Funding Public Services Through Real Estate Development

Listen to a recent segment on the Brian Lehrer show.  It's doesn't talk about the school but it does address the basic issues of selling public land.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association and Tom Angotti, director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and development, discuss the tactic of funding public housing projects, libraries, schools and post offices through developing real estate.

New York Times Article on City Selling Public Land

More about the City grabbing public land for private development.  This recent New York Times article is about displacing a local community center for a luxury high-rise.

The center has been here in East Harlem, amid public-housing towers that are home to about 3,480 residents, for more than 55 years. Most of the programming comes through the Union Settlement Association: after-school, summer, tutoring, arts, college prep, job readiness, fatherhood, re-entry, teen night, mental health and life skills.
Six days a week, the center draws people from as far as Staten Island. But lately there has been fear in the neighborhood, inspired by a plan of the New York City Housing Authority to raze the building housing the center for private residential development.

Read the Full Article. 

NYTs Op-Ed Piece on Midtown East Development - Some Simularities

A piece penned by Robert A.M. Stern questioning Bloomberg's push to redevelop Midtown East without proper foresight and planning, similar to how the push is being made to develop the PS 199 site and other school sites in the city.  Some highlights:


Protecting the integrity of the area:

Are we preparing to make the same mistake again, on multiple sites? The rezoning study makes no mention of protected-view corridors. Can we guarantee that in the future the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building will not be lost in thickets of taller buildings?

Planning backwards, infrastructure should come first:

And what of our streets and subway platforms? I commute through Grand Central several times a week, and at 6:20 a.m., when I catch my train to New Haven, the terminal is already full of people. When I return at 6:30 or 7 p.m., I can hardly make my way to the stairways and escalators that lead to the Lexington Avenue subway platforms.

How will the added workers quartered in these new buildings get from their trains to their desks? The plan says that special assessments and payments in lieu of taxes will guarantee “pedestrian network improvements as development occurs.” There is nothing wrong with privately financed infrastructure improvements. But the study, if I read it correctly, gets it backward: first you put in the infrastructure, then you build the buildings. Look at the example of Grand Central, the private enterprise that spurred all this development in the first place.

Read the full piece here. 

Support CDL and Help Save NYC Libraries

I've posted before about how the PS 199 issue is just one piece of a large effort by the City to sell off public land.  

An organization called Citizens Defending Libraries has been formed to fight the City on the closing and selling of libraries throughout NYC.

Library Protection Week has already brought the issue of the sell off and shrinkage of libraries to thousands of New Yorkers who knew nothing about it.  Come to the big event tomorrow at City Hall Park, where our City Comptroller John Liu will speak, 

Thursday, April 18th

12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. 

Steps of City Hall at Broadway and Chambers Streets, downtown Manhattan. 

Arrive early to get through security.

Assemblyperson O'Donnell's Bill to Require ULURP and Community Involvement for PS 199 and 191

O'Donnell Bill Requires Community Involvement in Sale of School Buildings 031413 by westsiderag

To read the full bill go here.

The Larger Context of City Privatization

What the city is proposing with the development of public school sites fits into a larger trend of privatization of public lands in the city.

See this article on Damrosch Park where the city is allowing the use of a public park for private profit.

This New York Times article about selling off Public Libraries.

And even worse, the proposed private developments of NYCHA properties as described here and here.

News from the NY Times

Saving Schools and Libraries by Giving Up the Land They Sit On

Quote from the article:

“What makes a place interesting is different kinds of architecture and a school looking like a school,” said Laurie Frey, a member of the Community Education Council in District 3, a board that represents public school parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “There’s a feeling of, ‘Oh please, not another high rise,’ and a feeling that, since we’re already getting used to an increased density in our few blocks, do we really need more?”

The city’s Educational Construction Fund is reviewing proposals for construction of high-rise apartment towers on the sites of two public schools near Lincoln Center — P.S. 191 on West 61st Street and P.S. 199 on West 70th Street, which was designed by the modernist architect Edward Durell Stone — and another school on East 96th Street, the School of Cooperative Technical Education. In each case, new schools would occupy the lower floors of the new buildings.

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