(Above, an example of how AIANY's postered Greenwich Village subway hall promoting subsidized projects SHOULD look, not how it actually does. Click to enlarge.)
On our way to catch and write about “Urbanized,” the new Gary Hustwit documentary about urban design* we discovered, heading up from the A Train, that the subway corridor directly under the IFC Center theater hosting the film is lined with AIANY (“American Institute of Architects New York”) posters featuring different architectural projects. Some of those images are of Hall of Shame subsidy grabbers, and for sure at least the pictures of the of the net-public-loss Atlantic Yards Prokhorov/Ratner (“Barclays”) basketball arena are destined to be disgruntling.
A second heavily subsidized expensive new sports venue, the Mets new CitiField baseball stadium was also amongst the images. Now seems like a good opportunity to recall something Noticing New York paid attention to in the summer of 2009: Prompted by the federal bailout (with Citibank among those getting substantial rescue funds) and the public’s hostility to the way that stadium had been financed with excessive public subsidies, suggestions were being made all over the place that CitiField should be renamed. (See: December 4, 2008, Citi Field by Any Other Name, by George Vecsey, December 5, 2008, Citi Field by Any Other Name, Part II, by Andrew Das, December 5, 2008, Answers From Brian Lehrer of WNYC, Part 3, by The New York Times, The Brian Lehrer Show, December 05, 2008, Bailout Stadium, Friday, December 05, 2008, and Mon Nov 24, 2008, So what should we, the American taxpayers, rename Citi Field? By 'Duk.)
The huge preponderance of suggestions (138 from Brian Lehrer listeners alone) for the renaming of the stadium reflect the public’s anger: “Debits Field,” “Field of Nightmares,” “Field of Schemes,” “Bailout Ballpark.” “The Field That Ruthless Built (reserved for the Yankees new stadium)” “Shea-m (Shame) Stadium,” our own “Shady Stadium” suggestion, or taking a cue from Bill Maher“SITTY Field with the H.”
Bank of America Tower
Also present amongst the images was the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. Though that building, currently the second tallest in New York City, may have things to recommend it, Bank of America is in the headlines right now due to consumer outrage over its decision (now retracted) to charge its customers ludicrous fees to use their debit cards, and the size of the tower bearing the bank’s name (bringing increasing density to Bryant Park) was facilitated by assistance the government gave the developer in wielding the threat of abusive eminent domain.
Positioned Pitches
(Above, from the promotional site for "Urbanized")
How did the AIANY gallery wind up being displayed in that underground Greenwich Village subway corridor? Does AIANY regularly display such posters at that location? Did AIANY envision that “Urbanized” would be showing above in the IFC Center and that they could catch the exact audience they’d like to reach? That seems a bit far fetched (even if we can find Hustwit on AIANY's calendar and actually, in NYC, October is “Archtober” in which AIANY has an annual New Work exhibition). More likely, the posters were there at the same location for the same reason that the film was. Greenwich Village is a place where you can find people interested in the arts, including architecture; maybe not business or corporate types but individuals susceptible to the seduction of well-crafted images. Maybe people you want to reach because they are an on-the-edge demographic you don't think you already have assuredly on board with your message. And if you want to reach out effectively to those people it's good to offer your wares around hub subway stations where flows of such people converge.
The subway images promoting the Prokhorov/Ratner arena and these other government assisted, government subsidized projects is also part of something else that has been a Noticing New York preoccupation recently: The pummeling we are getting everywhere we go reflecting a severe imbalance in the public dialogue delivered via paid speech. Big picture, the skewing of wealth in this country is working in conjunction with the increasing privatization of the traditional avenues and elements of public speech (including but not limited to public spaces and streets in which to speak). That means that we are forever being subjected to ubiquitous, insistent cues and reinforcements of (for example) the way Forest City Ratner wants things perceived. (See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)
Corrections Please
(More on the calculations with respect to the above is available here.)
And because the images on these subway corridor walls are of government-assisted, publicly- subsidized projects this is essentially a self-pummeling since the images are ultimately paid for by the public itself (and those who have been the victims of eminent domain), notwithstanding that it was skewed wealth that initially tilted those subsidies into the developers' pockets. Cyclically, if the message does get through, then no one amongst us is supposed to object the next time one of these developers persuades politicians to tilt more subsidies into their pockets.
Given that correction is desperately needed to the not-so-subliminal subterranean subjugation I thought I would do in this article what have been doing in others, provide examples of the images we should instead be seen on subway posters and on billboards blasting their message to the public around the city.
(Above, NY city planning chief in “Urbanized” a film in which she defends the Brooklyn's public against harm from a project right next to Atlantic Yards.)
Saturday morning we ventured out in the snowflakes of the October Northeaster to the IFC Center in the Village and saw “Urbanized,” Gary Hustwit’s new documentary about city planning. Boy, does the film sure let New York City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden get away with a lot! But we won’t.
Cramming Urban Design Into 82 Minutes
First some words about the film in general. I haven’t seen Mr. Hustwit’s much acclaimed first film, “Helvetica.” I’d very much like to. The notion of it appeals to the obsessive side of my personality. How do you make an entire film about a single typeface ? Obviously, you go into the subject much more deeply than anyone would expect you to.
As a film, “Urbanized” has the opposite problem: How do you cover the entire topic of city planning and what shapes cities either for good or for ill in a mere 82 minutes? The film then is sort of a sampler of things that can be learned about urban planning or design, covering a representative variety of ideas and concerns. You may learn from it no matter who you are, but if you know a bit about the thinking of how cities shape themselves you will probably keep noting how so much more than could have been covered. A.O. Scott’s New York Times review says essentially this, calling it a “remarkably concise film — which could easily have sprawled to 15 hours on public television.”
Another Times article discussing the making of the film the day before it came out said that Mr. Hustwit crowd-sourced the making of the film in several respects, tapping “his Twitter followers for suggestions” and quotes Hustwit about the film’s conciseness as follows:
“I had all these Google news alerts set up for, like, ‘city zoning controversies,’ and I got like a hundred a day,” . . . . . “There’s too much to talk about, and after a while, it started to drive me crazy.”
(Trailer for “Urbanized,” above. The film's site notes that it features the voice, among others, of Ms. Burden who also appears in the footage.)
Respect For Bicycles In Bogotá
The film covers more than a dozen issues in segmented vignettes. There is joyful sparkle to Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia (above) as we tour around with him as he shows how the city has reclaimed its roads and sidewalks to give priority to buses and bicycles over cars. His philosophy:
A city needs to show as much respect for a person riding a $30 bicycle as it does for someone driving a $30,000 car.
(And, the point is made people are taking up considerably less room in a bus or on a bike.) Are you listening, Senator Schumer?
Self-Building Communities, Chile: Communities Tossed Into the Cold NYC
New minimalist housing projects in Santiago, Chile get the film’s attention as an example of stretching tight resources by zeroing in on exactly what residents need and want most when they move in and then capitalizing on the residents’ own will, energy and sweat equity to add improvements thereafter to the infrastructure and boiled-down basics. There is innate constructive energy in any community waiting to be tapped. A knowledgeable viewer can make the connection that this approach of capitalizing on a community’s own energy is the converse of what goes on with Bloomberg’s eminent domain abuse mega-projects like Columbia’s takeover of West Harlem, and Atlantic Yards, where the government steps in (or, in truth, assists a private entity to do so) and obliterates what a community has successfully built up over time.
Brasília’s Vastly Separated Sculptural Buildings
(Above, from the trailer.)
The film isn’t visibly grinding any axes and is neutral in most of its presentations, letting those who believe certain things about urban design, including some professionals and academics, say what they will. That means that occasional statements that sound like balderdash or superficial tripe don’t get labeled as such by the film maker. The closest the film comes to calling expressed views into question is a segment with counterpointing viewpoints about Brasília, built from scratch in the 1950s and ’60s when Brazil's capital was transferred from the coast to the Mideastern interior. The city's huge sculpturesque buildings embody the very different thinking of the time about what constituted good urban design. It looks like a Robert Moses’ World’s Fair writ large. And large is a big part of the obvious problem with it. Almost all viewers of the film are going to agree with the counterpointing assessment, driven home by appropriate accompanying footage, that its distances are far too vast to be friendly to human habitation. Ready consensus on this point is not to say that New Yorkers don’t have to be wary of old ideas of Robert Moses’ ilk being brought back. The developer’s proposed design for the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly has a lot in common with the design of Moses’ old developments. That's not necessarily because anyone believes it is good design but because the proposed superblocking maximizes the various hidden subsidies the developer packed into that design.
New York comes up directly in the film a couple of times and the film even ends with a shot of the city. It is New York’s High Line that is featured with the most particular prominence getting justly deserved praise and being spoken of as inspiration for other cities in terms of adaptive reuse of post-industrial relics. No opposing views about the value of the High Line are presented within the film. These days who could find someone to express them?
The film therefore does New York City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden an enormous favor when it uses the end of High Line segment to introduce her, in no uncertain terms, as its staunch proponent. Says Ms. Burden as we meet her:
We were just passionate about saving the High Line. Zoning was just one piece of it. I only played a role in the zoning, and, being obsessive, I think I spent . . I said if I didn’t think about the High Line every single day it was going to come down. That was my mind set.
Lest we might think that the “zoning” Ms. Burden speaks of is either insignificant or dry stuff, we have the moment before been told (just after a reiteration of the community value of the High Line), “Underneath the design, a lot of what we see here today is a result of the care and attention that went into the zoning.” We are not told what that “zoning” was; it remains abstract, but it sounds pretty good irrespective. If you have come to the theater knowing what the “zoning” was, then you know.
Community Instigated High Line
One thing that is great about the High Line, which the film makes pretty clear, is that its preservation was not an example of top-down planning: The idea for the High Line came from community. As the story is told, and it’s in large part very true, the idea for it came from two men, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, after attending a community hearing and then the enthusiasm for that good idea grew when David and Hammond became its activist proponents. Preservation of the High Line was also not an example of the developer-driven, reactive planning so often practiced by Ms. Burden’s New York City Planning Department where developers tell the city what they want to do, what would be good for them, and then, as the planning department aids them, everyone has to fall in line even if it overrides community plans already in place (e.g. the 197-a plans superseded by the the West Side Columbia neighborhood takeover the huge East Side Solow project).
Development Community and the High Line
The film doesn’t tell you that the development community and property owners actually opposed the High Line. It does tell you that the High Line initially lacked supporters but the film’s one mentioned example is an unidentified someone attending the community hearing where David and Hammond met. Even very late in the game developer Douglas Durst, in some ways a more progressive developer supportive of the Municipal Art Society, was calling for demolition of at least the last third of the High Line that wraps around the proposed Hudson Yards project. At the time Mr. Durst had hopes he would win the competition to develop Hudson Yards and he viewed preservation of the High Line as an unnecessary expense rather than an asset.
But how often in New York do major initiatives like the High Line happen without development community support? That’s where Ms. Burden’s abstractly referred to “zoning” comes in. It would have been much more informative if, in the film,“upzoning” had been the word used. The way that the development community was swung over to support preservation of High Line was that the High Line initiative was used to spearhead an upzoning of the Chelsea neighborhood around the High Line together with the creation of zoning bonuses related to improvements of the High Line and transferable development rights. More density. That’s something the development community almost invariably favors.
Notably, when Mr. Durst was advocating demolition of the last third of the High Line he was almost certainly expecting that the permitted density of the Hudson Yards development would be established independently of whether the High Line was preserved.
Park Improves Community Value
Other than density the development and property-owning community favors something else: improved real estate values. The Times article about Mr. Hustwit that came out the day before the film tells us that Hustwit and his girlfriend live in an apartment “just a block away from the elevated park.” and that the personal downside of the High Line for Mr. Hustwit is that “it has really increased the price of rental space over here.” In other words, just as good parks and amenities should be expected to, the advent of the High Line has improved neighboring property values and increased rents even as the building boom prompted by it has been adding to the square footage available in the neighborhood. Almost any New Yorker aware of the High Line or anyone else who has visited it will be cognizant of the many buildings speedily being erected up around it.
Whether or not the greater density of the upzoning overseen by Ms. Burden should have been exacted as the price for preserving the High Line, it can be convincingly argued that upzoning was a good one for the neighborhood and city and was very appropriate. In addition, because it is helping to pay for the High Line the High Line’s development has thereby been hastened.
Do You Know What City Planning Is?: An Unmentioned Atlantic Yards
Having been so grandly introduced as a proponent of the High Line, the film immediately cuts to a scene of Ms. Burden meeting with representatives of a developer with a project in Brooklyn. Overlaid we hear her voice instructively supplying this city planning primer:
The Department of City Planning is responsible for shaping its neighborhoods, its waterfront, its industrial lands and its business districts, really shaping the form of the city, and where it is going to grow, where it’s going to develop.
Then we see Ms. Burden, in action. As an example of her work she is conspicuously defending the public from overdevelopment. Looking at the plans before her she critically says:
This is a double problem because not only have you lost holding the street wall here, you now have a building that’s very out of scale with the Brooklyn Academy of Music . . . historic building.
“Out of scale with the Brooklyn Academy of Music”? This is almost too clever by half: Clearly visible in the plans Ms. Burden is looking at on the movie screen, and right next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music is the skyline profile of the much more iconic Williamsburg Savings Bank. But the Williamsburg Savings Bank building is not mentioned. Was it just the editing or was Ms. Burden taking intentional care crafting her words?
The scale-establishing reference of the Williamsburg Savings Bank building has been central to very heated discussions about how inappropriately huge and out-of-scale and improperly dense the pending Forest City Ratner mega-monopoly is. Ms. Burden has been a defender of Atlantic Yards and was instrumental in getting its approval through, and yet here she is in this film shown criticizing the scale of another project right next to Atlantic Yards. The film doesn’t explain this but if you go into the film knowing enough it is anger inspiring.
(Above right, the Williamsburg Savings Bank as seen from below. Below, the Williamsburg Savings Bank as seen from behind a proposed Atlantic Yards tower.)
Burden again addresses the audience directly:
We can’t actually design architecture, we can’t design the storefront but at least we can set up these basic parameters that give you the best possibility that this will be a great street.
Not mentioned is that, in the case of the Atlantic Yards mega-project which she helped enable, all these “basic parameters” of zoning that had been set were overridden so the developer could do whatever he wanted to maximize his own best possibilities over those of the community, including his choice to eliminate and absorb into his private ownership formerly public streets, sidewalks and avenues.
(Proposed Atlantic Yards above from the Environmental Simulation Center’s Atlantic Yards plug-in for the Google Earth program and below from the Municipal Art Society’s “Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots” slide show.) Planning Chief Burden And Jane Jacobs Introduced
Working quickly, the film moves on to burnish Ms. Burden’s reputation in yet one more respect. Having introduced her as a key High Line proponent and savior, it then allowed her to authoritatively provide the film’s central primer on the value of zoning, next showing her as a defender against buildings of improper scale in Brooklyn (next to the Williamsburg Savings Bank). The film proceeds to let Ms. Burden introduce the historic struggle between the planning ideas of the Robert Moses’ ilk and those things Jane Jacobs espoused.
A.O. Scott in his Times review of the film says, “there is a distinct bias in favor of Jacobs-influenced new urbanism and against other approaches to city planning.” If it is true, and I think it is, this puts Ms. Burden in a place of enormous honor. It would be a place of enormous honor even if the film were not, itself, so pro-Jane Jacobs in its thinking. And getting this honor also has key implications in some other respects we shall visit momentarily.
Bloomberg Development Mantra: “We Will Grow”
When Ms. Burden begins speaking about the Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs dichotomy (and hinting that it perhaps can somehow even be fused) she dutifully invokes the Bloomberg administration’s mantra about the city needing to grow to quickly accommodate an additional one million people. She is, after all, a Bloomberg administration official.
The city will likely one day grow by the administration’s one million figure but despite the administration’s continued promulgation of inaccurate population graphs, the Bloomberg notion that this was all going to occur in a mere two decades (or less), bringing the city to a population of 9.1 or 9.2 million by 2030 is clearly off base. In fact, the city is apparently currently growing at so slow a rate that the city won’t actually grow to 9.4 million until almost 70 years from now. As Noticing New York has pointed out previously, the reason all this is important is that these projections for enormous population growth have been used as a backdrop to help justify the Bloomberg-style mega-development that begins with tearing things down while not having terrific success at replacing what gets demolished. (The image above is from Bloomberg’s PlaNYC website.- The graph shown is not up-to-date. If corrected the second green triangle approximately over 2010 should be down more or less level with the blue square over the year 2000, because the city hasn’t actually grown much under Bloomberg.)
So it is important that Burden begins talking about the tensions between Jane Jacobs’ and Robert Moses’ tenets by invoking the Bloombergian need to grow by one million mantra. Although she does not say by when such growth should be expected it is implicit that it should be in the time period being planned for by her:
Our plans have really redrawn the entire blueprint of the city because we have to grow by over a million people. And our plans therefore have been as ambitious as those of Robert Moses, but we really judge ourselves by Jane Jacobs standards. Robert Moses was the “Master Builder.” He planned, looking at the city from above, and his highway building destroyed entire neighborhoods. He cut off our entire island of Manhattan from the waterfront by building highways down the edges. His impact was profound and his insensitivity, was legendary, to the texture of the city. His downfall came at the same time as the rise of Jane Jacobs.
That’s the intro that Burden gets to deliver. It is left to others to briefly tell us who Jane Jacobs was and why she was so great, including telling us that without Ms. Jacobs most of Greenwich Village would have been knocked down.
Lurking Champions For Moses
There is a reason who is making what seemingly authoritative statements now about what we should believe respecting the calibration of credence for Robert Moses versus Jane Jacobs viewpoints is so important. Once it appeared that the views of Moses were safely dead, particularly after Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-wining book, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” Notwithstanding, during Ms. Burden’s tenure presiding at the City Planning Department a concerted effort was mounted to rehabilitate both Robert Moses and the sort of faith he had in big projects. As Adam Sternbergh observed in his Spring 2007 New York Magazine article about the High Line’s preservation:
As it happens, the High Line arrives at the exact moment when the legacy of Robert Moses—the imperious former New York City parks commissioner who had his own visions for the city—is being rehabilitated, or at least exhumed. Three separate museums this year mounted exhibits asking visitors to revisit his grandly imagined, and subsequently vilified, plans to remake New York into an expressway-laden megaplex, efficiently absorbing the daily swarms of auto-bound commuters.
Mr. Sternbergh ventures that the Jane Jacobs defeat of Robert Moses meant that “her theories on lively neighborhoods . . .have been entrenched as conventional wisdom ever since.” Those theories should have stayed unassailably entrenched but with Bloomberg’s penchant for megadevelopments (with Ms. Burden providing cover) the Jacobs theories have both been under attack and ignored.
The spirit of Robert Moses has climbed from its crypt and again stalks the city. Roberta Gratz— channeling her friend Jane Jacobs— is determined to re-inter him, not with a stake or silver bullet, but with a rigorous accounting of the true historical costs of Moses-style development, and the under appreciated benefits of citizen-led, bottom-up regeneration. Its paean to urban complexity, coupled with its practical policy prescriptions makes the feisty “Battle for Gotham” a compelling inspired read.
Moses Or Jacobs? Whose Side Is Burden Really On?
There is no question that Commissioner Burden knows her stuff. She can and does flaunt her Jane Jacobs credentials. Ms. Burden considers herself a disciple of William H. (“Holly’) Whyte as she once worked at his Project for Public Spaces. Mr. Whyte, renowned in his own right, is famous as Jane Jacobs’ mentor.
The question is whether in the Moses vs. Jacobs debates Ms. Burden is treacherously flying under a false flag, declaring herself to be observant of “Jane Jacobs standards” and eschewing Moses’ “legendary . . . insensitivity . . . to the texture of the city,” while actually working very hard to ensure approval of the destructive mega-projects that the Bloomberg administration wants approved, such as: Atlantic Yards, Columbia University’s take over of West Harlem, the removal of the Willets Point neighborhood via eminent domain abuse, the shrinkage and virtual elimination the historic areas of Coney Island through a zoning plan where the calculated pretext of preposterous postulations prevails over common sense. Even on small one-building deals like the Walentas Dock Street project Ms. Burden has signed on to duplicity and poor planning when the Bloombergian fix was in.
And Ms. Burden has been accused of insensitivity, perhaps the most famous instance of this being that Ms. Burden is reported to have decided that the controversial rezoning of Harlem’s 125th Street was necessary because she and a friend couldn’t find a good restaurant in the neighborhood after a Roberta Flack concert.
The most thorough Noticing New York analysis of Ms. Burden’s involvement in facilitating Atlantic Yards goes into the anomaly of how Ms. Burden, as the city’s planning chief, could have been concerned about the issue of ill-advised superblocking with the relatively very small and necessary aggregation of blocks to create Teardrop Park in Battery Park City when she then, in contrast, let pass without objection the much larger and unnecessary superblock aggregations involved in giving Forest City Ratner its Atlantic Yards mega-monoply. (See: Monday, September 22, 2008, Should a Teardrop be Shed- Considering the Burden?)
(See the images of Teardrop Park overlaid on the Atlantic Yards footprint below.) Another question is whether Burden’s City Planning Department and Commission side-stepped looking at Atlantic Yards as it should be looked at. Often presented as a 22-acre, 16 towers plus arena mega-project that managed to evade the technical jurisdiction of Ms. Burden’s minions, the building of Atlantic Yards actually involves 30 contiguous acres of Ratner ownership with 19 new towers plus arena, over which Ms. Burden could arguably have asserted jurisdiction. Those 30 acres are only a subset of Ratner’s larger 50+ acre government assisted superblocking mega-monopoly on prime Brooklyn real estate. (See: Wednesday, January 27, 2010, Did New York City Planning Officials Sidestep Looking at the Bigger Atlantic Yards Picture? Below, the Ratner 50+ government assisted acres)
Because she is aware of what she is doing Ms. Burden may sometimes experience a level of discomfort. Ms. Burden normally appears extraordinarily poised and in command but another Noticing New York article about an April 2009 New York Journalism Institute symposium noted the following about her Coney Island presentation:
Ms. Burden seemed to be very nervous during her presentation and we noticed that she left immediately after finishing her remarks so that she was not available to engage with either the evening’s panelists or the audience afterward.
In all likelihood Ms. Burden understands all or most of the implications of forcing through these grand scale top-down projects, including that decimation will follow in their wake, initially and for some time afterward. Who knows what she tells herself in her own defense? Perhaps she believes that if she were not doing these deeds it would be somebody else appointed to the planning commission in her place. Perhaps she believes that with her knowledge and good instincts she stands as a buffer against what could be worse. Perhaps she believes that she needs to do what she needs to do when she needs to do it in order to survive to fight another day on other issues of importance.
Perhaps Ms. Burden tells herself some variation of any combination of the above. Perhaps she does and she is wrong. Perhaps honest, open opposition opposition would be the best contribution to society she could make. Ms. Burden doesn’t need the money but she does seem to relish the position she holds.
Not Covered by “Urbanized”: The Negative Influence of Politically Wired Deals On City Design
“Urbanized” never tackles the city-shaping aspects of politically wired deals. That is perhaps the main recurring topic of Noticing New York’s articles. “Urbanized” deals pleasantly with the aftermath post-Katrina malaise of New Orleans by following a local artist who bedecks abandoned buildings with scores of stickers begging to be filled in that read: “I Wish This Was ____. ” It doesn’t ask the question whether much of the rebuilding of New Orleans is being steered by a local elite interested in downsizing and evicting poor blacks from their neighborhoods.
The film shows us the hope of local vegetable gardens tended by local residents on city-owned land in a depressed Detroit neighborhood but it doesn’t mention Jane Jacobs’ analysis that Detroit's company-town monoculture was destined to lead to such depression. It doesn’t mention the events underlying the infamous Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit case which ultimately prompted the Michigan Supreme Court to (in 2004) reverse itself and interpret more expansively what constitutes eminent domain abuse. (See: Wednesday, January 21, 2009, Caroline Kennedy, in Our Defense Against Eminent Domain?: The Way it Might be.)
As late as 1981 Detroit was till directing all its subsidy eggs to the motor industry basket. The Poletown case involved the City of Detroit’s judicially sanctioned “quick-removal” eviction of an entire neighborhood, a neighborhood of thirty-five hundred, “mostly elderly, mostly Polish first-generation Americans” who had lived in Poletown for three-quarters of a century, in order to, at the behest of General Motors, turn over the neighborhood’s land for the construction of a new 70-acre automobile manufacturing plant. After pouring in untold additional subsidy General Motors ultimately abandoned what had been built. It was after years of GM's not paying property taxes on the same basis as all other Detroit property owners, including those who had been dispossessed by eminent domain. And then there was the GM bankruptcy.
Public Protest In “Urbanized”
(Above, from the clip promoting fundraising for for the completion of "Urbanized.")
Public protest and outrage over imposed public planning is addressed in “Urbanized.” It is addressed in a segment of the film just before its conclusion that lasts about ten minutes, covering the “S21” or “Stuttgart 21 project” transportation project in Stuttgart, Germany. That involved the building of a new train station to facilitate or enable European bullet trains traveling between Paris, Vienna and Budapest to be routed through Stuttgart. Among other things, the film shows community ire being raised by the destruction of a treasured community park and the felling of huge 200-year-old trees.
The Brasília segment and this one are the only two segments in the film presented counterpointed fashion. Respecting s21, The audience is taken back and forth between the community protesters expressing their views and a representative from the rail company explaining why the project is necessary. Despite a superfluity of German subtitles insufficient information is given to know who might actually be right. The conversation in the men's room right afterwards was between two gents who were utterly at a loss to figure out what options were there to be sorted out.
If you are like me and have participated in activist protests here in New York you will certainly feel sympathy for the German protesters but it was impossible to know from the information presented who was right. Maybe that is the was intentional on Hustwit's part. There are some hints though. We are told that when all was said and done the public's opinions on the project swung from somewhat mixed to nearly universally opposed, resulting in the ouster of local politicians when election time came. Protesters complain that though there was formally a public process it moved forward in fits and starts with dormant periods where the project seemed virtually dead so that it was hard for the public to respond or appropriately engage. We are tantalizingly told that this proposed replacement of an old train station with a new train station somehow also involves the construction of a luxury housing complex in addition to the destruction of the park.
I invite anyone who understands the issues of this particular development better than I do to leave a comment on this post.
What’s To Complain About In NYC vs. Germany
Notwithstanding what I didn’t understand about S21 what I came into the documentary knowing from urban design seminars I’ve attended is this: In Germany, in contradistinction to Bloomberg’s Atlantic Yards, big public design projects are typically designed by government officials, not developers; they are divided up into multiple parcels to be executed by multiple developers and then the parcels are bid out competitively to select the developer for each subdivided site. Most of these principles should also have been followed with respect to other big Bloombergian projects like Hudson Yards as well. The other distinction between S21 and Atlantic Yards that I would note is that S21 is purportedly principally a transportation infrastructure project (not withstanding that tantalizingly quick mention of the luxury housing) but Atlantic Yards just feeds private property (taken from other private owners by eminent domain) to a private developer to further a vast privately owned mega-monopoly. There are a lot of arguments for the public to sacrifice for the former. There are no arguments at all for the latter.
Seeing “Urbanized” Together With a Deep Gap-Filling Movie
I recommend seeing “Urbanized” or, if you miss it, planning to rent the DVD. But you should go knowing that unless you already know enough going into the theater there is much that could elude you about what you will see. If you want one film that, in my opinion, would fill in the most serious gaps in “Urbanized,” see the still regularly playing “Battle For Brooklyn” about fighting off Atlantic Yards. That film, which goes into depth on the subject of good city planning versus rigged deals also necessarily leaves out a few things in order to keep its narrative concise (the misconduct of ACORN in selling out the Brooklyn’s communities had to be left on the cutting room floor) but it contains an impressive amount of what was left out of “Urbanized.” I don’t recall, however, that it had anything to say about New York’s city planning chief, Amanda Burden.
Here is the trailer (better seen in full screen by going to this link):
PS: If you hurry out to catch “Urbanized” you are like to discover, as we did on our trip, that the subway corridor directly under the IFC Center theater is lined with AIANY (“American Institute of Architects New York”) posters of architectural projects which feature, among the images presented, pictures of the of the Atlantic Yards Prokhorov/Ratner (“Barclays”) basketball arena.
(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.
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.
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.
NOTICING NEW YORK & NATIONAL NOTICE are both independent entities managed by Michael D. D. White of Hop-Skip Enterprises. Michael D. D. White is an attorney, urban planner and former government public finance and development official. *** Noticing New York covers New York development and associated politics. National Notice covers national policy and economic issues *** Contact: MichaelDDWhite(at)gmail.com
(Above, an example of how AIANY's postered Greenwich Village subway hall promoting subsidized projects SHOULD look, not how it actually does. Click to enlarge.)
CitiField Baseball Stadium
A second heavily subsidized expensive new sports venue, the Mets new CitiField baseball stadium was also amongst the images. Now seems like a good opportunity to recall something Noticing New York paid attention to in the summer of 2009: Prompted by the federal bailout (with Citibank among those getting substantial rescue funds) and the public’s hostility to the way that stadium had been financed with excessive public subsidies, suggestions were being made all over the place that CitiField should be renamed. (See: December 4, 2008, Citi Field by Any Other Name, by George Vecsey, December 5, 2008, Citi Field by Any Other Name, Part II, by Andrew Das, December 5, 2008, Answers From Brian Lehrer of WNYC, Part 3, by The New York Times, The Brian Lehrer Show, December 05, 2008, Bailout Stadium, Friday, December 05, 2008, and Mon Nov 24, 2008, So what should we, the American taxpayers, rename Citi Field? By 'Duk.)
Also present amongst the images was the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. Though that building, currently the second tallest in New York City, may have things to recommend it, Bank of America is in the headlines right now due to consumer outrage over its decision (now retracted) to charge its customers ludicrous fees to use their debit cards, and the size of the tower bearing the bank’s name (bringing increasing density to Bryant Park) was facilitated by assistance the government gave the developer in wielding the threat of abusive eminent domain.
(Above, from the promotional site for "Urbanized")
(More on the calculations with respect to the above is available here.)
To see more in this vein go to:
