Municipal Art Society, Once Venerable, Becomes Platform For Disseminating Misinformation Promoting Development, In this Case Backing Library Sales and Shrinkage

Linda Johnson speaking to her MAS audience about libraries as real estate- Pictures of the event are up on Flickr

I used to be a member of the Municipal Art Society.  I used to routinely encourage others to become members as well.  But now. . . .

I actually had a sort of extra-specially identification with the Municipal Art Society, a “born under the same star” thing.  The Municipal Art Society, with a long venerable history, was given birth to “in the wake of the World's Columbian Exposition, when the Great White City in Chicago ushered in” a new era of expecting more and better for New York in terms of its urban design.  Those are interests of mine.  My father’s paternal grand parents, Mr and Mrs. Peter White, were key in establishing and running the Irish Village that was part of that same 1893 Columbian Exposition, and their coming to the United State to do so is how the White family arrived here from Ireland.

Mr. and Mrs. (Annie) Peter White and the Irish Village at the Colombian Exposition

I don’t know that this gives me greater or lesser rights to be irked with what the Municipal Arts Society has become, but , like many others, I am mightily riled.  As it happens, a MAS board member told me ahead of time about the 180 degree turn around that for MAS that was intended.  Not everyone has perceived it yet, but people are fast catching on to what’s happened: Once part of the fight against such abominations as Atlantic Yards, (“the poster child for what goes wrong when process is ignored. . . a poorly designed project that has polarized the community and that squanders both opportunity and public trust”), MAS now goes out of its way to give multiple bogus awards for such developer-driven blighting of the city.

MAS Puts Its Weight Behind Library Sales and Shrinkage- Somewhat Deceptively

The 63,000 square foot Brooklyn Heights central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn.  The admired bas-relief murals are by C Spampintato.

At MAS’s February 26, 2015, Annual Members Meeting, MAS has continued to adulterate its its brand promoting, rather than holding to account, unbridled development, this time giving Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson a platform to pitch unchallenged for another prize currently being eyed by the development community: sale and shrinkage of libraries to transform them into real estate deals.  These deals benefit the developers they are handed out to, not the public.

As BPL President Linda Johnson spoke at the annual meeting MAS already had the Brooklyn Heights Library sale up and prominently featured on its website “Watchlist.”  There the proposed sale was advertised, not accurately, but as a developer would probably prefer to have things described to stay low on the radar screen and sidestep public opprobrium.

    •    The description says that BPL is `partnering' with a developer to build a 20-story condo building  on the site of the Brooklyn Heights Library.’  Was that correct?  No, not really.  Although something of a black box with the developer saying he is `starting from scratch' on the design and with no rendering furnished to the public showing all the available development rights being used, this building was last stated in the New York Time to be 38 stories tall, not “20-stories.”  (The release of this non applicable but apparently very multi-purpose rendering accompanied earlier statements by the Times that the building was going to be 30 stories.)

    •    The description said this joint venture will provide BPL with a more modern library “on the ground floor.”  It doesn't say that it will be a vastly shrunken library providing fewer functions, only 21,000 square feet (of which only 15,000 will be above ground- “on the ground floor” per the description) vs. the existing 63,000 square feet.  The Business and Career functions of the library will be banished from it.  Books will be exiled.

    •    The description said that the sale will provide the BPL with “an additional $40 million,” a figure only achieved by deliberately low-balling and not disclosing all the costs and public losses that need to be netted out.  In actuality, in selling the library and shrinking down this $100+ million asset to one-third size to benefit the developer, the BPL is likely even losing money when all is considered.

    •    The description said that the money netted from the sale will be “put towards maintaining and restoring other libraries in the borough.”    In actuality, the money from the sale goes to the city and there is no assurance that it would ever be returned to maintain and restore other libraries. The only obligation to do so would be a moral one, and since the city's current unprecedentedly low funding of the libraries is already immorally low there is no assurance such moral suasion would work.  Quite the contrary, since the current low funding levels go back to the introduction of plans for low funding to justify such self-cannibalizing funding schemes, if low funding leads successfully to the sales that real estate industry salivates for there will actually be an inducement to continue such low funding level to provoke more such sales in the future.

Here is the complete language of the MAS-published pitch for the project:

Brooklyn Public Library
BPL has partnered with Hudson Companies to build a 20-story condo building on the site of the current branch library at Cadman Plaza. This joint venture will provide BPL with a more modern library on the ground floor, as well as an additional $40 million to be put towards maintaining and restoring other libraries in the borough. This innovative project is part of broader trend of leveraging development to pay for civic assets.

BPL Linda Johnson Presumes When Speaking To the MAS Audience She Should Be Talking Real Estate

Johnson, in her calibrated pitch to the MAS meetings audience began, right off the bat, with an assumption that real estate was the most important part of what she was going speak to them about:

I am pleased to be here. I feel sometimes that I'm speaking more about real estate these days than I am  about literacy, . . . 

And was careful, continuing, to assure that other concerns were driving her focus on real estate (announced to her board as her top priority when she started at the BPL):

. . . but we need to actually address the real estate issues in order to deliver the services that the library is striving to do.

Attentive to the Fact That Size Matters

Ms. Johnson later similarly soothed the audience about how she cares about adequate library size when she explains that libraries built during the Lindsay era that are "on average 7500 square feet which is woefully small."  Ms. Johnson doesn't tip her hand to the audience to say that one of contradictory priorities was to shrink such a "woefully small" 7500 square foot library in Red Hook down to just 5,000 square feet in a privatizing handing off 2000 square feet of the library to Spaceworks in a scheme that deserved and got a lot more scrutiny from the local community than Ms. Johnson wanted.

Ms. Johnson indicated that she is attentive to the concept that "because of the way neighborhoods have changed" there are "libraries that are over-served and under-served" as a result.  That principle enunciated in the abstract may have lulled the her hearers when she got around to saying that she was going to be shrinking down to one-third size a key destination library, the downtown Brooklyn Heights Library in one of the fastest growing neighborhoods and business districts of the city's fasted growing borough.

A Plan For One Million Square Feet of Real Estate

Before she actually tells the gathering about the Brooklyn Heights library deal she acknowledges something ominous: That the BPL made a deal with the Bloomberg administration (now being carried out by the de Blasio administration) with respect to "over 1,000,000 square feet of real estate" used by the library ("It's actually owned by the city of New York The library is its custodian").  She says:

We said to the city if you give us this kind of money [capital funding], this kind of funding, we'll do our part as well.  And we will do the best that we can to use the assets that have been entrusted to us to take care to take care of them, in other words, try and leverage the properties that we have to the full extent.

Of All Things To Tell a Municipal Art Society Audience! 

Book ends?:  Brooklyn's two central destination libraries, the Downtown Brooklyn Heights Library and the Grand Army Plaza Library, were both designed by the same famed architect, Francis Keally.

That's when she progresses to the subject of selling the Brooklyn Heights Library and progresses to an assertion quite ironic for her to state before an assembly of Municipal, Art Society patrons:

The Brooklyn Heights library which has been in the press a fair amount recently . . . was built in the early 1960s and it's an aging library that's no longer really doing the kind of job that it should be. There is nobody that I have heard yet who has argued that this is a building which is architecturally important or historically significant.

No one has argued that "this is a building which is architecturally important or historically significant"?  The Library was designed by Francis Keally, who designed the borough's other esteemed central destination library at Grand Army Plaza.  Francis Keally was also, in his time, the president of the Municipal Art Society.  Keally was not only an admired architect; he fought for preservation of valuable, beautiful older buildings and their neighborhoods.  As MAS president, he fought for the passage of the laws that eventually would protect them.  Landmarks historian Anthony C. Wood writes in his 2008 book, "Preserving New York":

Francis Keally stressed that what was at stake "goes far beyond Washington Square and the Village."  He asked his audiances to imagine a New York where a skyscraper had been substituted for the Church of the Ascension, or where the south side of Gramercy Square was built up "to smother the sky."  Noting the loss of the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, he paints a picture of a New York where Trinity, St. Paul's, St. Bartholomew's, St. Patrick's, and St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie have all gone "the same way."

Keally's concern about building up on the "south side of Gramercy Square . . . to smother the sky" makes one think of Ms. Johnson's assertion that one good reason to tear down Keally's library to build a tower (perhaps 38 stories) that will loom over Brooklyn Heights from its edge is to "improve the skyline."  When the first Landmarks Commission was appointed pursuant to the law that Keally had been instrumental in passing, Keally was on Mayor Wagner's nominating committee to suggest the appointments.  The commission was appointed in 1962 the same year the library opened.

Ms.Johnson posing at the MAS event with Vin Cipolla, a successor as MAS president to Francis Keally, who helped usher in era of preservation.  Cipolla that night gave Johnson a platform to advocate for the destruction of Keally's library.

Landmarks and Libraries

Contrary to Ms. Johnson's dismissiveness of Keally's architecture for the design of his second destination library in Brooklyn, both the New York Times and the New York Herald instantly pronounced the library as "handsome" when it opened, the Times saying it was a "clean-lined limestone building of two stories, with book sacks below ground" and the Herald describing it as "limestone-and-red granite." 
The admired "sculptured figures at the glass-pannled entrance" are  "the work of C Spampintato."

Further, although Ms. Johnson ventured to quickly tell the MAS assembly the building was not "historically significant," a good precaution if you suspected that any of the MAS old-timers might be around, behind the scenes the BPL had already engaged in measures to prevent the Landmarks Commission from recognizing as historic any libraries it wanted to transform into real estate projects and this library was a top such target on the BPL's and Johnson's list.  According to BPL minutes from February 2009, in a rather frank acknowledgement that the system works in ways we often pretend it doesn't:

Landmarks informed BPL that they had completed their survey of our branches and found that we have 8 branches that are potentially eligible for designations as landmarks.  The Committee [Capital Planning & Oversight Committee, co-chaired by Sharon L. Greenberger and Alice Fisher Rubin] recommended that in response to Landmark's request to prioritize these branches, the Library will respond that we are conducting a comprehensive analysis of our real estate portfolio and would like to wait on any decisions on landmarking individual sites until the Board has reviewed and approved the findings of the analysis.

Ms. Johnson, the BPL and Landmarks have been less than transparent about this.  Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) have requested via Freedom of Information (and basic transparency precepts) the communications between the BPL and Landmarks about these libraries: It is just one of many things the Johnson and the BPL have refused to make public.

A Sturdy Library With a History

The Keally library is 63,000 feet of extraordinarily serviceable (and adaptable) square feet.  That includes two half-floors of underground space that, similar to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, were set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval.  Echoing the 42nd Street library, an “automatic conveyor belt” helped deliver books more efficiently.  To say that the building is sturdy is an understatement: When it was built, it was built with space set aside for a bomb shelter with the thought that people could go there to be protected against a nuclear attack.

The air-conditioned building was built in 1962 (at a cost in today's dollars of about $20 million) and opened with a collection of 90,000 volumes.  In 1991 (completion in October 1993) it was enlarged and upgraded (at a cost in today's dollars of about $10 million).  Then, additionally, a reclamation of the space people once thought might be used as a bomb shelter added even more space for books.  (The book count was 130,000 by 1992.)

The library was built intending to serve all of Brooklyn and, being the only library addressing certain business needs and functions (“the only library in the city” for such needs), was intended to draw patrons not only from all of Brooklyn but Manhattan, including lower Manhattan’s Wall Street right “across the river.”  As well as accommodating staff according to earlier, kinder standards the BPL does not now want to meet, the building has rooms used as conference rooms and more rooms that could be similarly used.  Its construction involved “special workrooms for business researchers,” including cubicles.  Wanting to give the library over to development (secretly since about 2007) the BPL has not adapted or made these spaces available for the kinds of uses the public would likely appreciate.

When it opened, the library's “collection in depth” included books “dating from 1786.”  In one irony- I'll explain below- one of the antecedent libraries that was combined to become this library opened “in 1823 with a wheelbarrow load of books” and when “General Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the building” Brooklyn resident Walt Whitman, a child then, “was present and was kissed by the general.”

 To read more of the articles from which the above quotes come, see New York Times, Brooklyn Library, Open Today Is rich In Business Information, by Sanka Knox, June 1, 1962 and New York Herald Tribune, In handsome New Home- Brooklyn Business Library Opening, by William G. Wing, June 1, 1962.


Urban Renewal and Some Unfortunate Ironies

The 1962 library was built using urban renewal to lower the density of this area of Brooklyn Heights and the border of Downtown Brooklyn.  That same urban renewal bull-dozing destroyed Walt Whitman’s print shop on Cranberry Street.  What remains now is the vague attachment of a name, “Whitman Close,” to some urban renewal townhouses near that spot. While it's strange the way these untethered names can float away from history, there is another example: Johnson told her captive MAS listeners that by selling off the $100+ million* Keally library the BPL hoped to have just a few dollars to spend on other libraries in its system, naming as one of them, the “Walt Whitman Library,” less than a mile’s walk of about 15 minutes away.

(*  Johnson told the audience that "The value of the property was not clear to us at the time, but through an RFP process we determined that it was worth over $50 million."  The problem is that out of that $50 million the BPL is likely to net virtually nothing or less, and what price a developer will pay for the land in this kind of process in not representative of what the value of the building and the land is to the public.) 

This citing of other libraries that will supposedly benefit is a divide-and-conquer strategy on the part of the BPL as it tries to push through its destruction of the Keally library.

The “Walt Whitman Library,” which is near the Navy Yard serves those living in the surrounding projects who also regularly use the Brooklyn Heights Library to a very great extent.  One of the insidious little secrets behind shrinking the Brooklyn Heights Library is that there are those who view the shrinkage as a way of making it a library just for the increasingly upper-crust Heights and disinviting visitors from other neighborhoods who are not desired.  See: Tuesday, May 14, 2013, A Consideration of Race, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy As NYC Libraries Are Sold And The Library System Shrunk And Deliberately Underfunded.

Plan To Move On To Other Libraries

Part of the lack of transparency on the part of the BPL is its refusal to release the “strategic real estate” plan, the formulation of which involved hiring a former Forest City Ratner vice president, Karen Backus, who then prioritized for sale two libraries adjacent to Forest City Ratner property, the Pacific Branch and the Keally Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library.   The plan deals with all the BPL real estate, which they say they want to “leverage” all of, but one thing its secrecy means is that, again in divide-and-conquer strategy, the public doesn’t know which libraries are next.  Ms. Johnson frequently denies that there is a list of libraries to move down, the most valuable at the top.  But she gave the MAS listeners (who probaly thought sale of the Keally library as she described sounded great) a clue that the BPL would be moving down the list, saying that the Heights Library sale and shrinkage is:

a model now that we are taking and looking at how we can tweak it to see if there are other examples in the borough which might benefit.

ULURP Starts Wednesday

She explained that the BPL was hopefully going to “get to ULURP soon” with the plan “in the works.”  The start of ULURP is the commencement of process required for public review and to obtain approval if the library, owned by the city as public property, is to be sold and shrunk.  She was speaking in February.  ULURP (Uniform land use Review Procedure), likely an extended process, is now scheduled to begin for this proposal this Wednesday, the 17th.  See:

Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee June 17, 2015: ULURP Hearing- First Hearing About Whether To Sell & Shrink Downtowns's Brooklyn Heights Library (Tillary & Clinton)

Libraries as Spear Points To Push Development

Is there any extreme to development that MAS would still oppose?  Some, maybe, it seems.  In his presentation that night Justin Davidson asked about super-super tall towers: Who owns the sky?

Meanwhile, in discussions, forums and reports that Ms. Johnson has praised as consistent with her aims, the provision of new or better libraries has been described as bait, or `placation,' to induce communities to accept upzonings to accommodate development.  Consider for example the Clinton Hill Library.

One plan to convert a library into a mixed-use development opportunity that was flushed out after I wrote about it here last August in Noticing New York is a plan for the Sunset Park Library.  Ms. Johnson spoke specifically about it next.  The BPL plans to make the Sunset Park Library. larger, in part because the community demanded it if there is to be any redevelopment.  It is planning to make this library on the R Train line 20,600 square feet or bigger, close to the same 21,000 square feet that it wants to shrink the Brooklyn Heights Central Library down to.

I’d like to consider that this proposed larger size for the Sunset Park Library is also because of the sunlight and focus that Noticing New York and Citizens Defending Libraries brought to the process.  As for what the original redevelopment plans for Sunset Parks were, going back to at least 2009, the BPL won’t release them indicating some embarrassment.

Libraries That Can't Grow With the City

Unfortunately, part of what the BPL is doing is saying, divide-and-conquer fashion, that the Sunset Park enlargement will theoretically be paid for out of selling the valuable central downtown Keally library.  Also, unfortunately, like the Brooklyn Heights Library, the proposed new Sunset Park Library will be in the base of a residential building and can never be enlarged afterward.  Involving long closures both libraries are susceptible to bait-and-switch with the BPL already probably underestimating the cost of building the Sunset Park Library.

The need for future growth is one reason why, if libraries are ever provided in the future as part of a multi-use development program, they should be in the base of commercial buildings where (unlike residential buildings) the city publicly owns more of the building for future expansion.

Population in Sunset Park has recently surged 19%.  Upzonings were pushed through not long ago, but building to take advantage of it has largely not yet occurred.  There are new city proposals, essentially additional upzonings, whereby buildings permitted to be 8-stories on Fourth and Seventh Avenues could become ten stories tall if certain kinds of units being considered are provided in the process.

Bows to Mayor's Development Deputy

MAS president Vin Cipolla and Deputy Mayor for Development Alicia Glen at the event

Also featured at the MAS annual meeting was Alicia Glen, late of Goldman Sachs, New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Development.  Ms. Johnson made reference to Glen’s presence and how redevelopment libraries would be part of the mayor’s plan to provide “affordable” housing units. That’s a stated reason for the BPL’s redeveloping both the Sunset Park Library and the Heights Library for 50 units and 114 units respectively, the latter being done “poor door” fashion far away from fashionable, historic Brooklyn Heights.  MAS president Vin Cipolla, interviewing Glen that night, similarly proclaimed that MAS was behind the mayor’s focus on full steam development to produce “affordable” units although many others worry about how Mayor de Blasio assured the Real Estate Board of New York that virtually all the rules could be thrown out to make developers happy in the process.  That involves throwing out a lot of what MAS fought for in the past.

Ms. Johnson had many captive ears to hear her unchallenged pitch for why selling and shrinking libraries is good

Ms. Johnson concluded her address circling back to the real estate-not real estate theme with which she started: 

So libraries are, in fact, not only about real estate, but also mostly about the people, about the great work that our libraries do inside the buildings, and about literacy as it relates to our communities in the way we work today.

Unchallenged, Ms. Johnson left the appreciably-sized MAS audience with a very skewed view of what she and the BPl are up to.  Let’s hope that the MAS audience was far less gullible than Ms. Johnson would like to believe.

Addendum (added 6/18/2015): At the Wednesday, June 17, 2015 hearing referred to above, MAS sent a representative to testify in favor of this building (below- more images here) to replace and shrink the Brooklyn Heights Downtown Library made public in an information-dump, ULURP certification 48 hours before the hearing and being described as a 36-story tower in that information dump and the next day by the architect in the New York Times as a "38-story tower."

  

Selling a $100 Million Plus Library For What? A Pittance! More Transparency Please.

Click to enlarge

“It’s public land and public facilities and public value under threat. . . and once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties”

That’s the mayor in 2013 as a candidate for election speaking about the tragedy of selling off and shrinking our public libraries, transforming them into real estate deals that benefit developers, not the public.  One of the libraries about which Mr. de Blasio was speaking was the Brooklyn Heights library, Brooklyn’s central destination library on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.  The Brooklyn Public Library is pushing a proposal to turn it into a luxury condominium tower.

Brooklyn Heights library, Brooklyn’s central destination library on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton

The proposal involves a vastly shrunken so-called “replacement” library of minimal size.  The current library is 63,000 square feet; the proposed “replacement” just one-third, 21,000 square feet.  The current library has about 38,000 square feet above ground, the proposed “replacement” just 15,000 square feet above ground.

This coming Wednesday, June 17th, a hearing will commence the process required to decide whether to sell and shrink the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library.  This will be the first ever hearing on such a sale because one was not required or held with respect to Donnell sold in 2007, or the now besieged 34th Street Science, Industry and Business library.  Here’s information about the 6:00 PM hearing:

Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee June 17, 2015: ULURP Hearing- First Hearing About Whether To Sell & Shrink Downtowns's Brooklyn Heights Library (Tillary & Clinton)

I urge everyone who cares about this city to be there.  (This library is also intended to serve lower Manhattan.)

Probably because the sale does not make sense from the public’s point of view and is proceeding as a boondoggle hand-off to a developer, the Brooklyn Public Library and EDC, the city real estate development corporation that serves developers, is proceeding with an extreme lack of transparency.

This extreme lack of transparency extends even to BPL’s refusal to provide basic information about how much the public is losing and how little the BPL is selling this asset for, including all the costs that should be netted out of the sale.

There many things to consider about what is being lost if this essential amenity is transferred out to a developer looking to make millions, even including the park space and trees surrounding the building and the sale of the public’s light and air. (Urban renewal was once used to bring this site to a lower density in order to have that light and air.)  We have given some consideration to this before:  Tuesday, October 7, 2014, The Public Loss of Selling And Shrinking the Brooklyn Heights Library- How Great Will the Loss Be? Let's Calculate.

And the BPL has already been asked to identify the costs of selling the library which they have refused to do: Thursday, October 9, 2014, Open Letter To Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson and Friday, February 6, 2015, Open Letter To Brooklyn Public Library Trustee Peter Aschkenasy Re Commitment to Provide Information About Library Sale.

Now, the weekend before the hearing, it is probably time to fill in the gap and supply, in basic bookkeeping terms, some fundamental calculations of the dollar value of the asset the BPL is selling and, in dollar terms, how that sale of this asset at a pittance, netting perhaps less than nothing, will be a loss to the public.

We also have a some new information to work with despite the BPL’s efforts to be totally opaque.

The Dollar Value of Just the Library Building Itself

The Brooklyn Heights central destination library is 63,000 feet of extraordinarily serviceable (and adaptable) square feet.  That includes two half-floors of underground space that, similar to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, were set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval.  To say that the building is sturdy is an understatement: When it was built, it was built with space set aside for a bomb shelter with the thought that people could go there to be protected against a nuclear attack.

The building was built in 1962 (at a cost in today's dollars of about $20 million) and opened with a collection of 90,000 volumes.  In 1991 it was enlarged and upgraded (at a cost in today's dollars of about $10 million).  Then, additionally, a reclamation of the space people once thought might be used as a bomb shelter added even more space for books.

Downstairs space set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval

It is therefore relatively safe to say that based on these original costs the book value of the library building alone is in the approximate neighborhood of $30 million.

That’s one starting figure. . . 

What if a new library were reconstructed in the bottom of a luxury tower?  The BPL tells us that reconstructing a new, much smaller library of only one-third size (21,000 square feet) to replace the library will cost $10 million.  But previously they said it would cost $12 million.  Making these low-ball costs all the more suspect and fanciful, the BPL is proposing to sell the library, locking in this extreme shrinkage to an exact footage, without even bothering to design a new library first (let alone engage the public in determining its library size needs).

Actually, putting this vastly shrunken 21,000 square foot library in the bottom of the luxury tower for which there are still no public designs either will probably cost more than $16 million.  Yes, $16+ million.  That’s based on the costs of “replacing” (and shrinking) the slightly larger Donnell Library.  That construction has announced overruns although it still isn’t complete and may not be complete until 2016.

That would mean that replacing the Brooklyn Heights Library full-scale in a luxury tower would cost the BPL (and the public) about $48 million.  That would wipe out entirely what the BPL is being paid to sell the library.  Why?  Because the developer is only paying the BPL a gross price (before we calculate any losses) of $52 million.  And, if the library were being replaced full-scale, all of its 63,000 square feet in the bottom of a luxury tower, the developer would be paying the BPL substantially at lot less than that $52 million gross figure.  The developer would pay less because the developer would be buying less, a smaller balance of development rights, and because it would have to bear a higher cost to build the shell in which the library would build its new space.  (According figures from the BPL’s spokesperson, the developer may be spending about $10 million now.  Three times that amount would be substantial.) 

It has long been known that the NYPL’s sale of Donnell effectively amounted to a loss of millions of dollars of public library assets.  The sale of this library is closely replicates the sale of Donnell with an overlap of people involved in the planning.

Selling public assets for the benefit of developers is more expensive than everyone might immediately suppose.  Unless the BPL plays these shell games (and that involves having to shrink the library as part of the game) it quickly becomes apparent how much the public is losing.

The BPL refuses to give figures, but if the BPL were putting a full scale replacement library in the bottom of the luxury tower it would be costing the BPL around $48 million just for the rebuilding costs . . .  And the developer would also then probably be paying far less than $30 million gross price.  Result?:A very substantial loss.

There is a much better way to evaluate the public dollar value of the building that we are losing in this sale. That’s to consider the cost of erecting a free-standing building on the site today.  One reason that’s important?: Because, whatever size library is put in the bottom of a luxury condominium, that library can never be enlarged afterward.  The current library is enlargeable: Owned by the city, the city can build on the site to enlarge the library or construct for other public uses as the city grows as it and the neighborhood is doing very fast now.

If the BPL erects a free-standing 21,000 square foot replacement library at the site of library, it would cost $20 million according to library spokesperson David Woloch (at the 6/10/2015 Sunset Park Library redevelopment meeting).  Constructing a full-scale, free-standing 63,000 square foot replacement library would cost $60 million.

One might argue, as the BPL promoting the sale no doubt would, that such a library would be newer and "state-of-the art" and that the dollar value involved would not yet be subject to any depreciation to reflect any aging of the building.  On the other hand, one of the things that is thwarting the te BPL in its arguments for selling its building to a developer is that the Brooklyn Heights library was built to last.  It's a case of: They don’t build them like they used to.  As much as the BPL would like to neglect the building and drive it into the ground, fail to clean rest rooms, or make the aspects of the building superficially unappealing, the building frustrates them with its solidity.  Crazy enough, it was meant to be still standing if there ever was a nuclear war.

The BPL has fallen all over itself in silly efforts to exaggerate the building’s current needs. Principal among these efforts has been the BPL’s refusal to repair the air conditioning and its exaggerations that fixing the air conditioning could cost almost $5 million or that making the building pristine and new again could cost around $10 million.  But the BPL has refused to release the information that is available about previous assessments that contradict what they are saying about the air conditioning repair needs.

The BPL initiated plans to turn this (and other libraries) into a real estate deal with a decision that goes back to at least 2007.  Its plan wasn’t announced until January 2013, a year before Bloomberg left office.  The air conditioning conveniently went out of commission six months before the planned announcement of sale where air conditioning problems would be cited as a reason for the sale.

$30 million? $48 million? $60 million?  Those are figures for the dollar value of the library building alone.

But you can’t get a library just for the cost of building the building.  You have to also buy the land and own the development rights. 

The Dollar Value of the Land Under the Building
   
What is the value of the land under the library that we must include as part of the dollar value of the public’s ownership of the library?

The developer is paying a gross price to the BPL of $52 million so the value of the land and development rights that must be added to value of the building is surely at least that.  But the developer isn’t paying to buy all the land or all the development rights so the actual figure is higher than that.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

In addition, what the developer is paying includes a discount for other costs like the cost of demolition.  The public won’t incur any cost of demolition if it retains the library so that adds to the public value of land the public retains.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

The developer is also incurring perhaps $10 million in costs to build the shell for the shrunken replacement library, in effect an additional part of the purchase price paid to the library.   How much then to the $52 million should we add for this? $10 million?

The developer must also rent space for a tiny temporary library (7,500 square feet) for the four years or so the BPL expects it may take to build a shrunken replacement.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?  In the case of Donnell, rent for the tiny cramped interim library beginning when Donnell closed in spring 2008 was pursuant to rental lease terms calling for “payment of $850,000 for the first year (with possible increases thereafter).”  - How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

In the case of Donnell, outfitting that tiny cramped temporary library cost the NYPL, “nearly $5 million.”   One thing that is not yet clear at the moment is whether this outfitting expense would be a cost borne by the BPL (i.e. public), thus an additional public cost of the transaction, or by the developer, in which case it would be an extra factor raising the value of the land and development rights.

The developer is also incurring other costs in buying this land.  Contributions to politicians and elected officials including Mayor di Blasio should properly be considered an additional cost to buy the land and development rights.  When the developer pays his architect more so that his architect can send money in the mayor’s direction, that too should properly be considered an additional cost to buy the land and development rights.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?
  
In fact, it should not be considered that the developer is buying this as unencumbered land in the normal sense.  Because it is a library that the public values and because this deal will properly arouse anger and suspicion with the public it comes with many hurdles, many toll booths that have to be passed through paying fees to high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to sell a  narrative skewed to and paving the road for the public and their elected officials to ignore the obvious math problems associated with this shortchanging of the public.  Among other things the sale will have to go through a multi-year process where the question must be evaluated whether it is absurd to sell this public assets netting virtually nothing.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

How much then is the value of the land and the development rights to the public?  The value of the land that will appreciate in the future?  The development rights that can be used for future expansion and public good?

Somewhere between $65 million and $100 million?  More?

Value of the Library Building PLUS The Library Land

The math above means that the dollar value to the public of the library plus the land it sits on with all accompanying rights is somewhere between a minimum of $95 million and a much higher figure?  That higher dollar value to the public figure could easily be $160 million or could be higher.  A higher figure won’t seem at all preposterous when you see the aggregate value for which luxury condominiums will sell.  In the case of Donnell the penthouse apartment in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell is on the market for $60 million.  Several weeks ago another single lower-level condo unit in the building, 43A, sold for $20,110,437.50.  There is also a 114 guest room luxury hotel in the tower and earlier this year Chinese investors made that hotel, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the most highly valued hotel in the U.S.” after agreeing to buy it for “more than $230 million. . .  .more than $2 million a room.”

The design for the Brooklyn Heights luxury tower has yet to be released and various statements about its final true height have been misleading but one figure given in the New York Times says it will be a 38-story tower.  The developer has spoken of having extra tall ceilings to make it seem taller and give the apartments more luxurious views.

Netting the Costs Out of The Paltry Amount the Library Is getting for selling Off a $100+ Million Asset

The BPL states that it is getting a gross price of $52 million for selling and shrinking the library.  Out of this must be netted certain costs, most immediately the $16+ million to build the as-yet-undesigned “replacement” library, bring the net cash figure for selling the library down to less than $36 million.

From than $36 million much more must be subtracted.

The reduction in space will supposedly be associated with shifting the functions of the library, business and career functions that ought better to remain in growing Downtown Brooklyn, to cram them into the Grand Army Plaza library.  Will some/all of these functions actually just disappear?  No additional space will be built at the changed location so sacrifices will have to result.  It is not that many years ago a space expansion was required at the Grand Army Plaza library.  The BPL has acknowledged that cramming the functions in will entail substantial construction costs but refuses to furnish these cost to the public. At one time the BPL president Johnson said they were irrelevant and should be ignored and another time BPL spokesperson Davis Woloch said the BPL simply doesn’t know what those costs will be.  Shrinking a library before designing it?  Selling a library before knowing the costs of doing so?  Is this lack of transparency or total stupidity?

Some of the reductions at the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library will also have to be taken up by other BPL facilities.  Are those costs and sacrifices similarly unknown and unevaluated?

There is the cost both to the public and to the BPL of keeping books off-site and moving them around and these costs can be far heftier than the BPL acknowledges.  There is the cost of moving to a temporary library.  The cost of moving back.  The possible cost of outfitting the temporary library ($5 million like Donnell?).

There is the cost to the community of going without any sort of library for a projected four years and associated disruptions.  (Donnell has turned into possibly eight years.)

These figures which the BPL will not furnish or account for could easily wipe out the paltry $36 million remaining.  It could readily adjust the miniscule “net cash” situation taking it into deep negative territory.  That’s a problem for the BPL, which is trying a divide-and-conquer, smoke-and-mirrors strategy, trying to convince other communities that they will be benefitted by the squandering of these library assets.  The BPL is trying to convince these other communities that if a library is handed out as a prize to a developer this first time with the central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn that their own neighborhood libraries won’t similarly come up somewhere, next in a public-be-damned transaction as the BPL moves down the list in its plan that we know looks at “leveraging” all its real estate assets.

Factoring In the Smaller Library In Calculating the Loss

But to be fair, the BPL is not selling off the entirety of its assets at this site when it sells the library for this shrinkage plan.  With a new library one-third the size of what exists now it may be thought of as selling off somewhere in excess of two-thirds of its assets, not the entire asset.  In excess of two-thirds because, with the development rights transferred, this library can never be enlarged again if the community grows or if the shrinkage turns out to be the mistake that most people have judged it to be.

Math-wise, in dollar value terms, selling off more that two-thirds of the library amounts, based on the previous figures, to selling off $63+ million to $106.7+ million in assets (2/3 x $95 million to $160+ million, plus an adjustment up for selling the development rights).  For this sale the library will get perhaps zero or less.

The smaller, shrunken library, forever to be a depressing reminder of this era of rampaging privatization and plunder would, albeit, have a value.  At the high end, the building’s value would be maybe the $20 million the BPL would spend if it were building a free-standing enlargeable building.  Since that’s not what the BPL is getting maybe we should subtract from that.

Added to that $20 (or less) million building value we must add some associated dollar value for part of the land.  Using the earlier figures that would come to less than $21.7 million to $33.3 million (1/3 x $65 million and $100 million, from which must be subtracted a substantial figure for the extraction of all the development rights).

In other words we would go from having a library with a dollar value to the public of between $95 million to $160+ million, to having a much smaller library with a dollar value to the public of substantially less than, at best, $41.7 million* to $53.3 million. . .

(* This figure may seem disproportionally high because it only uses the top-end figure for new construction.  Those who care about historical and landmark value are likely to view it as coming out too relatively high in the comparisons.)

. . . The bottom line is that we would have sold off $63+ million to $160+ million in assets either at a public loss or netting virtually nothing.. . . Bottom line, in a time of increasing wealth, income and power disparities, this proposal will amount to a huge transfer of capital assets from the public realm to the private.

I believe I have not been unfair in supplying any of these numbers.  I think the unfairness is that the BPL has refused to provide such numbers.

Book ends?:  Brooklyn's two central destination libraries, the Downtown Brooklyn Heights Library and the Grand Army Plaza Library, were both designed by the same famed architect, Francis Keally.

Affordable Public Housing?

The library location of the proposed new luxury tower- Downtown and on the edge of fashionable, historic Brooklyn Heights- Beside a park and near the Promenade

One last factor in the mix?  Like the building of many other luxury towers the developer will seek to build a bigger, taller luxury tower by building, “poor door” fashion, a few “affordable” housing units (114 altogether) in very different locations in the Community Board 2 district.  It is another example of using people’s desperation for affordable housing as bait to strip communities of their assets and drive wedges between different groups.  In doing the calculus, what sort of value should be given to these units?  Good question.  But, if you want to ask that question, then you need to ask another question: Should our libraries be sold off to produce a few units of “affordable” housing?  Because, if so, there is enough need for affordable housing to start selling off all our public assets and libraries would wind up being only a small part of the total inventory of public assets that would be seized and privatized before that need was ever satisfied

"Poor Door": One location where a few "affordable" units would be built resulting in. . .

Another location where a few "affordable" units would be built

Meanwhile, in other privatizing plans very reminiscent of these attacks on libraries, the Mayor is looking to sell our public housing assets.  That includes proposing to shed 14,000 units of public housing from the inventory.  Well after we loose all those units we could pick up few again by selling all the libraries?

Who benefits from these shell games in the end?  Surely not the public.

Real Estate Deal Revelations In Scott Sherman’s New “Patience and Fortitude” About NYPL Central Library Plan Fight: Observer-Owning Kushner Family In At Outset of Donnell Sale

I am reading and now am almost at the conclusion of Scott Sherman’s new “Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library.”  It’s about the fight to save the famed 42nd Street Central Reference Library from the NYPL “Central Library Plan” that would have also sold off the Mid-Manhattan and 34th Street Science, Industry and Business libraries.

The book’s official release date is a few days from now, but ordering directly from the publisher makes it available earlier, which is the way I got copies.

I am fascinated to see how Mr. Sherman ties it all up, although I already suspect that there will be a few threads left tantalizingly hanging.  The book deserves a thorough Noticing New York review, which I hope I will get around to soon.

In the meantime, the book produces some revelations in what I already have read.  One of them involves confirmation of something that was easy to suspect but was never before reported: The Kushner family that owns the New York Observer was in on the sale of the beloved Donnell Library from the outset.

Two November 7, 2007 NY Times stories about real estate deals that turned out to be connected

Why was that easy to suspect?  As reported previously by Noticing New York, on November 7, 2007 the New York Times published two stories that reported separately (even in two different sections of the newspaper) about two real estate deals that ultimately turned out to be connected: The New York Public Library’s announced sale of the Donnell Library and Jared Kushner’s purchase, for a record-setting amount (taken home by Tishman Speyer) of 666 Fifth Avenue.  Jared Kushner is the owner of the New York Observer.

In my previous NNY reporting on these tandem sales I asked: “Did somebody know when 666 was bought that there was other potential value in the building?”  Why? Because ultimately $30.825 million was paid to the owners of 666 Fifth Avenue for `air rights’ freeing the Donnell site developer from restrictions that would have limited what could be built there.

The purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue announced December 2006 occurred in January 2007, ten months before the announced sale of Donnell.  The Times reporting that November said it was the “first major foray into the Manhattan office market, the buyer, the Kushner Companies.”

Scott Sherman’s book reveals that in 2007:

[Marshall] Rose moved rapidly to dispose of the Donnell Library.  Two bidders emerged: The Kushner family, which owns many properties in Manhattan, and a subsidiary of the Bermuda-based Orient-Express company, which owned the abutting “21" Club.

When Citizens Defending Libraries (I as a co-founder of CDL was part of the interview team) interviewed NYPL Chief Operating Officer David Offensend about the NYPL’s library sales he was evasive about the bid process that wasn’t public so it isn’t a surprise that only these two bidders “emerged.”    It is interesting that behind the scenes, the Kushners, looking to make a second major foray into the market, apparently understood the connection and what it meant in terms of the transaction that would ultimately be structured.

Certainly others understood too, but that connection was not furnished publicly at the time Robin Pogrebin was reporting about the announced Donnell sale.  She was misled by the NYPL’s description of a very different transaction involving only an 11-story hotel, not a 50-story luxury tower in which the inclusion of a luxury hotel would be only a small part.

As the Kushner deal to acquire of 666 Fifth was solidified by the end of 2006 at a then suspiciously high price, it looks all the more likely that the Kushners knew of the likeliness of a Donnell sale somewhat earlier that year. . .

. . .  That, checked against the reporting in Scott Sherman’s book, seems to mean that the Kushners knew the outlines of the deal that was shaping up before the NYPL board knew about or approved it.  Notwithstanding, the Kushners were apparently taking significant action presuming they knew how things would unfold.

2006 seems to have been an interesting year for the Kushners.  Jared Kushner acquired the Observer in July 2006.  Also, as the Times reports, his father was released from prison:

Mr. Kushner’s father, Charles B. Kushner, is a company founder and a newsmaker in his own right. A major Democratic fund-raiser, Charles Kushner was convicted last year of 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. He was released from prison earlier this year.

Interesting thing about the owner of the Observer being involved in this deal?: It’s one more New York City news organ less likely to do investigative reporting about New York City library sell-offs. . .

At 53rd Street accross from MoMA, the 97,000 square foot Donnell on land from John D. Rockefeller out of stone that matched Rockefeller Center's

Mr. Sherman’s book has other revelations.  There are, for instance, revelations concerning the loss the NYPL suffered selling Donnell.   Noticing New York and Citizens Defending Libraries have previously made the point that Donnell was sold to net the NYPL less than $38 million.  It turns out the NYPL netted far less than that.  The NYPL collected a gross price of $59 million for the 97,000 square foot library, much of which had been recently renovated.  It is so far costing the NYPL at least $21 million to build the much smaller 28,000 square foot, largely bookless, largely underground library that will `replace' Donnell in 2015 or maybe 2016.

Additional losses must be subtracted.  The NYPL paid millions to professionals to tell them that its essentially stupid real estate transactions were the opposite of that.  That’s the way that you cover your ass when are doing something that you shouldn’t.

But, if the NYPL had tried to build a library that replaced Donnell full scale it would have lost money on the transaction even taking just these figures into account.

There is more information that will come out associated with the cost of removing the books from Donnell.

Books ready to be shipped off, disappearing from Donnell.  Many illions of books that were in Manhattan Libraries are not there anymore.  And there is substantial cost associated with not having them there.

Mr. Sherman’s book identifies some other costs that turned out to be huge in comparison to how little Donnell was sold for:

the outfitting of a temporary replacement library for the Donnell in a cramped space on 46th Street, which turned out to be a very costly proposition–  [NYPL President] LeClerc and Rose had inked a rental lease whose terms called for payment of $850,000 for the first year (with possible increases thereafter), but the Library also spent nearly $5 million to outfit that new temporary facility.

Ergo, even before recognizing that the NYPL would have suffered a net loss if it had to build a full-scale Donnell, the $5 million to outfit the temporary replacement means that the NYPL netted less than $33 million for selling the library and from that there needs to be further subtractions of the $850,000 annual rents for all the years since Donnell closed in spring of 2008.

Meanwhile, the penthouse apartment in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell is on the market for $60 million.  Several weeks ago another single lower-level condo unit in the building, 43A, sold for $20,110,437.50.  There is also a 114 guest room luxury hotel in the tower and earlier this year Chinese investors made that hotel, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the most highly valued hotel in the U.S.” after agreeing to buy it for “more than $230 million. . .  .more than $2 million a room.”

Having checked via the index, I know that there is one thing that Mr. Sherman didn’t report.

He reported how NYPL COO David Offensend (now replaced- not reported by Sherman- by Iris Weinshall, Senator Schumer’s wife) was a key driver of the Donnell sale and NYPL real estate plans.  Some flatteringly refer to Offensend as a `mastermind' of the plans.

But Sherman did not report that while David Offensend was engaged in such plans at the NYPL his wife, Janet Offensend was named to the board of the Brooklyn Public Library where she was instrumental in the introduction of parallel plans for the sell-off and shrinkage of Brooklyn libraries, including a sale very closely modeled on, almost exactly duplicating, the sale of Donnell: The sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library,   Brooklyn’s central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.*

(* The sale of Donnell was sudden and secretive, but the first ever public hearing about the sale of a major New York City library will be held Wednesday, June 17th, about the proposed sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights library.) 

On the left the Grand Army Plaza Library.  On the right the Brooklyn Heights Library.  Both central destination Brooklyn libraries were designed by Francis Keally, former president of the Municipal Art Society when it was a vital organization

WNYC Reports Mayor de Blasio’s “Furiously Raising Funds”- Including From Developers “Lurking Behind The Curtain” of Library Real Estate Sales- And WNYC’s Money?

Bill de Blasio funders: Library-purchasing developers David Kramer and Jonathan Marvel.  WNYC funder: The Revson Foundation

Here’s a link to a WNYC report: De Blasio Furiously Raising Funds, Privately, by Anna Sale. 

The article, informative and newsworthy mostly as long list of “who is helping” de Blasio, channeling big bucks to his door.  It doesn’t say who is bringing how much and you have to guess who is bringing the most.  You can make some good guesses though.

As you’d suspect the city’s heavy-hitting real estate developers are well represented: William Zeckendorf, the Sitt Family, Larry Silverstein, Fred Heller, Robert Levine and Ronny Levine, Mike Muse and Jason Muss, Ron Moelis, Gary Barnett, David Von Spreckelsen, Donald Capoccia.

A May 27th demonstration against Gary Barnett's Extell gentrifying 227 Cherry Street development that wiped out the local supermarket on the Lower East Side.

You also have people representing them like real estate lawyers Douglas Eisenberg or John Zuccotti, immortalized by having the private park from which Occupy Wall Street was evicted named after him.

There are, of course, lobbyists: Peter Vallone Sr., Sid Davidoff, Ken Fisher.

And then there are many others who may or may not have brought in that much money and who are likely on the list for reasons unconnected with real estate, in some cases perhaps because they even have altruistic hopes in common with the rest of us for Bill de Blasio’s future as mayor: Abby (Abigail) Disney, Emily Madoff, Yetta Kurland, Debbie Almontaser.

Attorney Jim Walden is on the list perhaps because in 2013 he was representing a huge public constituency hoping that de Blasio in his ascension to office as mayor would be key in defeating the sell-off of Long Island College Hospital as part of a plan to turn that facility into waterfront condominium towers.   No such luck: Mr. de Blasio wimped.

No doubt the reason that WNYC did an information dump of all these names for the public to analyze is the supposition that all these people sending money de Blasio’s way wanted him in office and to influence his decisions in office.

People that are particularly interesting on the list in one respect are the people connected to the selling off of New York City libraries, shrinking them to squeeze the best out of the real estate deals that materialize as a result.

David Kramer of Hudson Companies Development is on the list as is Jonathan Marvel of Marvel Architects.  Their fund-raising at this time was concurrent with Kramer and Marvel having a pending application in with the city to buy and shrink the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn’s central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.

This was October 2013.  Three months earlier in the campaign de Blasio stood on the steps of 42nd Street’s Central Reference Library with Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) and other activists opposing city library sales to speak of the proposed sale and shrinkage of the city’s libraries, including the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library, in harshly discrediting terms:

It’s public land and public facilities and public value under threat. . . and once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties

Eleven months after Kramer and Marvel flowed money to de Blasio’s campaign and nine month’s into de Blasio’s term as mayor, the de Blasio administration decided that the Kramer and Marvel application would be the one selected if the sale and shrinkage is approved to go forward.  The sale will entail a substantial loss to the city with library being shrunk down to one-third size.  As a technical matter the process to obtain that approval will commence with a hearing before Brooklyn Community Board 2's Land Use Committee on Wednesday, June 17th.*  The process will take at least 18 months, perhaps as much as two years, and will require de Blasio’s sign-off before it is complete.  A week ago de Blasio told one of the activists opposing library sales that he has not made his decision on the sale yet, but there are plenty who cynically believe he has already committed himself privately to the developer.

(*   This will be the first ever hearing about the selling and shrinking of a major New York City library.  No such hearings were required when the Donnell Library was suddenly and secretively sold off because, in that case, the library, not the city, owned the land.  Similarly, such a hearing isn’t required for the sale of another major destination library, SIBL, Science, Industry and Business Library at 34th Street.)

Developer David Kramer looks on approvingly as library administration officials do a sales pitch for his purchase and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Cointon Library

The developer David Kramer and I live in the same neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, which the other day resulted in our meeting and a discussion about the proposed library sale giving a young man who was present an impromptu civics lesson.  David described Citizens Defending Libraries and its opposition to the city’s transformation of libraries into real estate deals as being part of the “checks and balances” of the system.

I continued this discussion with him May 27th at a community board meeting where the library administration officials had flogged the plan to sell and shrink the library.  I asked him what check and balance there was to the influence of his money and the money of the real estate industry when it came to library sales.  He said he hadn’t given any money and that money wasn’t a factor in the process. . .

. . .  However, here is record of $4,725.00 going directly from Mr. Kramer to de Blasio’s coffers.

Not on the list published by WNYC is any fund-raising by Forest City Ratner for de Blasio which was prolific, the Daily News reporting on Bruce Ratner and associates sending $73,000 de Blaio’s way.

Forest City Ratner is important because Forest City Ratner is positioned as a gatekeeper able to also benefit from the Brooklyn Heights Library sale.  It was former Forest City Ratner vice president Karen Backus who created the BPL’s still secretly held “Strategic Real Estate Plan” to “right-size” Brooklyn’s libraries by “leveraging” all of the system’s real estate while prioritizing for sale the two libraries next to Forest City Ratner property, the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton library being one and the Pacific Branch the other.

The rationale was to sell the most valuable libraries first, but those are also the libraries most valuable to the public.  What’s considered next most valuable will be seen as the BPL moves down the list.

WNYC’s October 2013 list did have others involved in the library sales.  Among them is Nicholas A. Gravante, Jr. a lawyer that his firm spotlights for trial victories, including “winning an acquittal for three leading New York City real estate companies indicted under the Martin Act” (that means the firms were indicted for making misrepresentations to the public).  Gravante is a board member and is now currently chair of the Brooklyn Public Library board pushing for these library sales.  Other members of his Boies Schiller & Flexner law firm were also on the WNYC list: David Boies and Christopher Boies.

Carlos Scissura (Carlo A. Scissura, Esq.) is on the list. He is currently president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce that is supporting the library sales.  Previously he was General Counsel and Chief of Staff for Borough President Marty Markowitz, who supported the library sale and shrinkage.  Working for Markowitz Scissura served as an ex-officio member of the BPL board and was there for the concocting of the still secret “Strategic Real Estate Plan.”

Lastly, Joe Sitt (the Sitt Family was on the list) is a developer who is likely to have benefitted in ways that have yet to be publicly analyzed and discussed if the part of NYPL's Central Library Plan involving the proposed sale of Mid-Manhattan Library were ever to move forward.

I wrote above that no doubt the reason that WNYC furnished the list of the names of all these people funneling money to de Blasio is the supposition that the money was intended to have influence.. . .

In one final irony as we pay attention to the proposed transformation of city libraries into real estate deals, it is distressing to note that the WNYC article about who is sending money to de Blasio appears with the following note about who is providing money to WNYC:

WNYC is supported by the Charles H. Revson Foundation: Because a great city needs an informed and engaged public

The irony?  The Charles H. Revson Foundation has been suspiciously in the background and supportive of turning New York City libraries into real estate deals.  (See:  Thursday, June 6, 2015, Where Are They Now?: Sharon Greenberger, Evercore and the Revson Foundation- Selling And Shrinking NYC Libraries.). . . . It may be one of the reasons that WNYC reporting on the sale of libraries, something that should be a very important story, has fallen quite short of the mark.

The Revson Foundation gives WNYC big money: In the years 2010 to 2015 the Revson Foundation has given to WNYC (or in one case one of its projects) a total of $1.78 million.

The axiom (courtesy here of Bill Moyers) is that “news is what people want to keep hidden, everything else is publicity.”

WNYC says that its news reporting is not affected by the sponsors that ‘donate’ money.  WNYC, which now has Forest City Ratner head MaryAnne Gilmartin on its board, also takes sponsorship money from Forest City Ratner, in return for which it has run what are essentially advertisements for the firm.  WNYC has regularly been a publicist telling the public volumes of what the Revson Foundation wants known about how it is spending its money.  It has not, however, reported about what is going on behind the scenes to turn libraries into real estate deals.

Where Are They Now?: Sharon Greenberger, Evercore and the Revson Foundation- Selling And Shrinking NYC Libraries

Sharon L. Greenberger in government and now . . .  still selling libraries?

Sometimes coincidence seem just too frequent and sometimes it will surprise you where certain people will turn up.

Sharon L. Greenberger

Back last August I wrote a long article, the saga of the Brooklyn Public Library’s creation and pursuit of a “Strategic Real Estate Plan” to sell and shrink (“right-size”) its libraries, an article put together through the vantage of reading over ten years of the Brooklyn Public Library’s own minutes.   See: Sunday, August 31, 2014,  Mostly In Plain Sight (A Few Conscious Removals Notwithstanding) Minutes Of Brooklyn Public Library Tell Shocking Details Of Strategies To Sell Brooklyn's Public Libraries.

One of the BPL trustees who emerged as a fascinating spearhead pushing the plans to put library real estate in the hands of developers was Sharon L. Greenberger (the “L” stands for “Lee”) who was appointed to the BPL board by Mayor Bloomberg.  She was chief of staff for Bloomberg’s top development dog, Daniel Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding.

It was Ms. Greenberger who became the key designated leader of a BPL board task force created in the fall of 2008 to promote the "Strategic Real Estate Plan."  She regularly appears in the minutes pushing it forward. She is the one who introduced to the board Karen Backus, the former Forest City Ratner vice president, who was hired to create the real estate plan in 2007 and who in her task force role was responsible for coordinating with Backus and being a conduit for all board comments to her.  Greenberger’s committee in February 2009 also reviews whether to hold off on capital work that needs to be done at the Sunset Park Library, given that a secret “Revson Study” called for that library to become a “Mixed Use Real Estate” opportunity.

That “Revson Study” must be a pretty eye-opening one given that the BPL even now, years afterward, refuses to furnish it pursuant to the Freedom of Information Law as it is required to.

Revson

We’ll be back to Revson.

Back to Greenberger

February 2009 was also when Ms. Greenberg’s real estate committee is reportedly in communication with New York City’s Landmarks Commission to ensure that landmark designations don’t interfere with the real estate-related ambitions the BPL has for its multiple historic libraries.

Greenberg over time winds up in a fair number of other development and government related positions, all of which are interesting. 

Greenberger with NYU president John Sexton

For a while Greenburger was involved with NYU’s controversial expansion plan as Vice President of Campus Planning and Real Estate for New York University.  She was described as having “bolted” from it.  When she left to become President and CEO of the New York City School Construction Authority, Greenwich Village Historic District Director Andrew Berman  criticized her for her involvement in selling air rights to developers while at NYU and quipped that the same thing might now happen to NYC schools, something that ultimately proved to be a very valid concern. (See: Planning czar bolts N.Y.U. for Bloomberg schools job, By Lincoln Anderson, April 19 - 25 2006.

From the School Construction Authority Ms. Greenberger moved on to the Department of Education.  She left there in 2011 following the exceptionally brief troubled tenure and departure of Schools Chancellor Cathie Black, the Bloomberg appointee from the public relations world who had no education experience.

Greenberg wasn’t the only Doctoroff staff person to show up on the BPL’s board.  There was also Laurel Blatchford, a Senior Policy Advisor to Daniel Doctoroff before she moved on to become Deputy Commissioner for Strategy Planning, Policy, and Communications at New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).  She later was involved on the private sector side in events working towards the dismantling of the South Street Historic District.

If you read the previous longer NNY article it describes much more about how other Bloomberg operatives like Bloomberg Counsel Anthony Crowell another Bloomberg trustee and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, also charged with overseeing real estate matters for Bloomberg, were presiding over BPL governance matters in various ways.

Greenberger and Blatchford both overlap in their BPL board tenures, interestingly with another BPL trustee, Janet Offensend.

Greenberger showed up on the BPL board in December of 2004, appointed by Mayor Bloomberg for a five year term.  This is roughly the same time that Janet Offensend makes her first appearance in the BPL's minutes (September 21, 2004).  Ms. Offensend is interesting as another key BPL trustee associated with the BPL’s library sales although she didn’t get appointed to the board until the end of 2005.  Ms. Offensend shows up in the minutes about half a year after her husband David's assumption of the position of Chief Operating Officer at the NYPL where he would oversee the sudden, secretive sale of the Donnell Library in 2007 and the Central Library Plan, another massive boondoggle involving library shrinkage and the proposed sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL, the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library, together with the destruction of stacks at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and removal of its books.

Evercore

David G. Offensend started as Chief Operating Officer at the NYPL in the first half of 2004, coming from Evercore, a private equity and investment firm that spun off from the Blackstone Group, an investment company which has, as just one of its many lines of business, the world's largest real estate investment company, and which is headed by Stephen A. Schwarzman.  Mr. Schwarzman transferred $100 million to the NYPL when it was his understanding that the Central Library Plan would then proceed with its plans to shed valuable Manhattan real estate.  Oddly, months before the relatively contemporaneous Donnell sale was publicly known, there was weird speculation in the press that Schwarzman and his Blackstone Group would be involved in an acquisition of Orient Express, the company that it was revealed had contracted to purchase Donnell when information about the apparently bidless sale came out.

Where Are They Now?

Where is Sharon L. Greenberger now?  Yes, she has been at New York Presbyterian, SVP for Facilities Development and Engineering. . .  But she can also be found on the board of the “Charles H. Revson Foundation.”

Remember that “Revson Study” the BPL won’t release?  That study about libraries converted into  “Mixed Use Real Estate Opportunities”?

Recently the Revson Foundation was one of a principal movers and funders behind “Re-imagining New York City's Branch Libraries” that set up an orchestration of “six interdisciplinary teams to present innovative design solutions for the challenges facing branch libraries.”

More than one set of these presentations was made.  I missed the first one that borrowed Brian Lehrer from WNYC to moderate.  I was at the one at the New School’s Furman Center on January 12th early this year.  That evening's audience was informed that materials were going to be put up the web, but they decided not to put up a video of the evening.  It could have been embarrassing in some respects.

At the end of the presentation, the moderating New School host, summing up, said the following:

And again, as the final presentation has shown, and we will see again hopefully, at the end a library is real estate.  It's an integral ingredient in urban development.  I've studied libraries for years, and many design projects around the country have found it's often a nice placating gesture in a real estate development. You want to do commercial development?: Put a library in it and you win a new public that you might not have had on your team initially.  So in short a library has many fronts and functions.

The last presentation referred to above had, among other things, shown, with accompanying diagrams, how provision of libraries could be exchanged for community approval of real estate development: A better, bigger library traded for an upzoning where it is built, or the upzoning of an entire area surrounding such a library based on the exchanged assurance that surcharges on the new development would be paid into the library system’s general coffers.  Anything paid in by what was referred to as such a “surcharge,” would, theoretically, have to not be subtracted out of the city’s budget on the other end. . . . but that virtually insurmountable problem wasn’t hinted at.

Let developers upzone and get a bigger library?

Libraries as `nice placating gestures' to `win’ public approvals for development? . .

. . . Such enticement plans could hardly work if the public felt that libraries were a basic public service they were entitled to no matter what- And wasn’t such public entitlement the deal Carnegie struck with the city when he donated most of the city's libraries?  It's a deal the city is now breaking.

The only way such enticement plans work is if the public is kept starved for libraries and starved for library funding.  That, perversely, puts people hoping to use libraries as pawns for lubricating development in the camp of wanting libraries perpetually underfunded or even on the brink of extermination . . .

Such enticement plans do not work if libraries, like police, fire and sanitation departments, are looked upon as inherent public goods that pay for themselves because the cost of doing without them would be greater.

The presenters at these “re-envisioning” forums were all propounding themselves as being pro-library and pro-library funding..

The entire evening of presentations, more than three hours even in incomplete form, and even before it was opened up for audience questions, served up some good ideas.  It also served up some silly ones and some other ideas that were ominous and frightening.

The talk about having fewer books at the libraries was far too cheerful.  There was talk about libraries that would be appreciably smaller, their “flexible” spaces less committed to traditional library use with the idea of cramming in multiple competing prospective uses.  One possibility focused on: “ephemeral” small temporary storefront libraries.

As I made the point when audience questions were permitted, when evaluating all of this, what gets thrown out as a smorgasbord mix of good, silly and bad ideas is less relevant than which of these ideas gets cherry picked for actual execution by library administration officials.  The panelist presenters were loath to comment when I asked them what they thought of actual plans materializing against the background of the cloud of ideas thrown up.  The plans we have witnessed actually materializing involve sale and shrinkage of libraries and elimination of books, all of this structured to benefit the real estate industry: Selling and shrinking central destination libraries like the Donnell and Brooklyn Heights libraries,* and similarly the Central Library Plan shrinking library space and eliminating books while selling Mid-Manhattan and the Science, Industry and Business libraries.

(* The first ever hearing about selling off a NYC library, this one, will be held Wednesday, June 17th.)

The fact is that the Revson Foundation, as with the too-toxic-to-release “Revson Study” about converting libraries to multi-use development opportunities has been suspiciously in the background and suspiciously aligned with supporting these development ambitions.

The Revson Foundation has prominently backed Spaceworks, a private firm, technically a not-for-profit, comprised of real estate and political insiders that has as one of its principal purposes the privatizing takeover of space to shrink libraries.  Spaceworks targeted as one of its first guinea pig experiments the shrinking of the 7,500 square foot Red Hook Library down to just 5,500 square feet.  This was although the Center For an Urban Future in a report funded by the Revson Foundation (and promoting their redevelopment) said, somewhat at cross purposes, that New York City branch libraries should be at least 10,000 square feet or more and notwithstanding that BPL President Linda Johnson, given a high profile platform to speak unchallenged at the Municipal Art Society, said that 7.500 square feet for a library was “woefully inadequate.”

The Revson Foundation has also partnered with Urban Librarians Unite, a group that has testified in favor of selling and shrinking libraries and that also supports Spaceworks.  It donated at a total of $32,000 to that group over the years of 2012, 2013 and 2014.

To find in addition that the Revson Foundation has on its board Sharon L. Greenberger, who as a Daniel Doctoroff city development official was key in structuring the BPL’s plans to turn all its libraries into real estate opportunities, is shocking.

Looking at the Revson Foundation board, there is something else to exacerbate concern: Evercore, the firm spun off from Blackstone that David Offensend co-founded and left to work at NYPL selling and shrinking libraries. Revson Foundation board member Stacy Dick was at Evercore overlapping with for a number of years with Offensend.

Greenberger now?  She's just arriving at another institution that caretakes appreciable other assets about which the public cares.  About a month ago the YMCA announced Ms. Greenberger is becoming its new president.  She starts in July.  See: YMCA of Greater New York Announces Sharon Greenberger as New President & CEO, April 7, 2015.   

Takeover of Charitable Boards By Wall Street Financiers With Not So Charitable Values

There is new study on the increasing dominance of Wall Street financiers on charitable boards:  "The Wall Street Takeover of Nonprofit Boards," by Garry W. Jenkins at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.  See: Wall Street's latest takeover: Charity boards, by Robert Frank, May 28, 2015.

As CNBC’s Robert Frank summarizes:

the percentage of nonprofit board members in the study who come from finance has doubled since 1989. They hold an even larger percentage of leadership positions on nonprofit boards.

From the report:

As financiers come to dominate the boards of leading nonprofits, it is not surprising that their approaches and priorities have made their way, very explicitly and fundamentally, into the governance of the nonprofit sector.

Among multiple other critiques of the pitfalls of such boards the report notes that “numerous critics have written thoughtfully about the ways in which market-based thinking and approaches applied to the nonprofit sector provide false promise, with the potential to dilute charitable values” and “undermine long-term mission focus.”

Mr. Frank wraps up:

.. as the study makes clear, simply "following the money" may not be the best long-term strategy for today's most important charities.

This report and the Robert Frank summarizing of it apparently assume the good intentions of such dominating board members, their principal concern then being that the approach of such board members will be culturally misguided and insensitive to value that cannot be expressed monetarily

A May 30, 2015 New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed, “Who Will Watch the Charities?,” by David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, is far more caustic and cynical.  “(W)e should end the charade that all philanthropy is somehow charitable,” says Mr. Callahan.  He cites how earlier this year “a school reform group in Philadelphia offered $35 million to help that city close a funding gap, but demanded the right to open more charters as a condition and wouldn't disclose its donors.”  He warns a big problem with modern philanthropy: “how inextricably entwined it has become with politics and ideology.”  He says:

it’s alarming how in an era of high inequality, private funders have a growing say over central areas of civic life like education and public parks, and how this influence is often wielded against a backdrop of secrecy.

Mr. Callahan says that the secrecy can’t go on, predicting that it won’t, saying that as powerful institutions in American life charities need vigilant oversight.

I am not saying that the Revson Foundation has not done many things of value.  What's more I am sad to be questioning it at all as my aunt, Kay Daly, was Vice President of Revlon in charge of advertising and a close colleague of Revlon’s founder, Charles Revson Sr. who set up the Revson Foundation.  His son, Charles Revson Jr,. his son, is also on the Revson Foundation’s board.

Revson Board

I’ll leave it to the reader to study and try to discern how and by whom influence gets exercised on the Revson Foundation’s board.  I have not yet had time to do as much deep research as I’d like.

Does it matter that Sharon L. Greenberger is really more a development operative hailing from the Bloomberg administration’s Daniel Doctoroff days, than a financier and technically from Wall Street?

Does it matter that Cheryl Effron, a real estate developer on the board, has strong ties to the Bloomberg administration (see this from 2011):

In 2009 she founded Greater NY, a public-private partnership based in the Mayor's Office to engage fifty corporate executives in two-year one-on-one strategic partnerships with non-profit executives to develop new models for social service delivery in New York City.

    * * *

She is a trustee of the Mayor's Fund for the Advancement of New York City.

Does it matter that Jeffrey Goldberg on the foundation board is one of the columnists at Bloomberg View set up in May of 2011 as the editorial division of Bloomberg News, that is “an opinion product . .   to some extent, a reflection of its creator,” Michael Bloomberg, mayor at that time.

I invite my readers to investigate more.  These `where are they now' questions are indeed interesting, but where will WE be without libraries?   Wherever we are, we’ll probably be there without many of our other public assets as well. . . Because, if you can’t stop them at libraries, where can you stop them?

PS:  If it makes you feel any better- or worse- the Revson Foundation has given a great deal of money to WNYC radio which now has on its board MaryAnne Gilmartin, the head of Forest City Ratner (a gatekeeper for one of the library sales, Brooklyn Heights) and has recently run promotional spots that are essentially advertising for Forest City Ratner.