usually like to have more information before I write an article, but maybe the fact that I have so little information to provide here is evidence that the public has far too little information about some significant and very big decisions that are being made concerning development in the historic brownstone neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, and, in connection therewith, the health and hospital systems serving those neighborhoods and the rest of Brooklyn . . .

. . .  There is a public hearing scheduled before Brooklyn’s Community Board 6 for 6:00 PM, this coming Thursday, November 21st (John Jay High School, 237 7th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY).   Will the public be equipped with the information it needs to deal with it?  The hearing is about the proposed 500,000 square foot expansion of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, an expansion that will apparently increase the previously reported size of the hospital’s physical plant by about 60%.  That’s ostensibly all that the hearing is about, but mightn’t it really be about a lot more? . . .

Image from Preserve Park Slope's Facebook page showing scale of Methodist expansion in context near Prospect Park in background 

. . . At the same time very significant expenditures will be directed into this Methodist expansion, state health department officials have been involved with the intricacies of shutting down nearby Long Island College Hospital (LICH) in Cobble Hill where it borders Brooklyn Heights.  Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a public spending issue: In the end it is all paid for and financed through the insurance and government reimbursement rates for which we all pay.  In addition to LICH, another nearby hospital, Interfaith Hospital, providing services to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Brownsville, is under threat.

Selling Off Long Island College Hospital Real Estate

Recent reports in the real estate press say that the closing of LICH would put 200,000 square feet of real estate on the market but that figure apparently considers just just the land itself.  More than 765,000 square feet of medical facility space would be shut down.  Whatever the total is, it's additional to other LICH medical care facility space that has already been shut down.  In 2008, LICH doctors, alleging the hospital’s real estate assets were being looted, were able to provide a list of previously sold LICH real estate that appeared in a new York Times article:

    •    The Lamm Institute, at 110 Amity Street, fetched $6.123 million

    •    The former International Longshoremen’s Association Medical Center at 340 Court Street, which had been used as a nurses’ residence, $24 million

    •    A building at 145 Sackett Street for $3.1 million

    •    St. Peter’s Church and School on Hicks Street, which had been used as a nursing and radiology school

    •    A dozen brownstones on Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street

(See: Doctors Say Hospital Is Falling Victim to Its Own Real Estate Value, By Anemona Hartcollis, June 10, 2008.)

The article said that the real estate in the last two bullets above, the dozen brownstones plus the church and schools, were sold off for the low-sounding figure of  “about $16 million.” (The big downturn in real estate prices following the peak of the bubble came later in September of 2008.)

A Google Earth view of the LICH complex, next to the BQE, elevated and overlooking expanses of harbor just a little further on

A much more recent New York Times article about LICH, almost exactly five years later, underscored the attraction of selling off LICH’s real estate, hardly making it seem like it should be going for low values:

With its dwindling patient population, the huge red brick building in Cobble Hill stands on the border of Brooklyn Heights, with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline that make it more valuable as a real estate development site than as a medical center.

(See: Nurses Roam Empty Halls as Long Island College Hospital Is Prepared to Close, by Anemona Hartcollis, July 18, 2013.)

What a difference five years can make!  The “dwindling patient population” referred to in the summer 2013 article is due to the efforts the hospital owners are making to shut LICH down to effect those real estate sell-offs, even contravening recent court orders, but in the article five years ago Stanley Brezenoff, the president of Continuum, then the owner of the LICH, defended the real estate sales that were then transpiring in these terms:

He said that the company had no plans to close the hospital but acknowledged that it might soon be “reconfigured.”

What else was happening in those intervening five years?  Methodist was working on its plans for its expansion about two and half miles away.

The Real Estate Shell Game Model: St. Vincent's Hospital In Greenwich Village

In that article five years ago Mr. Brezenoff offered another, probably much more truthful observation:

He cited St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, which has threatened to close if it is not given permission to move the hospital so that some of its landmarked property can be redeveloped into luxury condominiums.

“What’s St. Vincent’s except a real estate strategy?” Mr. Brezenoff said.

Indeed, in the end, with administrator’s eyes on that St. Vincent’s “real estate strategy” what survived at the end of the day was a real estate deal for a developer as St. Vincent’s hospital itself went bankrupt.  See: Tuesday, December 13, 2011, Tough Luck: Heads the Developer Wins, Tails the Public Loses. . Unprincipled Upzoning for Rudin Luxury Apartments at Former St. Vincent’s Site.

When stripped down, St. Vincent’s “real estate strategy” referred to by Mr. Brezenoff essentially amounted to the use of St. Vincent’s special status as a public institution providing “charitable” public benefit to sell off a portion of the Greenwich Village Historical District so as to build at greater density than would have otherwise been permitted.  Property the hospital was divesting itself of was to become residential development.  Some of that residential development involved converting existing health facilities and some was new construction at density greater than normally permitted in the historic district.  At the same time, entirely new facilities for the St. Vincent’s hospital were to be built where a historic building was being taken down.  The new hospital building was going to be enormous and tower over the historic district.

It was all a bit of a real estate shell game.  Those who may have been motivated by the real estate profits from the switcheroos and property put into play ultimately got what they wanted, but those charged with the job of continuing to provide the public with health care services failed.  There were many confusing moving parts and that failure was probably not something that most bystanders would have thought to predict before it happened, but it did.

A developer slide showing the proposed new St. Vincent's tower with a ghostliness that disguised how it wold tower over the historic district.

Model showing more clearly the change in scale a new St. Vincent's was to bring to the historic Greenwich Village Historic District neighborhood

Looked at as if it were a single combined transaction, the shrinkage and extermination of LICH with the concurrent expansion of Methodist, the next nearest hospital in Brooklyn, reiterates virtually all the same elements seen in the St. Vincent’s real estate shell game:

   •     Hospital property will recycled to become expensive new residential development in a very desirable neighborhood,

   •     Some of that residential development may wind up being new and at increased densities greater than the surrounding historic area,

   •     Meanwhile other buildings in a historic neighborhood (though in this case not yet themselves historically designated) will be leveled . . .

    •    . . . so that new hospital facilities can be built that tower over a historic district and recalibrate its sense of scale.

In this case will the new medical facility (unlike St. Vincent’s) actually be built and will it be a success?  That depends in large part on whether the health planning that underlies these ambitions is any good.  If good planning is shunted aside by those led by real estate motivations, like St. Vincent’s, that is far from assured.

Large new Methodist building would be on Park Slope's 8th Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets

Google view of where the expansion woul dbe expected to fit in on the block on the right

Expansion building would be bigger than these existing ones

Is the Methodist Expansion Really Needed?

The public’s worry in this regard should be accentuated by the fact that Thursday’s hearing before Community Board 6 is for a real estate variance to let the Methodist real estate plan proceed and it is being requested to be put in place before the New York State Department of Health has issued a “Certificate of Need” for the expansion, and even before an application has been submitted that frames and defines what this project's developer might argue that need is.  Why?

Meanwhile, events that likely affect such planning are unfolding without any planning the public can perceive.  For instance, after the fact, wouldn’t a sale of all of LICH’s properties make the issuance of a certificate of need for Methodist a tad more credible?  But, conversely, should LICH be shut down before it is decided it makes sense for Methodist to expand?

Build and expand the Methodist medical campus at great expense at the same time other health facilities are being demolished?  No articles in the press have been covering this, but Brooklynites seizing upon the opportunity to comment on an article about the Methodist expansion in the Brooklyn Paper saw the connection immediately and spontaneously debated it at length.

Building From Scratch vs. Utilizing Existing Resources

The conservative economic approach to creating additional value normally involves building upon existing resources rather than demolishing and starting again from scratch.

Nevertheless, it is not necessarily an apples to apples comparison.  With new technologies and surgeries that are more minimally invasive, there is an ongoing shift these days to ambulatory care not requiring hospital beds.  Methodist is reportedly not proposing to add additional beds in the course of its huge expansion, but LICH has many beds.  Methodist may actually be increasing the amount of space devoted to beds so as to have more private or semi-private rooms, while not actually increasing the number of beds (this is not clear).  Even so, adaptive reuse of existing facilities is almost always the least expensive way to go.

Location of Brooklyn Hospitals In Relation To Potential Clientele

Does it make sense to consolidate the shrinking bed population into an expensive and more massive Methodist complex?  One argument that is being given for selling off LICH is that the people in the relatively well-to-do neighborhoods surrounding it are more likely to travel to the major medical complexes of Manhattan for those significant medical needs they can shop for and premeditatedly plan for, thus bypassing the services of LICH except in an emergency.  Do the administrators of Methodist believe that the more super complex they seek to build in Park Slope will survive such an argument to the extent that it is true?  Or do they view themselves as being an extension of the Manhattan complexes because they are part of the growing Presbyterian network that includes the original Columbia Presbyterian complex?

My understanding is that Methodist has historically done well being able to draw from the reasonably wealthy surrounding Parl Slope area, but would a larger, built-up Methodist start drawing the Brooklyn client population that the LICH executioners say go to Manhattan?  If not, Methodist, like LICH or Interfaith, is left to draw from two remaining sets of client populations, those who need emergency care and those looking for local convenience in getting the kind of care that they feel can be dependably delivered without going to a major medical center.

Those two client population sets don’t benefit from a consolidated Brooklyn complex; they benefit from dispersed provisions of resources.  Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has issued a report as Public Advocate on the reduction of emergency response times if LICH or Interfaith are closed (see illustrative images below).   In terms of local convenience, Methodist is near a stop for the F and G trains, further from others, and difficult to get to by car.  Overall, it is not that convenient.  LICH is a little more accessible by public transportation, and, just off the BQE, more accessible by automobile.

In the future the nearest emergency room might be somewhere else a lot further off

LICH emergency room ambulances

Unknown Expense of Methodist Expansion

I have referred several times to the expense of the Methodist expansion.  What is that expense?  Interestingly, as the public debates these matters Methodist has produced no figures for what its expansion will cost.  That concealment of such critically relevant information is an indication that they don’t want the public to know or think about the expense and that the expense itself is a strong argument against the expansion.

Elsewhere in the system where the Presbyterian network has submitted a Certificate of Need (go to page 41) for a similar ambulatory faculty (including maternity hospital space) to be located at 1283 York Avenue (an extension located across the street from NYP-New York Weill Cornell Center Campus facilities at 525 East 68th Street in Manhattan) its estimated cost is $830,020,454.  Without making too fine a point of guessing the unfurnished Methodist cost figures, that Manhattan facility is comparably sized with a total floor area of 568,801 square feet.

Public vs. Private Expenses and Matters of Interest

Rather than furnish information about what the cost of the project will be Methodist has issued statements (including in its project fact sheet):

Financing

NYM intends to privately finance the project.

What that actually means is unhelpfully vague in world where PR descriptions are plastically used to describe the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” arena as privately paid for when it is financed by municipal bonds and a diversion of New York City’s tax revenue stream.  In 2004 municipal bonds issued by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (still outstanding), financed Methodist’s adjacent 100,000 square foot expansion.  It is likely that this new expansion would be similarly paid for by this low cost, taxpayer-subsidized source and certainly no enforceable promise that this would not ultimately be the case.  No matter what, in the end, the insurance payments together with public reimbursements from programs like Medicaid and Medicare, mean that these directed income streams are paying for all the capital improvements in our health care system.  In fact, that’s why health facilities are regulated and the state Department of Health issues Certificates of Need.  Without properly submitted plans at the state level New York cannot get the kind of waivers for funding it needs at the federal level.

It is interesting how protestations that enterprises are “private” are being used to keep the public out of decisions that concern it.  The publicly financed New York Public Library (note the word “public”) largely paid for with taxpayer dollars has also asserted that it should be able to make unimpeded decisions because it argues it is a “private” institution.

What's Planned, What May Happen, A Seismic Detour?

While the Methodist expansion costs may edge into the billion dollar territory and will further cost Park Slope by ripping its historic brownstone fabric, the bang-for-the-buck may be questionable.  Methodist is asserting that of the 300,000 square feet of programmable space in the proposed new building, 220,000 square feet would be used to relocate and concentrate existing services offered by Methodist, and only 80,000 square feet -- just a bit more than 25% -- would be used for expanding services.  See 1st attachment to the BSA application (letter from NYM Sr VP explaining programmatic need), at page 4.  A net gain of only 80,000 square feet?  Mightn’t it then be better to build something far smaller and cheaper, perhaps only adding 80,000 square feet of new services and leave other services where they already are?

But, if the expansion occurred in the fashion Methodist is now requesting might Methodist not actually give the existing space from which it says it will relocate these functions, or might it expend to reoccupy those spaces later?  Things don’t always happen as planned.

Methodist is not now proposing to expand in the way that was originally contemplated when the current zoning was established.  That similar alternative, discussed as an as-of-right alternative, would involve Methodist building on top of an above-and-underground parking lot built back around 2004, as they previously said they meant to do.  Methodist officials say the don’t want to go forward with their original plan because changes in the seismic provisions in the building code which the garage doesn’t meet would make this difficult:

A development consultant from Washington Square Partners said that building on the parking garage would be difficult because of a seismic building code.

(It don’t fit: Residents blast Methodist building plan, by Natalie Musumeci, The Brooklyn Paper, July 12, 2013.)

The relatively smaller existing Methodist buildings on Park Slope's commercial 7th Avenue

A very long paragraph in the Environmental Assessment Statement (Bottom of page K-8) under the heading, “COMPLYING DEVELOPMENT BUILDING SEGMENT OVER EXISTING BELOW-GRADE PARKING GARAGE” makes it seem all the more formidable with sentences like:

Next, the floors and the columns of the existing garage would be demolished because the necessary seismic retrofitting is not possible and the existing columns and foundations are not adequate to support the new 10-story structure that would be constructed on this portion of the site for the Complying Development. Minimal additional excavation would be required since the depth of the existing below-grade garage is already near the required depth of the proposed building. 

A garage recently built for the purpose of being the foundation for a future medical facility and it was not properly designed to withstand earthquakes?  Irrespective of whatever changes there have been to the New York building code with respect to potential seismic activity that seems like poor planning.  If inconvenient to build on it now would Methodist someday in the future build on this parking lot?

Some of Methodist's existing smaller buildings on 7th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue are cleverly scaled and styled to fit in fairly well with brownstones across the street

The Methodist Rationale For Not Taking Over LICH: Superior Methodist Management

It is my understanding that when Methodist officials have been asked why they shouldn’t take over LICH and its facilities instead of building its expansion they cite the superior management of Methodist.  But if management is the sole difference then a transplant of management would seem to be the solution, unless they mean that poor management at LICH has somehow compromised the LICH real estate and other physical assets.  It would seem unlikely that would really be the case.

Toomas M. Sorra, M.D. of Concerned Physicians of LICH tells us that he doubts those commenting negatively know anything “about the physical plant at LICH,” that:

the physical plant has never been an issue, the issue is SUNY's systematic destruction of LICH via closing departments, services, etc.

For more about the looting of LICH’s assets in Noticing New York articles see: Friday, February 15, 2013, Last Night’s Community Meeting To Save Long Island College Hospital- Pictures And The Big Picture and Wednesday, February 13, 2013, One-Stop Petition Shopping: Report On The Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting, LICH and Libraries.

The proposition of getting rid of LICH is not just a question of getting rid of its management or its physical plant.  It is a move that also gets rid of existing staff and potentially unions.

Unions

Right now, in the sort of world we live in, unions provide one of the best, most stalwart defenses when a public asset like LICH is threatened when it should be preserved.  Unions, not always guaranteed to behave altruistically, can also introduce friction against changes in the status quo when such changes might benefit the public.  But, as in the case of conversions of public to charter schools, getting rid of unions represents one more thing that some may even have as a covert but important goal: As labor force pay scales decrease, the ability to jettison a union represents the elimination of bargained-for improvements in worker's lives.  If you come to things with a Bain Capital mind set this may be favorable viewed as “creative destruction,” or it may just be another expression of opportunistic greed.  The problem is that what is happening with our hospitals is already complicated enough without having also to take into account that these motivations also lurk in the mix to complicate matters further.  

One Roof or Two?

Is it really important to bring everyone to one location under one roof?  In upper Manhattan the Presbyterian runs the Allen Hospital which is about 2.9 miles north of the Columbia Presbyterian campus (with which it has integrated function), about the same distance LICH is from Methodist.

The Methodist Expansion Intrusion Into the Scale of Park Slope

7th Avenue on left.  8th Avenue on right.

Methodist provided drawings above from which the perhaps 17-residential stroy equivalent height of the building on 7th Avenue is difficult to calculate and discern.  Above the reverse: 8th Avenue on left.  7th Avenue on right.

What does the scale currently proposed for Methodist mean for Park Slope?

•    The new building, measuring from the down slope 7th Avenue side, is approximately the equivalent of 16 or 17 conventional residential stories.  The height as measured from the up slope side is 146 feet and the slope adds about 15 or twenty feet of height to that.  The Methodist materials seem like they were prepared to obscure that fact and make the measurements for the 7th Avenue side difficult.

•    The new building will likely be visible from Prospect Park.  As yet, there no visual representation showing what that will look like.

•    At least fifteen Park Slope townhouses will be sacrificed.

As Preserve Park Slope points out on its “Frequently Asked Questions” page, “For comparison, less than 1% of all the buildings in Park Slope rise above five stories, or about 50 feet.”  Preserve Park Slope also has an online petition: Oppose the Mega-Complex Being Proposed by New York Methodist Hospital.                   

Methodist rendering showing a view of the building not on context of the surrounding buildings of one third the height 

Again: Where's the neighborhood?

The renderings of the expansion released by Methodist show its building close up, not in the context of being three times the size of these surrounding buildings.

Townhouses on 8th Avenue across the street from where new Methodist Building would stand.  New building would eb three times as tall.

The scale at which people in Park Slope are accustomed to living happily?

From Preserve Park Slope- Does this image suffice to convey how the new hospital building would be three times the height of the 8th Avenue townhouses across the street

Another image from Preserve Park Slope

Any tall development comes with shadow studies.  See below. 

Here is a very short shadow study video animation from Preserve Park Slope: Shadow Study- Preserve Park Slope Preserve Park Slope.

 

Some advocates for development would assert that we should relentlessly proceed to levels of ever greater density and that, accordingly, greater and greater density for Park Slope is inevitable and desirable.  Maybe not.  Charles Montgomery has a new book out on the benefits of urban living, including the fact it apparently makes people happier: “Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.”  Even as he suggests that urban density helps people to be happier, he says that, based on surveys, there is a Goldilocks zone were people are happiest.  People living in cities are happier than those living in suburbs, but those living in city towers are not as happy as those living in more low-rise environments.  See: Does City Living Make Us Happy? Leonard Lopate Show, Monday, November 04, 2013

Google view showing how close the huge expansion would be to Prospect Park

A Bing version of that evidence

What might the expansion look like from Prospect Park?  Still guessing exactly.  Preserve Park Slope generated this image.

Insufficient Information To Reach The Right Decisions

Is Methodist’s big expansion the right decision for Park Slope?  Further, is it right for Brooklyn to close down other hospitals like LICH and Interfaith at the same time?  I have my suspicions that the answer is “No,” but I think that I and the rest of the public have a problem weighing in on these things at the present time because too little information has been furnished.  And yet hospital and state officials would proceed in closing LICH and would give the real estate approval needed to expand Methodist without such information being supplied.

I have asked Methodist a number of questions, intending to make this article more informative.  They have not replied.

What would I suggest to Community Board 6?. . . That it demand, at a minimum, that a Certificate of Need package be supplied before it considers what Methodist should be allowed to do with its real estate.  In addition, the future of LICH and Interfaith should be looked at in the context of an overall plan for Brooklyn’s hospitals.  That’s not where we are at the moment.

Where we are headed at the moment is the de facto implementation of what may be some pretty strange results, without having given any public consideration as to their likely lack of common sense.

Noticing New York's Testimony at Tonight's Hearing on the Draft Scope of Work for the DSEIS for Forest City Ratner Atlantic Yards Mega-monpoly

At this evening's hearing

This post may be updated with a few additional comments and certainly with a link to Atlantic Yards Report coverage of the hearing this evening (no doubt quite thorough) for the court-ordered redo of the environmental impact statement for Atlantic Yards which was necessitated because the original EIS did not take into account how much longer the meg-project would truly be likely to take.

The testimony of Noticing New York was actually delivered in two segments during the evening because of the three minute limit for oral comments.  In addition to the comments you see below, I extemporized a bit when I resumed to deliver the second half of my comments in order to refer to the comments of Deb Howard of the Pratt Area Community Council describing the kind of nearby development that has occurred in Brooklyn in a bad economy absent the kind of interference of Forest City Ratner that has more or less halted development nearer to the vicinity of Atlantic Yards.  While extemporizing, I also pointed out how many of the people testifying during the evening were there as a product of living with a Forest City Ratner together with their apparent inability to imagine alternatives to it.  That includes the few union laborers who showed up to speak on Ratner's behalf despite the his double cross (see footnote at end of testimony).

Another important note. There was some pretty devastating testimony from Michelle Del la Uz and the Fifth Avenue Committee.  It was something that had not previously occurred to me: That, because of gentrification, the delay and extended schedule Forest City Ratner has been able to command for itself (by virtue of being a monopoly) build will totally change the income levels (raise them) of those for whom apartments will be provided, disqualifying the lower income families who would have been eligible to qualify (albeit already dispiritedly small group given the tailoring of the CBA to benefit the developers courtesy of ACORN) and shutting out many black families because of the structuring of the lottery that will apply.

Coverage by Atlantic Yards Report, including a fuller description and video of the above is available here: Friday, March 01, 2013, Hearing on Atlantic Yards environmental review: critics suggest other developers be considered to achieve ten-year buildout; Forest City supporters urge removal of review roadblock (but avoid timetable).

The following is Noticing New York's testimony. 

* * * * 

February 27, 2013

Empire State Development Corporation
(Atlantic Yards)
633 Third Avenue, 37th Floor
New York, NY 10017
atlanticyards@esd.ny.gov.

Re:    Draft scope of work for the DSEIS for Forest City Ratner Atlantic Yards Mega-Monpoly

Dear ESDC:

This comment is being offered in the name of Noticing New York, dedicated to the insistence on good economic development policies in New York and the proposition that developing New York and appreciating New York must go hand in hand.  I offer this testimony as an attorney experienced in real estate, as an urban planner and as former senior government official who worked for more than a quarter of century in the areas of public finance and development for the state’s finance authorities.

    •    This hearing on the necessary dismantling of the Forest City Ratner Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly is long overdue.  As every economist knows, it is axiomatic that you can’t negotiate with and you can’t effectively regulate a monopoly.  You can’t even enforce legal documents, which explains why Empire State Development Corporation CEO Marisa Lago indicated in her public statements that she expected that Atlantic Yards will likely take on the order of four decades to complete even though the legal documents (then unreleased) call for its completion in twenty-five years or less. How much longer the community will be blighted beyond what was addressed in developer PR and in the complicity-flawed and manipulated EIS is a large part of what this hearing is about.

    •    This hearing and the revised scope of the EIS will be insufficient unless it considers the full scope of the Forest City Ratner mega-monopoly whereby governmental support and subsidy is suppressing economic activity and competition in Brooklyn.  Atlantic Yards is not truly a 22-acre project: Forest City Ratner has been governmentally assisted in acquiring more than 30 contiguous acres over which it is exercising exclusive rights, 19 towers, not 16. .  an arena plus two shopping malls.  When you also include other nearby property where  Forest City Ratner is getting government assistance to squat over the borough’s major subway lines, there are currently more than 50 acres of exclusive rights.

    •    The developer PR put out in preparation for this hearing pushes the importance of the tepidly-tempered notion that public reaction to the so-called “Barclays” arena (named after a disreputable bank) has not been quite as negative as predicted.   Gee, after inviting the world to gawk at the glitz of the Ratner/Prokhorov arena, that heaped pile of pirate plunder representing what has been stolen from the community and the deep subsidies diverting public resources from everywhere else, and the news pushed out is that the reaction to all that glittering treasure in one place hasn’t been that negative? Whoop-dee-do!  That’s damning by faint praise, not to mention that problems during construction were far worse than predicted.

    •    In fact, Atlantic Yards is a rolling disaster area.  In the mid-‘90s when I was at the New York State Housing Finance Agency, the Affordable Housing Corporation and the State of New York Mortgage Agency I worked with the New York Housing Partnership to provide subsidy to Forest City Ratner for Atlantic Commons immediately adjacent and to the north of the Atlantic Yards site.  As state agency officials we scrambled and strove to do everything we could to push the envelope, prioritize and ensure that Forest City Ratner got subsidy for that site and, at the time, it made sense to me because we were filling in a hole, blight going back to 1960 created by urban renewal clearances that, after decades, had been left gaping and unfilled.  I especially believed that we needed to do something because I had also been asked to help find solutions for the aftermath of that government bulldozing more than a decade before, in the early ‘80s when I was at the New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC).  Little did I know that no sooner had we finally succeeded in this government effort to fill in the destruction, than Forest City Ratner would use that success we furnished as a launching pad to renew and extend the decimation of the urban renewal area, expelling competing owners and developers from the vicinity.

    •    This is a rolling disaster because, with the new decimation of the landscape, those who succeeded me at HDC faced a decision, ultimately debasing to the standards of government and ethics, about whether they would reward Forest City for such actions with additional subsidy, a decision they should not have made and which they should not have been forced to make.  Why did they have to make it?: Because the Atlantic Yards has been handed to Forest City Ratner as a presumed extension of its monopoly rather than divided up for bid amongst multiple developers like Battery Park City.  (See my HDC hearing testimony: Wednesday, July 18, 2012, Noticing New York's Hearing Testimony Re New York City Housing Development Corporation's Subsidization of Ratner's Atlantic Yards Mega-Monopoly.)         

    •    Important Footnote: When we financed Atlantic Commons we put back streets and sidewalks that urban renewal had removed, something that should now be done in dealing with the Atlantic Yards site. 

    •    This is a rolling disaster because it has created a self-feeding cycle of corruption.  Atlantic Yards Report articles have described in fastidious detail all the ways the Forest City Ratner environment harbors a “culture of cheating” besmirching the many government officials it draws in.  Worse than that, I have watched as what was once illegal has been treated as if it is now legal and acceptable, the abuse of government’s tool of eminent domain for private purposes being just one aspect of this.

    •    This is a rolling disaster because the unfair power advantage enjoyed by Forest City Ratner has been extended, the cocked playing field tilted even further, including through influence over BIDs, by having other neighboring landowners shoulder the taxes, special assessments and BID contributions from which Forest City Ratner gets exempted.

    •    It is a rolling disaster because the continued deep, exclusive and self-perpetuating cycle of subsidization of the Ratner mega-monopoly turns city, state and federal money* into a launching pad for, and lure to, other nefarious developers for similar land grabs and abuses of the public trust.  Would we have asset-stripping at Long Island College Hospital (LICH) or the underfunding and selling off of our libraries were it not for the way that the Atlantic Yards abuses have been tolerated?  Some are even glorifying the impunity of it all.  The impact of continuing to assist such social disequilibriums must be addressed in the environmental impact statement.

(*  The diversion of subsides and resources for Ratner’s benefit are everywhere.  The Brooklyn Navy Yards, intended to incubate new businesses to provide jobs, has turned space over to Ratner for modular operations allowing it to avoid paying construction workers on site.  Rather than use an empty, subsidized parking lot for black cars clogging streets around the arena, public street space is turned over to arena use.  This list goes on.)   

                                Sincerely,

                                Michael D. D. White

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the evening was that BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music sent a representative to support the Ratner monopoly.  BAM refuses to provide a forum for any films that are critical of development practices in Brooklyn

(Updated 02/28/2013 to refer to the testimony by the Fifth Avenue Committee.  Updated 03/032013 to include link to Atlantic Yards Report  coverage.)

Last Night’s Community Meeting To Save Long Island College Hospital- Pictures And The Big Picture

One segment of last night's crowd convened to save LICH

Last night’s “Community Forum on the Future of Long Island College Hospital” (LICH), really a rally in support of saving the hospital with the dissemination of some strategy, was very well attended.  (It was held at the Kane Street Synagogue, 236 Kane Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.)

I am going to let the images here speak for themselves about that.

What I heard at the meeting was this:

    •    The community needs its hospital.
    •    The doctors and financial staff affiliated with the hospital are pretty well convinced they won’t have problems operating the hospital in the financial black if SUNY Downstate would just leave them alone to do it, thank you very much.
    •    That the integration of LICH into the SUNY Downstate system, which was ostensibly for the purpose of ensuring the future of LICH, has had the opposite effect.
    •    That instead of a good faith effort to run LICH as a successful hospital, a plan of asset stripping was being implemented almost immediately.  That meant, among other things, that no money was invested in the hospital with any significant expenditures being made (theoretically for the hospital) directed exclusively to portable assets that could easily be removed from the site when the secretly envisioned closure that was being worked toward takes effect.
    •    That to those in power pursuing this course of action, the attraction of shutting the hospital down  is to create a real estate deal, a sell-off, that will strip the real estate as the final asset out of the health care resources available in the surrounding neighborhood.   This doesn’t recognize that, when used for a necessary community hospital, the real estate has greater value to Brooklyn’s Northwest communities than the construction of more high-end condos.  (Elsewhere in Brooklyn, including at the other end of Brooklyn Heights, - with sort of a bookending effect- public property is similarly being sold off to shrink the library system for the purpose of creating real estate deals.)

More analysis and a petition to prevent the closure of the hospital is available here: Wednesday, February 13, 2013, One-Stop Petition Shopping: Report On The Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting, LICH and Libraries.

The crowd standing to chant "Save LICH"

State Assembly Member Joan Millman, whose petition is available to sign to save LICH, addressing the crowd

Panoramic collage of those Millman is addressing  (click to enlarge)

 

Senator Daniel Squadron

At the very back from the viewpoint of Lincoln Restler

Briefing press

Filled to the back

Middle

Front

Signs at the ready to be raised

One-Stop Petition Shopping: Report On The Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting, LICH and Libraries

Sent in by a NNY reader: The morning crowd waiting for the Brooklyn Heights downtown library to open

The Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting was held Monday night and the big news of the night concerned two items of significant concern that are remarkably similar in theme and associated suspicions about underlying mischief on the part of theoretically charitable institutions misconducting themselves.

Each concern is the subject of online petitions furnished at the end of this article for one-stop shopping purposes.  You can scroll down and click on each link to sign the petition and amplify the voice of the Brooklyn community.  (You don't have to be from Brooklyn to sign though!)

One of these two events involves, the selling of Brooklyn Heights’ downtown library as part of a city-wide mayoral program of defunding New York City libraries and shrinking the library system at a time of increasing public use, city growth and increased city wealth.  The new priority of the library system has apparently become the creation of real estate deals for real estate developers.

The other event involves the selling off of Long Island College Hospital (LICH), the only hospital for the community in the immediate vicinity, once again, because there are those who are salivating to create real estate deals.

Theme For An Entire Evening

The guest speaker of the evening was Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez who spoke concerning the importance of President Obama’s pitted battles with Republicans who are right now intent on restructuring the federal budget for the plutocratic benefit of a few at the expense of the rest of us.  In other words she was speaking about matters on a federal level quite parallel to the principal local concerns of most of those attending the meeting.

Connecting LICH With The Libraries: Jane Jacobs And The Drive For Real Estate Deals

Brooklyn Heights Board President Jane Carroll McGroarty, was the one who, connecting the issues of concern, spoke to the assembled gathering about the LICH and library matters.  She did so, making a link I think she was brilliant to recognize, to precepts renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs explored in one of her least-read books:  “Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics,” (1992).*

I’ve written about those precepts here: Sunday, June 24, 2012, Sports Glummery.

(* There are those of you who may find this article on the wonky side, long and detailed in terms of law, public policy and urban planning.  That's because much of the evening's content was wonky and because this kind of analysis is what is necessary to protect the public interest when others with power are conniving against it.  You can also, if you wish, just skip down to the bottom of this article to sign the petitions without further reading.)

What Jane Jacobs wrote about in "Sytems of Survival" has very on-target application to the LICH and Library situations where those who should be protecting the public wind up not doing so because they get distracted, when they shouldn’t, by lucre.  The only problem is that, if you haven’t yet spent some time with them, the concepts in that book could be a little abstruse for an auditorium crowd.  At one point Jacobs uses the word “immiscible,” which is a way of describing things like oil and water that don’t properly mix.

Here’s what I said before:

The book, which as its title indicates, is about the morality of systems, convincingly argues the flaws of trying to mix things that should not be mixed, particularly mixing business enterprises with government and politics, because the moral systems that apply to each must necessarily remain different and incompatible (so much for the current fashionability of today’s “private-public partnerships” like Atlantic Yards).

    * * * *

Jacobs’ book is full of other examples of what happens when realms that should remain distinct (together with their associated moralities) improperly intermix, so that one gets what she calls “monstrous hybrids.” Most typically the examples she gives involve an improper mixing of business and government (but there are also examples of improperly mixing charity and business). [I went on to cite examples.]

BHA Board President's Remarks On LICH And Library

Here is what BHA Board President McGroarty said:

In closing, I want to comment on two new and very troubling events that are affecting our neighborhood.

The first is the likely closing of the Brooklyn Heights branch library because, according to the spokesperson for the Brooklyn Public Library, the facility needs millions of dollars of repairs and upgrading.*  The plan would be to turn over the site to a developer who would demolish the existing structure, build a new branch library in the new building while the business library would be removed to Grand Army Plaza.

[Polite shouts of  “No” from the audience]

[* The cost of the repairs may be the subject of exaggeration by library with a pattern of exaggerating reports of decrepitude.  The main cited repairs being talked involve the HVAC system that at one point I understand was estimated to cost $700,000, and is now estimated to cost $3 million.  Other repairs library officials say they have been able to identify might bring the total for repairs up to $9 million.  The Brooklyn Paper somehow misreported that the HVAC repairs alone would cost $9 million, implying that total costs would be millions more. $12 million? $15 million?]

The second event is the decision by Downstate and the SUNY board to close Long Island College Hospital . . .

[Polite shouts of  “No” from the audience]

 . . . which will leave a giant hole in the health care needs of residents of Northwest Brooklyn.  

SUNY claims it’s losing money operating LICH, but a letter from Carl McCall, president of SUNY, to our elected officials details the financial problems with the SUNY University Hospital, not LICH.

Many people feel that the underlying agenda is to allow SUNY to sell off the valuable real estate at LICH for development.  The final decision about LICH will be made by the New York Department of Health and, ultimately, by Governor Cuomo.  There’s information outside with the contact information for both of those individuals if you want to write or email the Department of Health or the Governor.

In light of these two institutional closings, I am reminded of the late Jane Jacobs, who wrote about two basic systems which have been developed to foster human achievement and success. One is the commercial or the entrepreneurial system, including fields like trading, business and  science.  The other is the guardian system, such as government, education and the military.  Both are necessary and both work best separate from one another.  (emphasis supplied)

It seems to me, using Jacobs’ construct, that there’s an imbalance today between the two systems, fueled by the notion that every property ought to be put to its highest and best use, in spite of any common needs that a society might have.  This imbalance has put the caretakers and guardians such as City Planning. Community boards, Landmarks, other nonprofit institutions, at a financial disadvantage as they struggle to perform their mission in society.

In the case of LICH, no one is asking how we can maintain this important and viable hospital.  But, instead, there is ample evidence that the facts are being skewed in order to accomplish the entrepreneurial goal, not the caretaker goal.  In the case of the library there appears to be an intention to continue its mission by building a more centrally located* business library.

[* What “centrally located” would mean is relative.  The proposed new location of the library, in a residential neighborhood would be a lot less central to the borough’s “CBD,” (“Central” Business District), one of the largest in the country, less central to Brooklyn’s main transportation hub and less central to the universities now near it.]

I would hope that any deal would include a healthy sum from a developer for the Brooklyn Public Library’s endowment.  We shouldn’t be in such a hurry to sell off assets so cheaply.

This concludes my report and I will be happy to take questions after our community awards and our guest speaker.

As I will get to in a moment, and as you can well imagine, many in the audience who had come to address the LICH and library issues that evening were very eager to ask those questions, particularly to ask about the stance the BHA will be taking to protect the community.

The Hazards Of Developer-driven Partnerships and Mixed Agendas (Per J. Jacobs)

First, let me comment that the reference President McGroarty made to Jane Jacobs’ “Systems of Survival,” although it may possibly be regarded as somewhat abstruse, is very apt to make the point that the infiltration of entrepreneurial greed is not good when it is allowed to reset the priorities of what should be “charitable” institutions.  Those institutions are supposed to be looking out for the general public welfare.  Jacobs' analysis cautions us about how the danger of that not happening is extraordinarily accentuated when one risks mixing the “immiscible” with so-called “private-public partnerships” where government functions get taken over and driven by private developer agendas.

So my first assumption (which I wanted to confirm in the ensuing questions I expected Ms. McGroarty would answer at the end of the meeting) was that the BHA would object to any developer-driven “public/private” partnerships if the library site gets redeveloped.  The library system has actually stated that it is interested in such a partnership and that it is not ruling out that such a partnership would be with Forest City Ratner, a development firm renowned for its expertise in manipulatingly abusing such setups for their own agenda.  As the Brooklyn Heights library property (as is another in Brooklyn) is immediately adjacent to existing Ratner government-assisted property, I have noted that the library and its demolition may be in Ratner’s sights.  During the cocktails that followed the meeting I was informed by people who have dealings with the library that the secretiveness of the library's management about what is going on gives a vibe that there is already a handshake deal for the city to give the property to Ratner (likely on a no-bid basis).

Frustrating Public's Purpose When The Public Gives Money To Charities: Money Exits Out The Back Door Via Accounting Gimmicks  

The other thing I wanted to address with President McGroarty in the open meeting was the possibility that the BHA might be tempted to think it would be smart to negotiate to have money from a library sale put into the library system’s endowment, something that would be an absolutely meaningless tactic.  (Ms. McGroarty had said: “I would hope that any deal would include a healthy sum from a developer for the Brooklyn Public Library’s endowment.”)

One of the huge frustrations in dealing with these “charities” that depend so much on taxpayer-funded cash flow to operate is how much we are ultimately at the mercy of those elected officials in control of the bigger picture, Mayor Bloomberg in the case of the libraries and Governor Cuomo in the case of LICH.

Mayor Bloomberg is underfunding the city library system at a time when usage is up, 40% programmatically and 59% in terms of circulation.  This intentional underfunding helps make the real estate deals the Bloomberg administration is looking to hand out plausibly defensible.  If members of the broader public wanted to thwart this tactic by collectively donating extra funds to the libraries it wouldn’t work, because Bloomberg has already decided at what level he wants the libraries funded and he can simply subtract out a dollar of city funding for every dollar the public donates to try to close the gap between supplied and desired services.  If you understand accounting and how money is fungible you will understand that putting money into a library endowment fund is meaningless.  The only thing the public can meaningfully negotiate for is that full, proper and complete funding for the library system resume.

One way we will know when this has happened is when, like the (bankrupt) city of Detroit, the (wealthy) city of New York is keeping its libraries open longer hours, not closing on weekends, and staff is rehired.

LICH is similarly frustrating.  Many will remember a remarkable story that unfolded at the end of the 1990s.  An unostentatious Brooklyn Heights couple, who few guessed to be wealthy, died possessed of enormous wealth.  They were the Othmers, Donald and Mildred.  He was a chemical engineering professor.  She was a former teacher and a buyer for her mother's dress stores and a charitable volunteer.  They had invested their savings with Warren E. Buffett, an old family friend.  When Mrs. Othmer died she left $340 million to five institutions serving the community in Brooklyn:

    •    Polytechnic
    •    Long Island College Hospital
    •    The Brooklyn Historical Society
    •    Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, and
    •    The Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Long Island College Hospital had already received a large sum of money when Mr. Othmer died four years before his wife.  (See: $340 Million Windfall in Brooklyn; 5 Institutions' Happy Problem: How to Spend the Money, by Jim Yardley, February 04, 1999 and Staggering Bequests by Unassuming Couple, by Karen W. Arenson, July 13, 1998.)

It is absolutely clear that the Othmers intended to benefit the community interests in Brooklyn they cared about, but in a story that is much too long and complicated to recount here the money they left to LICH was raided, siphoned off by Continuum Health Partners.

The community has complained how subsequent infusions of cash for LICH seem to have vanished.  One minute LICH is reported to be operating in the black and the next it is supposedly in the red.

Hospital accounting is far too mysteriously malleable and complicated.  I’ve written about this before when writing about St. Vincent’s Hospital, another example where people running a hospital took their eye off the ball, salivating over a shell-game real estate deal: The hospital went bankrupt and what survived was the real estate deal.  When I was a lawyer in government one of the things I used to do was finance hospitals.  In fact, I worked on the financing of LICH.  I was involved in the negotiations and policy review that applied when the community gave up parkland (there was a swap involved) so that LICH could have a new parking garage.*  At the BHA meeting one audience member astutely suggested that the parkland be given back to the community (rather than used for high-end condos) if LICH is ultimately closed.

(* This is remarkably parallel to the situation with the 42nd Street Library: Bryant Park was sacrificed, closed for over 4 years, in order to have a functioning research library, but the library’s research stacks are now being sacrificed for the sake of a big-bucks real estate deal.) 

The New York State Department of Health regulates hospitals and seeks to ensure that good health care is delivered throughout the state. At the same time, DOH also does everything it can to hold down the cost of health care. Here is what Noticing New York observed when talking about St. Vincent’s:

Hospital accounting in New York State is far from easy, counterintuitive and, at best, can only be understood by experienced insiders. Regulations involving highly complex reimbursement formulae force hospitals to operate constantly on the brink of artificially narrow and rather manipulable profit margins.

(See: Wednesday, October 8, 2008, The Subsidy Ball: The Rudin/St. Vincent’s Proposal.)

The net, net of all of this is that, just as with libraries, it is not sufficient for the community to pump money into an institution to save it because that money can be made to disappear with accounting tricks.  The only thing that works is to demand government’s commitment to making the institutions work.

What's Required From BHA To Protect The Community Respecting The Library 

I was never able to ask President McGroarty the questions I wanted to ask about how the BHA plans to protect the Brooklyn Heights community in the face of the proposed sale of the library because after Nydia Velazquez spoke, Ms. McGroarty, announcing the meeting was over, did not take questions as many of us thought was supposed to happen. (It would not have made sense to speak to Congresswoman Velazquez on the subject because the federal government has little involvement in the running of local libraries.)

Here is what I was prepared to ask questions about although I likely would have gotten only as far as protecting against a developer-driven project, barring Ratner from participation and limiting the size of the replacement building.  If the list of bullet points below appears detailed I guess that flows from the many years I spent in public service as a government lawyer negotiating to protect the public interest.  (When I was around that was the policy.)

I was going to ask whether the Brooklyn Heights Association was planning to insist on the following:

    •    No developer-driven “public/private” partnerships to build a new library to replace the existing one.  (That’s only if it is ultimately determined that it is a good idea to tear down the existing library to redevelop the site.)  In shorthand terms that means that the replacement building, particularly the library would be fully designed before it is bid.  Among other things this would curtail possibilities for bait and switching.

    •    Forest City Ratner, a developer who has a proven track record of abusing the so-called “public/private” partnerships, should be blackballed and barred from bidding on the property.  Other developers with a bad record can be similarly barred form bidding.  (Barring Ratner from bidding also has the public policy benefit of no further government promotion of the government-sponsored Ratner mega-monopoly.  Besides, Forest City Ratner should not undertake anything new in the city until Atlantic Yards is either turned over to other developers or finished.)

    •    There should be multiple developer bids for the property, at least six or more.  (The city should not be telling other developers not to bid via behind-the-scenes messages and absurdly short bid-response time frames.  In a truly open bid environment you will get lost of bids.)

    •    The library should not be shrunk in size to something less than exists now.  As any redevelopment would be part of an ongoing increasing in density in Brooklyn Heights and the surrounding area, thought should be given to specifying that any replacement library should be larger in size commensurate with neighborhood growth.

    •    The Business and Career library should not be moved from its Downtown Brooklyn site in the Central Business District, a hub of transportation, and location near the universities.

    •    There should be no selling off of any real estate used for libraries until appropriate funding to the library system has been restored.  This should be an absolute precondition and by taking this position it will put the Brooklyn Heights Association where its should be in terms of providing a united front of communities around the city, not just looking out for an enclave of a neighborhood.

    •      The library should be sold with a deed that specifies:

    •      The existing zoning cannot be changed to permit a bigger building, for instance greater density than presently permitted.  Similarly, the ability to seek variances to do the same sort of thing should also be hemmed in.

    •        Notwithstanding any imports or transfers of development rights the building will not be taller/bigger than the Brooklyn Heights Association thinks it should be, perhaps the 40 stories that have apparently been the subject of some discussion internally amongst library personnel, maybe something less, 35 stories or 28, whatever.

    •        That provision would be enforceable by the city (meaning more money would have to be paid if it was ever waived) and, for insurance purposes, would also be enforceable by the Brooklyn Heights Association.

    •    Any temporary transition library would have to be open at least as soon as the existing library were to close.  It would have to be substantially as good, not smaller and not have less staff.  So long as this is assured, assurance that the new library will open within the predicted time frame will be relatively unimportant.  It should be recognized that any additional costs of having the temporary transition library reduce the benefit of the transaction and should therefore be identified in advance.  The proceeds from the sale of the property should exceed these costs.  In addition, if the new library is not in place by the agreed upon date then all of those additional costs should be borne by the developer from that date on.  That will also amount to an incentive to complete the reconstruction on time.

    •    Normal construction rules should apply (not like the Atlantic Yards Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” arena).  There shouldn’t be special permissions for the developer to engage in loud and brightly illuminated construction 24/7.   The Brooklyn Heights Association should be able to enforce compliance.

Accountability of  Elected Officials To The Public And The BHA

Could the Brooklyn Heights Association demand all of the above?  Absolutely, and they should demand each and every one of the above.  That’s what a neighborhood association is for.  Was the Brooklyn Heights Association once able to demand that the neighborhood not be bulldozed for urban renewal?  Indeed, it once did and it largely (though not completely) succeeded.

This is not the same thing as a private developer looking to build a project as of right where the only restrictions would be the zoning code.  These are public assets that are being dealt with, the land underneath the library and the library itself.

The real estate belongs to the city.  As such the mayor and the City Council need to decide how and whether it is appropriate to dispose of the property, and specify, as they regularly do, what deed and other restrictions should apply.  The mayor and the city council are accountable to the public (which includes the Brooklyn Heights Association) in this process and will be subject to a ULURP review so that the public can make all of these recommendations.

The library system (this part of it being the Brooklyn Public Library sub-system) owns the library assets other than the real estate.  For all intents and purposes the current library "boss" is the current mayor, who appoints almost a third of the system trustees.  The same number are appointed by the current Brooklyn Borough President, whose entertainment charities are funded by the mayor’s personal private Bloomberg L.P. “charities” and by the Mayor’s Fund of The City of New York which the mayor controls.  And the library depends on the mayor for its operating funds.  The public, including the Brooklyn Heights Association, is entitled to demand accountability.

If there is a planned no-bid crony-capitalist deal with Ratner now in the works it might actually die on the vine when made subject to the above standards.  That, however, would not be a bad thing.  It would be a god thing.  If there is a deal to be made that wold actually generate enough benefit to make it genuinely worthwhile to the community it would survive these tests.

More information and links respecting what is happening with the libraries can be found here:

    •    Saturday, February 9, 2013, Libraries That Are Now Supposedly “Dilapidated” Were Just Renovated: And Are Developers’ Real Estate Deals More Important Than Bryant Park?

The Petitions

Here are the two petitions concerning keeping LICH open and preserving the libraries I recommend everyone sign.  I would think that because the essential issues are intrinsically the same anyone interested in signing and passing around one of the petitions would also be interested in signing and passing around the other.

    •    Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction

    •    Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYS Health Department Commissioner Dr. Nirav Shah : Keep University Hospital Brooklyn at Long Island College Hospital open, by  Assemblywoman Joan Millman