Scoop

Private Memo Guarantees Ratner Space
BY DANIEL HEMEL - Special to the Sun
August 18, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/18795

City and state officials, in a memorandum they never released, promised the developer Forest City Ratner six months ago that they would arrange for the firm to obtain the rights to build almost 1.9 million square feet of residential and commercial space in downtown Brooklyn, even if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority rejected the firm's bid for the development rights at a nearby rail yard.

The disclosure of the February 18 memorandum comes three weeks after the MTA board told Forest City Ratner the firm's $50 million cash bid was insufficient. The firm's president, Bruce Ratner, is also the principal owner of the New Jersey Nets, and he is seeking to build an arena at the rail yard to house his professional basketball team.

A rival firm, Extell Development Company, offered the MTA $150 million for the development rights at the rail yard, but the transportation authority's board, which is dominated by members appointed by Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, voted July 27 to negotiate exclusively with Forest City Ratner.

Council Member Letitia James, who has led the opposition to the Ratner project and whose district includes the rail yard, said the memorandum speaks volumes about the cozy relationship that Mr. Ratner maintains with city and state officials.

"It says that he is a favored developer, and it says to me that he's going to continue to have a monopoly on downtown Brooklyn and in my district without giving any other developer the opportunity to bid," she said.

In early March, Messrs. Bloomberg and Pataki announced a separate memorandum, also signed on February 18, endorsing Mr. Ratner's plans to build a 7.8 million-square-foot commercial and residential complex in downtown Brooklyn. The high-rise development would encompass the 8.4-acre MTA-owned rail yard, as well as nearly 13 additional acres in the adjacent Prospect Heights neighborhood. Mr. Ratner's firm has purchased most of the Prospect Heights property, but a handful of homes and small businesses face seizure by city and state officials through eminent domain to make room for the developer's ambitions.

Although Messrs. Bloomberg and Pataki announced one of the two February 18 memorandums with considerable fanfare, they did not mention the other, which was signed by Mr. Ratner and by the deputy mayor for economic development, Daniel Doctoroff; the Pataki administration's chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, Charles Gargano, and the Bloomberg administration's president of the Economic Development Corporation, Andrew Alper.

In it, the officials agreed to facilitate Mr. Ratner's development aspirations at a pair of nearby properties along Atlantic and Flatbush avenues: a Ratner owned mall located north of the rail yard, Atlantic Center, and a commercial block on Flatbush Avenue, which is referred to as Site 5 in the memo. That site is currently occupied by a sporting goods retailer, Modell's, and an electronics store, P.C. Richard & Son.

The development called for in that memorandum increases by 25% the square footage that Mr. Ratner - whose previously publicized project has been attacked in some quarters as too big - would construct in the area.

A Ratner spokesman, Joseph DePlasco, said yesterday, "The proposed development at Site 5 should not come as a surprise to anyone." He noted that the firm's plans for the site were revealed in many public meetings, including a presentation at a May 26 hearing of the City Council. Also, a chain of local weeklies, the Brooklyn Papers, reported that a vice president of Forest City Ratner, James Stuckey, mentioned plans for Site 5 at the May 26 hearing.

Another council member from Brooklyn who opposes the Ratner project, Charles Barron, said yesterday, however, that although he attended the May 26 hearing, he was never informed about plans to build an additional 1.9 million square feet at Atlantic Center and Site 5. After The New York Sun contacted Mr. Barron to ask about his reaction to the newly surfaced memorandum, the council member said: "This is the first time I've heard of it."

Council Member James, too, said she had no recollection that plans for Atlantic Center and Site 5 were mentioned at the May hearing. As for the memorandum, a spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation, Janel Patterson, said that although it was never distributed publicly, it "has been available to anyone that requested it."

The anti-Ratner group Develop Don't Destroy obtained a copy of the previously unreleased memorandum and distributed it to reporters yesterday. A spokesman for the group, Daniel Goldstein, would not say how he initially secured a copy of the memo. But he said that, given the failure by city and state officials to disclose the existence of the memo before yesterday, "Why should we trust any of the information the public has seen from the developer and the public agencies?"

Forest City Ratner has said that the 21-acre Atlantic Yards project - which does not include the Atlantic Center and Site 5 developments - will create 7,500 permanent jobs as well as 2,250 units of affordable housing.

Mr. DePlasco, the Ratner spokesman, said that the firm "already owns part of what is being called Site 5 here," but that P.C. Richard, which also owns part of the site, has not yet agreed to sell its stake. He said negotiations between Forest City Ratner and P.C. Richard are continuing.

In the newly surfaced memorandum, state and city officials said they would aid Forest City Ratner's efforts to gain control over the remainder of Site 5, specifically mentioning the possibility that they will use eminent domain.

Regardless of whether Mr. Ratner's arena plan comes to fruition, the memorandum authorizes his firm to build 308,000 square feet of residential space at Site 5 and 1.3 million square feet of commercial and residential space at Atlantic Center, "subject to obtaining necessary approvals." Under the terms of the memo, Mr. Ratner's firm will build an additional 328,000 square feet of office space at the Atlantic Center site if his bid for the MTA site falls through.

The famed architect Frank Gehry, who was hired by Mr. Ratner to design the proposed high-rise hub,has sketched plans for a 60-story tower along Flatbush Avenue that would be named "Miss Brooklyn." If the MTA approves the Ratner bid, allowing the Miss Brooklyn plans to proceed, then, according to the newly surfaced memorandum, the developer will be able to transfer the additional 328,000 square feet of zoning rights from Atlantic Center to Site 5.

August 18, 2005 Edition > Section: New York > Printer-Friendly Version

The New York Times
August 14, 2005
Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough
By JESSICA PRESSLER

PHILADELPHIA

WEARING a Paul Green School of Rock T-shirt, his bangs plastered to his forehead in the summer heat, Laris Kreslins pulled in front of a handsome brownstone on Rittenhouse Square, the priciest neighborhood in the city, and hopped out of his car.

"We're going to show you what a real Philly apartment looks like," he said, unlocking the door to reveal a spacious one-bedroom flat sparsely decorated with CD's and copies of music magazines. "As you can see, it has hardwood floors, lots of light and very high ceilings," he said. Then Mr. Kreslins paused and delivered what he knew would be the kicker: "Rent is $800 a month. Heat and electricity included."

Mr. Kreslins isn't selling real estate. He's selling Philadelphia. The publisher of Arthur, a free arts and culture magazine, Mr. Kreslins, 30, lived in a tiny apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before leaving New York two years ago and ending up in Philadelphia, where he and his girlfriend, Kendra Gaeta, 30, another Brooklynite, bought a four-bedroom house close to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in March and promptly started a Web site, movetophilly.com.

The site, designed to lure 20- and 30-something singles and couples to the city, features a sultry caricature of Patti LaBelle, a longtime resident, who entreats visitors to e-mail for the kind of tour Mr. Kreslins was recently holding, taking visitors to a thrift store, a Polish butcher and his friend Brendan's apartment.

Philadelphians occasionally refer to their city - somewhat deprecatingly - as the "sixth borough" of New York, and with almost 8,000 commuters making the 75-minute train ride between the cities each weekday, the label seems not far off the mark. But Mr. Kreslins and Ms. Gaeta are a new breed of Philadelphia-bound commuters, those who come from New York by train or the popular Chinatown bus for a weekend and then come back, with a U-Haul, to stay.

They are the first wave of what could be called Philadelphia's Brooklynization.

Hard numbers assessing exactly how many new residents are from New York are not available, but real estate brokers are noting an influx of prospective buyers and renters from the city; club owners and restaurant employees have spotted newcomers, on both sides of the bar; and "everyone knows someone who's moved here from New York," said Paul Levy, the executive director of the Center City District, a business improvement group, and himself a former Brooklyn resident.

Attracted by a thriving arts and music scene here and a cost of living that is 37 percent lower than New York's, according to city figures, a significant number of youngish artists, musicians, restaurateurs and designers are leaving New York City and heading down the turnpike for the same reasons they once moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan.

"We got priced out of Manhattan, and we moved to Brooklyn," said John Schmersal, 32, of the three-member band Enon; two of them migrated here in January. "Then we got priced out of Brooklyn. Now we're in Philadelphia."

On a recent Friday night Mr. Schmersal and his girlfriend, Toko Yasuda, were huddled at the bar at the Khyber, a smoky rock institution in the nightclub-heavy Old City neighborhood, a Colonial area of narrow streets bordering the Delaware River east of City Hall, to see Love as Laughter, a New York City band. "We like going to shows here," Mr. Schmersal said. "In New York there are so many people, it's impossible to even get in to see hot bands."

Much less be in a band. "For years I was willing to sacrifice quality of life for artistic fulfillment - you know, you find a circle of artists and you scrape by," said Anna Neighbor, a 27-year-old bass player and Williamsburg exile, between sips of Yuengling lager at a bar in the Northern Liberties neighborhood, an artists' enclave north of City Hall. In January Ms. Neighbor and her husband, Daniel Matz, and Jason McNeely, all members of the indie rock band Windsor for the Derby, decided to leave Brooklyn.

Ms. Neighbor and Mr. Matz discovered Fishtown, a gentrifying blue-collar neighborhood adjacent to Northern Liberties, where, in the last five years, youthful faces with bed head have made their way among the traditionally Irish Catholic residents. They found a three-bedroom row house for $170,000.

"New York is mythologically all about vibrancy and creativity, but it's hard to work a 40-hour week and come home and be Jackson Pollock," said Mr. Matz, 32, a guitarist. He said that by living in Philadelphia he could support himself teaching public school and devote the rest of his time to his band.

A few blocks away from Ms. Neighbor's house live Laura Watt, a 38-year-old painter, and her husband, Clark Thompson, 38, a financial services technician who left his Manhattan-based bank for one in Philadelphia a year ago. They settled in a three-level condominium in a new housing development called Rag Flats in Fishtown with their two children, Gus and Lydia. At $439,000 it was pricier than any of the block's three-story row houses, but with three bedrooms, each with an outdoor deck; solar heat and electricity; a rooftop with spectacular views; and a dumbwaiter going down to the kitchen, they thought it was worth it.

"Philadelphia reminds me a lot of what Brooklyn used to be like," said Ms. Watt, who had lived in Brooklyn and Westchester County for 15 years.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, the idea of Philadelphia as a place to go for quality life would have been laughable to many people, even to Philadelphians. Sandwiched between New York and Washington, Philadelphia was a flyover city - trainover really - a place where a mayor had ordered the bombing of a neighborhood and where Eagles fans reveled in booing their own team, its chief popular exports cheese steaks and "Rocky." While Philadelphia's rich cultural history, like its art museum, its symphony orchestra and its Colonial architecture, gave the city establishment credentials, it did not produce much of an avant-garde.

"The Philadelphia market was really provincial," said Steven Lowy, who opened a gallery in Philadelphia in 1984 but fled back to Manhattan three years later.

Lately the city has stepped up its efforts to woo people back, in part by trying to position Center City as "young and hip and cool," said Meryl Levitz, the president of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation, who regularly holds lunches at which she tells the New York media, "We're closer than the Hamptons!"

The campaign had a boost last month when Forbes magazine named Philadelphia No. 12 on its list of best cities for singles (out of 40), a jump from No. 15 a year ago. In 2004 tourists in Philadelphia numbered 25.5 million, an increase of 41 percent in the last five years, and though the city had been losing residents - especially young ones - steadily since the 1950's, when it had 2.07 million people, the population of the city, the nation's fifth-largest, has leveled off at 1.5 million in the last four years.

A government plan to provide the city with free wireless Internet access has as yet gone unrealized, but the national publicity surrounding it has given Philadelphia a progressive image, as has a marketing campaign by the tourism bureau, started in 2003 to attract gay tourists. That tagline was "Get your history straight and your nightlife gay."

"There's a big gay clientele coming down here," said Michael McCann, a real estate agent with Prudential Fox and Roach, who also said he has seen a "significant increase" in buyers from Manhattan and has worked with "a ton" of "single people and couples between 28 and 43" from Brooklyn.

Often they move to start the kind of business they had in New York. Danuta Mieloch, 39, an owner of Rescue Rittenhouse Spa, who administered body scrubs to celebrities at Paul Labrecque on the Upper East Side before moving to Philadelphia to start her own place, is an example. Jose Garces, 33, a former chef at Chicama and Pipa in Gramercy Park, will open Amada, a tapas restaurant in Old City, in September. Matthew Izzo, 35, and his business partner, Mark Ax, 35, defected from New York design firms to start their own home and design boutiques, the Matthew Izzo shops.

"It's just so much more workable here," Mr. Izzo said. "It's smaller and more manageable." And Lindsay Berman, 27, who left a marketing job at the Showtime network in Manhattan, is waiting tables part time at Jones, a 70's throwback diner in Center City, while she gets her T-shirt line, Dirty Old Shirt, off the ground.

Not that everyone is committed for life. Some "can't give up their Brooklyn phone numbers," said Heather Murphy Monteith, a dancer who runs a disco for toddlers. She has noticed 718 and 917 area codes popping up on the contact sheets.

Some keep more than just their digits: Mitzi Wong, 36, a buyer for the Philadelphia-based trend mecca Anthropologie, bought a "Jane Austen-like" row house in Society Hill, the historic Philadelphia neighborhood, but she is keeping her East Village apartment for weekends.

Lee Daniels, a native Philadelphian and producer of the film "Monster's Ball," rents in Harlem but bought a luxury apartment on the Delaware riverfront. "So many people are moving here," Mr. Daniels said. "People just fall in love with it."

Many of the things that were once deterring about Philadelphia have also been turned around. The recent lifting of archaic building ordinances and a 10-year tax abatement on new construction means that blighted factories and brownstones are now being converted, many into luxury apartments, and new buildings are going up in place of weed-filled lots. Bring-your-own restaurants, born out of Pennsylvania's Puritan liquor restrictions, have become a charming hallmark of Center City.

Philadelphia still has its share of urban blight: It ranks higher than New York in homelessness, crime and poverty. It maintains a high position in the Men's Health list of America's Fattest Cities each year, and, as New Yorkers often complain, you would be hard-pressed to find much open after 2 a.m. But the renaissance in real estate and restaurants has aligned with the city's music scene, which runs the gamut of cool.

In a recent conversation Nick Sylvester, who covers Philadelphia music for The Village Voice and Pitchfork Media, an online music magazine, mentions diverse acts like the indie rockers Dr. Dog and Man Man, Beanie Sigel's State Property crew, and D.J.'s Diplo and Dave Pianka.

"Philly's decidedly anti-scene, and that appeals to a lot of musicians that move there," he said. "They can actually do their own thing."

There are art shows of international renown, like the Salvador Dalí show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring, and shows by quirky collectives like Space 1026 in Chinatown, which recently housed an installation made with Cheez-Its. All of which has collided with a peculiar cultural moment in which uncool is the new cool, in which blue-collar scrappiness and a surfeit of fried-meat specialties now seems endearingly kitschy.

At least one developer is banking on the hope that Philadelphia's appeal is not just a fleeting fad. On a vast tract of land in Northern Liberties, an area once notable for hate crimes and heroin availability, a 50-year-old former shopping center developer named Bart Blatstein is building a $100 million development. Scheduled for completion in 2007, it will have 1,000 apartments, half a million square feet of ground-floor retail space and 100,000 square feet of industrial-chic office space, all of which Mr. Blatstein says will be offered at reduced rents to "edgy, creative types." The project is seeking New Yorkers. (Mr. Blatstein's company, Tower Properties, plans to advertise both in The Village Voice and on New York's Craigslist.) "We want it to be a cross between Williamsburg and SoHo," he said.

But Mr. Lowy, of Portico gallery in SoHo, is skeptical about the long-run chances for young artists: "The quality of life is pretty good but many of those artists probably won't stay. Can you get an art dealer to come to your studio when you're in Philly? Sure, you have time to make more art, but there's no one to buy it."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The Owl of Minerva ... flies only at Sunset Park? The Post reports today that the Department of City Planning is promoting a rezoning of South Slope/Sunset Park to curtail out-of-scale development on the side streets around Fourth Avenue, while at the same time allowing larger developments--up to 12 stories--on the avenue itself.

According to Brooklyn Community Board 7 district manager Jeremy Laufer, residents of the "South South Slope" and Greenwood Heights met with the board in late 2004 to work up a proposal for the D.C.P. to down-zone the area (along Fourth Avenue between 15th and 24th streets) to preserve the character of the neighborhood. Residents have been up in arms over new developments that disregard the scale and character of the nabe.

The D.C.P. evidently liked the plan, and it's due to be certified later this month. A public hearing is scheduled for Aug. 25 at Community Board 7's full-board meeting (4201 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, 6:30 p.m.), and it will be voted on later that night.

This is all preliminary, though; its needs to go through the land-use review process, hopefully by September, and the D.C.P. has to approve it before it eventually makes its way to the City Council for a vote.

D.C.P. spokesperson Rachaelle Raynoff told The Real Estate that the intent of the proposed rezoning is to preserve the character of the neighborhood (including preserving the sight line of the statue of Minerva, which sites atop the Greenwood Cemetery as a tribute to the Battle of Brooklyn that inaugurated the Revolutionary War, to the Statue of Liberty (photo)) while at the same time providing additional housing.

- Matthew Grace

The New York Times
August 15, 2005
Invisible to Most, Immigrant Women Line Up for Day Labor
By NINA BERNSTEIN

The women are not noticed by the weekday morning crowds that rush past Eighth Avenue and 37th Street, in the heart of Manhattan's fashion district. They arrive in twos and threes after 8 a.m., shrinking against the buildings on both sides of the avenue, until scores of them are waiting, small, dark-haired Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, Hondurans.

By noon they have vanished. In swift, discreet sidewalk negotiations, perhaps half have been hired for a day's work at the minimum wage or less in some of the neighborhood's last struggling garment factories. The rest have given up until tomorrow.

A few miles away in Williamsburg, commuters on the busy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway are equally oblivious to the similar scene unfolding on an overpass above them. There, the work at stake is $8-an-hour housecleaning, and those vying for a day's scrubbing, mainly for Hasidic homemakers, stand in a crude ascending hierarchy of employer preference: Mexican and Central American women in their 30's at the back, Polish immigrant women in their 50's and 60's in the middle, and young Polish students with a command of English at the head of the line.

At a time when male day laborers have become the most public and contentious face of economic immigration to the United States, these two rare female shape-ups have doubled in size almost unobserved in recent years. Their growth reflects a larger overlooked reality: Women make up 44 percent of the nation's low-wage immigrant work force, and worldwide, studies show, more and more women are migrating for work.

Often invisible and undercounted, experts say, female economic migrants are an increasing presence, especially in big cities like New York, where the demand is not for men to pick lettuce or process poultry, but for women to pick up the scraps of a collapsed manufacturing sector, or to serve in the vast underground economy of domestic service.

Although more women across the country are showing up in day-labor hiring halls, often run by grass-roots labor groups, experts say that these two female shape-ups may well be the only significant ones of their kind in the nation - places where women are willing to put their personal safety in jeopardy for a few hours of work.

"What else is there to do if you have nothing to eat?" asked Rosario Jocha, 49, still standing on Eighth Avenue at 11 a.m. on a recent Wednesday. She said she had recently grabbed a day's work cutting threads from jackets even when the employer, a Chinese immigrant subcontractor, insisted he could not pay more than $5.75 an hour, 25 cents below the state minimum wage. "I've been here 11 years, and I still haven't found a stable, steady job."

At both locations, some of the women waiting for work had been in the country as little as a few months; others, like Ms. Jocha, a Queens resident from Ecuador, were old-timers who spoke of better jobs lost when small-business employers could not pay rising rent. On Eighth Avenue, merchants said that 100 to 150 women regularly sought work six mornings a week year round - double or triple the number when the intersection first emerged as an informal female hiring site about six years ago.

Yet May Chen, a vice president of Unite, the garment workers' union, whose headquarters is only a dozen blocks away, said she was unaware of the shape-up's existence until she was asked about it for this article. And Aaron Adams, a veteran garment center landlord who passes by every day, said he had assumed the women standing there "were just shooting the breeze."

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a sociologist who has written extensively about the feminization of migration, said she was not surprised. "The space that these women occupy, the public spaces in the city, are just like fleeting moments," she said. "They don't really have a place in the city that's visible, so it's easy to ignore them."

Even the discussion of legal guest worker proposals in Congress centers on male migrants, she said. But though nationally men account for about two-thirds of labor migration among illegal immigrants, primarily because of agricultural demand, she said, global patterns indicate that women are easily half the immigrant workers flowing to large metropolitan areas like New York.

Ms. Parreñas and other researchers find that women who migrate for work are likely to be single mothers supporting children in their native countries. Compared with their male counterparts, they earn less, despite higher levels of education, according to a 2002 study of the United States' low-wage immigrant work force by the Urban Institute, a research group in Washington, which estimated that two million foreign-born women made less than the minimum wage. Yet women are also more likely to remain in America, and they send home a higher proportion of their earnings.

Unvarnished lessons in global supply, demand and division play out at both New York hiring sites.

"We never talk to the Latinas - sometimes they agree to work for less," said Teresa, a 53-year-old Polish widow who, like many of the 60 women waiting for cleaning work near Marcy and Division Avenues in Williamsburg on a recent Friday morning, would give only her first name.

At the other end of the curved concrete abutment, Maria, 35, from Ecuador, gave a shrug. "They pay them more," she complained, as a woman in Hasidic dress passed by the Spanish-speaking group and selected a tall young Polish woman. "It's just that they're white."

Even among the Poles, immigration complicates the pecking order. Some older women won green cards after years as live-in maids for sponsors, and boast in broken English of children in college. Other women lack papers, or shuttle on temporary work visas between their struggling families in rural Poland and spartan, overpriced rooms in Brooklyn. And in summer, just when demand declines because of employer vacations, they now face growing numbers of young Polish women working illegally on tourist visas while living rent-free with Brooklyn relatives.

"They don't want babushkas," complained Zofia, a 50-year-old mother of five, as a young Hasidic man led Justyne, a 24-year-old Polish student, to his S.U.V.

Not all employers had the same preferences, however, and most, like Rifky Kohn, 28, a pregnant mother of four, were on foot. At midday, with the Sabbath approaching, she gladly hired a Polish woman in her late 60's.

"She looks more experienced," explained Mrs. Kohn.

Rosa Yumbla, who supports four children in Ecuador, recently skipped a day on the overpass to address a national conference of day labor organizers at New York University Law School. She spoke at the urging of the Latin American Workers Project, an advocacy group in Brooklyn.

"We suffer the changing weather throughout the year, the heat of the sun and cold in winter, because where we wait to be picked up is on the corner," Ms. Yumbla said in Spanish to an audience that included the mayor's commissioner for immigrant affairs. "Help us secure a space where we can be safer."

For now, the women depend on one another and their own instincts for safety. On a recent Wednesday, when a man on Eighth Avenue approached a young Mexican woman with a vague description of a part-time job in a store at the Port Authority, an older woman drew close and signaled disapproval. The man, who gave his name as Victor Miranda and his age as 55, then turned to Josefa Limas, 32, who arrived from Puebla, Mexico, only six months ago.

She, too, shook her head. "Sometimes they'll just end up taking you somewhere else," she said, describing another woman's close call the previous day. "An Indian man took her to an elevator and wouldn't let her out. He came over and tried to grab her. She pressed an emergency button and got away."

Still, the pressure to take chances can be strong. Nellie, 32, who shares a room in the Bronx, pulled out a picture of the three children she left four years ago with her sister in rural Ecuador, in an effort to earn money for the heart operation needed by her son, the youngest.

"The little I make here I send to him," she said. "Many times I just want to go to be with him, but I don't have the money to do so. It gives me a desperate feeling."

On this day she counted herself lucky: she had been called back for a second day's work at $6 an hour, she said. And leaving the line, she melted into the crowd.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Out West, a Paradox: Densely Packed Sprawl



L.A. Area Growing Crowded the Fastest

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 11, 2005; A01

SIGNAL HILL, Calif. -- Sure, it looks like sprawl.

From atop this hill near the port of Long Beach, greater Los Angeles splays out through the midsummer haze as a low-rise suburban muddle stitched together by freeways.

But take a closer look: What you knew about sprawl turns out to be wrong.

The urbanized area in and around Los Angeles has become the most densely populated place in the continental United States, according to the Census Bureau. Its density is 25 percent higher than that of New York, twice that of Washington and four times that of Atlanta, as measured by residents per square mile of urban land.

And Los Angeles grows more crowded every year, adding residents faster than it adds land, while most metropolitan areas in the Northeast, Midwest and South march in the opposite direction. They are the sprawling ones, dense in the center but devouring land at their edges much faster than they add people.

Odd as it may seem, density is the rule, not an exception, in the wide-open spaces of the West. Salt Lake City is more tightly packed than Philadelphia. So is Las Vegas in comparison with Chicago, and Denver compared with Detroit. Ten of the country's 15 most densely populated metro areas are in the West, where residents move to newly developed land at triple the per-acre density of any other part of the country.

"If you want elbow room, move to Atlanta or Charlotte or the countrified suburbs of Washington," said Robert E. Lang, director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria. "You probably aren't going to get it in the West. There, if you and your neighbor lean out your windows, you can hold hands."

This demographic pattern is having profound effects on housing construction, commuting and the quality of urban life.

In upper-income quarters of metro Los Angeles, density can be an aesthetic kick. When wedded to smart design and careful planning, it is a high-energy stimulant for suburban ennui, luring high-end stores, protecting open space and paying for toll roads that reduce traffic. But in poorer parts of the region, especially where large immigrant families have settled, density is a just fancy word for severe overcrowding.

Ten municipalities in the nation average more than four people per household -- and nine of them are in greater Los Angeles, according to the Census Bureau. In these mostly older neighborhoods of tract houses, density has a way of turning garages into illegal apartments, while strangling public schools, overwhelming parks and choking streets with cars. Problems born of overcrowding also have a way of being ignored by politicians, since many residents are illegal or poor or both -- and do not vote.
Bursting at the Seams

Open space in the West has always seemed endless. But deserts, mountains, huge tracts of federally owned land and a pervasive lack of water make much of the region unlivable. As such, it has remained the most rural part of the country in terms of land use while becoming the most densely urban in terms of where people live.

Sometime around the early 1980s, greater Los Angeles collided with these unforgiving restraints.

Still, newcomers kept pouring into the Los Angeles Basin, at a rate of about 2 million to 3 million a decade. They had to live somewhere, and many could not afford to settle in -- or did not want to drive for hours to -- suburbs way out in the desert or on the far side of the mountains.

So sprawl sputtered to an unplanned and unheralded halt. Los Angeles began "densifying dramatically," even at its fringe, according to an analysis of federal population numbers by the Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

From 1982 to 1997, as part of a uniquely L.A. phenomenon called "dense sprawl," an average of nine people occupied every acre of newly urbanized land in metropolitan Los Angeles, the Brookings study found. That is nine times the average in Nashville during those years, four times that of Atlanta and three times that of New York.

During these years, both the Washington and Los Angeles areas gained population at a brisk 30 percent clip. But Washington's growth gobbled up rural land at about twice the pace of Los Angeles', the Brookings study found. As a result, Washington had a 12 percent decline in overall density, compared with a 3 percent gain in Los Angeles.
Planned Communities

To understand how cheek-by-jowl western living can seem both gracious and roomy, it is instructive to look in on Susan DeSantis. She lives in a three-bedroom townhouse perched on a ridge of the San Joaquin Hills near the Pacific.

The home shares walls on two sides with neighbors. Yet from its soaring living room, neighbors seem not to exist, hidden behind landscaping that is tended daily by gardeners. From large windows and from the patio, the eye is drawn to the sky, the distant hills and Newport Bay.

"There is light and there is openness," said DeSantis, 55, a consultant in urban planning and a former director of housing for the state of California. "With housing in pods like this, you can get angles for views and privacy. It is the density that allows these design features. I can see my neighbors, if they are out on their patio, but it is very rare."

DeSantis lives in Newport Coast, a gated, master-planned development in Orange County, the nation's most densely populated suburban county. Most of the housing in Newport Coast has been built at a density of about seven units per acre. That leaves nearly 80 percent of the development's 9,493 acres as open space -- covered by chaparral, threaded with footpaths and overlooking the sea.

The master plan controls life in Newport Coast with a fussy rigor. It bans mortuaries, union halls and sanitariums for the mentally ill. It permits gazebos, tennis courts and therapy baths. An "opaque screen" must shield all parked cars from arterial highways. "All landscaping shall be maintained in a neat, clean and healthy condition," by order of the master plan.

What it lacks in flexibility, Newport Coast makes up for in convenience. A six-lane road feeds cars in and out of the development so efficiently, DeSantis said, that in the past nine years she has never seen it clogged with traffic. The road connects to a nearby toll highway, part of a regional system of toll roads that cushions many Orange County commuters from the traffic congestion that torments much of the region.

By car, DeSantis is five minutes from the ocean, 10 minutes from high-end shopping and 15 minutes from John Wayne Airport. She can also take commuter rail -- a station is about 15 minutes away -- to downtown Los Angeles or San Diego. Distances here are measured by time in a car. DeSantis said she has never once walked to a local grocery store, although the nearest one is 10 minutes away on foot.

Newport Coast is the final oceanfront piece in the largest private master-planned development in the United States. Begun in the early 1960s by the Irvine Co., it is eight times the size of Manhattan and covers a fifth of Orange County.

"The Irvine Company persuaded a fairly conservative, mostly Republican market to buy a lot of attached housing by creating a product that was predictable and well-built," said Ann Forsyth, a professor of urban design at the University of Minnesota and author of "Reforming Suburbia," a study of large planned communities. "But none of it is cheap."

Indeed, housing across Orange County is among the most unaffordable in the country. Just one out of 10 households earns the $165,000 a year needed to buy a median-priced house, which cost $702,000 in June, according to the California Association of Realtors. DeSantis bought her townhouse for $385,000 in 1996. Since then, she says, it has at least doubled in value. If she were buying now, she said, she could not afford Newport Coast.
Infill With a View

Land for new development in the Los Angeles area is all but unavailable -- at any price. Builders, though, have found a way to squeeze new housing into the old urban footprint. It is called "infill" and is widely viewed as the final frontier of home development in Southern California and across the urban West.

Emerson and Darci Fersch, along with their 18-month-old son, Ethan, are infill pioneers. Three years ago, they bought a townhouse on Signal Hill, a hump of once-scruffy industrial land encircled by the city of Long Beach and adjacent to the San Diego Freeway.

It has been dotted with wells ever since oil was discovered on Signal Hill in the 1920s. For much of that time, it has also been known as a dumping ground for machinery and unwanted pets.

"We thought: Wow, we don't want to live there," said Darci Fersch, 44, a legal assistant, recalling her reaction when she heard that middle-class housing was supplanting rubbish on Signal Hill.

But with a child on the way, she and her husband needed more space than they could afford in their beachfront neighborhood in Long Beach. They drove up the hill to take a look and were astonished. "Every last possible spot where someone could possibly stick a house was being improved on," said Emerson Fersch, 41, a financial planner.

Builders such as Bob Comstock, who only builds infill housing, had been busy using bioremediation to extract toxic chemicals from soil, outfitting houses with passive in-wall venting for clearing methane and working with an oil company so that new wells and new luxury homes could coexist as next-door neighbors.

"Until we got about halfway through the first phase of construction, the perception was that it was still a dump," said Comstock, whose company is the largest builder on the hill. "But after we started selling, we found that we could sell pretty much every unit in less than two weeks."

Signal Hill offers a rare breed of housing in Los Angeles County -- infill with a view. Prices have risen accordingly.

The Fersch family bought their three-bedroom townhouse in 2002 for $385,000. They traded up this spring, selling the townhouse for $680,000 and paying $920,000 for a four-bedroom single-family house perched near the top of the hill. From the study, there is a view of Long Beach Harbor; from the master bedroom, a working oil well.
Beyond Overcrowded

There is another kind of infill. It occurs -- without planning, rubbish removal or construction -- when poor people pack into old houses and apartments. This is the single most important reason Los Angeles has become the nation's densest urban area, housing experts say.

Maria Sanchez is an expert on this kind of housing. She is one of nine members of an immigrant family from Guadalajara, Mexico, that lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Maywood, a one-square-mile patch of southeast Los Angeles County that is the densest city in California and probably the densest city in the West.

This summer, in one of the apartment's bedrooms, Sanchez, 42, is sharing a double bed with her mother and her father, both of them in their late sixties.

Her daughter, Yesenia, 19, sleeps in the second bedroom, along with her boyfriend, Raul, and their 2-year-old son, Raul Jr. In the living room, Sanchez's two sons, Efrain, 28, and Juan, 8, share a sofa bed with one of Sanchez's brothers.

"There is a lot more room for the kids to play back home in Guadalajara, but there is no work," Sanchez said. "We are better off here. We have enough to eat."

Efrain is the family's breadwinner. He makes about $90 a day deboning chickens in a processing plant within walking distance of the apartment.

By Maywood standards, there is nothing exceptional about the Sanchez family's living situation.

The city's white working-class population fled Maywood in the early 1980s and was replaced by Latino immigrants, most of them Mexicans from poor areas such as Guadalajara. Maywood's sewers, water lines, streets, schools and housing were built in the 1930s to serve a population of about 10,000. There are now at least 30,000 residents, and virtually no new housing or infrastructure has been built.

"It is futile to try to enforce laws against overcrowding," said David Mango, director of building and planning in Maywood. "When we go to a house and see six adults living in one room, they say, "We are just visiting.' "

City inspectors recently issued a citation to an enterprising landlord who had purchased four metal toolsheds from Home Depot, set them up around her house and rented each one for more than $150 a month.

"Every year, I say that this city can't accommodate more density," said Samuel A. Peña, the mayor of Maywood. "But every year I see the enrollment numbers from the schools, and I am wrong."

Schools have been officially overcrowded and operating on an emergency year-round schedule for 23 years. School officials acknowledge that crowding has undermined children's ability to learn.

"As it has increased, we have a seen a steady decline in attendance, student performance, graduation and an increase in dropouts," said Shelley Weston, director of instructional support services for secondary schools in the most crowded part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. To ease crowding, new schools are being built. But in Maywood, where virtually every inch of land is spoken for, less-crowded schools have meant more crowded housing. School construction required the demolition of 200 housing units, all of which were occupied, mostly by large immigrant families.

"Residents now tell me they are approached all the time by people saying, 'You have a really nice garage. I will convert it for you and pay you $800 a month,' " said Mango, the city planning director.

Maywood's housing miseries echo across Southern California, according to a report on regional housing from the School of Public Affairs at the University of California at Los Angeles. It found that in Los Angeles, the population grew by 11 percent between 1990 and 2002, but the number of households increased by just 5 percent.

Density's Burden

The regionwide momentum toward density that has jazzed up life in Newport Coast and transformed Signal Hill from industrial dump to real estate gold mine is also putting pressure on the Sanchez family.

Maria Sanchez learned a couple of weeks ago that her rent would increase in September, from $650 to $950 a month. She said that that is more than her family can afford and that she will soon start looking for another place to live.

Since there are no vacant apartments in Maywood that her family can afford, they will probably have to find another immigrant family that is strapped for cash and double up.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Ferrer's Color-Coded Victory Plan
A Freddy win in September could pose a demographic dilemma for big-bucks Mike
by Wayne Barrett
August 9th, 2005 11:46 AM

Race will determine the winner of the 2005 campaign, as it has in every mayoral contest over the last 40 years—virtually ever since John Lindsay became the only Republican elected by a black majority in 1965.

It has already been the convulsive theme of most electoral media coverage, with Fernando Ferrer's comments about a 1999 police shooting now in their fifth month of inexplicable controversy, the latest manifestation of the city's craving for divisive distraction. The Bloomberg camp and its media allies still hope that the endless retelling of Ferrer's Diallo gaffe will force a runoff between Ferrer and Virginia Fields, the black borough president of Manhattan, poisoning the well just as an ugly leaflet depicting Ferrer kissing Al Sharpton's butt did in 2001. Acting as a surrogate for Bloomberg and Fields, Reverend Calvin Butts tried to revive the Diallo theme on NY1 last week, though he never so much as appeared at the 1999 protests. His blast fell so flat no daily wrote about it.

If, as polls suggest, November becomes a choice between Mike Bloomberg and Ferrer, the city may wind up gripped by a racial whirlwind it has not experienced since 1989, when David Dinkins won City Hall in an unprecedented burst of pride and promise. In a Voice interview, Ferrer said that the "it's-our-time" undercurrent of the 1989 campaign wasn't Dinkins's "reason for running," nor is it "mine now," but asked: "Did it help David? Yes." There are people, Ferrer concluded, "who are rightly concerned" that all New Yorkers "have their day in the sun," and while he doesn't know "if people look at it in the same terms as they did" in 1989, he is certainly well aware of this year's historic opportunity.

Though the multinational Latino community is the city's largest ethnic group, no one from it has ever held any position of citywide power, and no pollster has any real idea how many Latinos will vote when they finally have an opportunity to collectively claim the top prize. No insider has any idea either how many black voters, 71 percent of whom supported Ferrer in the 2001 runoff, will conclude that their own fortunes are inextricably tied to their economic and ethnic neighbors. And as 16 point wide as Bloomberg's lead is, even his campaign could provide no evidence that, in an actual election, saturation advertising moves minority voters—as it demonstrably does white voters—especially when there is a minority alternative on the ballot.

It's these unknowns that haunt Bloomberg's money machine. He has a record that commands multiracial respect in public polls, with the overwhelming majority of blacks and Latinos joining whites in seeing him as "a strong leader" who has managed the city's budget and services with competence. Unlike his two white predecessors, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, whose five combined terms reach back nearly three decades, Mayor Mike has never played the race card and hopes to win as a crossover candidate, albeit one with virtually monolithic white support.

The likelihood of his garnering significant minority support against a minority candidate is, however, another great unknown, never achieved in a citywide primary or general election that has pitted white candidates against blacks or Latinos. Can Bloomberg, running as a Republican in a Bush era without the spark of racial insult that consumed Mark Green four years ago, win enough of the minority vote simply by being evenhanded and capable? Or will he become an incidental casualty of the rising tide of empowering history?

The power of race in New York politics is axiomatic. Ed Koch was the last white Democrat to win an open mayoral election—i.e., one without an incumbent—and he did it way back in 1977. That year was also a watershed in black/Latino political relations, with Congressman Herman Badillo belatedly entering the race and submarining Percy Sutton, the first black with a real shot at winning. Ask David Dinkins today and he will tell you exactly which month Sutton and Badillo announced 28 years ago, a tit-for-tat obstacle to coalition still alive an era later. Koch won a third term in 1985 after Harlem's black leadership repaid Badillo by blocking his candidacy in a subterranean deal that catapulted Dinkins to the Manhattan borough presidency and, ultimately, the mayoralty. In 1993, though, Dinkins became the only incumbent in the 20th century to lose a general election, defeated by Giuliani's "One City, One Standard" racial theme.

The last three prominent white Democratic liberals to run—City Council President Carol Bellamy in 1985, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger in 1997, and Public Advocate Mark Green in 2001—have lost, two of them to Republicans in general elections. White mayoral wannabes in 2001, like Council Speaker Peter Vallone and City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, repeated this pattern, as Speaker Gifford Miller and Congressman Anthony Weiner appear to be doing this year. Even though Miller has the support of many minority councilmembers, he has been unable so far to break Ferrer and Fields's hold on Latino and black voters.

These past and anticipated results, sometimes by crushing margins, have established that minority voters will turn out in large numbers only for minority candidates, as blacks did for Dinkins in 1989 and, to a lesser degree, 1993, and as Latinos did for Ferrer in 2001. No matter how much they disliked Koch in 1985 and Giuliani in 1997, as the polls showed, they were not driven to vote against a white candidate as much as they were to vote for one of their own.

Similarly, when Bloomberg snared 25 percent of the black vote and 47 percent of Hispanics in 2001, the general-election turnout in some minority districts was actually lower than in the primary or runoff, an unheard-of indication of how disaffected voters were by Green's alleged leaflet race-baiting. The chances of Bloomberg finding a way to either deflate minority turnout to 2001 levels or win similar percentages of it are at least as slim as Ferrer's chances of getting near Green's 38 percent of the white vote.

While the pollsters and media are depicting this election as a yawn, here are the historical numbers that guide Ferrer's hopes:

* The working Ferrer model is 1989, when Dinkins got between 91 and 95 percent of the black vote, 64 percent of the Latino vote and 29 percent of the white vote, winning the general election by three points over first-timer Rudy Giuliani. Though current polls show Bloomberg running well with minorities, the Ferrer premise is that those numbers will return to historical form by Election Day and that Ferrer can roughly flip the black and Latino percentages, getting 65 to 70 percent of the black vote and 85 to 90 percent of Latinos. He may then be able to win with a quarter of whites. Of course, Dinkins also swept the minority vote against three white opponents in the Democratic primary that year, winning 50 percent of the vote, an achievement Ferrer has virtually no chance of repeating with Fields in the race.

* City University's John Mollenkopf, the
Times' 2001 statistical analyst and author of two books on recent mayoral elections, says that the 2004 breakdown of the city vote was 50 percent white, 25 percent black, 18 percent Latino, and 7 percent Asian. Assuming the same percentages this year, Mollenkopf says Ferrer needs three or four Asian points, 16 of the 18 Latino points, 20 of the 25 black points, and 11 or 12 white points. Mollenkopf says the white base was 55 points in 1989 and that a revolution in Latino voting may be about to occur, contending that moving up to 20 points is "easily achievable" and that 25 percent of the total vote is plausible. Should Ferrer drive that kind of turnout, he would obviously need less of the black or white vote. Mollenkopf thinks Ferrer "can achieve similar levels" of combined minority support as Dinkins did in 1989, but he is unsure that Ferrer can get the liberal white support Dinkins did.

* The Ferrer model implicitly assumes that turnout is a question mark on both sides of the racial divide. Just as no one knows how large a black or Latino vote his candidacy will draw, no one knows if Bloomberg can come close to matching the Giuliani, or even Koch, appeal to white outer-borough Catholics and other ethnics. His property tax boost, support for gay marriage, and unwillingness to exploit race may keep griping couch potatoes on their couches in Staten Island, Bay Ridge, and stretches of Queens. Whites may wind up only 46 or 47 of Mollenkopf's 50 points.

* Bloomberg, on the other hand, is more attractive to white Democratic liberals than Giuliani was in 1989. Liberals also identified more with the cause of black empowerment embodied in the Dinkins candidacy than they do today with Latino empowerment, as difficult as it is to figure out why. Ferrer actually has a far deeper résumé than Dinkins did in 1989—15 years as borough president, compared to Dinkins's four, and five years in the City Council. When Dinkins ran, he had a public profile in Manhattan only, while Ferrer's citywide recognition was indelibly affirmed in 2001. It is impossible to distinguish the two on issues, or their salty machine histories, yet Dinkins became a cause célèbre in the same circles that dismiss Ferrer. Still, on Mollenkopf's system, these differences may give the mayor several more points in an otherwise shrinking white voter pool.

The Bloomberg model for victory, though no one will acknowledge it, is Giuliani 1997. Bloomberg is trying, on at least two levels, to morph Ferrer into Messinger. Ferrer's early endorsement of a stock-transfer tax gave the mayor the ammunition he needed to depict Ferrer as an ideologue with no grasp of what makes the New York economic engine purr, just as Giuliani did with Messinger.

As well as this has worked so far, Ferrer's willingness to face up to the reality that the city will have to identify new revenue sources to pry loose from Albany additional billions in court-mandated state aid is appreciated by many with real stakes in our schools.

Bloomberg tried last week to do much the same with Ferrer's affordable housing plan, taking shots at the side effects of its financing. But, as right as Bloomberg may be about Ferrer's vacant-property tax hike on the $400 rebates, he is nibbling at the edges. Ferrer's 167,000-unit, $8.5 billion program is still almost three times Bloomberg's otherwise solid program and, with 30 to 50 percent affordable apartments, Freddy is now reaching out to every living-space-starved New Yorker in a way that resonates. By November, unless the mayor steps forward with a plan to make the school-aid billions doable, Ferrer may capture the education high ground even though Mike Bloomberg has done more to change schools than any mayor in modern times.

But if Bloomberg is failing in his attempt to stereotype Ferrer as a free-taxing lefty, he is succeeding at the much more subtle game of compromising Big Dems. He's got the largest municipal union, DC 37, to endorse him, just as Giuliani did in 1997; he has at least temporarily neutralized the other big unions—Dennis Rivera's hospital workers and Randi Weingarten's teachers, with powerful Election Day field and phone operations—like Giuliani did. Chuck Schumer and Comptroller Bill Thompson refuse to utter a single critical word about him, as Schumer and Thompson's predecessor Hevesi did when Rudy was seeking re-election.

There's an "absolute parallel," Messinger told the Voice, recounting the ways Rivera, Hevesi, Schumer, and others undercut her. When asked after her 1997 loss to rate Big Dems on how helpful they were, she gave Ferrer the only 10 and Schumer and Hevesi bottom-trawling scores. Of course, Thompson and Hevesi sent mixed signals for precisely the same reason—Thompson is planning to run in four years and can only do so if the Democratic challenger loses. Hevesi was dialing up donors for his 2001 mayoral run even before he squeezed himself onstage with Messinger the night she lost, striking the pose, as even Hillary Clinton may do this year, of a loyal Democrat. Not only was Schumer's wife working for Giuliani in 1997, she's now a Bloomberg commissioner, and the mayor's campaign employs Schumer's former spokesman and the brother of his chief of staff.

The only way Ferrer can combat these covert Big Dem compromises is by rattling his Latino base. Bronx Democratic boss José Rivera's quotes in El Diario threatening Thompson about 2009 may have forced his endorsement last week, as tepid as it was. No Big Dems will take a Ferrer nosedive if they fear they will pay a Latino price. Gail Collins wrote an Editorial Notebook column in the Times early in 1997 about the sexist underside of the Big Dem abandonment of Messinger—accusing them of "edging away from her and sidling up to Giuliani"—but the boys went on being boys and were never held to account.

Ferrer isn't the candidate yet, though the endorsements of Albany's two top legislative Democrats, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate leader David Paterson, appear imminent. Virginia Fields is still competitive and could go negative, though her spokeswoman insisted Monday that she wouldn't echo her pastor Butts's complaint about Diallo, a wise position since she stayed upstairs in her office overlooking the 1 Police Plaza demonstrations while Ferrer was getting arrested. Miller can afford a bigger TV blitz than his $1.6 million publicly subsidized campaign mailing and increasingly appears to be the Democrat most likely to force a runoff.

But barring a transforming event, Fernando Ferrer, 55, who has found a new measured and inclusive campaign tone, will soon be the first Latino Democrat ever nominated for a citywide office. Should it happen, it will be the dawning of a new age in the endlessly racial politics of New York.

Research assistance: Nicole D'Andrea, Bryan Farrell, Alex Gecan, Leslie Kaufmann, Ian Kriegish, and Stephen Stirling

The New York Times
August 10, 2005
A Roof Garden? It's Much More Than That
By LISA CHAMBERLAIN



As temperatures soared over 90 degrees and New York City broke records for electricity use at the end of July, landscapers were installing a "green" roof at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens, where parts of the HBO series "The Sopranos" are filmed.

Above Tony Soprano's head will be New York City's largest green roof, a thin layer of plants covering 35,000 square feet in a design that aims to reduce air pollution, control heating and cooling costs, and absorb storm water runoff.

Proponents of the project, which has been two years in the making, are hoping to use data collected from it to convince commercial property owners and developers that not only are green roofs good for the environment, they can benefit the bottom line.

The highly visible location near the large Silvercup Studios' sign will be its own best advertisement. A matrix of 1,500 planters will have 20 different species of plants intended to show off their red, yellow and green colors, visible from the Queensboro Bridge when in full bloom.

Not to be confused with a roof garden, however, a green roof is less of an aesthetic amenity than it is a workhorse. The carefully selected plants and soil - engineered to weigh only a fifth as much as typical dirt - help clean the air and absorb rain that would otherwise become storm-water runoff. And when many of them are clustered together, green roofs can reduce the urban heat island effect (densely populated cities tend to be hotter than surrounding areas because of the heat-trapping properties of tall buildings, asphalt and concrete).

Less well established are the benefits of green roofs to property owners and developers. It is known that they can reduce a building's heating and cooling costs, and extend the life of the roof, but the question is, Do the long-term benefits justify the initial cost?

"We are looking to demonstrate to the government, the public and most of all private business that green technologies are an economic benefit," said Stuart Suna, co-owner of Silvercup Studios. "What exactly that benefit is will be determined by this green-roof demonstration project."

The Silvercup project originated with a study undertaken by Diana Balmori of Balmori Associates, a landscape design firm.

Ms. Balmori's interest in the submarket of green-roof design led to a comprehensive assessment of New York City's flat-roof buildings. What she discovered is that Long Island City has 667 acres of empty flat-roof surfaces suitable for vegetation, an area more than three-quarters the size of Central Park. Given the available flat roofs, the air pollution generated from the area's heavy industry and traffic, and a nearby power plant that produces 25 percent of the city's electricity, Long Island City turned out to be the perfect green-roof laboratory.

Ms. Balmori took her idea to build a demonstration green roof to the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, the neighborhood's business improvement district; Mr. Suna is a member of the group. They secured a grant from Clean Air Communities, an organization devoted to reducing air pollution and energy consumption in the city's low-income neighborhoods.

The $500,000 grant is paying for the green-roof design by Balmori Associates, and the installation by Greener by Design, a landscaping company based in New York that specializes in green roofs. Ms. Balmori estimates the outlay will be about $10 a square foot, not including the structural engineering costs paid for by Silvercup Studios, or the yearlong study to be undertaken by the Earth Pledge Foundation, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization based in New York.

Leslie Hoffman, executive director of Earth Pledge, said that once the green roof was established, her organization would measure energy savings as a result of reduced temperature fluctuations in and around the building. The study will also measure the amount of storm-water retention, which alleviates pressure on the city's overtaxed wastewater system.

A study conducted in Chicago, for instance, demonstrated that a green roof absorbed nearly half the water that was captured elsewhere in a conventional roof rain barrel during a downpour.

Richard Heller, president and chief executive of Greener by Design, said energy savings from green roofs would fluctuate depending on the building type, but the greatest savings would be achieved in low-rise flat-roof buildings. The same Chicago study, conducted in 2003, showed that green-roof temperatures were 19 percent to 31 percent cooler during peak daytime hours in July compared with a conventional roof.

Despite the existing data, Ms. Hoffman and many other green-roof proponents agree that appealing to the enlightened self-interest of property owners and developers is not enough. Getting local government involved is critical to reducing the cost of green-roof installation and achieving economies of scale through mass production. With current technology, green roofs typically cost $8 to $10 a square foot, whereas a regular roof costs about $4 to $6 a square foot.

"Isolated green roofs are expensive insulation," Ms. Hoffman said. "But when you have a whole community of green roofs, it changes the microclimate of the area and reduces demand for energy. Think about one sidewalk in front of a building. That doesn't make a transportation path. But if everyone has one in front of their property, you have a way to walk around the city. Only a citywide effort can achieve that."

To that end, proponents in New York have been lobbying City Hall to offer incentives to developers and property owners. While green-roof incentives are still in the "nice idea" phase at City Hall in New York, Chicago has been a proponent of green roofs since Mayor Richard M. Daley installed the country's first municipal green roof on top of City Hall in 2001. Chicago now has both requirements and incentives in place for private businesses to follow the city's lead.

As a result, Sadhu Johnston, Chicago's commissioner of the environment, said there were approximately two million square feet of green roofs already built or in various stages of construction in Chicago. Currently, New York City has approximately 60,000 square feet of green roofs built or under construction.

Two years ago, Chicago began offering a density bonus in the central business district in exchange for green-roof installation. The city uses a complex formula to calculate the bonus, but at least 50 percent of the roof must be covered with vegetation before the bonus starts to apply. More significantly, of the estimated 150 green-roof projects currently in development, only 12 are taking advantage of the city's incentives. The rest are being built because the city requires that new developments that benefit from city financing must install a green roof.

"It's a combination of incentives and requirements," Mr. Johnston said. McDonald's built a flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago and installed a highly visible, 3,150-square-foot, bi-level green roof. Target and Apple Computer have also installed green roofs on their stores in Chicago.

While studies in Chicago and other cities in Canada and Europe have demonstrated the environmental benefits of green roofs, green roof proponents know they need hard numbers to convince New York's developers of the economic benefits.

"We want to bridge the gap between theory and reality," said Glenn Goldstein, program director for Clean Air Communities. "Having definitive data that informs developers and other real estate people how a green roof could perform for them is critical."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New York Times
August 10, 2005
Ferrer's Bid Mines Hopes of an Ethnic City
By DIANE CARDWELL

Over the last decade, Fernando Ferrer has come to define Democratic politics in New York City and all their searing divisions.

In 1997, he ran for mayor but dropped out before the primary, leading some moderate and Hispanic Democrats to support Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican incumbent, who won re-election. In 2001, he came within a hair of winning the Democratic primary runoff, losing to Mark Green in a battle that split the party along ethnic lines and contributed to its defeat that November.

Now, as he pursues a mayoral bid for the third time, leading Democrats and numerous polls suggest that the stars are finally aligned in his favor for the Sept. 13 primary, and his strategists are hoping that he will not only take first place, but will capture the 40 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff.

It has been a remarkable rise for Mr. Ferrer from a drug- and violence-riddled South Bronx neighborhood to become the city's most prominent Hispanic politician. But that road, especially the stretch that runs through his campaign this year, has also been bumpy, pocked with seeming inconsistencies that have exposed some of the old party divisions.

As a result, many party leaders have questioned whether Mr. Ferrer, 55, is the person who can finally remake the traditional Democratic power base and break a decade-long Republican hold on City Hall. And underlying the political concerns is the sense that Mr. Ferrer's style - cautious to the point of inertia - will fail to energize the coalition of labor, minorities and whites he so needs for victory should he make it to the November general election.

For months, Mr. Ferrer has been going around the city, reaching far beyond his Bronx roots and seeking to draw in the middle-class voters who have proven key to winning city elections. His message - given at a backyard fund-raiser in an affluent Staten Island neighborhood one swampy night, or at an African Methodist Episcopal church in southeast Queens on another - strikes traditional Democratic themes in a city that has turned its back on the party, at least in selecting its mayors: that government can solve city ills through building more subsidized housing, by hiring more employees, by taxing Wall Street to improve its schools.

At the core of his candidacy is his belief that many New Yorkers face huge challenges merely trying to get by in the city, given rising housing costs, public schools that often fail to provide an adequate education, and a lack of attractive jobs for all but the elite. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he argues, does not even recognize these concerns and panders only to business concerns and wealthier New Yorkers.

In carrying that message, Mr. Ferrer is mining the same potent yet flammable vein of ethnic aspiration, minority kinship and class anxiety that he did in his failed 2001 bid. But he is also emphasizing his common-man credentials, portraying himself as an ordinary striving New Yorker who raised himself up through hard work and opportunity.

"If not for a good, sound education, I would not be standing here before you today," he often says. "Someone else would."

It is a message his advisers hope will resonate in neighborhoods throughout the city, and it is one that he, among all of the candidates, is uniquely suited to bear.

Unlike the other Democratic candidates, Mr. Ferrer can point to a hardscrabble New York background in which he surmounted formidable obstacles. Raised during tough times by a working mother who divorced when her only son was 8, he worked odd jobs around the neighborhood beginning at 10, excelled both in and out of school and became the first in his family to graduate from college.

But it was in political circles that Mr. Ferrer made his mark early on, charting a course that reflects an earlier age of New York civic life, when promising candidates were nurtured by a county political machine that groomed them for higher office. Known as a policy grind who is part operator and part conciliator, he quickly rose to prominence in the City Council and, through his ties to the powerful Bronx Democratic organization, was anointed in 1987 as Bronx borough president, the springboard to his mayoral aspirations.

Even though Mr. Ferrer portrays himself as a reluctant politician, his path from a South Bronx tenement can often seem like a finely rendered road map to City Hall.

"My idea of Freddy all this time is that ever since I've known him he's been running for office," said Angelo Falcón, a political scientist who first met Mr. Ferrer when they were teenagers. "You know the guy who wants to be student president and he's like a real cutthroat politician in high school? Well, that was Freddy."

And now, Mr. Ferrer is making what could be his last stand, his final chance to attain an office his wife, Aramina, says he was clearly destined for when she met him back in high school.

"I always knew," Ms. Ferrer, a public school principal, said in an interview in the couple's Bronx apartment in Riverdale. "I knew he was extraordinary because he was so focused, so serious and so smart. I thought, 'Wow, where did you get that from?'"

Public Service Boot Camp

The roots of where he got that from lie on Fox Street in the South Bronx, in the ghost of a five-story walk-up where Mr. Ferrer lived in circumstances that he mentions frequently but describes, when pressed, only in the most general terms. His early youth was "beautiful," he says, with stickball on the block, Sunday breakfast at his grandmother's house after church and pizza every Friday night with his mother and sister (both named Susan) at the Venice Restaurant on Wales Avenue.

But as the Bronx slowly gave itself over to the ravages of the drug trade and middle-class flight during the 1960's, things began to change in his neighborhood. His grandmother, Inocenzia Lopez, was mugged in her building. There were frequent arrests on the streets. The superintendent stopped making repairs.

There had been early harbingers of the trouble ahead. At 6, Mr. Ferrer said, he and his mother found anti-black and anti-Hispanic graffiti scrawled on a sign. "Get out of the neighborhood," it read.

"Now I had never heard those terms in my life," Mr. Ferrer recalled in an interview at his campaign headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, referring to ethnic slurs in the graffiti. When he asked what they meant, he said, his mother replied, "Well that's us."

After the departure of Mr. Ferrer's father, Santiago, of whom he will say only that they had "tough moments," money was tight, so Mr. Ferrer began working odd jobs as a child, first shining shoes, then making deliveries, including the case of Pabst Blue Ribbon quart bottles he walked up five flights to one apartment every Saturday.

Mr. Ferrer describes his grandmother, who prepared food in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and his mother, who was a hotel bookkeeper, as hard-nosed women who pushed him to excel in school and make something of himself. If his grandmother was stirring oatmeal at the stove and he got out of line, Mr. Ferrer recalled, he got a spoonful of the thick porridge flicked onto his cheek.

But it was his involvement in the Puerto Rican youth leadership group Aspira in high school that may have set the direction of his life, helping to develop his serious side while laying the groundwork for his political ambitions and public persona. Even now, on the campaign trail, he can seem like an overachieving debate-club president, bristling at questions or peppering his speech with words like ameliorate and temporize.

Former members of Aspira describe it as a kind of public service boot camp, with seminars on Robert's Rules of Order and work on voter registration drives, that served as a catapult to prominence for generations of young Latinos. But the organization also helped its members form a sense of Nuyorican identity, one that promoted mainstream values in contrast to the more militant groups of that day.

"It was great because it gave us an opportunity to see that we weren't alone in our schools, gave us an opportunity to see that, yes, we were smart," said Marlene Cintrón, the executive director of the HopeLine, a South Bronx charity that helps immigrants, adding, "and we could get empowered together."

Luis A. Miranda Jr., a former Aspira leader who was once president of the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation and is now one of Mr. Ferrer's closest advisers, described the organization as serious-minded, like Mr. Ferrer.

"It wasn't just to stay out of trouble," he said. "You had to sign an agreement that you were going to get good grades, that you were going to strive to be the best in your class." Recalling a trip to Puerto Rico, Mr. Miranda summarized the gravity of the group: "There is a beach 10 miles away from you but, no, you go to the legislature and you spend the day talking to the legislators."

Among his peers, Mr. Ferrer developed a reputation that would follow him into politics for being intelligent and driven with a flair for cogent, articulate debate.

"We used to call him Sit Down Freddy," Ms. Cintrón said, because at Aspira meetings, he always had something to say. "And we were like, 'Sit down! Sit down, Freddy.' So we knew even back then, that we were going to be seeing - and hearing - a lot from Freddy."

A top student at the demanding Cardinal Spellman High School in the Northeast Bronx, Mr. Ferrer became president of its Aspira chapter. But there was another side to his exuberance, some say. At one point, he discovered that a treasurer had misspent about $10 of the group's money, so he hauled the girl before a meeting, recalled Mr. Falcón, a member at the time, and reduced her to tears.

"He was like a prosecutor," Mr. Falcón said. "He could have talked to her privately, but instead he made a big deal of it. He was just that kind of a guy."

Fast Political Celebrity

After high school, Mr. Ferrer went on to New York University in the Bronx on scholarship, and studied government, philosophy and the classics. After graduation, he worked for several government agencies and elected officials in the city and state, and eventually became a district leader. He became close to the Bronx Democratic Party, which, mindful of the demographic changes sweeping the borough, was looking for promising young, loyal Puerto Ricans to nurture for leadership roles.

After losing his first election - a race for the State Assembly that he ran on a bet - he became a councilman in 1982, which put him on a fast track to political celebrity. Before long, political operatives began talking of him as potentially the city's first Latino mayor.

"Freddy was one of the stars of the Council," said Peter F. Vallone, who led the Council for 16 years. "Freddy was the kind of council member who understood the difference between doing something that was popular and doing something that was right," Mr. Vallone said, adding that he always chose the latter.

But in 1987, when the Bronx borough president, Stanley Simon, resigned amid impending indictments stemming from a bribery scandal, Mr. Ferrer was installed as borough president. He was reluctant at first - "I thought if God was good to me, I'd be a congressman," he recalled. "I enjoyed being a legislator."

Nonetheless, laboring against low expectations, Mr. Ferrer took to the job with a certain gusto. He says his first two acts were to clean house, figuratively (asking for staff resignations) and literally (stripping the Bronx County Courthouse, where the borough president's office is, of its graffiti). He says now that he liked being in charge because he saw the potential to help improve the Bronx, but he also clearly enjoyed the status that came with being an executive. Although he is best known as Freddy to the outside world, his staff began addressing him as Mr. President, a label that some aides use to this day.

"I made the transition from the legislative to the executive in 20 minutes," Mr. Ferrer said in an interview at a Brooklyn diner. "I liked it, it worked for me, I had a very clear sense of what I wanted to accomplish."

At the time, the borough had become a dystopian punch line and a popular synonym for urban blight, something Mr. Ferrer says he was determined to change. He is fond of saying on the campaign trail that under his watch, the Bronx gained more than 66,000 units of housing and 34,000 new jobs. It was even selected as an All-America City by the National Civic League in 1997.

But Mr. Ferrer's role has been debated over the years, with fans heaping credit on him and others saying he was simply the steward of a renaissance that mirrored the city's broader recovery from the depths of a wrenching decline. At the same time, consultants and public policy experts say that after the 1990 Charter revision diluted much of the power of the borough presidents, Mr. Ferrer's ability to act as much more than a cheerleader was severely curtailed.

At the same time, Mr. Ferrer's close relationship to the Bronx Democratic machine, with its reputation for shady dealings if not outright corruption, has always hovered around him.

Still, he gained a reputation as a relentless advocate for his borough, and before long he became restless. In 1997, he ran for mayor for the first time, a decision Mr. Ferrer, who often refers to himself in the second person, said he reached because "you come to realize, in the context of this city, the place to try to make a positive difference in people's lives is City Hall, the mayoralty." In that race, he sought to position himself as a moderate. Before abruptly dropping out, he competed for the Democratic berth that ultimately went to Ruth W. Messinger, who lost to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican incumbent.

After four more years as borough president, he tried in 2001, as his term ended by law, to carve out a territory to the left of the other Democrats. He ran as the anti-Rudy and casting himself as the savior of the "other New York," where he said people left behind by the freight train of the Giuliani administration lived.

That message brought him to the brink of winning the primary runoff, although his opponents labeled it divisive. And he is still tainted by the treacherous ethnic and racial politics that exploded in the contest against Mark Green. To this day, many Democrats blame Mr. Ferrer and his supporters for the Democratic Party's defeat on Election Day, saying that in a fit of spite after losing the runoff, they failed to rally behind Mr. Green, paving the way for Mr. Bloomberg's victory.

An Ethnic Investment

Since then, Mr. Ferrer has lived a more serene life, quietly finishing a master's degree in public administration at Baruch, and running the Drum Major Institute, a public policy advocacy center he redirected to focus on problems of the working poor and the middle class, concerns that form the backbone of his campaign.

He was also able to spend more time with his family, including his daughter, Carlina, and his two young grandsons, and indulge his passion for cooking. Self-taught in the kitchen, but by many accounts accomplished, and a man who is perhaps at his most animated when discussing the relative merits of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and White Castle burgers, Mr. Ferrer said he had to think long and hard about whether he wanted to start down this road again.

"I was not especially eager to do it because I happen to like the idea of coming home for dinner," he said. "I didn't need another run to affirm my life - I had a nice life," he added, tucking into a potato-and-onion omelet, like the ones he ate at his grandmother's house growing up.

Mr. Ferrer says that he was spurred to run by his disillusionment with how Mr. Bloomberg has governed the city, but his candidacy also represents the chance to pay off the investment of an entire generation of Latino leaders and prove the political maturation of the city's largest minority group.

And for Mr. Ferrer, the heart of his candidacy lies in his upbringing, in contrast to Mr. Bloomberg, who he says has no understanding of the problems of ordinary New Yorkers.

At a Midtown diner in the spring, Mr. Ferrer put it this way. "Everything I am, everything I've become, every opportunity I've ever had has been as a result of being a kid growing up in New York," he said, speaking slowly and tapping the table, seemingly unsure that he was being understood. "I want those same opportunities for generations to follow."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New Republic Online
WHITE HOUSE WATCH
Source Code
by Ryan Lizza
Post date: 08.06.05
Issue date: 08.15.05

Hours before President Bush announced his Supreme Court nominee, a White House reporter from a major daily newspaper was on the phone with one of "the four horsemen." The horsemen--former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, Federalist Society pooh-bah Leonard Leo, and Jay Sekulow, best known as Washington's most prominent Jew for Jesus--had earned their nickname because they were the four outsiders who worked most closely with the White House on the Supreme Court nomination. If anyone knew who Bush was about to pick, it would be one of them.

The reporter declined to identify which horseman he spoke with, but the source confidently provided the scribe with what seemed like confirmation of the scoop of the day--that Bush's choice was Edith Brown Clement. "He was talking about the pros and cons of Clement, and why it was such a brilliant pick," says the reporter.

Elsewhere in Washington, other "sources close to the White House" were also fanning the Clement flames. Up on the Hill, Senator John Cornyn, another self-styled Bush adviser wired into the White House, e-mailed reporters an embargoed statement praising Clement as an inspired choice.

The horsemen and Cornyn were obviously wrong about Clement, but the episode underscores how much reporters now rely on GOP operatives outside the White House to tell them what's going on inside of it. These sources and their ilk fed the frenzied, daylong speculation that Bush would pick Clement, and they now shape the coverage of every major White House story. Whether they are called "sources close to the White House" or "Bush advisers" or "GOP strategists familiar with White House thinking," their role in Washington is the same. They act as an essential lubricant in the daily clash between the White House and its press corps.

This is partly the White House's own fault. The Bush administration has promoted an explosion in the use of "sources close to the White House"--or scttwh. The phrase shows up in news databases more times for Bush's four and a half years than it does for the eight years of the Clinton presidency. This White House's stinginess with information has sent reporters scurrying to find knowledgeable outsiders, even if those sources don't always know what they're talking about. "They fill a vacuum," says Richard Wolffe, who covers the White House for Newsweek.

As a service to readers, and in an effort to demystify the anonymous source phenomenon, I asked 15 of the finest Bush White House reporters to help assemble a guide to the secret society of sources close to the White House. Despite the swelling ranks of scttwh, interviews revealed that there is indeed a core membership that might be called the Usual Suspects: a cadre of lobbyists, congressmen, ex-officials, and other hangers-on who seem to be programmed into every cell phone on the White House beat.

For reporters, they represent Washington's shadow White House, a place filled with slightly more accessible sources armed with dramatically less knowledge.



The Übersource

The first name to come rolling off the tongues of reporters when it comes to scttwh is Ed Gillespie. "He is the top guy I would put on that list," says a newspaper correspondent. Gillespie is Washington's omnipresent GOP operative. His core business is his multimillion-dollar lobbying firm, Quinn Gillespie, but he spins through the revolving door between the Bush world and K Street at a dizzying rate. Over the last few years, his lobbying career has been interrupted by stints on Bush's first campaign, as party chair, and, most recently, as a strategist working out of the West Wing on the John Roberts nomination.

Almost everyone agrees that, if the veil of anonymity were magically lifted from all White House coverage, Gillespie would be the single most frequently cited source close to the White House or a Bush adviser. He is a rare creature in Bush's Washington, someone genuinely close to the key players in the White House, as well as someone who talks regularly and semi-candidly with the press.

Notably, Gillespie's replacement as party chair, Ken Mehlman, is also a frequent nominee, although, having been raised in the hierarchical Rove machine rather than the more entrepreneurial Beltway culture that spawned Gillespie, Mehlman is regarded as more journalistically useless. Still, White House reporters say he is a top scttwh.



The Troika

Nipping at Gillespie's heels for scttwh dominance are three Republican lobbyists: Charles Black, Ken Duberstein, and Vin Weber. Black, chairman of the lobbying firm bksh and co-chairman of Civitas Group, which helps corporations extract homeland security dollars from Uncle Sam, is a pioneer in his field. He was a senior adviser to both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but, more importantly, he is credited with destroying the stigma once attached to public servants who shift back and forth between politics and lobbying, clearing the path for the Ed Gillespies of today. When he is named, Black is alternatively described as "close to the Bush family," "an informal adviser to Bush," "a Republican strategist with close ties to the White House," and "a longtime Cheney friend." He has gained a reputation among some reporters as one of the few genuine scttwh willing to dollop out the occasional criticism.

Others disagree. "Black touches more bases than Duberstein does, but he's also singing from the choir book," says a White House wire reporter. Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and a regular scttwh in daily Bush coverage, is seen as less knowledgeable about the White House's inner workings, but quick with a quote. "He's perfect for attributing something that you already know," says one political reporter. "But, on the other hand, if Ken Duberstein told me Edith Clement was the choice, I would never go with it."

The final member of the troika is Vin Weber, who served a six-term stint in the House before launching his career as a lobbyist. Discreet and influential, he is the source close to the White House whom reporters are most likely to call for an outside perspective on how Bush's legislative agenda is faring. "He has a good sense of what the market will bear there," says a White House reporter, "a good sense of when the administration is pushing the Hill too far on an issue."



Hill Dwellers

White House correspondents recently suffered a devastating loss. Representative Rob Portman was sworn in as the U.S. trade representative in May. Reporters agree that Portman was the most helpful scttwh in Congress. "Portman was as close as anyone else on the Hill to the White House," confirms one correspondent. Adds another, "Portman was the classic example" of a scttwh. With ties to several Bush aides that go back to his own days as a staffer in the first Bush administration--and a penchant for returning calls and speaking honestly to reporters--he was the king of the Hill for White House scribes.

A small sample of reporters nominate Cornyn as a replacement. "He's often at the White House and will often tell you he was there," explains a newspaper reporter. But that press release on Clement has severely damaged Cornyn's reputation as a budding scttwh. "He was duped," says the reporter. Adds another, "It's the perfect example of how he's close to the White House but not in the loop."

With Cornyn on the sidelines, there is no other member that has risen to the level of Usual Suspect. "It's not the leadership. It's not Hastert and DeLay," says a longtime White House reporter. "And Frist and his staff are much more yoked to the White House. They are more taking orders." The lack of a real Hill scttwh underscores the fact that Bush--unlike his father, who was famously chummy with members--is in fact not close to anyone on the Hill, as well as the fact that his White House has never made cultivating members a priority. "Does Bush have any genuine friends in the Congress?" asks Ed Chen, who covers the White House for the Los Angeles Times. "I'm not sure he does."



Ex-Bush Spokesbots

The second Bush term has contributed to a rise in former officials dotting the Washington landscape, and reporters are lassoing them as they exit the White House. The same list of people is mentioned by numerous reporters and consists largely of former communications operatives who continue to talk to the press after they leave the campaign or the White House. Opinions about the value of each varies widely. At the top of the list are two former Bush campaign operatives: strategist Matthew Dowd and ad-maker Mark McKinnon. Dowd is generally seen as the more wired scttwh, his line to Karl Rove during the campaign having earned him a unique cachet. "Last year, Dowd was probably talking to Karl 17 times a day," says a reporter. But the fact that McKinnon exercises with the president is noted by several reporters, though critics dismiss the mountain-bike connection, claiming, "The circle has gotten big enough that [McKinnon] seems less plugged in."

Also in the top tier of former Bush officials likely to show up anonymously in your morning paper is Mary Matalin, who left her perch as a chief aide to Dick Cheney in December 2002. She receives fairly warm reviews from several reporters. Says a newsweekly correspondent, "She still talks. She is still very much on the circuit." A daily scribe adds, "Matalin is actually a really good one. She's a little more able to talk now that she doesn't work there. Still spewing the company line, but somewhat helpful." Such are the scraps that White House reporters have been reduced to coveting.

A click below these big names is Stuart Stevens, a former Bush ad-maker who is well-liked by the press and therefore suspect to Bush aides. "He is much more likely to say something zesty, although that is one of the reasons he is not in the inner, inner loop," explains a White House reporter.

Finally, there is a small faction of minor league ex-staffers who might sometimes claim to be close to the White House but who really aren't. "These are people who have to dine out for months on a single phone call. They are not in the real loop, but they once were," says the same reporter. In this group, White House reporters place former press aide Adam Levine, onetime Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt, and former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer. Shockingly, not a single reporter interviewed believes Fleischer is a true scttwh. Asked if Fleischer should be on the list of Usual Suspects, Chen simply responds, "No." A wire reporter adds, "If he knows stuff, it's because he asks, not because he's told. He's not in the inner circle and never was."



The longer Bush is in office, the more sources close to the White House there seem to be. The culture of fear that the Bushies have instilled in Republicans who speak ill of the administration--or who speak candidly--has forced more of them to hide behind veils of vague attribution. In fact, the epidemic has now migrated into the White House itself. At least one reporter recently granted a White House official the cover of a scttwh. Reporters say that this practice of officials inside the White House trying to disguise themselves as outsiders is becoming more common. Which means there's a whole new category of sources close to the White House: liars.

Ryan Lizza is a senior editor at TNR.

Copyright 2005, The New Republic

The New York Times
August 5, 2005
Ferrer and Bloomberg Trade Charges on How to Add Housing
By DIANE CARDWELL

Accusing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of failing to solve a city housing shortage, Fernando Ferrer said yesterday that he would preserve or build more than 100,000 low-cost homes if elected mayor by raising taxes on vacant land and forcing developers in certain areas to set aside housing for low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

In making the $8.5 billion proposal, Mr. Ferrer, a Democrat, tried not only to distinguish himself from the Republican mayor he seeks to unseat but also to portray himself as a champion of the middle class, rather than just of the working poor.

His plan would represent a sharp departure in New York City housing policy, mandating creation of lower-cost homes for many developers to solve what he labeled a crisis facing the city.

"Make no mistake," he said, standing in front of low-cost housing he helped develop in the Melrose section as Bronx borough president. "Today's problems do not exempt our most vulnerable, but this crisis we face today is squeezing middle-class, middle-income New Yorkers in unprecedented ways."

Under Mr. Ferrer's plan, the city would designate areas scheduled for higher-density zoning changes as "growth zones" where developers would be required to set aside at least 30 percent of the new units for low- and moderate-income residents as a condition of building. They would be eligible for subsidies and so-called density bonuses, or would be allowed to build larger buildings, and could receive even bigger incentives if they agreed to set aside an additional 20 percent of their units for low- and moderate-income residents.

In other parts of the city, Mr. Ferrer's plan would eliminate tax incentives for developers unless they reserved 20 percent of their homes as affordable units.

By contrast, the Bloomberg administration has moved only recently to offer aggressive zoning incentives to developers to set aside units for lower- and moderate-income tenants, most notably as part of the rezoning plan for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area of Brooklyn.

Mr. Ferrer said his plan would cost $8.5 billion over 10 years and yield 167,000 inexpensive homes, either through new construction or by preserving existing housing that is subsidized under programs like Mitchell-Lama and Section 8. He would pay for the plan from a mix of sources, including federal community development block grants, the city's capital budget and the increased tax on vacant property.

That plan would reclassify vacant lots in residential areas from Class 1, currently taxed on 6 percent of market value, to Class 4, currently taxed on 45 percent of market value.

Mr. Bloomberg's campaign was quick to attack Mr. Ferrer's plan, saying that the bulk of it had been stolen from the mayor, whose record on housing was far better than Mr. Ferrer said. The Bloomberg administration has already been moving in a similar direction to that laid out by Mr. Ferrer, but, in recent rezonings, officials have used a mix of tax incentives and density bonuses rather than mandates to encourage housing development.

"Freddy funds his plan through a nearly $1 billion property tax hike," said Stu Loeser, the Bloomberg campaign spokesman. "Coupled with his stock-transfer tax to fix the schools, it seems there is no problem that higher taxes can't solve."

And Mr. Bloomberg, speaking at the dedication of a new waterfront park in Riverdale, not far from Mr. Ferrer's apartment, defended his record, saying that the administration had committed the financing for the construction or renovation of 68,000 low-cost homes to be completed before 2008.

"It is the largest affordable housing plan any administration has had since the days of Ed Koch," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We need affordable housing, and we need luxury housing, and we need everything in the middle."

Mr. Ferrer's campaign shot back that the tax was intended in part as a source of revenue but also as a way of treating vacant residential property as commercial property to discourage speculation, as opposed to the mayor's 18.5 percent property tax increase on all homeowners of a few years ago.

Mr. Ferrer has tried to depict himself to voters as a leader in the development of low-cost housing in the Bronx during his borough presidency, but the extent of his role has always been debated. And that debate spilled over into Mr. Ferrer's policy announcement.

On Tuesday, former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, said that Mr. Ferrer had nothing to do with building the housing because it was a mayoral initiative.

Asked about Mr. Koch's comments, Mr. Ferrer read several remarks from Mr. Koch from 2001 suggesting a more positive assessment.

Then, for instance, after Mr. Koch endorsed Mr. Ferrer against Mark Green in the Democratic primary runoff, he said of Mr. Ferrer, "Thousands of units of affordable housing that became available in the Bronx were achieved as a result of his working with my office very closely."

In a telephone interview, Mr. Koch, who also said in a 2001 commercial for Mr. Ferrer that he would make a "superb mayor," said that at the time he was supporting Mr. Ferrer in a race against Mr. Green "and I wanted to say something positive."

Also yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg received an endorsement from a coalition of Asian-American and Pacific Islanders, who pledged to campaign for him in their communities.

Meanwhile, Council Speaker Gifford Miller focused his efforts on a different voting bloc, unveiling proposed legislation that would create a city program to reimburse older and disabled people on fixed incomes for up to a quarter of their electric bills during a heat emergency. The program would pay out a maximum of $5 million annually on a first-come basis and could take effect as early as next summer.

Mr. Miller, who frequently visits senior centers to woo voters, said it was "a serious health problem" when older people could not afford to turn on their air-conditioners in sweltering weather. "I think this is in response to the heat and not the election, which is on more people's minds, frankly right now," he said. "And look, this is part of the Council's long and historic commitment to seniors."

Thomas J. Lueck and Winnie Hu contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company