Just What Would 28 Towers in Williamsburg Look Like?
If you have not heard, developer Quadriad is pushing a plan to put 28 towers in the middle of Williamsburg. Quadriad is seeking a rezoning of the special low rise area that was created as part of last years waterfront rezoning. This is not insignificant. If the city were to reverse course on last year's zoning deal, it would render all such other deals around the city meaningless. Other community groups negotiating over the zoning in their areas should be watching this proposal closely. To bring this to light onNYTurf takes a look at that plan with new renderings and a map.
You can see the map here
This map is like other onNYTurf maps, though we are getting better at this. With the Atlantic Yards map there were some criticisms that the renderings were less than fair. It was our first such project and I tried not to be too negative, I always thought the project was negative enough on its own. But in anycase, to address that critism for this project I went out and photographed typical looking residential towers in Manhattan, and have used those to represent the developer's buildings. The interesting consequence I think is that the renderings this time in being even more realistic are even more scary! So get your security blanket and a glass of milk before hitting the map.
There are a couple more observations about this project that I want to make here. One thing that I got for this project was a copy of Quadriad's power point proposal (which is available for download from the map page). Quadriad themselves have reported that there will be 28 towers on the site. In looking through the slides, I could not spot where two of the towers would go. Generally Quadriad places them on the corner blocks. Here is the detail of Quadriad's slide:
Looks to me like two towers are missing from the center left block. That would mean the towers would have to go mid block? This is unclear so I left it out of the map.
The Way of The Future
Another thing that came to mind as I looked at the quality of this project's renderings, was that there is the strong potential for a real sea change in how communities dictate what kinds of development will happen in their area.My renderings this time are even impressive to myself, but they are only the tip of the iceberg of what can be done. With all the great new maps and availablity of imagery and digital cameras there is no reason community groups and concerned citizens can not be putting forward very compelling visions for the city. In fact there will be no way to take a community group seriously if they are not engaging on this level.
Renderings are simply the most compelling way to sell projects. Architects and politicians have known this for a long time, and unfortunately only they and large organizations generally were the only ones who had the resources and time to put any together. But this is not the case any more.
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Williamsburg resident
What are they smoking?
The upzoning of the waterfront was one of the tradeoffs for preserving some of the smaller residential buildings in the rest of the neighborhood. There are already a bunch of sites to be developed on the upland where there were manufacturing buildings.
There is a lot to lose in these blocks that is worth saving- a carpet depot that employs over 100 people, two high end art shippers that employ 70 people collectively, a national design company that employs 30 people, asian food distributors that employ 50 people, etc. Not to mention an affordable housing complex, Northside Gardens.
Upzoning the area dramatically (up to 11 or 12 FAR! more dense than Atlantic Yards!) is not a recipe for a healthy, stable community.
If industrial retention is a key issue
And the question with talking about past "community" agreements is WHO gets defined as the community. What about the folks not living in the area because of high prices who would love to move there if affordable units were available? Retaining jobs in New York requires addressing housing costs, since such costs inevitably effect the salaries companies need to offer to retain employees and their likelihood to depart for cheaper areas.
I fully appreciate preserving mixed use of space, but it seems like more space overall can be used to achieve that if does creatively. The very fact that there is so much demand for the space in question actually gives folks leverage to demand such creative uses of the space, but the less density allowed, the less that can inherently be demanded from the developers.
Nathan
What Bruce Hath Wrought
The point of zoning
In this case, Quadriad is offering that up to 30% of the units be affordable and that community retail space be provided. While the devil is in the details, that seems like a pretty good result for the community extracted from the earlier zoning deal.
Where are lower and middle income families going to live if affordable units aren't built? The Brookings Institute in a recent report analyzed the "disappearing middle class" in various cities including New York:
New York has a smaller share of middle-income families than any other major metropolitan area in the nation, and like residents of most American cities and suburbs, they live in a dwindling number of middle-income neighborhoods..."Middle-income neighborhoods are vanishing faster than middle-income families," said the nationwide analysis, done by the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Is preserving a few low-density enclaves worth creating a city where no middle-income folks can live here? Recently, the city removed the rule that city employees have to live in New York City, because it is becoming impossible for middle-income government employees to find housing in the City. A city where the employees of that government can't afford to live there is a city in a housing crisis.
Nathan
other things the
Williamsburg's transit woes aside, there are plenty of other things the city can do rather than skyscraper everything that is within spitting distance of Manhattan. Real and sane rent regulation, encouraging business centers in the other boroughs, mandatory affordability (which would help end the crazy property speculation going on), localized AMIs so that affordability really means affordability. Those are just a few options the city never uses, talks about, brainstorms, considers etc.
how to build for the next few decades
But while it's nice for existing residents to depend on rent regulation, you can't get around the problem of fewer available apartments than people needing a place to live. More demand than supply inherently hands power to the speculators. And every new apartment in New York City is one less SUV-driving suburbanite destroying the environment, so more housing is an environmental imperative as well as a working families imperative.
Encouraging more businesses in the outer boroughs is useful, but there will still remain a concentration of jobs that locate in the central city precisely because collaboration among existing businesses downtown remains the competitive advantage of a range of remaining industries in New York City.
The question has to be how to build the housing needed for the estimated 1 million additional NYC residents over the next few decades. Obviously, mass transit needs an upgrade, but why isn't building housing in the inner core of the city where people want to live the right strategy?
Nathan
size limit?
I do think it is a bit of a fantasy to think that big buildings near the core mean few cars. The Quadriad plan discusses, IIRC, ~300 parking spaces per block! Couple that with the thousands of spaces that will go in along the water front and we are talking massive amounts of auto traffic in that area.
None of the options I listed ignore the problem of incoming people. They all can and are designed to be used to address that. Rent regulation does not have to be about a static set of units, you can bring more on line as has been done for decades. Mandatory affordability and redefining the AMI would also create new spaces for lower and middle class.
What is fueling speculation, and what the city does not address in its land use policies is that the city is attracting a lot of wealthier people. Every time a regulated tenement with maybe 16 units in it is converted to 4 lofts at $1.5M a piece you exacerbate problem. There is a lot of space but it is going to a very small number of people. So the city needs to say with more frequency: X amount of space must be at whatever prices. This would end a lot of speculative pricing, and would take wind out of the argument that "it costs a lot to build". It's the land prices that are expensive — well that and construction labor which thus far is proving to be pretty community unfriendly. If you limit the profits nobody will be able to demand the prices they are. Developers and landlords can make plenty of money even with regulated tenants. And the wealthy can go find a crash pad without views of Manhattan.
Then there is a final question? At what point do you say: we have reached the size limit for this area. I think it is a good question. I think it is too simple to say, "well, the business is here" or "the people want to live here so we must build here". Businesses will adapt and find other places to go, and so will people. Especially if you encourage it. I argue for vigilance in finding a way to distribute businesses and populations. It is too lazy to me to just give into the kind of "we have to build here cause everyone is here" arguments. Supersizing every last scrap of land in and around Manhattan ultimately only prolongs the problem, it does not solve it. Focusing on distributing populations would go a long way toward easing pressure on the real estate market as well as the transit system and the desire to own a car.
The L train is too crowded
To simplify issues tremendously, development along the L train is better than development in the suburbs. (People in the city tend not to have cars, and if they do, they drive them less frequently and shorter distances. Apartments are smaller and easier to heat and cool than detached houses.)
Problem: The L train is too crowded.
Republican response: In theory, the L train being too crowded would discourage people who might ride the L from moving into apartments along it, so the all-knowing and all-seeing "market" would solve the problem by itself. Only G-train riders or motorists or bicyclists will choose t move to this big new development.
A rational response I'd like to see Democrats make: If the L train is too crowded we must take every step possible to augment public transit. If there are no absolutely no transportation remedies feasible, then they should encourage development along the J, M and Z lines, which are operating undercapacity.
I've been following the "peak oil" or oil depletion meme for a year or two, and it seems to me that the estimate that NYC's population will increase by a million people is really low. In the coming decades as gasoline, oil and energy prices rise due to increased worldwide demand from emerging countries and a giant question mark when it comes to supply and alternative energies. How many people there in NYC's suburbs? 10 million? Whether we'd like to see it or not, many of those people are going to start to realize that their credit-financed SUV-and-McMansion energy-guzzling lifestyle is not feasible with energy costs that don't come down. If the ratio of NYC- to suburban population reverts to what it was before the post-war oil boom, we can expect the suburbs to wither drastically AND see a reversal of the
post-war population migration to the A/C and car-dependent American south and west. Hopefully people will repopulate regional cities like Bridgeport, Newark and Poughkeepsie that would benefit from restored density, but many will probably NYC.
I think NYC could get even more crowded than people realize. We need to find creative ways to increase our housing supply at all income levels (yes even the rich) and enhance public transportation, and to make people realize that development and transportation are really a single issue.
-Aaron
Denser development in the suburbs would be a very good thing
It's a misnomer to think that business have to be within 10 minutes of midtown or downtown. There are large business centers in Whiteplanes, NJ, Stamford, Westport, throughout Long Island. There could be centers in LIC and Forest Hills/ East NY/ North of Coney Island (proximity to the airport is awesome)/ Jersey City/ Downtown Brooklyn etc. But you have to build the kinds of places people want to go to. Prospect Heights and Williamsburg are popular because A. its close to business centers, and B. they are damn nice hoods - mostly because of their scale. To me the idea is to recreate it, not supersize it which kills it's quality of life in the process. There are plenty of places outside Manhattan we could have affordable housing. But I really feel we need to create job opportunities around them that require less than a hour commute.
only part of the solution
> > suburbs would be a very good thing. Would make mass-transit there more
> > feasible/appealing. Would be better land use. etc. In a way NYC around
> > Manhattan is already highly functional. I would argue that what needs to
> > happen is not bring more people there, but recreating its type of
> > housing-business district model in near-by areas.
> > It's a misnomer to think that business have to be within 10 minutes of
> > midtown or downtown. There are large business centers in Whiteplanes,
> > NJ, Stamford, Westport, throughout Long Island. There could be centers
> > in LIC and Forest Hills/ East NY/ North of Coney Island (proximity to
> > the airport is awesome)/ Jersey City/ Downtown Brooklyn etc.
Definitely a good idea for future growth, but I think that's only part of the solution, since you still have 2.1 million people working in Manhattan with 360,000 of NEW YORKERS driving to work-- a built in market driving up prices near Manhattan. Maybe you can encourage some of the jobs out to the outer boroughs, but a lot are enmeshed in relationships with other firms in the City. Manhattan exists as multiple industrial clusters and the reason they are there and haven't fled to cheaper environs means they are unlikely to move out to the outer boroughs either.
> > But you
> > have to build the kinds of places people want to go to. Prospect Heights
> > and Williamsburg are popular because A. its close to business centers,
> > and B. they are damn nice hoods - mostly because of their scale. To me
> > the idea is to recreate it, not supersize it which kills it's quality of
> > life in the process. There are plenty of places outside Manhattan we
> > could have affordable housing. But I really feel we need to create job
> > opportunities around them that require less than a hour commute.
Except the "scale" is what drives long commutes for everyone else who is now priced out of those areas. Recreating them is a good idea, but at best that can accomodate future growth in the city-- it's unlikely to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people without decent mass transit access to their Manhattan jobs. So the neighborhoods you are inexorably being gentrified and their character being lost.
What I'd rather see folks discussing is how to keep the aspects they like about Brooklyn at the much higher density needed to accomodate more people. The fact remains that most of the housing developments being built in the nation are ecological disasters, yet Manhattan continues to attract more demand. If progressives in New York can't figure out how to absorb growth and build affordable housing, they shouldn't complain when folks driven to live out in sprawl exurbs elect rightwing politicians who defund urban programs. (A recent poll found that 75% of weekly Wal-Mart shoppers are Republicans).
Nathan
not NYC's fault
What? Ok, stop. The other points are well heard, but that's just silly to pin nation wide voting patterns and life style choices on NYC. Even if NYC were completely affordable lots of people would still select to live in the suburbs and blaze around in their SUVs.
Re: not NYC's fault
I don't think that was his point. I think the point was that if you drive people out into the suburbs, why should they elect leaders who will spend money on urban development? They have nothing to gain from it. They'd rather have the tax rates lowered or money spent on roads. As with all two-party politics, we don't fight over the extremes, we fight over the moderates (a.k.a. "swing" voters).
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Rahul
Re: Denser development in the suburbs would be a very good thing
What happens when a Brooklynite suddenly has to commute to Newark because that's where his/her company just moved to?
It's already happening. Brooklyn to Jersey City is a rather common commute, and there are people who need to commute from the UWS to the Morristown, NJ area.
Is this practical? No, I don't think that piling up all businesses in midtown and downtown Manhattan and then driving all residential developments out to the borougs and secondary cities is the answer. That would just suck(tm).
We could have companies that have similar needs or that are interdependent grouped together in different centers so that people who work in that industry can live nearby, but I'm not sure that's so easily achieved.
If we end up with a large mass of urban centers that's not planned very well, we could have a public transportation system that needs to be a complex spiderweb of interconnections. Horribly inefficient no matter which way you do it: basically defeats the purpose of public transportation. I guess this is where the term "business corridor" comes from. You have feeder lines from residential areas into the main commercial corridor, where you have your primary trasportation line. But that doesn't mesh all that well with mixed-use zoning.
Not saying I have the answers. I think it was all questions... Good thing I didn't go into urban planning, as a middle school employment profile suggested. :)
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Rahul
Re: Denser development in the suburbs would be a very good thing
What I meant by that is "No, and I don't think that ... is the answer either"
Quadriad doesn't own any of the land...