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.

Tough Luck: Heads the Developer Wins, Tails the Public Loses. . Unprincipled Upzoning for Rudin Luxury Apartments at Former St. Vincent’s Site

Below is Noticing New York's testimony furnished yesterday to the City Planning Commission in connection with Rudin Management Company's proposed special upzoning of a portion of the Greenwich Village Historic district so that the company may construct a larger luxury residential condominium tower than otherwise permitted. The testimony concerning the request that involves a history of events that very significantly includes the bankruptcy and ultimate demise of the St. Vincent's Hospital is self-explanatory.

* * * *

December 12, 2011

Amanda Burden
Chair, New York City Planning Commission
22 Reade Street
New York, NY 10007
via e-mail to aburden@planning.nyc.gov

Re: ULURP application for Rudin Management Company’s proposed rezoning of the former St. Vincent’s hospital campus
Dear Ms. Burden:

I am writing with respect to the above referenced proposal before the Commission to allow Rudin Management Company to privately benefit by side-stepping zoning that requires a lower of residential development for its above referenced site and applying to itself instead a special upzoning intended exclusively for the development of hospital buildings because of the public purpose they serve.

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.

For my testimony before the commission I am restating my testimony before the September 15th Community Board 2 hearing, below.

I am also attaching and including as part of my testimony to you the article I wrote about that hearing and my testimony, together with a follow-up article I wrote concerning public hearings for big New York real estate projects:

• Wednesday, November 2, 2011, Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process.

• Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Public Hearings For Big Real Estate Projects: Refining Your Sense of the Absurd.

I invite you, in order to appreciate the bigger picture, not only to read these articles but also to visit it where it is posted on the web so as to make full use of all the amplifying interior links it makes available. One thing the articles make clear is how completely and rightly opposed to the Rudin proposal the community is although it is acknowledged that there is very little likelihood that the Commission will be listening to the salient points that we or the community make. - - Nevertheless, I invite you to prove me wrong by turning down the Rudin proposal.

This testimony I am furnishing will also appear on the web with links.

I am also expanding my testimony to compare and contrast the testimony furnished in connection with this matter by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (consistent with Noticing New York’s) and the testimony furnished by the Municipal Art Society of New York (inadequate as will be discussed). That comparison and contrast follows the restatement of Noticing New York’s Community Board hearing testimony below.

Noticing New York’s September 15th Community Board 2 Hearing Testimony

• Why do we even need to be here to consider this question?

• The Rudin/St. Vincent’s real estate deal was a very complicated shell game designed to cash in using the hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. That was a bad thing and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted other 501(c)(3)s to follow suit notwithstanding that there were some who favored this as a way to subsidize the hospital at the expense of the integrity of the zoning code and landmark preservation law.

• The shell game failed when St. Vincent’s failed. One lesson that can be taken away from that failure is that with all the complicated rigamarole and professional energy being put into that subterfuge the eye had been taken off the ball- - In basic terms, the hospital for whom all this bending of the rules was being done was not being properly managed.

• The moral is to stick to basics, to keep your eye on doing right what needs to be done. In this case, it’s a question of proper and consistent enforcement and administration of the zoning code. You can’t get pulled off course by shenanigans.

• If Greenwich Village needs to be upzoned then thought needs to be given to doing that in a thoughtful way throughout the community as a whole.

• You can’t hand out a special up-zoning as a consolation prize when a developer fails to pull off what was a fairly nefarious deal to begin with.

I believe that the testimony furnished by Andrew Berman as Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation accords significantly with Noticing New York’s criticism of this proposal because it focuses on the “particularly profound” issue of principle that is proposed to be violated if this proposal is approved by your commission. And that is why it quite rightly references the unleashing of the free-for-all, Wild West, open-Pandora’s Box situation we will be in if your commission does not adhere to principle. To quote from the Berman testimony:

Our fundamental, overriding concern with the requested rezoning is that a private developer, seeking to construct luxury housing on the site, is seeking an upzoning, using the current zoning density which was allowed specifically for the construction of a hospital in 1979, as the baseline for the new allowable density. This is wrong, not just for this site, but for the city as a whole. If the increased density granted for the development of public service facilities, such as hospitals, can, in whole or in part, as proposed here, be used by private, for-profit developers in the future, we are opening a deeply troubling Pandora’s Box with profound potential consequences for the entire city. If the City Planning Commission approves such a change, it is in fact putting in place a tremendous incentive to allow greater density of development for public service facilities which can later be exploited by private developers when the facility no longer exists, is forced out, or is bought out.

That issue of principle is really the whole of it: Private developer Rudin should not have conferred upon it private benefit from the extra density which was granted to St. Vincent's in order to meet a public purpose that will now not be met and with which the Rudin development has absolutely NO connection. If there is one respect in which Noticing New York’s testimony perhaps diverges from GVSP’s testimony above it is to be absolutely clear that the bamboozling shell game that was played initially was wrong and unprincipled and would have remained so even had St. Vincent’s Hospital not gone bankrupt in the course of the confused misdirection of focus.

That issue of principle zeroed in upon by the testimony that the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation provided is not only the essential whole of it, it is also the hole in the doughnut of the testimony provided by the Municipal Art Society: Somehow MAS manages to provide testimony that dances around and so doing leaves at its core a void of unaddressed principle. In so doing, it consigns itself to irrelevance by suggesting that everything now is about playing a standard developer’s game of negotiating collateral prettifications when principles are violated to seize the public realm and override basics such as zoning. By engaging in those negotiations everything becomes a matter of mere degree and all track is ultimately lost of what is fair and balanced. In retrospect when all is said and done and some ersatz “compromise” is achieved, who will remember how much MAS “won” of what it “fought” for. All that will be remembered is that MAS simply participated in trotting out a familiar list of things that politically-connected developers like to negotiate about as distracting eyewash when they ride roughshod over rules and protections: affordable housing, a little bit of park space, reduced parking.

This is not to say that the huge amount of parking Rudin is proposing to introduce into Greenwich Village via this single project isn’t ludicrous: It would certainly destroy the neighborhood to introduce it as the norm. Affordable housing and park space are also nice but they shouldn’t be introduced into conversations like this as distractions that disguise the importance of what is going on.

In its testimony MAS invokes its past: “Throughout all of our work, MAS has long history of engagement in Greenwich Village.” But without guts to take on the flouting of principle, is MAS really the same MAS it was in the past?

Here is a clue: Elsewhere in its testimony MAS mentions an earlier fight, partly won and (not acknowledged) partly lost, praising, I think inappropriately, the work of its current Chairman, architect David Childs, brought in to complete both the Time Warner Center and the Freedom Tower:

In 1987, we lead the fight to scale back a proposal for a massive tower on the site of the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, thus leading to the creation of one of New York’s most iconic buildings, the Time Warner Center.

The commission may conceive that pragmatism is the thing that is providing the counterweight to principle as it considers this matter. That is not the case. Pragmatism isn’t what is rearing its head here; what we are witnessing is crony capitalism.

After the 2008 financial crisis people were frequently observing that we no longer have functioning capitalism in this society and that we no longer have a level playing field. What we have now instead is crony capitalism. In this regard people noted that with the government bailout of the banks after the risks undertaken by the banks soured, what we got was a privatization of profit with a socialization of risk. The proposed Rudin plan is essentially a version of this page from the crony capitalism game book.

A Rudin masterminded shell game was being played. It was very complicated and not truly defensible. But to recap, the idea was that St. Vincent’s Hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status would be used in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. As inappropriate, unprincipled and unfair as it was, everything was predicated upon a new St. Vincent’s Hospital being created and that hospital being subsidized via an infusion of some of the cash value of selling off a portion of the Greenwich Village Historic District. That plan had certain inherent risks, one of them being the risk that materialized. . . that the hospital would fail. Obviously, our argument is also that the Rudin plan may have contributed to that failure even without that being its intention.

When the risks of the Rudin plan materialized the plan should have ended. Instead, the proposal now before the commission is to rescue Rudin from the materialization of risk inherent in a plan of Rudin’s own design. The private sector will be protected and rescued by the government sector. At the same time there will be no public benefit from a hospital; there will be no government sector rescue of the public in this regard.

The only reason to protect Rudin by salvaging this deal now that the original shell game has collapsed (with no hospital being provided) is that Mr. Rudin is a member of the politically-connected 1% Club. That is the way that crony capitalism works, as will be demonstrated by the commission if it approves this proposal.

Sincerely,


Michael D. D. White

Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process

(Above, Daniel J. Kaplan, senior partner with the architectural firm of FX Fowle presenting the Rudin/St. Vincent's project at the September 15th Community Board 2 hearing.)

When I heard Bill Maher on his Real Time show a week ago offer his thesis about the futility of the forms of participatory democracy into which we are routinely channeled by those with the political upper hand I couldn’t help but think of the public hearing process in New York City with respect to big real estate projects. . . I am not thinking about all real estate projects, but the “done deals,” the “wired deals” involving those you know are the politically connected heavyweights.

Maher On the Wish of Plutocrats: Channel The Opposition To Do It THEIR Way So They Will Lose, Outgunned By the Plutocrats’ “Lobbyists and Suits.”

(Bill Maher, above, commenting on futility of plutocratically-preferred process.)

Maher was speaking about the complacent assurance of plutocrats that they’ve cornered the political market and therefore can expect to have the Occupy Wall Street 99% boxed in, just so long as the opposition movement can be channeled into the regular and routine forms of civic contest. Then plutocrats know that the 99% “will lose” if they can be channeled into the normal ways of doing political battle, says Maher, because “the other side [the plutocratic side] has all the lobbyists and all the suits.” Or, as Rachel Maddow observed in the same conversation, when the 99% does it the way the plutocrats would like, an out-gunned 99% can be ignored.

That’s why, says Maher, the plutocrats are intent on having the opposition do it THEIR way. (See: Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Bill Maher: Right Wing, Wanting It THEIR Way, Yearns To Get Occupy Wall Street On THEIR Unlevel Playing Field of Lobbyists and Suits.)

Maher didn’t say the “plutocrats”; he said the “right wing” but he was clearly talking about those who want the Occupy Wall Street 99 percenters not to have any power. The reason I substituted “plutocrats” instead of “wealthy” in my paraphrase is that, just because you are one of the wealthy doesn’t mean that you believe that wealth should rule; it’s the “plutocrats” who promote that belief.

Chris Hedges on OWS Charlie Rose Show: Try Voting Against Goldman Sachs and You Will Be Ignored

What Maher was saying sounds like what Chris Hedges said discussing Occupy Wall Street on an edition (October 24) of Charlie Rose where he and Amy Goodman were guests. Hedges, it should be noted, contributed his “No excuses left. It’s now or never” essay to the first issue of the Occupy Wall Street Journal, an unofficial house organ of the protest.



(Click above to watch the video of the Charlie Rose program discussion.)

On the Rose program Hedges described a world where it “doesn’t matter what the citizens think,” where what Goldman Sachs wants, Goldman Sachs gets because: “There is no way to vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs.” Hedges was saying that “There is no way to vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs” by way of specific example speaking about the 100-to-1 phone calls in opposition to the Wall Street bailout but his remark can also be taken as a central metaphor. He didn’t mean, I don’t think, that you actually can’t “vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs”: We still have a system where people certainly can vote. What he almost certainly meant was that if you “vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs” your vote will simply be ignored because, as Bill Maher might analyze it, your vote doesn’t count in a system where “the other side has all the lobbyists and all the suits.”

Atlantic Yards Not the Best Example

Atlantic Yards is probably the fist mega-politically-connected-project that comes to mind when thinking about big New York real estate projects where the public’s wishes will be ignored but it is not the best example of what I am talking about. In the case of Atlantic Yards the public processes of participatory democracy, public comment and review were changed, substantially eliminated and strangled via the intervention of the state’s Empire State Development corporation to override local zoning and public review procedures such as the city’s ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedures) process. Note that the state ESDC (now, in a continuing PR shift of names calling itself just “ESD”) never comes in uninvited by the locality's chief executive officer. That means that Mayor Bloomberg bears substantial responsibility for the ESDC override too.

While Atlantic Yards is not the best example of the public being channeled into conventional participatory processes so they can then be ignored, it is a good example of the tinkering around the edges that occurs as things are engineered when the powers-that-be want a preordained result. Had those in power not had some appreciation of how massively objectionable to the public the Forest City Ratner project was likely to be they might not have decided to override standard public review process to deliver the deal to Ratner.

Example Set By Columbia’s Takeover of West Harlem

The Columbia University takeover of West Harlem, so similar in so many ways to the Atlantic Yards aggregation of monopolistically owned acres, is a better example of how the routines of participatory democracy can be followed while those in the political driver's seat feel safe that the public, to the extent that it could not be manipulated, can be ignored.

It isn’t quite that the public is entirely ignored. Measures are taken (I referred to the `tinkering around the edges’) to tailor presentations and produce a project aura as acceptable to the public as can be managed. That is so there will not be an unnecessary expenditure of political capital, but the bottom line is that, whatever precautionary analgesics are administered in the process, when push comes to shove the intent is to ignore the public and shove the deal through.

Other examples of tailoring projects for the interests of the real estate industry abound: the Coney Island rezoning, the Willets Point eminent domain abuse, the DUMBO Walentas Dock Street project, the faltering of the vision to overhaul Penn Station as the proposed new Moynihan Station, and the list goes on.

Current Example: Rudin/St. Vincent’s Hospital Project

Notwithstanding the magnitude of the Atlantic Yards and Colombia West Harlem takeover insults, the project that was most on my mind recently in terms of ignoring the community in order to shove through a connected deal is the Rudin/St. Vincent’s (formerly Hospital) project.

I attended the Thursday, September 15th Manhattan Community Board 2 public hearing on the St. Vincent's/Rudin Rezoning Plan, at the LGBT Community Center at 208 West 13th Street. What was remarkable about the hearing was that the proposal being considered at that hearing remained on the table at all. The Rudin Management real estate corporation was seeking a substantial upzoning of a portion of Greenwich Village, the former St. Vincent’s campus east of 7th Avenue so as to build a larger residential development than the Greenwich Village zoning permits.

To review the history, the way this preferential upzoning, an example of spot zoning, even got on the table all had to do the community previously being told to expect an improved St. Vincent’s Hospital in return for the sacrifice of accepting it. It’s complicated but, essentially, the old St. Vincent’s Hospital was participating in a manipulation to leverage its nonprofit or 501(c)(3) status into the creation of extra real estate rights (density and zoning override) for the benefit of a private real estate developer looking to build a very large project on some of the city’s most valuable real estate.

I would say that the deal was all about the real estate benefit for the private developer, not about tending to, sustaining, or managing the community asset of the hospital.

What happened? Before the convoluted real estate deal that was in the works for the Rudin organization could be completed St. Vincent’s Hospital was suddenly declared bankrupt.

One might think that with the bankruptcy of the hospital the elaborately complicated deal being careful shepherded through many city agencies, (the Landmarks Commission, the City Planning Commission, the City Council, and as herein mentioned, Community Board 2) would evanesce. To the chagrin of the community all that disappeared was the one element of the deal that was at all attractive to any of its community, the notion that in exchange for the community’s sufferance of a big new luxury real estate development it would get a hospital providing quality health care.

Public Opposition, And Nothing But, At Rudin/St. Vincent’s Hearing

The strangeness of this state of affairs was compounded by the additional strangeness or surrealism of the hearing. It was announced at the outset of the hearing that 24 people had signed up to speak against the project. Slightly more actually wound up speaking against it although not everyone signed up to speak against it was actually there to speak when called (including attorney Al Butzel) and one person at the end of the evening passed on her opportunity. Most spoke with great passion. Nobody spoke in favor of the proposed special upzoning for the Rudins. In fact, at the hearing’s conclusion, when checking if there were any additional people in the room wishing to testify it was perfunctorily asked whether there was anyone who wanted to make a statement in favor of the Rudin proposal. “Do you think anyone would dare to?” the community board member presiding asked after a pause, and the audience twittered at the patent absurdity of the question.

Notwithstanding this universal and passionate opposition to the project there was a thoroughgoing expectation amongst virtually all that the upzoning was going to be granted anyway. This was not only the expectation of the frustrated members of the community speaking to the board, it was also the expectation of some of the politically savvy board members seemingly in the know. (They confided this to me.)

Despite this expectation of approval some of the community board members put the real estate professionals representing the developer on the spot with some excellent questions for which they did not have good answers. Those questions essentially boiled down to different variations of why?: Why was there any reason at all to give the special benefit of a different and inappropriate zoning for a luxury residential project providing no community benefit, the land for which, bought out of the bankruptcy, was probably obtained at a discount with full understanding of the traditional zoning that has always applied?

The two real estate professionals there to represent the developer were Melanie Meyers, a partner practicing in the area of land use with the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP and Daniel J. Kaplan, senior partner with the architectural firm of FX Fowle.

( Melanie Meyers at the hearing above.)

The frustration of the public in attendance was so high that the entire hearing and board meeting almost broke down a number of times.

It’s true that not all those speaking against the approval focused on why specifically an upzoning was bad. Many instead were justifiably riled by the lack of focus to restore a community hospital. When speakers veered to this subject they were reminded by board members that the hearing was about the upzoning not about the hospital but the missing hospital was the unexorcizable ghost in the room. To be fair though, wasn’t the concept of having hospital inextricably entwined in the all details of the devilishly complex deal that had been originally proposed?

Still, maybe the board members were absolutely correct: The upzoning and the provision a hospital should be kept separate, and had that admonition been heeded all along this presumptiously proposed override of Greenwich Village’s zoning, ignoring the community’s clear consensus, would never have gotten a foothold. And there’s another thing: If these things had been kept separate perhaps the community would still have a hospital. This was raised in Noticing New York’s testimony provided at the hearing which we will get to in a moment.

Up Against the Wall Street Journal Spin?

In case it might have been unclear what the public gathered at the meeting that day were up against or who could be expected to listen to whom, that very same day an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal to which many of those giving testimony referred: September, 2011 St. Vincent's Site Moves On: Rudin Family Obtains Financing for New Complex on Former Hospital's Property. That article, very supportive of the project, was about how the Rudin project had “obtained $525 million in construction financing” observing complimentarily that the “project's success at obtaining financing is unusual in today's market.”

Without any mention that the community view might be that the demise of the bargained for hospital ought to be a game-changer the article is heavily structured around several ornamenting quotes from William Rudin, chief executive of Rudin Management, about how the Rudin family is inclined to “resist efforts” to cut back the project size or make other changes, like including affordable housing. Together the quotes and the article imply that the Rudins have reached the end of a protracted process that was all about giving in to the community. Mr.Rudin’s quotes: “It's been an interesting saga, to say the least” . . . “We think that we have responded in a very positive way to all the concerns that have been expressed to us before,” (before the hospital was subtracted out?) . . . “We believe that this project should move forward as proposed.”

One of the community members testifying said he could tell that the article had been written by the PR firm SKD Knickerbocker. Funny. SKD Knickerbocker has also been involved promoting Atlantic Yards. There’s more available on that and their activities in general.

To Whom Do You Address Your Remarks At A Hearing Where Those In Authority Will Ignore You?

By the time I got up to deliver my Noticing New York testimony a procedural question had clearly been raised several times by the cries of the crowd in attendance. To whom would I address my remarks, the community board member or to the crowd directly? Several of the previous speakers had already been chided by the attending audience for not speaking directly to them. It is an interesting conundrum: Speak to those you feel are destined to ignore you or speak instead to those willing to take your words to heart but don’t have the power to do anything about it. . . and you will be preaching to the choir. The attending crowd had not been granted the formal power that the community board members had to vote and pass along its recommendation to the City Planning Commission and the City Council. Nor did the crowd have the power not to be ignored, but then that is power that the community board didn’t have either.

Community boards are comprised of board members accountable to local politicians.* Buy the local politician to whom a board member is accountable, buy the borough president, and you have almost bought the board member. I say “almost” because there can be a difference but consider the meaningfulness of it: Community boards, responding to their communities voted against the Yankee Stadium project and against the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment. They were responding to their communities but then afterwards they suffered vengeful purges of their members, respectively, by Bronx Borough President, Adolfo Carrión Jr. and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

(* Community boards consist of up to 50 unsalaried members selected and appointed by the Borough Presidents for two year terms with half of the appointees nominated by council members representing the district. Additionally, city council members whose council districts cover part of a community district are non-voting, ex-officio board members.)

So if you were a Community Board member confronting a wired deal what would you do?: Vote conscientiously to represent the community’s interest or give it up and live, instead, to fight another day? Would your spine be stiffened, would your decision be any different thinking of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zucotti Park?

As for the local politicians, the public present at the community board meeting the night of that hearing was getting an interesting message which they were swift to remark upon, taking their own roll call to enforce the point: The local politicians usually so quick to present themselves at meetings where important issues came up were all AWOL that night. Though several speakers made remarks pleading that their representatives not succumb to the lobbying of real estate interests the elected representatives were not there to hear them. It was noted that Laura Morrison, chief of staff for State Senator Tom Duane was there and the city council representative, Christine Quinn, president of the council had representatives who were booed with an especially raucous loudness, much louder than any that signified disfavor or other politicians not in attendance. Quinn and Duane had both delivered statements in favor of the original Rudin/St. Vincent’s proposal, critically instrumental in getting that ball rolling.

In other words, oughtn't those politician now be taking corrective action for their own past deeds?

Jane Jacobs: Arrested For Her Demonstration In Protest When Those At a Hearing Were Destined To Be Ignored

To whom to address one remarks at a public hearing such as this figures prominently in a famous story about how activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs was arrested when she protested because it was clear that a hearing respecting one of the iterations of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway was going to be merely pro forma, or worse, and that those testifying were destined to be ignored. There are multiple versions of this story. The one that I initially knew was that Jane Jacobs, because she knew those testifying at the hearing were being ignored and not listened to, intentionally unspooled the tape the stenographer was making of the hearing.

This version appears in the book, “Shaping the City: New York and the Municipal Art Society” (1995) by Gregory F. Gilmartin wherein the author also notes the incident of Jacobs’ arrest was the reason the Municipal Art Society refused to give Jacobs an award for her life’s work (although it now honors others with the award of Rockefeller Foundation “Jane Jacobs Medals”) (p.392):

In a celebrated incident Jacobs appeared at a public hearing and unwound the stenographer’s tape: without a record of the proceedings, the city was forced to schedule another hearing. . . .

. . . . Jacobs act was prompted by desperation and she had concluded that since the city had no intention of actually listening to the opposition, guerrilla tactics were fully justified.

That version is elegant in the simplicity with which it makes the point that when you’re engaged in a process the purpose of which is to ignore you, it is appropriate to step outside the box and call into question the process itself, perhaps even with some well-targeted civil disobedience. I think, however, I will accept as much more authoritative the more nuanced version I read in Roberta Brandes Gratz’s excellent “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs” (2010) where, in an appendix to the book, the details respecting Jane Jacobs’ arrest is described at length in Jacobs’ own words transcribed from tapes of conversation she had with Ms. Brandes Gratz.

In Ms. Jacobs' words (although this is edited way down to convey only the essential gist from the full account in the Brandes Gratz book):

A very curious thing was occurring. I was used to hearings at the Board of Estimate where the microphone for the speaker faces the people holding the hearing, the ones going to make the decision. The speaker’s back was always to the audience. At this hearing, however, the microphone was directed the other way. . . . The speaker’s back was to the officials. This was symbolic. The hearing was being held with the idea that it was necessary for people to let off steam, not that would have anything that would be instructive or informative for the hearing officers whose minds were plainly made up. . .

* * * *

So I decided that at least I would send them back to Albany with the message that we really didn’t like this, and since talk would never be that kind of a message, since they didn’t hear anything, I planned to walk across the stage and let them know that I was not content to remain down there talking to my fellow citizens, that I wanted to give them an immediate message. And I said, anybody who wants to come with me, come along . . .

* * * *

. . . And pretty nearly all the audience got up and began to follow me as I walked across the stage. That’s all I was going to do, walk across the and down the other steps. And this threw them into the most incredible tizzy. [Ms. Brandes Gratz notes that Jacobs laughed “with obvious enjoyment of the memory.”] . . . You never saw people so frightened. . . .

* * * *

As I came up on the stage with I guess pretty nearly all the audience coming along too, everything was quiet, absolutely quiet, except the chairman, a state engineer, kept yelling, “Officer, arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!”

* * * *

[Then with Jacobs sitting down and the chairman blocking the traffic on stage. . ] The woman with the stenotype had jumped up in alarm— nobody was even making an ugly face— and her tape was all running out, and she grabbed her stenotype So people began picking up this tape that was all around now and sort of tossed it around. That was all that was happening, and this eerie silence and sort of leisurely kind of confetti, it was surrealistic, because nobody was tearing it up or doing anything violent, just wafting this paper and the engineer was yelling, “Arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!”

The Jacobs account goes on with ensuing details about her arrest (She says to the policeman, “They’ve got their minds made up; they’re just trying to do us in,” to which he understandingly responds “Aren’t they though.”). There is great confusion about what to charge Ms. Jacobs with but at her arraignment the prosecuting authorities try hard for and fail to get “what they wanted most”: “They wanted the judge to order that I could not address any meeting or take part in activities until my trial.” Her lawyer successfully argued that Jacobs could not be “enjoined from exercising my normal, peaceful civil rights.”

Ms. Jacobs’ account does not say the record of the hearing was destroyed. Instead she says that the authorities wanted to deceptively fib that there had been damage to the stenotype machine, but they were problematically faced with the need to minimize “what was destroyed of the record”:

They couldn’t make a big thing out of that because it would not have been a valid hearing. And actually, very little of that paper was gone, obviously, because they still had a big transcript.

(Ms. Brandes Gratz’s book states that the above description of Jacobs’ arrest is supposed to be put up on the web at: Center for the Living City (centerforthelivingcity.org), though it does not seem to have been posted there yet.

Speaking When You Will Be Ignored: The Validity of Process

It is hard to think what is appropriate to do at a hearing when it is clear that the hearing is being held with no intent that your testimony will be listened to or even heard. What do you do when those holding a hearing tell you that your remarks will not be transcribed, that those holding the hearing don’t know who the decision makers are, what will be done with your testimony and how it would be used, or how, if the testimony was not transcribed, it could be part of the record. This was what happened to me at a recent hearing on whether Forest City Ratner could add to the size of their 50+ acre mega-monopoly via the seizure of additional street space alongside the Prokhorov/Ratner (Barclays) basketball arena. These are such elemental defects of process that they ought to call into question the very validity of such odd hearings. (See: Wednesday, October 5, 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg In the Regalia of Queen Elizabeth I? Noticing New York’s Testimony at the DOT Hearing on Atlantic Yards Bollard Plan.)

Noticing New York Testimony at the Rudin/St. Vincent’s Community Board Hearing

In presenting my testimony at the community board hearing on the Rudin/St. Vincent’s project I tried to handle the question of whom to speak to and whether I would be be listened to as best I could. Making a reference to “theater in the round” I tried to stand where I would be addressing everyone, both the community board members and the audience. I said, “I'd like to do a 360 here but I also know that the decision makers, those who are going to make a decision for which they are going to have be responsible are the members of the community board.” and so it was to them I principally directed myself.

Here are my testifying remarks:

• Why do we even need to be here to consider this question?

• The Rudin/St. Vincent’s real estate deal was a very complicated shell game designed to cash in using the hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. That was a bad thing and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted other 501(c)(3)s to follow suit notwithstanding that there were some who favored this as a way to subsidize the hospital at the expense of the integrity of the zoning code and landmark preservation law.

• The shell game failed when St. Vincent’s failed. One lesson that can be taken away from that failure is that with all the complicated rigamarole and professional energy being put into that subterfuge the eye had been taken off the ball- - In basic terms, the hospital for whom all this bending of the rules was being done was not being properly managed.

• The moral is to stick to basics, to keep your eye on doing right what needs to be done. In this case, it’s a question of proper and consistent enforcement and administration of the zoning code. You can’t get pulled off course by shenanigans.

• If Greenwich Village needs to be upzoned then thought needs to be given to doing that in a thoughtful way throughout the community as a whole.

• You can’t hand out a special up-zoning as a consolation prize when a developer fails to pull off what was a fairly nefarious deal to begin with.

On Being Ignored: Noticing New York’s Recommendation

It is frustrating to be ignored. That’s why the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations commanding attention at Zucotti Park are so inspiring. But what do you do when you believe you will be ignored. The noticing New York position on this is not to cease participating in available process, not to stop voting. But there is a need for a greater ferocity of outrage and commitment when confronted by such situations, a need to drink in and internalize some of the energy of protest one sees at Occupy Wall Street. That extends to calling into question the very validity of participatory processes when the game is rigged, when the other side ignores the rights of the majority, complacently assuming it will inevitably and easily win because they have all the lobbyists and all the suits.

Do Bill Maher's Most Recent Remarks Present Any Insights About What To Do?

(Above, Maher on Friday night with Ron Christie reacting to his remarks.)

This past Friday night Bill Maher returned to repeat his point once again (as he was talking with Republican author Ron Christie about 40 minutes into the program):

My point I was trying to make last week is that the Republicans don’t want them in the streets, the people, because they would like them to fight the way THEY fight, with lobbyists, where they will lose.

* * * *

When the original Red Coats. . . didn’t like it when George Washington and his troops were fighting behind trees, you know, not fighting in a straight line with red coats where they can be SHOT– It’s the same thing with these people. They’re not fighting FAIR in the way they will LOSE by going to Washington and getting a lobbyist: They’re in the streets! It’s the same way you guys are all saying about Obama, “Oh, he’s out campaigning. He’s not governing!” Yeah, he’s not sitting in Washington giving you guys bills that you’ll crumple up and throw away. He’s taking his case to the people. Is there something wrong if you are not winning with one tactic . . . . Is it so wrong to try the other tactic where you might be able to WIN?

What tactics might actually work? I’m not sure I know. But I do know it is remarkably strange to be sitting around having frustrating conversations about the tactics that will work to win, or even simply avoid being channeled into processes where you are destined to be completely ignored, when you are the majority, you are the 99%.

The 99%? At least in terms of our relative economic standing and, in the case of the Rudin/former St. Vincent’s project hearing, there was nobody at that community board hearing wanting to make a statement supportive of the project, unless you count the two`suits’ in the employ of the developer.

Guess what?: On October 20th Community Board 2 voted against the Rudin/St. Vincent’s project. That’s not what was predicted. (See: Rudin's St. Vincent's plans get rejected by community board, October 21, 2011, The Real Deal.) Now it remains to be seen if the City Council and the City Planning Commission will ignore the community board as was the situation with Yankee Stadium and Atlantic Yards.