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Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/arts/20060131/1/1745

Space Woes
by Jonathan Mandell
31 Jan 2006

To understand why artist Andrea Zittel moved to New York City –- and also why she, like so many others, left -- it helps to look at her art projects. For one, she lived in a small basement room for a week without sunlight, a clock or a calendar; “I wanted to see if my day-to-day activities would completely fall apart.” She also lived for a month in one of her “Cellular Compartment Units” (which are not much bigger than a jail cell), and she has designed and constructed even smaller “Homestead Units” (the size of a kitchen) and “Living Units”(the size of a closet) and “Escape Vehicles” (the size of a car trunk) that she likes to call “intimate universes,” though others might see them as "cramped spaces."

So she did not mind that her first apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when she moved to New York in 1990, was just 200 square feet, bigger than most of the universes that the city would help inspire her to create.

"I prefer small spaces," she told me the other day at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, where her work is on display in an exhibition that opened this month entitled "Critical Space."

There is nowhere where space is more critical than in New York City, and arguably no New Yorkers who struggle more for enough of it than the city's artists.
Fleeing For Space

“Space is the number one issue,” Robin Keegan testified last month in the third hearing by the New York City Council’s committee on cultural affairs into the problems facing the city’s cultural community. Keegan is one of the authors of Creative New York, a report (in pdf format) released in December by the Center for an Urban Future that examines the strengths and challenges of what it calls the "creative core" of New York. "In New York, complaints about high real-estate costs and too little space are hardly unique," the report concedes. But the space problems of artists and arts groups –- space for living, for working, and for presenting their art -- are "particularly acute.” For example, “the high cost and scarcity of studio time for musicians and visual artists, and rehearsal space for performing artists, regularly requires them to make heroic efforts to pursue their art in the city.”

Many have been giving up trying to be heroes. “Most artists are driven out of New York because they can’t afford space,” Andrea Zittel said.

She herself certainly still has a presence in the city -- besides her current exhibition at the New Museum and another one beginning February 9th at the Whitney, her art work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and in Central Park, where her “Deserted Islands,” about the size of bean bag chairs, were placed in the Central Park Pond. She also owns a three-story building in Williamsburg, which she bought once her art career had begun to take off, where she lived, worked, and presented her art in storefront exhibits on the ground floor.

But she left New York City five years ago for California, and visits only a few times a year; the ground floor of her building is now a café. In a recent article about her in New York Magazine entitled “The Non-Manhattan Project: Andrea Zittel bolted New York for the California scrub…”, she is quoted as saying: “I wanted to show that there could be a viable arts community outside a cultural capital like New York or Los Angeles, somewhere more affordable.”

Artists quoted in the Creative New York report seem to be fleeing New York not because they want to prove anything, but because they feel they have no choice. Hope Forstenzer, a graphic designer and glass blower, moved to Seattle. “I love New York,” she told the authors. “But I couldn’t change my life in any way to make it more secure.” At the time he talked to the authors, sculptor and copy editor Doug Culhane had definitely had it with New York City: After living in the same building in Williamsburg for 12 years, he was being evicted by his landlord, along with 11 other artists who live in the building -- even though the presence of such artists helped revitalize the neighborhood in the first place. Culhane had decided to leave the city altogether, and was trying to choose among Hudson, New York, Providence, Rhode Island and several other destinations. “Cities everywhere want artists,” Culhane said, “and are making room for them.”

“Even cities like Paducah, Kentucky are developing tax incentives and affordable housing to retain and attract creative talent,” Robin Keegan testified. “And whose talent do they want most? Ours.”
Scrambling For Space

Nearly every day there seems to be an arts story in the papers that is as much a story about real estate. Two hit Off-Broadway shows can't find a Broadway theater to move to. The Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue announced this month that it will be turned into a venue for the performing arts, which worries the art and antique dealers who have been holding their fairs there. The Department of Education sent a letter evicting the Boys Choir Of Harlem from the public school where it has operated rent-free since 1993.

The one mention of art or culture in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City address -- delivered at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island -- was, in a way, all about space. After boasting of having "dramatically increased capital funding for arts organizations in every borough," he continued: “This year, the 30th Anniversary of our city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, we will help unveil a number of exciting projects, including a new performing arts center at Harlem’s Aaron Davis Hall, and a beautiful new wing at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. And -– I know this will be a favorite with many here today -– the Staten Island Zoo will open its long-awaited Reptile Wing!”

If many arts institutions are looking to expand -- most art museums, for example, have enough exhibition space to show only one or two percent of their collection -- less-established arts groups and individual artists feel increasingly desperate about getting enough space just to meet their basic needs.

Artists “are losing hope and growing bitter about not being able to live and work and stay here,” testified Ted Berger, retiring director of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Offering Space

Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin acknowledges the problem, and (during the second hearing of the city council committee in October) enumerated some of the ways the city government is trying to do something about it, such as creating a new cultural district in downtown Brooklyn "that will include rehearsal and performance spaces at affordable rates," and transfering ownership of a half-dozen city-owned properties on East Fourth Street "to the cultural tenants that have occupied them for years, including Ellen Stewart's La Mama Experimental Theater Company."

Several non-profit organizations also have stepped up to help.

NYC Performance Arts Spaces helps artists find rehearsal and performance space, with searchable online databases for musicians and for dancers, and one soon for theater performers and also authors looking for a place to give readings. (The average rate for a rehearsal space these days, according to program administrator David Johnston, is $20 an hour.)

Swing Space, a project of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, convinces owners of buildings below Canal Street to make available temporarily vacant space for free or at low cost. Currently, according to cultural council president Tom Healey, 140 artists have free use of some 80,000 square feet of “vacant storefronts, storage units, office floors and lofts.”
Workshop space is often available through artist residencies, such as those offered by the New York State Artist Workspace Consortium, a group of ten art institutions (five of them in the city, from Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City to the Lower East Side Printshop). Brooklyn installation artist Kim Mayhorn has been accepted to some half dozen artist residencies, most (but not all) offering workspace as part of the deal, including one at the Whitney Museum and a residency lasting two months in Utica, New York at Sculpture Space. “My brain tends to work on a very large canvas,” she said, “but I can’t afford to rent an art studio of the size that I would need for my work, unless I also moved to a cheaper apartment, which would have to be the size of a box.” The residencies, she said, “allowed me to have more space to think, and to create.”

There is even affordable housing specifically geared for artists. Some of it is famous, such as Westbeth, a century-old factory building in Greenwich Village which four decades ago was converted into what it claims is “the largest artists community in the world,” and the Manhattan Plaza on 42nd Street. Less well-known is the Aurora, developed by the Actors’ Fund, which also has been offering monthly seminars on finding affordable housing. The Fund is just about to construct new artist housing as well, Schermerhorn House in downtown Brooklyn, in a joint project with Common Ground. And they are not alone: Artspace, which bills itself as “America’s leading non-profit real estate developer for the arts,” is engaging in its first foray into New York City, a joint project with a local community group, El Barrio Operation Fight Back to create 65 affordable apartments for artists and their families in the building that once housed P.S. 109 on Third Avenue and 99th Street.

Nobody is pretending that any of this is enough.

“Many of these projects are becoming less and less replicable," Keegan said, "due to the continued escalation of real estate costs across the five boroughs."
Suggested Solutions

At the city council hearing in December, Norma Munn, of the New York City Arts Coalition, suggested three ways that the city government could help solve the problem, ideas that have the backing of many arts advocates in the city. One, which she called an interim solution, would be for the city to provide a package of tax incentives that would encourage landlords to rent to non-profit arts groups and to individual artists; and that would encourage developers to set aside part of their new building for an art group or individual artists.

Longer term, Munn suggested the establishment of a “citywide community cultural land trust” – basically, a not-for-profit real estate development corporation that would buy, renovate and resell buildings but restrict their use in perpetuity to something art-related, such as artist workspaces.

Munn also recommended that the city use its planning and zoning in a way that is more attentive to the real cultural needs of the city. “Right now the City Planning commission’s idea of planning for culture is to block off an area in a master plan and say cultural center,” Munn testified. The planners, she said, give no thought to what that center will actually be -- “It’s just a blob” – and as a result, it rarely happens.

Indeed, planning sometimes does as much harm as good. Ironically, the recent rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint to create new affordable housing there has increased the price of real estate in these two arts-heavy neighborhoods to the point of threatening to drive out many arts groups.
A Room Of One's Own

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Virginia Woolf famously wrote . She understood why there could be no great female artist in Shakespeare's time: "One has only to think of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no woman could have written poetry then."

T.J. Volonis has a room of his own -- or almost his own; it's a room in a brownstone, without enough space for a bathroom, which is out in the hall and which he shares with the other tenant on the floor. Volonis does "functional art," sculpture-like chairs and tables, one of which sold at an art auction for $1,300, but he's having trouble doing it where he lives. "I've been looking for a new space so I can do my work. I'm tripping over my sculptures. It makes it difficult to produce more pieces."

On the other hand, he admits he is not one of those frustrated New York artists. It is hard to be frustrated after only a few months. Volonis, who moved to the city after graduating from college in 1999, did not make his first piece until last August, the one that sold in November. "If I had moved anywhere else," he says, "I don't think I would be producing art." Space isn't everything.

New York Times
January 25, 2006
As Manhattan Booms, Inflation Squeezes Rest of New York
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

As the pay and purchasing power of Manhattan residents have moved higher and higher, incomes in all four of the boroughs outside Manhattan have trailed inflation over the last few years, in a stark example of the increasing income disparity in New York City. In terms of wages, Manhattan families are doing better on average than those in the rest of the nation, while families in the four other boroughs are doing worse.

In Manhattan, real wages - earnings adjusted for inflation - rose 5.4 percent between the first quarters of 2002 and 2005, led by the finance and information industries, while the national average was flat.

Soaring year-end bonuses seemed to play a major role in the Manhattan increase. Economists generally look on first-quarter results as providing the best indicators of trends.

But in the rest of the city, those wages fell at least 2.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The drop was biggest on Staten Island at 8.3 percent, although that figure may be more volatile because that borough has the smallest population in New York City.

Real wages are one of the best indicators of how people are doing financially. Driving the buying power of these wages down, it appears, is inflation. There is also an absence of serious upward pressure on wages in most industries, especially those that employ the lowest earners. The number of both high- and low-wage jobs has grown, but there is little mobility between the two.

Stories of financial frustration abound in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

Joshua Henderson, who is 29 and works in Queens as a case manager for a welfare-to-work company, said his salary had gone up about $10,000 since he left his former teaching job.

But a rise in rent on his apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn - to $950 a month from $850 - and increases in telephone, cellphone and utility costs have eaten up much of his salary increase, he said.

Mr. Henderson feels "priced out of Brooklyn, where I was born and bred," he said, adding: "I feel disgusted. I feel like the 'Sex and the City' set has taken over, spending most of their money on rents, which puts pressure on the rest of us."

Limits on opportunity have also contributed to the trend toward lower real wages. Low-skilled workers - many of them immigrants - now tend to get the lowest-paying jobs in the market, like restaurant jobs, in contrast to unskilled laborers of the past, who often found work in manufacturing, shipping and other industries that offered benefits and a chance for advancement.

"The typical jobs for immigrants with health benefits and union benefits don't exist anymore," said Frank J. Franz, president of the Belmont Small Business Association in the Bronx.

"My father had no skills at all, but he worked in a paper manufacturing plant on Bruckner Boulevard and ended up at the post office, bought a house, sent us to Fordham, and threw my sister a big wedding," he said. "You think a guy who works at a post office now who has a wife who doesn't work can send a kid to Fordham University today?"

New data compiled by the federal government suggests that New Yorkers who work outside Manhattan are being increasingly squeezed by inflation and slow wage growth - the bookends of economic struggle. And while inflation may vary somewhat from borough to borough, economists say that those variations do not affect the overall trend.

"There are two dynamics at work," said Michael L. Dolfman, the regional commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in New York. "You had, in all boroughs except Manhattan, increases in wages and salaries that were less than in the rest of the country but inflation being greater. And this has had a significant impact on the purchasing power of people who live in the city."

Workers who toil in Manhattan but who live in the four other boroughs may be earning more than those working in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, Mr. Dolfman said, but their wages would not change the data, because by and large those earners tend not to have the highest-earning jobs in Manhattan.

To be sure, most workers in New York City benefited from the economic boom of the 1990's, and the recovery after a recession in 2001. From 1996 to 2005, the real wages of Manhattan workers grew almost 40 percent, and grew 2.5 percent in Queens and Staten Island. They were flat in the Bronx and fell 1 percent in Brooklyn.

But while prices have risen on health care and education around the country in recent years, and housing prices in major cities have also soared, inflation has hit harder in New York in other areas.

The Consumer Price Index rose 24 percent from 1996 to 2005 nationwide but grew 27.6 percent in every borough of New York. In the last three years, New Yorkers saw fuel prices rise 27 percent, while they grew 19 percent nationwide. And while the housing prices rose 8.4 percent nationwide, they went up 14.7 percent in New York. At the same time, benefits have decreased in many professions.

"My salary has gone up 40 percent over the last several years because I have had several promotions," said Loreto Porte, a professor at Hostos Community College in the Bronx who lives in Queens. "But my expenses have gone up 50 percent. We have lost health benefits." She said that the electricity bill for her house had climbed, adding: "Property taxes have gone up. It's everything."

While Manhattan workers were not impervious to inflation, their wages helped shield its blow. Indeed, the number of families in Manhattan earning more than $200,000 a year rose almost 20 percent from 2002 to 2004 alone, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists are divided on what this data means. Some say that rising tides still lift all economic boats, even if some of those are actually ships with giant lido decks and an open bar while others remain dinghies bobbing precariously.

They argue that low crime, which has led to soaring real estate prices, has helped improve nearly every corner of the city.

"The tangible C.P.I. and income is good summary measure," said Jason Bram, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "But then you have to ask, if you take a family in Bushwick and you look at them and their income in mid-90's and now it is this much higher but prices have gone up more than their average in income. The next question you have to ask is does that fully capture their quality of life."

"Because," Mr. Bram continued, "one statistic that really strikes me is that in the poorest neighborhoods the rate of crime and other indicators like abandoned houses have improved more dramatically than in New York City as a whole."

WNYC: Chinatown Falls on Hard Times
by Wilma Consul

NEW YORK, NY, January 23, 2006 — Much of the Jewish Lower East Side has been lost over time replaced by new immigrants from other parts of the world, particularly China. Those seeking their fortunes in Manhattan's Chinatown are in for a surprise -- Chinatown has fallen on hard times. Its economy has not bounced back since the street closures caused by the collapse of the World Trade Towers on 9-11, but other factors have contributed to the downturn, too. Reporter Wilma Consul takes a look, and asks what's ahead for the neighborhood that was once an important immigrant enclave in the City.

REPORTER: Wiggling through the crowd of tourists and shoppers on Chinatown's main drag, Canal Street, the smell of fresh fish and cigarette smoke waft through the air. It's not immediately obvious that this neighborhood is still struggling.

But veer off to Mott Street, where many old timers say Chinatown began, and you'll hear a different story.

PAUL LEE: So we're standing at the old Kam Kuo Supermarket, was here for 30 years at 7-9 Mott Street, and just now it's an empty building.

REPORTER: Paul Lee has witnessed the changes on this street. He ran the family business, the 32 Mott Street General Store, until it closed in 2004, after 113 years in business.

LEE: In addition, let's see, 12 Mott was an import-export store. They were doing well before 9-11. They've closed and moved away since then. - And now, it's a hair salon. But it was empty for a good 6 months to a year. Just at the corner, there was a 30- to 40-year-old dim sum, coffee shop. They closed about 3 days ago.

REPORTER: Closures have been widespread in Chinatown. The thousands who used to walk up from the World Trade Center area and fill the restaurants at lunchtime have dwindled.

Park Row, also a major artery to Chinatown, had been closed for security reasons. There is still only restricted access because of its proximity to Police Headquarters.

It's easy to blame September 11th for Chinatown's ailing economy. But according to Peter Kwong, professor at Hunter College and author of numerous books on Chinese Americans, Chinatown's slump did not start then.

PETER KWONG: 9-11 exposed something that's already decaying and rotting. Sure it make it worse, but it did not cause Chinatown's economic problems.

REPORTER: The reasons are more complex. Kwong points to the garment factories that, at one time, supplied up to 20,000 customers daily to the small steamy restaurants and tiny storefront shops. High rents forced the garment business out to the outer boroughs.

It takes only 20 minutes from Mott Street to get to 8th Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn via a mini-van - it's a transportation alternative that only Chinese people seem to know about.

Sunset Park is where some of those garment factories set up shop. 61st street is lined with warehouse buildings. Something written in Chinese gets Kwong's attention.

KWONG: This is a sign written on red cloth. It says: looking for somebody who is experienced in sewing. Those who are interested, please call, and it gives the number, asking for Mr. Tan.

A man hauls a cart loaded with floral nighties down the sidewalk.

KWONG: (asking guy in Chinese) He says everything inside which we can not see is all garment factories. Some of the trucks out are for shipping the garments.

Kwong says most of the Chinese in Brooklyn have moved to areas near subway lines that connect to Manhattan's Chinatown - the N, R and Q trains. And when an area gets crowded and real estate prices go up, people go farther out. This is happening now in Sunset Park, where tiny residential buildings go for more than a million. Old buildings are being torn down and turned into luxury condos.

So Chinese here are moving about five miles away to Avenue U. It's being touted as the new Chinatown. The Century 21 Realty on East 15th and Avenue U posts classified ads for two-bedroom condos priced at 425-thousand dollars.

KWONG: The ads are all in Chinese. Mr. Andrew Gun is the manager. But you can see in this office, there are Russians as well as Chinese. They are selling real estate to Chinese as well as Russian immigrants.

Avenue U has not exactly attained full Chinatown status. On one block, you can see a Chinese bakery next to a pizzeria, around the corner from a Latino store.

Kwong says it will take a few more years before Avenue U reaches the vitality of New York's most active and largest Chinese hub: Flushing, Queens.

The number 7 train and the Long Island Rail Road will get you to the heart of Flushing.

WELLINGTON CHEN: We're on Main Street. And we just came out of the subway station.

REPORTER: Wellington Chen is the perfect guide to this city within the city. The 53-year-old architect helped develop Flushing into a haven of hip Asian restaurants and lucrative businesses.

CHEN: This is the main thoroughfare for the town. You see, we're on a flight path to the La Guardia Airport. So you're asking how tall can a building be? They can never exceed certain flight path heights. So the closer you get to the runway, there's a limitation on how high you can go.

REPORTER: A grocer closing for the day calls out sale prices, and a vendor's television blasts a Chinese variety show.

Passers-by stop to watch.

CHEN: It's comedy, in Mandarin. As u can see, it's a man dressed in a bikini outfit so you know it has to be a comedy.

REPORTER: This Queens Chinatown resembles parts of Hong Kong and Taiwan, where most of the 140-thousand Chinese immigrants in Queens came from. This middle class community elected the first Chinese member of the New York City Council, John Lui.

As the revitalization efforts of Manhattan's Chinatown move forward, many people wonder if the goal is to replicate what's been built in Flushing. Especially since Wellington Chen is the new director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation.

CHEN: This is not what I'm trying to do for Chinatown at all. The two of them are totally different. I agreed to go down there to level the playing field, because I see the growth here. And there'll be four billion dollars invested in this neighborhood, do you think there'll be a billion dollar invested in Chinatown? No way. (CONSUL: Why not?) - The incomes are poor, the educational levels are far lower, profit margins are marginal. But there's the vitality. So there's the struggle.

REPORTER: Chen bristles at the implications that he would gentrify Chinatown because he's viewed as a developer. He points out that he spent 13 years volunteering on community boards.

Chen says he's driven to champion the needs of the voiceless because of his lineage. The son of nurse and a U.S. Army translator during World War II, Chen lived in Singapore, Brazil and South Africa, countries where he saw the disparity between the rich and poor. Chen says his Chinese name defines who he ought to be.

CHEN: You know what my Chinese name is? Cho chow, the linkage. It's heavy responsibility. But it's blessed responsibility. And that's what I'm about.

REPORTER: And that background may serve Chen very well as he tries to balance all the competing visions for what Manhattan's Chinatown could be.

Historian Peter Kwong has his own.

If you want to make Chinatown prosperous, which means attracting non-Chinese, then, you're talking about a different kind of Chinatown. But don't use the term rebuilding Chinatown. That's a phony slogan, alright. Because rebuilding Chinatown means building the people who originally lived here. That's something different.

REPORTER: But the old Chinatown that catered to the first Chinese immigrants, the Cantonese has already given way. Stroll down East Broadway, right under the Manhattan Bridge, and you'll get a glimpse of the new Chinatown -- one that bustles with everything Fujianese.

KWONG: "This street is always busy. This is not a street that needs to be talking about rebuilding. Here, everything is still purely for Chinese. And the signs are all in Chinese practically.

REPORTER: Kwong says this newest group of immigrants has created a vibrant business sector that serves the needs of Chinese businesses everywhere.

KWONG: People will call all over the country, and say: Hey, you know I need three restaurant help. Could you send them over? It's almost like day laborer situation. They go all the way as south as Georgia, north as Maine and west as Chicago. So this is the heart of cheap labor supply.

REPORTER: This demand prompted the creation of the now very popular low-priced Chinatown buses. They transport Chinese speaking workers to their destinations without getting lost.

New York's Chinatown was once the center of Chinese life and culture in the City. Today, the need to go there for fresh bamboo shoots or fine Chinese cuisine is no longer true. Other immigrants from Asia have formed their own enclaves where they can eat their food and buy Asian ingredients.

A good place to contemplate what the new Chinatown could be is at the Silk Road Place, a cafe-slash-art house, packed with young people, Chinese and non-Chinese. A Lower East Side vegetarian restaurant has a concession here.

On stage is singer/songwriter Kevin So.

Friday night is TeaBag time, an open mic event founded by Telly Wong. He's a Chinatown kid who still lives in the neighborhood.

TELLY WONG: I think the future of Chinatown lies in collaborations with China and HongKong. Chinese have always been into import/export. The Chinese traveling around the world now. They would like to be in neighborhoods they feel comfortable. Chinatown has a lot of history, homeland.

REPORTER: The new face of Chinatown is really a continuing thread of the New York experience. Change is also happening in Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Williamsburg, Park Slope, and soon, the Bronx.

But even if the real estate market transforms the look and lifestyle of this century-old neighborhood, Margaret Chin of Asian Americans for Equality vows to keep affordable housing part of the development.

MARGARET CHIN: We'll make sure that government gets involved and that whatever development happens will be balanced. Chinatown is not gonna disappear.

REPORTER: Activists like her and longtime residents in Chinatown say they'll continue to provide support and a sense of belonging to new immigrants because that is the core of New York's Chinatown.

For WNYC, I'm Wilma Consul.

The New York Times
January 19, 2006
For Whom Will the Foghorn Blow?
By JOSEPH BERGER and CHARLES V. BAGLI

Red Hook could've been a contender, just like Marlon Brando's character in "On the Waterfront," a film that immortalized the bleak, harsh atmosphere of the Brooklyn docks (even if it was filmed in Hoboken).

With acres of piers for hauling cargo, and sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, Red Hook should have become a leading industrial port or another charming Brooklyn village like nearby Carroll Gardens.

But a series of government miscalculations - like cutting the neighborhood off from the rest of Brooklyn with the Gowanus Expressway and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and shifts in the waterfront economy to containerized cargo - left the square-mile peninsula with forlorn blocks pocked by tumbledown houses, unkempt lots and hollow-eyed factories.

In recent years, however, Red Hook has become a vigorous place again, so much so that it is now a contested ground for apartment developers wanting to cash in on the views, artists and restaurateurs looking for cheap space, factories seeking a haven from gentrification elsewhere and old-line residents wanting to keep the old-time flavor.

Red Hook is poised to receive stores like Ikea and Fairway, million-dollar condominiums, humming factories and bustling docks, and even a pier for the 1,132-foot Queen Mary 2 and other cruise ships. Yet, its future is caught up in a battle royal.

Developers want to convert waterfront warehouses and factories into apartments, even though the areas are zoned for manufacturing. But factory owners and cargo haulers fear that well-heeled apartment dwellers would not take kindly to their trucks barreling through Red Hook's narrow cobblestone streets or their middle-of-the-night foghorns and bright lights.

"You're going to be doing something they don't like, even if it's interfering with a guy barbecuing on the block," said Michael DiMarino, owner of Linda Tool and Die Corporation, a precision metal fabricator with clients like NASA and Boeing. "I don't blame him, but we were here first."

Many factions dread the prospect of big-box stores like Ikea, which plans to build a waterfront furniture emporium with 1,500 parking spaces by 2007. Blue-collar businesses fear that Ikea's shoppers would clog Red Hook, stalling their trucks. Homeowners worry that Ikea would shatter the quiet.

Yet residents of the housing projects, whose 8,000 tenants represent three-quarters of Red Hook's population, are eager for the 500 jobs Ikea is dangling. Dorothy Shields, 74, the president of the Red Hook Houses East Tenants Association, who has taken a liking to Ikea's Swedish meatballs, supports the store because one of every four of the projects' tenants is unemployed.

"It's the jobs," she said. "I have so many people who needs jobs."

Artists and craftsmen trickling in from Dumbo and Williamsburg fear any change because they suspect they will end up priced out of another blossoming neighborhood. Madigan Shive, a 29-year-old cellist, moved from San Francisco into a rental house with three other artists.

"There's a good chance we could lose our house in the next year," she said. "If I lose this space, I don't know that I can stay in New York."

The neighborhood quarrel is embodied in two men, John McGettrick, co-president of the Red Hook Civic Association, and Gregory O'Connell, a former city detective turned millionaire developer and one of Red Hook's largest property owners.

Mr. O'Connell, who supports expanding blue-collar businesses, is a ubiquitous figure who uses the paper-strewn dashboard of his pickup as his desk and file cabinet. Mr. McGettrick, whose father slung cargo on the docks but who favors housing, manages an investigations agency.

The two antagonists tap into different elements of Red Hook history and are backed by rival civic groups. Mr. McGettrick contends the city hurt Red Hook in 1961 when it zoned as industrial numerous blocks in which frame or brick houses had always been mixed in. Homeowners could not expand and banks would not offer mortgages, and the result, he said, was abandonment and arson. "There is a desperate need to rebuild the population that was lost," Mr. McGettrick said.

Mr. O'Connell has revamped Civil War-era warehouses set on waterfront piers but filled them with blue-collar trades like wood and glass workers. Those tenants will be joined this spring by a Fairway, the grocery cornucopia, which is also on Manhattan's West Side and in Harlem.

Much of the tension has crystallized around a mammoth concrete warehouse at 160 Imlay Street that a Manhattan group bought in 2000 for $7.2 million and for which it received a zoning variance allowing conversion into 144 condominiums. Standing on the windswept sixth floor overlooking the harbor, with the building shrouded in netting, the developer, Bruce Batkin, said: "We're not here to rape and pillage. We're going to do something beautiful. How can we do something worse?"

But the project, supported by Mr. McGettrick, has been mired by stop-work orders resulting from a two-year-old lawsuit brought by opponents including more than 80 local businesses, as well as Mr. O'Connell.

"Imlay Street could be the tipping point that affects all the zoning in Red Hook," Mr. O'Connell said. "You pay $1 million for an apartment, you don't want to hear trucks loading or unloading early in the morning."

In court papers, the opponents contend that the city's Board of Standards and Appeals was improperly swayed into believing that the building could not attract industrial tenants. A lawyer described a meeting between a lobbyist for the owners and Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, which the lawyer said resulted in a $100,000 gift to Mr. Doctoroff's favorite cause, NYC2012, the group that bid unsuccessfully for the 2012 Olympics.

In an interview, Mr. Doctoroff described the claim as "completely absurd," adding: "I'd isolated myself from the fund-raising effort. I didn't even know there was a contribution."

He described Red Hook as the city's "single most complex land-use issue" because it has potential in retailing, housing and manufacturing. "Every conceivable issue is wrapped up in this one community, which makes everything you do there very sensitive and very difficult," he said.

The outlook for industry in Red Hook is no longer bleak. According to Phaedra Thomas, executive director of the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, the number of industrial businesses has grown 60 percent since 1991, to 455, and jobs have increased 19 percent, to 5,000.

Waterfront activity has also rebounded. The Erie Basin Bargeport was vacant 15 years ago, but it now provides staging for 500 barges used for repairing bridges or shooting off Macy's Fourth of July fireworks.

Another pier operator, John Quadrozzi Jr., president of the Gowanus Industrial Park, has taken a 46-acre complex of grain silos and docks and uses it, in part, to unload hundreds of thousands of tons of Chilean salt for de-icing the city's streets. He says he opposes Ikea but is finding it hard to resist offers from megastores that want to move in nearby. "If I'm a salmon, I can only swim upstream so long," he said. "I get tired."

Factory owners also fret when they see the kind of shops new to Red Hook sprouting on the commercial spine of Van Brunt Street: Baked, a SoHo-like bakery; 360, a French restaurant; and LeNell's, a specialty liquor store that sells 100 brands of bourbon.

Until now, the Bloomberg administration has encouraged residential and commercial development along the waterfront. The city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave American Stevedoring Inc., which operates gantry cranes for moving large containers, only a short lease extension on Piers 8, 9 and 10 that expires in April 2007 and removed the company from Pier 6 and 11. Pier 7 is in litigation.

But a year ago, the administration, apparently responding to a reaction against rezoning to residential in Dumbo and Long Island City, mapped out 15 "industrial business zones" where rezoning would be forbidden. Such a move would protect companies like Linda Tool from speculative landlords who might raise rents and offer only short leases. What is not yet clear is how many factories would be vulnerable in a murky "ombudsman" zone, where the city could consider zoning changes for housing.

For developers like Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities, who eyes the waterfront ravenously, the problem is that his property is in the industrial zone. Last year, he paid $40 million to acquire the crumbling pier that holds the old Revere sugar plant.

He has told city officials that he is considering a residential project that would include a marina. The officials say he may retain Revere's steel funnel silo as a memento of the industrial past. In the coming weeks, Mr. Sitt will lobby the city to pull in the borders of the industrial zone so he can consider other uses.

Many old-timers want to see the neighborhood livened up with more apartment dwellers. Sue and Annette Amendola, two of the 10 children of an immigrant longshoreman who hauled bags of coffee on his back, live in the apartment where they were born in the 1940's and do not want the neighborhood moribund any longer.

Sunny Balzano, 71, a painter whose family has owned a bar on Conover Street since 1890, wants more housing, too, but worries that development that would attract big-box stores would also destroy the neighborhood's singular character. He remembers when the noon whistle blew for lunch and children had to escape the sidewalks because of the stampede of beefy dockworkers trying to grab lunch or a shot of whiskey at one of the 40 bars in the neighborhood.

"In the summer, you can hear the water lapping against the docks and the foghorns and the ships going by," he said. "But if you're going to have thousands of cars, the quality of life is about to change."

* Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20060116/200/1713

Endless Traffic: Can It End?
by Gail Robinson
16 Jan 2006

On the third day of last month's transit strike, some New Yorkers found a silver lining in the shutdown of subways and buses. Bicycle traffic had increased by 500 percent. People got more exercise as they walked to work. And some of the emergency traffic rules -- requiring cars entering much of Manhattan to have at least four people, and restricting some avenues for emergency vehicles -- seemed to work.

"Because this strike is teaching us that we are dependent on mass transit, not cars, to travel in and around Gotham, we now have the freedom to rethink our outmoded policies of giving every inch of public space for the exclusive use of private automobiles," wrote Harris Silver of Citystreets in the New York Sun.

New Yorkers are of course happy the strike is over, and most surely hope that, when the vote is completed this week, transit workers will have approved their proposed new contract. But Silver is not alone in believing that something good came out of the strike -- a hint of what New York could do to combat congestion caused by cars and trucks.

Because such congestion pollutes the air, wastes energy, threatens pedestrians and cyclists, and affects the quality of life, a growing number of individuals and organizations say New Yorkers should not have to put up with it anymore. For inspiration many look to London, which three years ago began charging drivers to enter the city's auto-clogged central district during peak hours. (That's not all London has done: See New York Needs A London Plan by Stephen Hammer.) Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that such a plan, popularly known as congestion pricing or value pricing, is not on his agenda, advocates still plan to pursue it along with other strategies that might ease traffic throughout the city.
THE PROBLEM

New York City has a low rate of car ownership and remains the one major American city where most people do not even own a car. Almost half of New Yorkers use public transportation to get to work -- about ten times the national average, according to a report (in pdf format) by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Since many others walk or bike, only 360,000 New Yorkers drive cars to get to their jobs. Nevertheless, every weekday some 800,000 cars enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.

The city streets almost burst from the strain. "The heart of midtown Manhattan can accommodate only 9,000 moving vehicles without succumbing to gridlock," John Seabrook wrote in the New Yorker in 2002.

And so the average New Yorker who drove at peak hours spent about 50 hours a year in traffic delays in 2003, according to the Texas Transportation Institute's Mobility Survey (in pdf format). It's a lot worse elsewhere. New York ranked (in pdf format) as the 18th most congested urban area in the nation, behind not only such well-known bottlenecks as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. but such smaller areas as Orlando, Florida, and Baltimore, Maryland.

Such statistics provide scant comfort. Congestion creates huge problems here. It fouls the city's air, since trucks, buses and cars create much of New York's smog and soot problem and adds to the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming. The traffic wastes energy and slows buses.

The jams extend beyond Manhattan. One key argument against the Atlantic Yards project is that it would bring the already clogged traffic along Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in downtown Brooklyn to a complete halt. Residents of Staten Island cite as a key problem the severe traffic congestion arising from the borough's rapid growth. The American Automobile Association singles out the exit ramp from the George Washington bridge in upper Manhattan as one of the worst "commuter hot spots" in the entire country, creating traffic jams on the Major Deegan and Cross Bronx Expressways.
AIDING AND ABETTING CONGESTION

At least some of this congestion results from deliberate policies over the years.

Indeed, congestion traditionally has been seen as an indication of urban vitality. To many experts, "a bumper-to-bumper crop of cars is a byproduct of the very prosperity, mobility and individual flexibility modern citizens value: Where traffic is at a standstill, it generally means business is humming," Ann Hulbert recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine.

For decades, Robert Moses, the city's master builder of the 20th century, encouraged cars by building parkways and gearing his projects to drivers instead of bus or subway riders. Planners removed rail track from bridges in favor of more lanes for cars. The Brooklyn Bridge could carry 426,000 people a day in 1907, but only 178,000 in 1988, according to former city traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz. To make matters worse, the city does not charge a toll to cross any of its four East River bridges -- and, since 1986, has charged only a one-way toll (into Staten Island) on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which some critics consider one of the most pro congestion policies ever devised.

The city government provides free or subsidized parking to some employees. As a result, government workers in lower and midtown Manhattan are twice as likely as their private sector counterparts to drive to work , according to one study (in pdf format). "If government workers commuted by car at the same rate as other workers, there would be 14,000 fewer cars coming into the Manhattan Central Business District each day," the report concluded.

And some critics charge the city's view of its role adds to the problem. "We're still measuring success the old fashioned way," said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives. He notes that, under transportation, the Mayor's Management Report does not explicitly mention reducing traffic, and instead cites such goals as "improving traffic flow" and repairing potholes.
CONGESTION PRICING

In 2000, central London faced many problems similar to those confronting New York today. Although only about 10 percent of people traveled into the area by private cars (by one estimate, less than 15 percent of New Yorkers use private cars to come into Manhattan), this greatly taxed streets that have changed little since medieval days. With London set to have an elected mayor for the first time, Ken Livingstone ran on a platform that included a charge on driving at peak hours in certain parts of the city, with the revenue slated for mass transit, particularly an increase in the number of buses.

Interestingly the idea for congestion pricing had its roots in New York -- in the work of William Vickery, a Columbia University professor and Nobel prize winner. In the 1950s, he proposed the subways charge riders more at peak travel times. He later extended the concept to traffic. The idea was adopted in Singapore and in three Norwegian cities. But in Vickery's hometown, congestion pricing has remained largely just an idea.

While the British may not be quite so enamored of their cars as Americans, it is a country whose onetime leader Margaret Thatcher said, "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." Livingstone's Conservative rival came out against congestion charges, and opponents set up a Web site to collect signatures and campaign against the proposal -- in sometimes virulent language.

But Livingstone won, and he and his traffic commissioner Robert Kiley, who once chaired New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, went ahead with the plan. Beginning in February 2003, the city charged cars entering an area of about eight square miles on weekdays 5 pounds, or about $8.75, with some exemptions. In July 2005 the fee increased to 8 pounds. People can pay at machines, stores and by Internet or cell phone. Video cameras photograph cars to insure compliance.

The city government considers the program a success. It lists (in pdf format) reductions in congestion of about 30 percent. Auto trips during peak hours declined by about 20 percent, as bus ridership increased by 29,000 in the first year. The city plans to extend the zone westward in February 2007.

There are dissenters. While the charges have eased inner city traffic, they have made things worse on approaches to the city and on outer roads, Johan Wennstrom wrote in Tech Central Station, an online technology publication.

Some say it has hurt business. "A five pound-a-day charge has already resulted in 70,000 fewer car journeys a day into central London -- and this diminution of paying customers has already had an extremely negative impact on retailers and restaurateurs in particular," the London Chamber of Commerce's chief executive, Colin Stanbridge, told the Guardian.

Other cities may follow London's lead however. Stockholm has been testing a plan and will decide whether to implement it permanently later this year.
A PLAN FOR NEW YORK

On this side of the Atlantic, the idea attracted a flurry of interest last November when the Partnership for New York City, a business group, began discussing how congestion pricing might work here.

Some of the impetus arose from concerns that congestion is bad for business. ''In the core of Times Square, there is no doubt about the need to create more space for pedestrians,'' Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance business district, told the New York Times. ''In one October afternoon a couple of years ago, between 3 and 7 p.m. we counted 4,000 people walking literally in the street, in traffic lanes, because the sidewalks were too crowded.''

But newly reelected Mayor Michael Bloomberg quickly cast doubt on any such proposal. "Although we're always open to ideas from the business community, this isn't on the mayor's second-term agenda," said Edward Skyler, then a Bloomberg spokesman (now a deputy mayor).

The partnership says it will issue a report later this year that will consider congestion pricing along with other measures to fight New York's traffic jams. But however the partnership comes down on the issue, other groups will push for it. The Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief has formed to advocate a number of measures to combat congestion, including congestion pricing. And in its editorial on Bloomberg's inauguration for a second term, the New York Times said, "We hope that the mayor uses his unusual position to go a few places where no normal politician dares, like imposing congestion pricing for cars coming into those areas of the city with the heaviest traffic."

"There is no other tool out there as effective for cutting traffic as congestion pricing," Andrew H.Darrell, New York regional director of the group Environmental Defense, has said.

A 2003 analysis by the Regional Plan Association says charging people to enter part of Manhattan at peak hours could reduce morning rush hour traffic by up to 17 percent, depending on the specifics of the pricing scheme. In its analysis, the group found that only one percent of the four million people who enter Manhattan on a weekday would not do so because of a congestion fee.

There is some small precedent for the idea here. The Port Authority charges customers using EZ pass at its bridges and tunnels in the city $1 more at peak times than at less traveled hours of the day.

Until recently, congestion fees would have been unworkable because tollbooths with attendants would have had to collect the charges. But experts say the technology now used in EZ passes allows motorists to be charged electronically without even stopping.

The charges appeal to environmentalists and advocates for mass transit, walking and cycling. They also have support from some free-market champions. "Roads are congested because they are free, and because no market mechanism exists to allocate scarce road capacity," wrote Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren of the Cato Institute, a think tank that supports limited government and free markets.

But not everyone agrees. Mitchell Moss, a professor at NYU's Wagner school and onetime adviser to Bloomberg, has called congestion pricing "a threat to the economic vitality of our city." Writing in the Daily News, he said, the fees would "increase the cost of getting to work for New Yorkers who live in communities not served by mass transit, hurt Manhattan hospitals that treat patients from all five boroughs and make our museums and cultural attractions less accessible to suburbanites."

Others raise the equity issue. Congestion pricing, wrote Kerry Dougherty in the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, penalizes lower income workers and "rewards those with flexible hours and punishes those with inflexible schedules [who] tend to be concentrated toward the bottom of the wage scale."

This is less true in New York than in other places,since in New York poor people are unlikely to own cars, let along drive them into Manhattan in the middle of the workweek. But certainly any fee poses more of a burden on people with less money to pay it.

And even the plan's adherents concede it would face huge political obstacles (in pdf format), with many observers predicting that Bloomberg would not want to risk a bruising battle on this issue.
TOLLS FOR BRIDGES

Photos by Michael Hauer

The mayor has reason to be wary. Early in his first term, he considered placing tolls on the now free East River bridges to generate revenue. The idea had first surfaced in 1970, as part of a possible New York response to the requirements of the Clean Air Act. But it never went anywhere.

And it died again in 2002. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz reportedly called the tolls "a turkey," and his Queens counterpart, Helen Marshall, said commuters should not be "punished" for traveling from one borough to another. City Council members from Brooklyn and Queens protested too. Bloomberg backed down, saying, "Some of the effects of reducing traffic and that sort of thing would be ... a good idea, but I think, if you really look at it, it's not a short-term solution to our problems."

But advocates say it would solve problems. They note free bridges are not free, costing about $60 million a year to maintain and operate. According to a report (in pdf format) by transportation analyst (and Gotham Gazette columnist) Bruce Schaller, the tolls would reduce traffic congestion in downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City by up to 14 percent.
OTHER IDEAS TO FIGHT TRAFFIC

Turn-restricted Streets: Under Bloomberg, the city has designated nine cross-town Manhattan streets "Thru Streets," restricting turns from them during the business day. A report (in pdf format) by the Department of Transportation found that travel times on the street fell by 25 percent, while speeds increased by 33 percent.

Cleaner Fuel:Last summer, Bloomberg announced a $71 million program to improve traffic congestion in the city. In truth, much of the program would leave cars where they are but make them burn cleaner fuel.

Encouraging Alternative Transportation, etc.:The mayor's new program also called for spending $21 million on various efforts to encourage walking and bicycling and $14 million for improvements to the Traffic Management Center in Long Island City, which sends out electronic advisories of traffic tie-ups.

Traffic Calming: So called "traffic calming measures'' are not so much designed to reduce traffic as to make the cars less of a threat to pedestrians and cyclists. As part of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project, the city is changing the timing on traffic signals to give pedestrians a green light a few seconds before vehicles get the go-ahead. This, said Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6 in Brooklyn, "gives pedestrians the opportunity to take control of the crosswalk." While such measures do not explicitly aim to reduce congestion, Hammerman said, they can have that effect because they slow traffic down, making driving a less attractive option.

Parking policies: Drivers circling blocks looking for parking spaces create congestion. The solution according to some advocates: less parking, not more. A 2002 survey found that only 24 percent of the almost 30,000 curbside parking spaces in Manhattan south of 59th Street had meters. Donald Shoup, a professor at University of California Los Angeles and author of "The High Cost of Free Parking" argues that free parking adds to "extreme auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl and extravagant energy use." Shoup believes the city should set rates for on-street parking high enough so that about 15 percent of the spaces are usually unoccupied. London has already done this.

Removing Roads: For many years, people figured the solution to congestion was to build more roads. While such a solution is largely impractical in densely developed New York, many say it is not very effective anywhere. Building more roads, as the interstate system and Robert Moses' New York parkways have shown, makes driving more attractive, leading more people to do more of it.

Conversely, some experts believe, removing roads does not make congestion worse. In the late 1990s, Transport for London studied a number of major roads -- including the West Side Highway in the 1970s -- that were taken out of service. While traffic engineers predicted chaos, little resulted. Instead, some traffic disappeared, wrote Aaron Naparstek in the New York Press: "When it wasn't convenient to drive anymore, commuters took a different mode of transit, traveled at a different time of day, or made fewer, more efficient trips."

While few people call for destroying existing highways, advocates say that something must -- and can -- be done to ease traffic. "We got rid of graffiti, we have discounts on subways and buses, and we may even be on the verge of having clean public bathrooms," the Regional Plan Association wrote in 2003. "We have it in our grasp to do something about mind-numbing traffic congestion."


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Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20060116/200/1717

New York Needs a �London Plan�
by Stephen A. Hammer
16 Jan 2006

With Mayor Michael Bloomberg�s inauguration behind us, the debate now begins in earnest about the issues he will tackle in his second administration. As he considers what to do, Mayor Bloomberg would do well to consider London�s example.

Some of the issues facing Mayor Bloomberg are clear � since the election he has vowed several times to build new affordable housing and aggressively focus on Lower Manhattan redevelopment. New Council Speaker Christine Quinn may have a few ideas of her own, of course, as do many other politicians and advocates around the city who would like the mayor to put his overwhelming electoral mandate to work on their behalf. Neighborhood revitalization efforts will be at the top of many lists, while others will likely focus on a congestion charge scheme like the one that has proven so successful in London. Such initiatives would all leave a mark on New York, but in isolation � and without a broader vision � their long-term impact would ultimately be limited.

A bolder approach would borrow another big idea from across the pond � the London Plan. More formally known as London�s Spatial Development Strategy, this land use planning document articulates a coherent, long-term vision that says where development should occur, and what it should look like. What is truly unique about the London Plan, however � and what makes it noteworthy for policymakers in New York � is the way it links to and is supported by other strategic plans covering topics like transport, noise, waste management, air quality, economic development and energy. To borrow a term from British policy debates, London�s strategies emphasize �joined up� thinking, with each individual strategy reflecting and supporting key themes found in other policy documents.

In the London Plan, for example, London Mayor Ken Livingstone announced he wants developers to build high density, energy efficient, mixed-use complexes near existing transit hubs, and he is using his planning control powers to make sure this occurs. By concentrating development, the Mayor makes it easier for Londoners to walk or bike to bus stops and London Underground stations. In other words, his land use plan is also a transportation and energy conservation plan, complementing his congestion charge program, while simultaneously reducing traffic noise and improving the city�s air quality. It is hardly rocket science, and in the world of urban planning these ideas are fairly commonplace. But whereas most cities employ this technique on a spot basis � say to revitalize one small neighborhood � in London the mayor wants to make it work citywide.

The London Plan also ventures into energy policy by requiring new developments to generate electricity on-site using renewable energy technologies. In doing so, the mayor is reinforcing his economic development strategy by focusing on making London the hub of a new urban energy business sector in Europe.

Strategic planning is nothing new to New York City � or to Michael Bloomberg. The world-renowned 1929 Regional Plan demonstrably shaped how our city grew, and we still benefit from the system of bridges, tunnels, highways, parkland and natural preserves that resulted from that original planning effort.

More recently, Mayor Bloomberg has issued a bold solid waste plan, helped New Yorkers reclaim waterfront access, and worked to expand commercial development in Brooklyn. He partnered with local residents to create a �vision plan� for a more livable Hunts Point and extended bikeways so New Yorkers can safely pedal to work. (The latter idea proved particularly important during the December transit strike, when thousands of New Yorkers took their bikes out of storage to get around the city, despite the frigid temperatures.) These initiatives articulated a clear vision by the mayor and his team about how to improve our city.

What is missing, however, are the links that make the London Plan an important tool for that city�s future. New York�s new waste plan could have emphasized both export and the use of locally available recyclable materials as the basis for new manufacturing jobs here. Plans for �big box� stores delight many New Yorkers � but aggravate others � because they frequently are proposed for areas like Red Hook, where limited public transit access forces shoppers to drive, increasing local traffic congestion. Brooklyn�s proposed Atlantic Yards development has far more public transit options, but there has been no discussion of how clean, on-site energy systems for this massive complex could help address the looming electricity crisis identified by Mayor Bloomberg�s 2004 Energy Task Force.

None of these issues are mutually exclusive, but because city agency responsibilities are narrowly defined, new development proposals often advance within a policy or planning vacuum.

A �New York Plan� would thus represent a seismic shift in how New York City is managed. Residential and commercial development would not stop, but would instead be directed to specific neighborhoods on terms that better reflect the city�s long range interests � not just the developer�s parochial financial interests and �as-of-right� prerogatives.

In other words, a New York Plan would help the city achieve sustained economic growth, less traffic and a cleaner environment, while providing City agency heads with a mandate and platform to deliver it. As in London, such a plan could galvanize public support around a vision of our city�s future, and create a powerful legacy befitting Mayor Bloomberg�s historic second term opportunity.

Stephen A. Hammer, a consultant on energy and environmental issues who studied urban planning at the London School of Economics, teaches a course on urban energy policy at Columbia University�s School of International and Public Affairs.

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20060116/200/1717

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20060116/202/1718

Segregated Schools: Shame of The City
by Jonathan Kozol
16 Jan 2006


New York City schools, argues Kozol, are in many ways unaffected by the Brown decision of 1954.

Stuyvesant High School is one of the most vivid symbols of the consequences of decades of systematic racism in the United States. Black and Hispanic children make up about 72 percent of the citywide enrollment in the New York City public schools. At Stuyvesant – the most prestigious public school in the city – they make up less than six percent of enrollment.

In fact, the percentage of black kids who go to Stuyvesant has decreased dramatically in the last quarter century. Twenty-six years ago, black students represented almost 13 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant; today they represent 2.7 percent.

I'm not implying that the administration at Stuyvesant is made up of racists – they must be remarkable people to run such a wonderful school. Black and Latino students do not have access to Stuyvesant because they have not been adequately prepared to compete with the other students applying for a limited number of spots. What the racial gap in admissions represents is the devastating end result of the failure to educate black and Latino children effectively from the age of two and a half up to their 8th grade year.

It is impossible to improve the inferior quality of the education that minority children receive without confronting the fact that they are attending increasingly segregated schools; separate is still unequal. Yet that is exactly what New York policymakers are trying to do. Until it begins to follow the lead of several smaller cities across the country, New York's school system will continue to fail to serve the majority of its students.
THE RESEGREGATION OF AMERICAN SCHOOLS

Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

"We’ve got to come to see that the problem of racial injustice is a national problem. No community in this country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Now in the North it’s different in that it doesn’t have the legal sanction that it has in the South. But it has its subtle and hidden forms and it exists in three areas: in the area of employment discrimination, in the area of housing discrimination, and in the area of de facto segregation in the public schools. And we must come to see that de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South. "

Martin Luther King, Speech at the Great March on Detroit in 1963.

Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance, as a result of years of federal policies that started in the early 1990s when the US Supreme Court and the local federal courts began to rip apart the legacy of the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegration ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. The percentage of black children who now go to integrated schools has dropped to its lowest level since 1968.

New York State is the most segregated state for black and Latino children in America: seven out of eight black and Latino kids here go to segregated schools. The majority of them go to schools where no more than two to four percent of the children are white. Only Illinois, Michigan, and California come close to this abysmal record. The level of segregation statewide is due largely to New York City, which is probably the country's most segregated city

When it comes to residential integration and school integration, New York has an undeserved reputation for progressive values. For the last 40 years it has been one of the most regressive cities in America, in many ways unaffected by the Brown decision. The courts never tried to integrate New York, and the major media, including the New York Times, consistently opposed any drastic measures that would significantly integrate the city's system.
BLOOMBERG AND KLEIN'S EDUCATION REFORMS

The position of chancellor of New York City schools is an almost impossible job. I sometimes think that job was created so that one man or woman in New York could die for our sins every year. Like it or not, Chancellor Joel Klein's real job description is to mediate the separation of the races and put the best possible face on a flagrantly unequal system.

The Bloomberg administration's educational reforms have been centered on mayoral control of the schools. This probably gives the mayor and the chancellor better tools to approach the problems in the schools, and it is to their credit that they have used this power to get rid of the rote and drill, stimulus-response curriculum that was being used in failing schools across the city.

But we have wasted too much time in the last 20 years fiddling around with governance arrangements. The fact is that whether the school systems I visit are governed directly by the mayor independently, or through an appointed school board or an elected one, virtually all cities face the same calamity: a devastating gulf in the quality of education offered to minority kids as opposed to white kids.
NEW YORK CITY AND SMALL SCHOOLS

Alleged panaceas have been introduced repeatedly in every urban district since I first walked into a classroom in 1964. Every five years there's a "solution" to the problems of separate and unequal education -- a solution that never addresses the problems of either separate or unequal.

The newest magic pill that is being advertised is small schools, and it is one that Bloomberg and Klein have bought into.

Small schools are usually less chaotic than big schools; they are sometimes more intimate and relaxed than big schools. But the small school concept, which no one is proposing for the schools in white suburban districts, is essentially an anti-riot strategy for segregated children, an anti-turbulence measure, a short-term solution to perceived chaos in large segregated schools. Small, segregated, and unequal schools are only an incremental improvement over large, segregated and unequal schools. They don't address the basic issues.

In fact, in New York City small schools are being used, intentionally or not, in ways that widen the racial divide. On the one hand, we're seeing small schools that cater to very artistic, upscale Greenwich Village families. These schools are overwhelmingly attractive to white people. On the other hand, we're seeing a proliferation of so-called small academies for black and Latino students with names like Academy of Leadership, or the Academy of Business Enterprise. (In some other cities such schools are explicitly given names like the African American Academy). These schools tend to be even more segregated than larger ones.

At this point New York City, like many cities in America, is rolling out small schools as this year's trendy attempt to do an end run around inequality and segregation. It is not going to work on a significant basis. I predict that within ten years the entire small schools movement will collapse and be declared a failure.
REFORMS THAT ADDRESS THE REAL PROBLEM

Today, Bloomberg and Klein are trying their best to sweeten the pill of segregation rather than confronting it. But they have to confront it, and smaller cities have offered a model of how to do so.

The metropolitan New York City area is one of the most adamantly resistant sections of the nation, in which there has never been any serious attempt at voluntary integration programs between the city and the suburbs. This is in great contrast to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Boston, and several other cities, all of which have successful suburban integration programs for inner city children. While some of these programs were initially begun under court orders, others (Boston's, for example) are entirely voluntary and are supported by the parents of the suburbs because they believe that integrated schooling is of benefit to their own children.

In virtually all of the urban-suburban integration programs, the high school completion rate and graduation rate for black students average 90 to 95 percent or better, and the overwhelming number of these black kids go to college. There are waiting lists for all these programs; in St. Louis there are four applicants for every opening.

It is only about a fifteen minute ride from a typical, segregated Bronx neighborhood to one of the very first suburbs to the north of the Bronx – Bronxville, for example, one of the most affluent communities in the United States. It spends nearly $19,000 per pupil, compared to $11,600 in the Bronx. It has zero percent poverty in its public schools. Only one percent of its students are black or Latino. It would be a very short ride for almost any Bronx child to go to school in Bronxville or any of the other suburbs immediately to the north.

The chancellor and the mayor ought to be advocating for cross-district integration with the 40 or 50 affluent suburban districts that immediately surround New York City. Admittedly, this step would take extraordinary political audacity.

If he wanted to take a really visionary stance, Mayor Bloomberg could also turn small schools from institutions that reinforce segregation into places that help break it down. He could provide incentives for small schools to be created with the explicit goal of bringing the poorest children and the richest children, black, Latino, white and Asian children together in the same classrooms. If he were to take that step, and use the small school concept to achieve that goal, then he would have left behind a really decent legacy. He would have begun to make a serious dent in the intense racial isolation that continues to make New York the shame of the nation.

Jonathan Kozol is the author of seven books on urban education, and the winner of the National Book Award. His most recent book is "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America."

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20060116/202/1718