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 July 1, 2008 | Vol 7, No. 13 |
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In This Issue: – A Crossroads at Willets Point – Calendar All of this will change if a plan of Mayor Bloomberg’s is approved. This past Monday a review process started that will ultimately lead to a decision by the City Council on whether to accept the Mayor’s proposal to redevelop the area into a mixed-use district of new housing, retail stores, offices, park space and possibly a convention facility. Instead of junkyards and small manufacturers, in a few years one would see apartment buildings, small office towers, a hotel, even possibly a convention center. The stakes are high. The proposed plan would displace an estimated 260 businesses and 1,711 employees. The City would also invest substantial public funds in new infrastructure to support the project. In return, the City expects the redeveloped site to generate nearly 6,000 units of desperately needed housing, two million square feet of retail, 750,000 square feet of office space, a 400,000 square- foot convention center, a 700 room hotel, a 150,000 square-foot community facility and 8 acres of open space. It will also connect the nearby thriving residential neighborhoods of Flushing, Corona and Queensboro Hill with the largely commercial and industrial College Point area and integrate a number of Queens attractions, including the new Citi Field, Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the National Tennis Center. The proposed neighborhood has also qualified as a “green neighborhood” by the U.S. Green Building Council. The threshold question is whether the public benefits justify the substantial public investment and use of eminent domain that go with this kind of large-scale urban redevelopment. If it was simply a question of displacing these largely industrial jobs with higher-value activity, the City would need a stronger economic justification. Over time, the City will need this location, and others like it that are close to transit, to make use of the waterfront and accommodate expected population and job growth. But ideally this could be done in a more organic manner that would develop the site incrementally, preferably in a way that retains some of the original businesses. However, there is another aspect to Willets Point that tips the scales to favor wholesale redevelopment. The District’s long history of industrial use, informal business practices and lack of basic infrastructure – including poor road and sidewalk conditions, chronic flooding and limited storm and sanitary sewer infrastructure – has left a legacy of hazardous contamination. PCBs, heavy metals and pesticides leach into Flushing Bay and impair air quality for workers and nearby residents. In order to remediate the area and prevent future pollution, contaminated soil will have to be removed or covered with clean fill. Storm sewers need to be installed. Without clearing the site and starting over, not only will we be left with an area that is underperforming in its economic potential, but also we will be shirking our responsibility to protect public health and the urban environment. This does not mean the plan proposed by the City cannot be improved. There are a host of potential benefits that should be maximized. A leading issue is the number of housing units that will be affordable to low- and moderate-income households. Pedestrian access to the waterfront and to adjoining neighborhoods, a desire of local communities, has not been solved. Finding homes for displaced manufacturing jobs – on site or elsewhere – needs to be certain and efficient. The feasibility and benefits of a convention center on the site is also an unresolved issue. City resources, and the dollars that can be generated by redevelopment of the site, are too scarce to meet all of these needs, so trade-offs need to be made. However, the important point is to move the process forward and take advantage of this opportunity to make Willets Point a model of both economic and environmental sustainability. Obama and Building Bridges, Real Ones But about a week ago the presumed Democratic nominee Barack Obama gave a speech in Miami on June 21st to the U.S. Conference of Mayors that was mostly about infrastructure, and why and how we needed to invest more in it. In political terms, the little lost orphan had been invited into the dinner party, and given a seat at the table. “We'll unlock the potential of all our regions by connecting them with a 21st century infrastructure,” Obama said. “You know why this is so important. You see the traffic along I-95 in Miami. You see the crumbling roads and bridges, the aging water and sewer pipes, the faltering electrical grids that cost us billions in blackouts, repairs, and travel delays.” He went on to talk about investing in “a world-class transit system, . . .green energy technology, . . . and in our ports, roads, and high-speed rails.” What Obama was calling for was a renewed and redefined federal role in infrastructure development, in the context of investment in cities and regions themselves. Those who follow such things could see that Obama, like any good politician, was following as much as leading, choosing the right moment to highlight an issue that others had already underscored and defined. He has surely noticed the debated beginning to gain traction in the past few months. Many of Obama's themes draw directly from RPA's America 2050 program. The conference, “Rebuilding and Renewing America: Toward a 21st Century Infrastructure Investment Plan”, which RPA organized in early May in Washington, D.C., inspired an article in The Economist this week, citing America 2050’s efforts emphasizing an enhanced role for the federal government in the creation of freight, passenger rail and intermodal networks, all things referenced in Obama's speech. Obama's language discussing a historic tradition of federal involvement in planning and transportation, going back to Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, draws from a paper commissioned by America 2050 and written by historian Robert Fishman. And, just 10 days before Obama's speech, the Brookings Institution held a conference in Washington D.C. that also examined the relationship of the federal government to cities and metropolitan areas. Many of Obama's themes on the importance of metropolitan regions use Brookings research. At a transportation panel there that I moderated, Brookings Fellow Robert Puentes read his new report “A Bridge to Somewhere” that called for the creation of “Strategic Transportation Investments Commission (STIC)—to prioritize federal investments.” Meanwhile, Obama's colleagues in Congress have also been active. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, has introduced H.R. 5976 to establish a “Commission on Rebuilding America for the 21st Century” that calls for, well, a renewed federal role in infrastructure development. In the Senate, Republican maverick Chuck Hagel and Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd from Connecticut have introduced a bill to establish a National Infrastructure Bank, something proposed several years ago by New Yorker Felix Rohatyn and former Sen. Warren Rudman. “I'll also launch a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years, and create nearly two million new jobs,” Obama said. “It's time to stop spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and start investing that money in Phoenix, Nashville, Seattle and metro areas across this country.” Many of these efforts that Obama is picking up on are the culmination of years of effort. But they are coming to fruition in a very different political climate, something that Obama surely senses. Since roughly the collapse last August of the I-35 Minneapolis bridge across the Mississippi that killed 13 people, the issue of how much to invest in maintenance and upgrading of infrastructure has suddenly become viable politically. A tipping point appears to have been reached. Meanwhile, Obama's opponent Sen. John McCain has drawn a sharp distinction between himself and Obama on many of these issues. While McCain has emphasized cutting pork in federal expenditures, and has advocated investing in nuclear power and space travel, he has not laid out any sort of comprehensive program or policy for federal investment in transportation infrastructure. But the candidates will have to do more than pledge more focus and resources. Given the federal track record, is greater involvement in infrastructure an unalloyed good? Like most things, it depends. If the federal government can work out an effective way to rank projects and funding, if it can develop projects with some sort of care and attention, then the answer is yes. Conceptually, it certainly makes sense for the federal government to take a strong role in transportation between and among multiple states. The cautionary note I strike is that subtlety has often not been the federal government's strong suit. Everything from urban renewal in the 1950s to the invasion of Iraq in current times demonstrates it. But hope springs eternal. Book Review: It's A Fast Train Coming Quite the same situation existed a century ago, even a half century ago, with train lines. Thousands of miles of train routes crisscrossed the nation, and imagining a time when more than half of these would lie abandoned would have been simply inconceivable. Yet here we are. Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe, in his wonderful, beautifully written, fact-drenched book “Train Time,” forecasts a future in which, to exaggerate Stilgoe's thesis a bit, these stories flip. Stilgoe, a self-titled “landscape historian” whose “Metropolitan Corridors” is a classic, uses his deep knowledge of train lines past as a knowledge base from which to predict a resurgence of train use for both freight and passengers. Stilgoe essentially sees a return to the status-quo anti, where congestion in both freight and passenger lines gradually forces both business and government to rediscover the treasure right under their noses: the thousand of miles of underused or abandoned lines that usually go right into the heart of a city. Proof of sorts, Stilgoe says, is that crafty companies are already buying up land around still-abandoned train lines, waiting for a resurgence they see coming. “Parking lots that once served long-demolished passenger and freight stations host lengthy visits by deep-pocked real estate developers who stare speculatively at adjacent stores and roads, spread old maps across automobile hoods, and make notes on laptop computers.” Leaving aside the point he is illustrating, this is a typical Stilgoe sentence in that it's incredibly well written. The whole book is like this. The famed newspaper editor Gene Roberts said in a talk I once attended that “Good writing makes you see.” That's what Stilgoe's does, and it's the rare writer that does it consistently, and even rarer the academic. To a large degree, the future Stilgoe predicts has already started. Even before the current rise in gas prices, statistics were showing a growing use of mass transit and flat lines of per-capita driving. Now it is actually declining. The question is only whether the trend will continue, and if so, at what grade of descent.
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July 1 and 2 July 9 July 10 July 15 July 16 September 27 November 15 |
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Spotlight on the Region: A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President / Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727 x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
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