Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan for a streetcar along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront may not pay for itself after all, according to an internal City Hall memo.
A confidential memo sent by the administration’s “BQX Project Team” to Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen in February says that the “successful implementation” of the $2.5 billion, 16-mile Brooklyn Queens Connector “faces several serious challenges,” including its financing model.
Since de Blasio unveiled the proposal in his February 2016 State of the City address, critics have questioned why the mayor would consider funding a developer-driven streetcar through already gentrified neighborhoods, rather than putting more capital behind another of his ideas, a subway extension into working class neighborhoods along Utica Avenue.
The administration has consistently argued that the BQX project can pay for itself, since the city can capture a piece of the rising property values that would be spurred by the creation of the streetcar. It’s a financing model known as “value capture.”
The February memo acquired by POLITICO New York suggests that the city’s confidence in the streetcar’s ability to pay for itself may be wavering.
Among the “four serious challenges” listed in the memo is the following: “Value Capture not providing sufficient revenue to fund the entire project as originally stated.”
In part, that's because, as the memo also notes, it's really expensive to move and rehabilitate the water, gas and sewer mains that lie along the streetcar’s proposed path between Sunset Park and Astoria.
9 comments:
The BQX is officially Trump's Wall in Mexico. Actually it always was, with the same claims by De Faustio and his agents/advisors about it "paying for itself" and how consequentially it will be paid by the taxpayers who don't want it.
This would be cause to celebrate and engage in schadenfreude if it wasn't for the fact that the city hired KPMG to do the study. They don't work cheap.
Of course the necessity for these "studies" would not be needed when the voices of the people are free. And the people thought this was fucking stupid and were on to this public land grab for a hipshit and tourist tram.
Sorry Walentas, Ritter, Kushner and the rest of you fiends. Tell your clientele, current and speculative to get on the damn bus like everyone else. Suckers.
And who the fuck is Johnathan on page 3?. Could it be that neoliberal wormtongue Rosen
Well, if there has been any progress on accountability from this corrupt mayor, at least this memo wasn't redacted.
“Value Capture not providing sufficient revenue to fund the entire project as originally stated.”
Watch for the city scumbags to come up with some bullshit like it's for the "greater public good" blah blah blah
This piece of shit will get built and then neglected.
More like Value Grasping than capturing.
This is SOP for new projects that someone wants to push along. The initial estimates are totally unrealistic in a direction favorable to the project (as in stadium deals between teams and cities). Later, when it is looked at even semi-realistically, it turns out that the first set of estimates were totally phony. There was clearly an initial political push to ignore obvious costs and to overestimate income.
Is the memo saying the public gets to weigh in only after all the other costly studies and estimates are completed? This is just a money pit they plan on forcing on the public with window dressing of asking for input. There's nothing here a SBS bus line couldn't accomplish at a fraction of the cost.
Good -now the thugs won't be able to do crimes on the streetcar.
I forgot to give a shout out to the suckers at Alma Realty, they of the landfill storage and garbage dump on Astoria Cove, who also was expecting the BQX to manifest with their filthy lucre donation to the Blaz.
I just think of the smell of urine, and solid human waste mixed with fried chicken and mcdonalds after three days in operation of these new street cars...
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