Scoop

The Planner Behind Bloomberg's PlaNYC
BY ANNIE KARNI - Special to the Sun
May 29, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/55342

Consultants at McKinsey & Co. often joke that they can double their salaries and cut their hours in half when they leave the firm for another private sector job. When Rohit Aggarwala left McKinsey last summer to head a new New York City agency, the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, he failed on both counts.

Mr. Aggarwala, 35, is the slim, soft-spoken technocrat who has spent the last year crafting PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg's 127-point roadmap for New York City to prepare for an expected influx of 1 million new residents by 2030. The plan includes a new tax on traffic in Manhattan and an effort to plant 1 million new trees in the city.

Mr. Aggarwala has a professorial air that befits someone who has earned four degrees from Columbia University, including a doctorate in history and an MBA. He has handed out more than 3,000 business cards over the past year. A mass transit devotee, he does not own a car and rides the E train to work at City Hall every day from his home in Hell's Kitchen. While he theoretically enjoys cooking, he acknowledges that his refrigerator has stood empty over the past 12 months while he has devoted himself to PlaNYC.

"My most typical lunch has been nothing," Mr. Aggarwala said in an interview at his office on Broadway, across the street from City Hall. Dinner often came delivered to City Hall in pizza boxes or in cartons from Zen Palate, and it has been months, he said, since his Blackberry was turned off or placed out of his reach.

If Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff have been at the center of the effort to explain PlaNYC to the public and get it passed in Albany, Mr. Aggarwala has been a crucial player behind the scenes, gathering input and building early support for the plan from business and civic leaders, community groups, elected officials, academic experts, and thousands of New Yorkers across the city.

Mr. Aggarwala, known to friends and colleagues as "Rit," grew up in the Westchester County New York suburb of White Plains, and moved to Rome, Italy during high school when his father, an Indian project manager for the United Nations, was transferred there on assignment. His mother, an Irish-American from Queens, works as a teacher, and his brother as an aero-space engineer.

While he still spends his free time writing chapters of a book he plans to publish about how New York City surpassed Philadelphia as an economic hub in the 1800s, Mr. Aggarwala for now has strayed far from academia.

Mr. Aggarwala was serving a McKinsey client in the suburbs of New York when he was approached by Marc Ricks, a senior policy adviser to Mr. Doctoroff, who asked him to present his ideas on transportation to Mr. Doctoroff.

"Marc said ‘do you consider yourself a transportation advocate?' He said ‘for the price of a resume, you get to tell the deputy mayor what you think about transportation,'" Mr. Aggarwala recalled. When Mr. Aggarwala began to understand the "bigness" of the mayor's vision for creating a sustainable New York City, the job offer that followed his presentation to Mr. Doctoroff was one he said he felt he couldn't refuse.

"I've been a committed Democrat all my life, but a fan of the mayor's since the beginning for his willingness to face facts," Mr. Aggarwala said. He said he would consider working for Mr. Bloomberg on a presidential run if the mayor asked for his help. "He could do anything he wanted," he said when asked about Mr. Bloomberg's presidential aspirations.

Over the past year, Mr. Aggarwala said, there was no typical day at work. He was often the first to arrive at his office around 7:30 a.m, and returned home to his apartment late in the night after talking to New Yorkers at town hall meetings about their ideas for creating a greater, greener, New York City.

"We'd have meetings at 7 or 8 in the evening, but there were always people who wanted to linger and talk, which was great," he said.

Mr. Aggarwala seems more accustomed to working behind the scenes analyzing data. He has earned a reputation for being more modest, if less charismatic, than his boss, Mr. Doctoroff.

"What are we here to talk about?" he asked this reporter, and seemed mildly embarrassed when reminded that the subject of the interview was him.

"Dan Doctoroff likes very smart people who can be jacks of all trades," the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City who served on the PlaNYC advisory board, Kathryn Wylde, said. "Rit is the kind of person you would want to implement your vision and to frame it and build consensus around it."

The two personalities — the visionary and the implementer — complemented each other well in assembling an operational plan for New York City, according to members of the advisory board that worked alongside them.

At a briefing for reporters on the Saturday before Mr. Bloomberg unveiled PlaNYC in front of an energized crowd of 700 supporters at the Museum of Natural History, Mr. Aggarwala gave the presentation a test run of sorts in front of a handful of reporters in City Hall's Blue Room. As he rattled off details about cleaning up brownfields, establishing a transit financing authority, and strengthening energy codes in New York City, Mr. Doctoroff had to signal to him from the back of the room that he was getting bogged down in too many details, that he had to move the presentation along.

Where Mr. Doctoroff seems adept at boiling down an exhaustive plan into a rousing message, Mr. Aggarwala's presentation at times seemed merely exhaustive.

It is Mr. Aggarwala's intimate knowledge of the data culled from thousands of conversations with New Yorkers, however, that city leaders say give the plan a greater chance of success than Mr. Doctoroff's previous oversized dreams for New York City — the 2012 Olympics bid and his plan to build a stadium for the Jets on Manhattan's West Side — that ultimately failed to win state support.

"Compare this with the Olympics bid, and they've done things the opposite way," a Columbia University professor who served on the advisory board, Esther Fuchs, said in an interview.

"It wasn't so much me and Dan surveying the city in some omniscient way, saying ‘this is what we need,'" Mr. Aggarwala said. "We met with a lot of people."

The bullpen at City Hall has a clock counting down the number of days the Bloomberg administration has left in office (947). The limited time the mayor has left in office makes it more desirable to build coalitions that can support big plans under future mayors.

"The commitment to outreach, listen, and build a broad coalition was probably influenced by the lessons of the stadium," Mr. Aggarwala said. "It made the plan better."

Since the plan was announced earlier this year, Mr. Aggarwala and his staff of 10 have met with more than 100 advocacy organizations and sifted through more than 3,000 e-mails received through its Web site.

"He ran with the mayor's concept and came up with an operational plan," Ms. Fuchs said.

Mr. Aggarwala, a facilitator by training and a transportation wonk by nature, worked in the U.S. Department of Transportation in the Clinton administration before joining McKinsey, and served a brief stint in Albany as a transportation policy advisor to Assemblyman Samuel Hoyt, a Democrat of Buffalo. "We shared a passion for high-speed trains," Mr. Hoyt said in an interview. "My memory of Rit is that he would get passionate about something and put in endless hours to make it happen. In one legislative session, he made more progress on the issue of high-speed rail in the region than we ever had before."

Mr. Aggarwala's practical solutions to Mr. Bloomberg's lofty goals have not pleased everyone. "A 10-minute walk to a park could include public space that's made park-like," such as Herald Square or Times Square, Mr. Aggarwala said earlier this year at a Forum for Urban Design conference. Some environmentalists at the speech balked at what they said was an overly-broad definition of park space, and a dodge for achieving the goal of having every New Yorker reside within a 10-minute walk of a park.

The proposal to charge drivers a fee to use Manhattan's most crowded streets during rush hour quickly emerged as the most political contentious initiative in the plan. "Congestion pricing was London's smoking ban," Mr. Aggarwala said. "They did it first and many cities around the world are now thinking it can work."

The idea of instituting congestion pricing on the streets of Manhattan was on the table very early in the planning process, Mr. Aggarwala said. "I don't think anyone's going to come up with a plan without congestion pricing," he said. "We tried and we couldn't. Other initiatives are already in the plan and they're not enough to close the $31 billion transportation funding gap this region faces."

The Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability will likely become a permanent office at City Hall, Mr. Aggarwala said. While his working in crafting the plan is done, he said the hardest part of his job may lie ahead. "Now we have 127 initiatives to implement," he said. "When it identifies the lead agency, it often says us."

May 29, 2007 Edition > Section: New York > Printer-Friendly Version

The New York Times
May 6, 2007
A Tale of Two Cities
By MICHAEL POWELL

THE question trails Robert Caro like a fly, buzzing in his ear. Over and over, at cocktail parties and museum receptions in the past few years, he hears variations on the same query.

“Doesn’t New York need a new master builder?” people ask. “Don’t we need a new Robert Moses?”

Mr. Caro, 71, sits in his spare writer’s aerie high in a Midtown office building, an owlish man with a faint smile. His answer has the virtue of concision:

No.

Mr. Caro, a man of Ahab-like writerly obsessions, sees no need to rethink, redraw or revise his measure of Moses, despite the prominent critics now baying at him. His 1974 biography, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” documented many of what he regards as Moses’ transgressions, like acres of sterile public housing towers, parks and playgrounds for the rich and comfortable, and highways that sundered working-class neighborhoods and dispossessed a quarter of a million people. Why say more, he asks; the book speaks for itself.

“We don’t need a new Robert Moses because he ignored the values of New York,” Mr. Caro says. “If anything, I see the city moving today to correct his ravages.”

Unusual in an age when sentence fragments on a blog pass for intellectual argument and “definitive” accounts have half-lives measured in months, Mr. Caro’s 1,246-page tome has for three decades dominated our understanding of modern New York. A tale of hubris and unchecked power, “The Power Broker” was more than a Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of the man who shaped and misshaped New York. It offered a compelling narrative of the city’s rise and long slide toward the darkness of the 1970s.

Now a powerful revisionist tide is running in. New York has the feel of a boomtown — highways clogged, subways crowded, luxury condo towers rising — and an influential band of historians and planners have argued that Moses, who served as chief of public authorities and confidant to a half-century’s worth of New York’s mayors and governors, had much to do with the rise of the city and little to do with its (temporary) fall.

This revisionist project has taken form in much-praised exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York (through May 28) and the Queens Museum of Art (through May 27), and at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, where a Moses exhibit closed three weeks ago. The revisionists mounted a symposium — to which Mr. Caro says he was at first not invited — and Norton earlier this year published “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” a 336-page collection of essays with a revisionist theme running throughout. All would restore Moses, whose cracked bust is displayed on the cover of “The Power Broker,” to his pedestal as a master builder.

Argument Without End

That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower.

Looking forward, the revisionists assert a broader claim: A Moses-like vision is needed to guard against another slide toward obsolescence. The transformations of Williamsburg, the Atlantic Yards tract in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens are harbingers of this assertive mood.

“ ‘The Power Broker’ was an important book, but after three decades an intellectual logjam had to be broken,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University and the editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City. “Moses built with quality and a remarkable honesty, and we need a return of some of that today.

“The city is trying to change now,” said Professor Jackson, who with Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia, edited the new collection of essays about Moses. “We need to help that along.”

These arguments strike partisans of Mr. Caro as blinkered. Thousands of people spent decades advocating for mass transit and parkland, and waging war against stadiums and projects seen as too dense and too weighted toward the rich. “The Power Broker” is often their touchstone.

“This is precisely the wrong time to deify Moses,” said Theodore Kheel, the retired labor mediator who at 92 is one of the few New Yorkers who recall going toe to toe with Moses over a 1965 proposal to double bridge and tunnel tolls and use the revenue to subsidize the subway fare. “He was hostile to mass transit and hostile to poor New Yorkers.”

So two visions of New York collide, each borne of a different cultural moment. If the arguments about the book and the man are testy and tinged with recriminations and charges of incomplete scholarship, how could it be otherwise? Historical understanding is contingent, contentious and rarely at a remove from the broader culture. In this “that was yesterday’s interpretation” age, the only surprise may be that “The Power Broker” has gone so long without a challenge.

“There is no ‘definitive’ study of any prominent biographical figure,” said the historian Robert Dallek, author of an acclaimed two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson and a recent book examining the relationship between President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He salutes Mr. Caro’s achievement even as he finds the wave of revisionist thinking inevitable.

“Historians still debate Lincoln,” Mr. Dallek says. “History is a construction of the contemporary mood and culture.”

History, as the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl said, is argument without end. So it is with reconsideration of Moses, whose legacy still stirs debate in this most disputatious of cities.

The Master Builder’s Case

Disgorging a rapid and perfectly formed stream of nouns and verbs, Professor Ballon recently gave a visitor a quick tour of the Moses exhibit at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. The show’s curator, she genuflected, briefly, toward Mr. Caro’s book.

“It’s a mesmerizing narrative,” she said. “Caro stimulated a great discussion, and there’s a human truth there: Powerful people become undone by their power.”

Then came the rhetorical pivot.

“But the book is far from definitive and misjudges history,” Professor Ballon said. “It’s absolutely evident to me that ‘The Power Broker’ is symptomatic of a time and a zeitgeist. In the community of historians, there’s been brewing a sense of discontent.”

The revisionist case for Moses has percolated for nearly two decades and goes something like this: He was a visionary who gazed upon the city and region from the perspective of an eagle. He saw wastelands that would become parks, bridges that would span rivers and bays, and a necklace of highways and parkways that would weave the city and region into one.

He tore down tenements to make way for giant clumps of middle-income housing, from Kips Bay and Stuyvesant Town on the East Side of Manhattan to Co-op City in the northeast Bronx. And that’s not to count mammoth icons like Lincoln Center and the United Nations, and the expansion of the campuses of the Pratt Institute and Fordham and New York Universities.

Where else can one find barrier-island public beaches — Jacob Riis Park, Jones Beach and Robert Moses State Park — within hailing distance of a cacophonous world capital?

Moses was a creature of his time; the revisionists emphasize this. By midcentury, planners wrestled with suburbanization, decaying urban cores and the dominance of the car. Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles: Each claimed its own power broker.

But few were so powerful, visionary and devious. Decade after decade, Moses helped New York gobble up a lion’s share of federal money, and before anyone could raise much of a protest, he spent it.

That there was a human cost, that half a million people were displaced and neighborhoods broken to realize his vision, is beyond question. But, revisionists ask, does history hold a brief against Shah Jahan, who set thousands laboring for 20 years to build the Taj Mahal? Is the Cathedral of Chartres testament to grandiosity or grandeur?

“My hunch is that the more we distance ourselves, we will forget the costs,” Professor Ballon said, “just as we look at ancient monuments and forget the labor that was expended in building them.”

The sands of time slowly covered Moses’ more egregious tracks. He built his most elegant playgrounds for the white and comfortable, but because of demographic shifts, some now are thick with black, Asian and Latino children. Orchard Beach and Riis Park long ago became working-class havens.

“It was totally inadvertent, but Moses’ legacy is that he created great beaches for poor people,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.

A whiff of overstatement can cloud the revisionist perspective. It’s argued, for example that Moses’ racism was a product of his time. He was “a pragmatist, cavalier as too many were in his day about racial prejudice,” the essayist Phillip Lopate wrote in a recent article for The New York Times, and so was more intent on building apartments than on objecting to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s desire to bar blacks from renting in Stuyvesant Town.

Professor Jackson also challenges two allegations in “The Power Broker”: One is that Moses chilled the water at a swimming pool in East Harlem based on his belief that blacks disliked cold water. The other is that Moses built low bridges to keep buses — ostensibly carrying black passengers — away from Jones Beach.

But in the collection of essays, Martha Biondi, a professor of African-American history at Northwestern University, concludes that Moses was an enthusiastic and “leading supporter” of a whites-only policy at Stuyvesant Town even as civic leaders urged integration.

As for the pool-cooling, Mr. Caro interviewed Moses’ associates on the record (“You can pretty well keep them out of any pool if you keep the water cold enough,” he quotes Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses aide, as saying). Such accounts, Professor Biondi says, gain “credence from the very well-documented history of racial discrimination and exclusion that surrounded so many of Moses’ undertakings.”

To reappraise a man so complex as Moses, and a book so ambitious as “The Power Broker,” demands great discipline. Setting aside one’s cultural lens is not easy.

“When I read of the heroic building of the 1930s, I brought to mind the stalled projects of our day,” Professor Ballon said. “It’s easy enough now to realize that New York hasn’t fallen down, as Caro thought. Look at this resurgent city. It’s spectacular.”

Caro (Un)bound

Ask Mr. Caro about the Cross Bronx Expressway and the price paid for progress, and the author cannot contain himself. This neatly attired man with hair still more dark than gray leans forward and scoops up a dogeared copy of “The Power Broker,” which sits on his desk like the King James Bible of municipal history. (It was at the time the largest book Random House could physically print.)

“Turn to Page 19,” he says as he turns the pages. “When I speak, I’m imprecise.”

So he quotes from his book:

“To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons — more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods.”

He slaps the book shut and closes his eyes to concentrate on his words.

“Robert Moses bent the democratic processes and the city to his will,” Mr. Caro says. “There were lots of people who didn’t want to gouge a highway through East Tremont, and they couldn’t stop him.”

Mr. Caro fluctuates between two poles. He is immersed in a multivolume study of Lyndon Johnson — the first three volumes are in print; he typed each on his Smith Corona — and he wishes that “The Power Broker,” now in its 44th printing, could stand on its own against the critics. “It’s a compliment, really, that they are still debating my book as if it was new,” he says.

But impatience wells up. Mr. Caro, a lifelong New Yorker, declined to participate in the revisionists’ forums on Moses; he says his only invitation came too late and as an afterthought. But he gave a speech on Moses at the Museum of the City of New York in February. And he follows up an interview with a reporter with phone calls every few days, poking at the revisionists. “I understand each age looks through its own prism,” he said a few days ago. “But the revisionists are not coming to grips with this man.”

Mr. Caro came to his epic pursuit of Moses as a young newspaper reporter in the 1960s, a moment when a national revulsion was growing against the depredations of urban renewal and unaccountable officials.

“The Power Broker” opens with an image of Moses as the progressive dreamer. His first decades in public life are a reformist blur of building pools and creating parks from wasteland. His understanding of finance is complex, his manipulation of the levers of power nimble, and Mr. Caro gives him his due.

Mr. Caro peers at a reporter — he wants to be very clear this isn’t a book about an evil man. “It’s about a genius who was blinded by his own arrogance,” he says.

Inevitably, power corrupts. Moses gouges highways through neighborhoods, secures the loyalty of venal politicians and hoards bridge and tunnel receipts, starving subways and schools. His dreams grow gargantuan: He envisions a mammoth highway stretching from Staten Island through Brooklyn and Fire Island to Montauk Point. Two bridges would gird Long Island Sound, and a highway would slash into Greenwich Village.

It was never enough. SoHo, TriBeCa and the meatpacking district are the city’s hottest neighborhoods; Moses wanted to flatten them. Community opposition killed his final project, the $1.7 billion superhighway proposal known as Westway. Opponents took the money and poured much of it into a transit system then near collapse.

“People remember Westway as a symbol of how we couldn’t build,” said Gene Russianoff, founder of the Straphangers Campaign, who says “The Power Broker” persuaded him to take up a career in public advocacy. “For me, it is a symbol of how David held off Goliath and saved the subways.”

Mr. Caro can be a careful guardian of his own flame. He has a legion of admirers, but some say his book overstates the dominance of Moses and understates the constraints on his behavior.

For all his highways and failures to extend light-rail lines to eastern Queens and Long Island, Moses did not turn the city into Los Angeles East. “I’m left thinking that it’s not just light and then darkness,” said Rick Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “His legacy is more complicated.”

Mr. Caro insists he has always seen Moses as a complex character. But he shakes his head at the notion that New Yorkers pine for a new master builder.

“I don’t think there is a cultural shift, not at all,” Mr. Caro said. “The culture would be repelled to see his methods.”

He caught himself and added: “The great problem posed by Robert Moses is whether this city can build what’s needed while adhering to democratic principles. We’re about to find out if we’ve solved that problem.”

•

The truth is, New York never was so paralyzed as the revisionists imagine. Rebirth began even as the metropolis fell. In the 1980s city officials poured billions of dollars into rebuilding vast swaths of working-class housing in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority renovated the subways, and the 1990s saw the privately financed construction of a tennis center with acres of public courts in Queens. There are the capitalism-on-hallucinogens makeover of Times Square, the greening of the West Side waterfront and maybe even the Second Avenue subway, along with refurbished parks and pools across the city.

Whatever his manifold faults, Moses nursed a faith in the power of government to throw up public works. He was a public servant with the temperament of a czar.

And a book by his most eloquent critic ensures his immortality.

“Caro wrote a grand tale and made Moses famous,” Professor Jackson said. “As much as Moses detested Caro, ‘The Power Broker’ has become his monument.”

The New York Times
May 8, 2007
An Irish Taste for Real Estate in Manhattan
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

They live an ocean away, but that has not stopped the Irish from lining up to buy condominiums in Midtown Manhattan, often years before they are built.

In some cases, entire buildings or large blocks of apartments in unfinished high-rises are being sold to Irish investors hungry to own a piece of New York City.

Neil McCann, an entrepreneur in Belfast, joined the rush of would-be Manhattan landlords last year when he said he signed a contract to buy a one-bedroom apartment near Gramercy Park for $600,000.

“It’s an Irishman’s dream to be able to go to Manhattan and be able to buy property there,” said Mr. McCann, 36, who added that he hoped to buy more New York apartments.

With a weak dollar, Mr. McCann said, the New York apartments are relative bargains compared with real estate in Ireland and Britain.

After a long economic boom that earned their country the nickname the Celtic Tiger, the Irish are flush with cash and searching the globe for places to invest it.

The westward flow of money “seems to be another example of how, in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, the relationship between Ireland and the United States has flipped,” said Linda Dowling Almeida, who teaches Irish studies at New York University.

The buyers do not even have to travel to New York, because the sellers are coming to them. Armed with glossy brochures about amenity-laden towers, New York brokers like Anne Marie Moriarty, of the Corcoran Group, have been dropping in to Dublin and Belfast and taking deposits.

“Most of these people are buying one or two apartments at a time,” said Ms. Moriarty, who has specialized in selling to the Irish for about two and a half years.

“Many of them buy off plan, because they’re fearless,” she added, referring to the custom of putting money down on apartments long before they are completed.

Of course, people from all over the world have been contributing to the sustained demand for apartments in Manhattan. But developers and brokers said the Irish seem to be the voracious newcomers of the moment, though their purchases have drawn less attention than previous buying sprees by the Japanese and the Saudis, who made splashes by acquiring trophy properties like Rockefeller Center and the Plaza hotel.

“Because of the weak dollar, we’re seeing a lot of European buyers and it just seems like there’s a disproportionate amount from Ireland,” said Jonathan J. Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real estate consulting company.

Jules Demchick, who has developed several buildings in Manhattan, said the Irish are following a long parade of foreign buyers. “I’ve seen the Persians and the French and the Dutch and the Germans and the South Americans do this,” said Mr. Demchick, the president of J. D. Carlisle.

Still, he said he was surprised when Cathal McGinley, managing director of the Irish broker Kean Mahony Smith, offered to take a block of apartments in the Centria, a high-rise near Rockefeller Center, and sell them in Ireland.

After Mr. McGinley’s company quickly sold the first 25, he came back for more. Eventually, most of the units in the building were sold to Irish investors, most of whom planned to rent them.

“Bar none, the No. 1 investment strategy for an Irish person is through property,” Mr. McGinley said. “Your average Joe on the street has probably got two, three, four, five residential assets. It’s considered to be a safe play.”

To them, an apartment in the center of Manhattan, no matter if it measures only 800 square feet, is a “trophy asset,” Mr. McGinley said.

His company also sold more than 60 apartments in the Atelier, a new building on the west end of 42nd Street.

Jay Eisenstadt, whose company, Esplanade Capital in Manhattan, is developing a 43-story condominium on Eighth Avenue in the theater district, said he planned to sell all 122 units in the building to a company based in Dublin, the Sorrento Group, which would then resell them to investors. Selling them as a block is more cost-effective than lining up buyers one by one, Mr. Eisenstadt said.

“The amount of money floating around over here is just phenomenal,” said Bryan Turley, Sorrento’s chief executive. “At some stage it has to leave the island. If you follow where Irish money is going, a good deal of it is going into property.”

Mr. Turley said his company had bought a piece of land near the Empire State Building, where a construction company owned by two brothers from County Kerry will build a 110-unit apartment building. Sorrento will then buy the finished building and sell the apartments, probably mostly to Irish buyers, he said.

At the heart of this investment surge lies some simple math, brokers said. With the dollar at historically low levels against the euro and the British pound, apartments generally cost less in Manhattan than in Dublin or London. But they still rent for more in Manhattan.

“Even if they could afford to buy in Dublin,” Ms. Moriarty said, “they could not get rent anywhere near what they get here.”

Kevin Harmon, a broker with Savills Hamilton Osbourne King, a real estate company in Dublin, used the example of a luxurious one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that would sell for $900,000, equivalent to about 665,000 euros.

“For 665,000 euros, you’d buy a very nice two- or three-bedroom apartment in a good development” in the Dublin area, Mr. Harmon said. But the rent on the apartment in Dublin would be about 2,000 euros, or $2,700 a month, while the place in New York would rent for about $4,000 a month, he said.

“Going to New York and looking at those prices in dollars, there was a time when they would be a shock,” Mr. Harmon said.

Now, with the Irish property market cooling after a long, steep run, he added, “People feel there is better opportunity for capital appreciation there.”

To experienced property buyers like Mr. McCann, investing in real estate almost anywhere sounds safer then buying stocks on the exchange in Dublin or London. Mr. McCann, who said he had never owned a share of company stock, said he largely agreed with Mr. McGinley’s view that trusting one’s retirement to the vagaries of the financial markets would be “utter madness.”

Many of their countrymen have shown less hesitation, sinking their self-directed retirement funds into apartments far from home, even in a country that they have never visited.

They have bought so much property in England, Spain and in countries in Eastern Europe that they have been dubbed Crispies — short for cash-rich Irish seeking properties in Europe.

Irish newspapers feed the obsession with weekly sections filled with articles about far-flung markets. A recent edition of The Irish Times carried one article about buying apartments in Sofia, Bulgaria.

By comparison, Manhattan, with a well-established set of rules for buying and selling apartments, appears to be an island of stability, Mr. McCann said.

“It’s not like you’re investing in old Communist countries where landowners have only recently received title to their property,” Mr. McCann said.

Still, not everybody in the real estate business in Manhattan sees it as a sure thing. William Fegan, a partner with a real estate development company, Tribeach Holdings in New York, said he feared that many Irish buyers were too focused on the potential rental income and not enough on all of the other costs of owning an apartment in New York.

“For the life of me I haven’t been able to figure it out,” Mr. Fegan said. “If I was to advise them, I’d probably tell them not to do it. Carrying an apartment in New York City is an expensive proposition.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Scramble On for Traffic Dollars
Lobbyist Who Killed Olympics Is Now on Bloomberg Side

BY ANNIE KARNI - Special to the Sun
May 2, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/53591

As the Bloomberg administration scrambles to build political support for its proposed road tax, New York City is facing stiff competition from some of America's biggest cities for hundreds of millions of federal dollars that would fund portions of the congestion-pricing scheme.

More than 25 cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Las Vegas, and even Lincoln, Neb., have entered the race for a piece of the $1.2 billion in discretionary funds that the federal Department of Transportation will invest in communities that want to relieve traffic congestion with "value pricing" programs. A spokesman said the department would likely choose three or fewer cities for funding.

The federal guidelines say applicants must demonstrate that there is "already sufficient political support for implementation."
Also, "near-term" implementation of the road-pricing initiative has to be likely, most preferably by January 2009.

As of Monday's deadline, however, New York City was the only city planning to apply that had not completed its application. The city had submitted only a "conditional application" and a request for a two-month extension. During that time, Mr. Bloomberg said he would drum up political support from Governor Spitzer and the state Legislature, as well as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — both state-run transportation agencies.

Such support so far has been hard to come by. But as Mr. Bloomberg fights to shape the city's future for decades to come, he is taking steps to avoid the pitfalls that ultimately spoiled his first bold initiative to build a football stadium for the Jets on Manhattan's West Side. Without political and civic allies to back the Jets deal, the city's bid for the 2012 Olympics ended as a fruitless endeavor about two years ago.

This time around, however, the Bloomberg administration is working closely with more than 70 environmental groups and civic and business organizations to lobby for the plan in Albany. One group that has been coordinating closely with the mayor's office on congestion pricing, Environmental Defense, has hired one of the state's most powerful lobbyists, Patricia Lynch, the Assembly speaker's former press secretary and director of communications, to generate political good will for congestion pricing at the state level. The Legislature so far has balked at the program, and Mr. Spitzer has yet to declare a firm stance.

Ms. Lynch previously lobbied Speaker Sheldon Silver on behalf of Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden, against the West Side stadium plan. It was Mr. Silver's lack of support on the Public Authorities Control Board that abruptly ended City Hall's Olympic dreams.

Mr. Bloomberg has been counting on using federal funds to implement the congestion pricing scheme he unveiled last month as a piece of his sweeping plan to make New York City environmentally friendly and sustainable by 2030. In his proposal, cars would be charged $8 and trucks would be charged $21 to enter Manhattan south of 86th Street weekdays between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Those fees would be offset by any tolls paid to enter the city. The infrastructure needed to implement his plan would cost at least a quarter of a billion dollars, a city official said.

Some of the federal funds would be used pay for an extensive network of cameras that would photograph license plates so that drivers could be sent a bill in the mail. Drivers entering Manhattan during the peak hours also would be encouraged to pay using E-ZPass technology.

A spokesman for the Department of Transportation said it is too early to tell how New York City's application would be affected by its "conditional" status. The transportation department has not yet set a date for announcing which cities would divvy up the federal funds.
Meanwhile, the city and the organizations supporting the plan are stepping up their efforts to lobby lawmakers in Albany to support congestion pricing.

The director of the mayor's office of operations, Jeffrey Kay, recently made a trip to Albany to meet with Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who has for years been vocal in his opposition to charging drivers to use the streets of New York. Mr. Brodsky, a Democrat of Westchester, maintains that access to the public streets should not be available only to drivers who could afford to pay.

"They want cameras all over the city," Mr. Brodsky said in an interview following his meeting with Mr. Kay. "It has real privacy implications." Mr. Brodsky said the meeting did not sway him in his opposition to congestion pricing, but added: "If the mayor wants a serious conversation, I'd be glad to participate."

There are other political hurdles in addition to the state Legislature. The executive director and CEO of the MTA, Elliot Sander, has not endorsed Mr. Bloomberg's traffic tax plan. An agency spokesman said last night that the MTA was still analyzing the proposal to understand how it would affect mass transit in the city. The Port Authority has stated vaguely that it would work the city and both states to meet their collective traffic challenges.

This is the first year the federal government has earmarked money to fight congestion through road-pricing schemes. The transportation department spokesman said the department now plans to make an undetermined amount of money for congestion pricing available every year.

The communities that have applied for federal funds are: Denver, Los Angeles, Louisville, Phoenix and Tuscon jointly, San Diego, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, southwestern Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Clearwater, Fla., Jacksonville, Fla., Orlando, Fla., Florida's State Department of Transportation, Atlanta and Georgia's toll road authority jointly, Minneapolis and St. Paul jointly, Lincoln, Las Vegas, another area of Nevada, Austin, Texas, Dallas, Houston, Northern Virginia, Fairfax County, King County and Seattle jointly, and Washington State.

May 2, 2007 Edition > Section: New York > Printer-Friendly Version