It's the skyscrapers, stupid!

Dirty Buildings Report by Alexander Kaufman on Scribd

From Huffington Post:

The 90-floor tower nicknamed the “Oligarch’s Erection” is the gaudy centerpiece of Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row ― a place where a corrupt Nigerian oil tycoon set a $51 million record for the biggest foreclosure in the city’s history in 2017 and a Silicon Valley tech mogul bought the most expensive home ever sold in New York for $100.5 million in 2018.

But 157 West 57th Street is part of another, equally exclusive club that includes Trump Tower, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, the Kushner family’s 666 Fifth Avenue, the ritzy Baccarat Hotel and Residences and 15 Central Park West, where Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein lives.

That club is the biggest contributors to carbon dioxide pollution in New York, where just 2 percent of buildings produce nearly 50 percent of the city’s climate-altering emissions, according to a report released by New York Communities for Change, the People’s Climate Movement NY, the Working Families Party and two other city-based environmental nonprofits.

Only the rich are moving in

From The Real Deal:

Pricey American cities are starting to attract more residents who can afford those prices.

Research from economist Issi Romem has found that new residents coming into cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles are making significantly more money than residents who are leaving, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The trend is strongest in San Francisco, where the people moving to the city and nearby Silicon Valley earned almost $20,000 a year more than the people who left the area in 2016. In Los Angeles, the income gap between people leaving and people arriving was $7,600.

Former industrial cities like Detroit and Cleveland are seeing the opposite trend, where new arrivals are making less than people leaving the cities.

New arrivals to cities also tend to be younger, more likely to rent and less likely to have children than people leaving.

DeBlasio has tax-the-rich scheme to fix subways

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to push for a tax on wealthy New Yorkers to pay for improvements needed to address the crisis engulfing New York City’s subway, city officials said on Sunday.

The proposal is the latest move in the battle between Mr. de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over who bears responsibility for repairing the deteriorating transit system. The plan would also pay for half-price MetroCards for low-income riders — part of a national movement that has gained momentum in New York.

Mr. de Blasio will announce a so-called millionaires tax on Monday for wealthy New York City residents to pay for subway and bus upgrades and for reduced fares for more riders, an idea that has been successful in Seattle.

His funding push comes as the subway faces a multitude of problems, and leaders at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, have called on Mr. de Blasio to provide more money for the system.

The Penn Station blues

From the Wall Street Journal:

Diverted passengers who face a grueling commute this summer because of rail disruption at New York’s Penn Station deserve discounted tickets on the Long Island Rail Road, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday morning.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Suffolk County board member later suggested such a discount could be up to 15%.

As Mr. Cuomo made his suggestion, during a news conference at Penn Station, the head of the MTA, which owns the LIRR, told a committee of the agency’s board in lower Manhattan that the MTA will withhold regular payments it makes to Amtrak for use of Penn Station and that the MTA will send Amtrak a bill for costs incurred by the disruption.

Amtrak, which owns and operates the Midtown Manhattan terminal, will reduce weekday rush-hour service into and out of the station beginning July 10. The outages are needed so that Amtrak can carry out extensive repair work to rails and switches following two low-speed derailments earlier this year.

From NY1:

City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer is not mincing words when it comes to his opinion on the MTA's plan for Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) riders this summer.

“I think it is ridiculous,” he said.

This week, the agency announced it would cancel or divert close to three dozen rush hour trains into and out of Penn Station while Amtrak does emergency track work. That means more LIRR trains originating or terminating at stations in Brooklyn and Queens, including Hunterspoint Avenue in Long Island City. Passengers there would then either take a ferry or transfer to the 7 train.

“To take Long Island Rail Road users and divert them to the 7 train is stupid,” Van Bramer said. “We know the service is unreliable as it is.”

From NY1:

A State Senator from Queens says taxing the rich is how to fund repair work at Penn Station.

Senator Michael Gianaris says his bill would require millionaires in New York to pay a three-year temporary state income tax surcharge. It would apply to those living in any county where the MTA operates.

Gianaris says it would generate close to $2 billion dollars for the MTA every year.

Hotel taxes would also see a new $5 fee on top of the already existing tax in the city.

Wealthy renters are choosing Queens

From LIC Post:

High-income renters are flooding into Queens, according to a recent study.

Wealthy residents of New York City have shown a preference for renting rather than owning homes over the last decade, a new report from RentCafe shows, with the number of affluent renters more than tripling in Queens over the last decade.

After Brooklyn, Queens has seen the second largest influx of wealthy renters over the last 10 years by percentage.

Queens saw a jump in high-income renters from 8,486 households to 29,473 households, or 247 percent, over the last decade, compared to the city as a whole, which saw an increase by 137 percent.

The report defined high-income renters as households earning more than $150,000 per year, and found that about a fifth of New York City renters qualified as high-income, or 211,482 households, which is more than all the affluent renters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Jose, and San Diego combined.

The report points out that an influx in wealthy renters is a sign of gentrification, with about seven percent of Queens renters now making more than $150,000 per year.

1% keeping the city afloat

From the Daily News:

It takes an income of $636,866 a year to make you a member of the one percent in New York City.

And members of that elite group paid 47% of city personal income taxes in 2013, according to new data from the Independent Budget Office.

IBO found that 36,851 tax filers fell into the top one percent — and they collectively earned $107.5 billion, 38% of the entire city population’s income. On average, they brought in $2.9 million in 2013.

The high rollers brought in 19% of the city’s wages and salaries, but a whopping 87% of its capital gains.

They paid $3.9 billion of the $8.3 billion the city brought in in income taxes — nearly half of the total, and an average of $105,924 each.

People with high incomes living in public housing

From PIX11:

PIX11 Investigates has found over 1,500 households earning six-figure salaries while living in New York City Housing Authority apartments.

Got trees? Then you're doing all right

From Brick Underground:

How to trace the pattern of wealth disparity in this city—besides the widening chasm between super-luxury condos and the rest of the market, that is? Look for the trees. Or rather, for how many trees there are in your neighborhood. The Atlantic's CityLab shared findings of a study published in the journal PLOS One that found that in New York City, and in a handful of other cities (including Philadelphia and Baltimore), tree cover correlated with neighborhood income. In other words, the richer the area, the more trees there are and the denser the foliage.

Sunnyside Railyard plan a disaster

(with permission from the Woodside Herald)
Please Don't Build Over Sunnyside Yards
Op Ed By Patricia Dorfman

The Mayor has discarded the wishes of the electorate in his enthusiastic speech about his Yards development plan, which seems to favor giant real estate interests and construction workers who do not live here (East Side Access workers live in onsite dormitories). This disconnect from actual human beings who have chosen our lives in Western Queens, who believe we live in a democracy, look to him as our Mayor, not the Mayor of only people who live elsewhere or who have not yet moved to NYC, is a shock.

A "Sunnyside Starrett City" being featured so lavishly as a centerpiece of his February 2 speech, when one has yet to find one resident in favor not connected to current government or special interests, gives the appearance that the entire project is one crafted by rich, powerful people that Mayor deBlasio has accepted dutifully. He gets to let giant financial firms make millions, gets to please the unions and others giving huge donations to the party, and can call it “affordable housing,” as though it is a kindness to the needy.

If affordable housing, whatever that means, is wanted, why not immediately buy five vacant small lots in Sunnyside Woodside here, and get started, for a fraction of the billions this will cost us taxpayers? In two years, something real can happen. The hole in the ground at Sunnyside center where Dae Dong burned down has been ready for 14 years.

If the Yards are built over as he projects, that would mean that there seems to be a frightening marriage of political, economic, and organized labor at a national, state and local level which is not by the consent or in the interest of local voters, taxpayers and residents. The words used by his aides, that the Yards are an “ugly scar,” and we residents are clamoring for decking, sounds like heartless people looking down upon us from on high.

Many in the Queens are shocked at the mayor's lack of interest in the welfare and wishes of actual residents and small businesses. Mitch Waxman, Astoria resident who reports and photographs for NewtownPentacle.com and Brownstoner.com, says, "I find it surprising that the self-proclaimed progressive mayor of New York City has so thoroughly embraced the plan of Michael Bloomberg's former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff. (Doctoroff was CEO of Bloomberg LLC.)

We live in a one party system out here, with so much power in the hands of elected officials to dispense patronage favors, that sometimes the party itself has become a kind of company, which runs for itself. That might be occurring in the larger picture now. We ask the Mayor and City Hall to care about us above all and not read the “party memo” which will forever change our lives for the worse.

And for those who want to have an open “discussion” about how to use some of the Sunnyside Yards for anything other than a giant park (hey, billionaires Bloomberg and Doctoroff, buy us a park, that will change all of our lives instantly and make you our heroes) means that once any building is done, the rest is up for grabs. We cannot build on just part of it.

Please do not build over Sunnyside Yards. If "Sunnyside Starrett City" comes to pass, it means we no longer have any say about our city. It means that all rezoning of the past 20 years of Queens is calculated to line the pockets of the rich, displace the working class and small businesses who would not be afford the new rents, is paid for by the taxpayer, and is now described as “affordable housing,” as though it is a noble goal, to crush our lifestyles, wishes, hopes and dreams. Developing over the Yards will extend Manhattan over us like serfs on their land.

(The author is a registered Democrat, union member, and lives in Sunnyside.)
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/124/232/303/please-do-not-build-over-the-sunnyside-yards/

Because the DeBlasio administration is all about the little people

From DNA Info:

Since he started his $205,180-a-year job, Silver has had sitdowns with Bette Midler, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Donald Trump, billionaire real estate investor Douglas Durst and the wife of a Russian oligarch to discuss their pet park projects, according to his daily schedules.

But Silver's schedules show that he held scores of meetings with heads of powerful nonprofits, wealthy donors, lobbyists and celebrities while he only had five meetings with local community groups.

No one's home at the Pied a Terres

From the NY Times:

The question of who, if anyone, lives in the multimillion-dollar condominiums being built across Manhattan grows more intriguing with every new tower crane that hoists glass slabs and concrete blocks hundreds of feet into the sky.

New Yorkers want to know: Who are these people who hide behind limited liability companies while shelling out a fortune for a condominium — who see the apartment as an investment or even just a vanity play, and who are too busy sunning in St. Bart’s or skiing in Gstaad to actually show up and shop at the local market or pay for tickets to a Broadway show?

Many well-heeled New Yorkers are frustrated that while a large share of their income goes to taxes of all kinds, their non-New Yorker neighbors down the street pay a comparatively minuscule amount in property taxes. And an evening stroll through Midtown is starting to feel like the Wild West after the gold rush, with buildings like the Plaza — officially the Plaza Pied a Terre Hotel Condominiums — sitting mostly dark. It wouldn’t surprise some of us to see tumbleweed blow by the Apple cube on Fifth Avenue.

As it turns out, this is not just hyperbole.

In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, or 285 of 496 apartments, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a year. From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or almost 50 percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data from the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey.

“My district has some of the most expensive land values in the world — I’m ground zero for the issue of foreign buyers,” said State Senator Liz Krueger, whose district includes Midtown. “I met with a developer who is building one of those billionaire buildings on 57th Street and he told me, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t need any more services, because the buyers won’t be sending their kids to school here, there won’t be traffic.’ ”

The developer told her that the buyers basically would never be here, Ms. Krueger said. “He said it like this was a positive thing,” she added. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Well as far as providing services, that is a positive thing. As far as keeping cost of living reasonable, it's not.

DeBlasio will continue to rely on the rich

From the Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio has his work cut out for him if he really wants to end New York’s “tale of two cities.” Gotham has become the American capital of a national and even international trend toward greater income inequality and declining social mobility.

There are things the new mayor can do to help, but the early signs aren’t promising that he will be able to reverse 30 years of the hollowing out of the city’s once vibrant middle class.

As the cost of living has skyrocketed while pay has stagnated except for those at the very top, New York has shifted from a place people go to make it to a place for those who already have it made, or whose families have.

And once here, the rich are indeed getting richer even as the rest of the city is barely holding on.

Between 1990 and 2010, the city’s 1% saw their median income shoot up from $452,415 to $716,625 in 2010 dollars, even as the bottom 60% hardly saw their incomes budge at all, according to a recent City University study. The trend precedes Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor who envisioned New York as a “luxury city,” and it won’t be easy for de Blasio to reverse — especially as he rolls out pricey new public-employee contracts and programs like universal pre-K that further expand the city’s dependence on its wealthiest citizens.

Rather than forge a more upwardly mobile society, New York epitomizes what Citigroup researchers have labeled a “plutonomy,” an economy and society driven largely by the investment behavior and spending of the uber-rich. This creates great demand for low-end service workers — dog-walkers, baristas and waiters — but not much for New York’s middle or aspiring middle class.

Adjusting for the cost of living here, the average paycheck in New York is one of the lowest of any major metropolitan area. Put otherwise, working New Yorkers pay a huge premium to live in the five boroughs, one that repels middle-class individuals and families who aren’t compelled to be here.

The exodus of the middle class has been ongoing for 30 years, with New York by one measure now having the second lowest share of middle-income neighborhoods of America’s 100 largest cities.As the middle class has waned, even exemplars of the celebrated creative class — musicians, artists, writers — find the going increasingly rough, and unrewarding. Laments rock icon Patti Smith: “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. New York City has been taken away from you.”

Certainly some middle class jobs could be created by boosting such things as the port and logistics, resuscitating industries such as food processing and specialized household goods, and rolling out policies that encourage, rather than overregulate, smaller firms in the business-service industry.

But de Blasio’s press to bring in more tax revenue to pay for ambitious new programs, more generous social services and new contracts for city workers have the perverse effect of doubling down on Bloomberg’s bet on the wealthy.

His ambitious ramping up of green-energy policy could be the straw that breaks the back of what remains of the logistics and manufacturing industries in New York, something that has already occurred in California.

And his kowtowing to the teachers union and attempted assaults on charter schools threaten to further undermine the effectiveness of public education, something vital to middle and working class residents.

In fact, the effect of de Blasio’s policies may turn out to be more neo-Victorian than progressive. Rather than new homeowners, the city may see a greater concentration of people dependent on government largesse.

Astoria apartment breaks rent record

From the Times Ledger:

A three-bedroom, 3 1/2-bathroom apartment has set a new record for rentals in Astoria at $5,000 per month, according to an agent at Douglas Elliman, which had the exclusive listing.

The Greek owner of the townhouse, on 35th Street,lives in Geneva, Switzerland, and did a wholesale renovation of the property with European-style finishes.

The unit was listed in late January and Kinslow had his tenants lined up less than two months later.

“They are three guys in their mid-20s, all Ivy League graduates who work in finance and were looking for more space,” he said. “They really like the feel of the community, having moved from the East Village where they say everyone is there to just party.”

Chicken coop runs a-fowl of the rules

From the NY Times:

Keeping chickens in New York City has become a popular hobby, especially in precincts of Brooklyn where foodies and do-it-yourselfers prize locally grown food. Ms. Saye, 48, bought a dozen heritage chickens last July to provide free-range eggs for her daughter, Scarlett, 5, because she wants to serve foods that are free of hormones.

“I got them for nutritional reasons,” Ms. Saye said. “You can’t buy these eggs in a supermarket.”

Ms. Saye bought a $2,500 coop and had fencing installed to protect the chickens from predators. But a month ago, she learned of a different type of threat to her chickens: the stringent restrictions that homeowners in her neighborhood are supposed to abide by.

Ms. Saye lives in Forest Hills Gardens, a private neighborhood nestled in one of the more pristine sections of New York City. It is renowned for its stately country garden style, multimillion-dollar Tudor and Georgian homes, and for its strict regulations, which forbid the keeping of backyard chickens.

Ms. Saye has been ordered by the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation, which manages the neighborhood, to get rid of the chickens. In a recent letter, corporation officials cited the nuisances section of a century-old homeowners’ covenant.

The rules were set down in 1913, during the infancy of this 140-acre, leafy swath that is one of America’s oldest planned communities and was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., whose father was Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape architect who helped design Central Park.

She noted that the nuisances section also does not allow a “cattle yard, hog pen, fowl yard or house, cesspool, privy vault; nor any cattle, hogs or other live stock or live poultry.”

“These are 101-year-old rules,” she said, adding that she decided to order the chickens after seeing Martha Stewart talk about them on television. She even bought the birds from the website that Ms. Stewart recommended, Mypetchicken.com.

Mitchell Cohen, the president of the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation, said the regulations detailed in the homeowners’ covenant and restrictions are meant “to protect the whole community” and an “amazing document that has held the test of time.”

You can buy free range eggs at stores. Don't buy a house in a privileged neighborhood and then act like you're above the rules that make it a privileged neighborhood. The wealthy have such problems, don't they?

There's actually a shortage of luxury condos

From CNBC:

The records keep piling up for Manhattan real estate.

The fourth quarter saw a string of records broken—from number of deals and average sale prices to dwindling inventory—as the rich from around the world scoop up luxury apartments as a store of wealth.

The average sales price in Manhattan rose 5.3 percent to $1,538,203 in the fourth quarter compared to a year ago. That marked the highest-ever price for a fourth quarter. The median sales price for condos is the highest-ever tracked, hitting $1.3 million.

And the inventory of apartments for sale has shrunk to its lowest level in recent memory, with a little over 4,000 apartments for sale.

The total number of sales surged 27 percent—a surprisingly strong increase given the rush in the fourth quarter of 2012 to do deals before the "fiscal cliff" tax changes.

While the overall market is on fire, New York is quickly becoming a tale of two markets—the soaring condo market and the lackluster co-op market.

The average sales price for condos surged 13 percent over the prior year to $2,115,228. The number of sales jumped 23 percent.

Yet co-ops—those storied preserves of Manhattan wealth and exclusivity—are being left behind. The average price for co-ops fell 1.6 percent in the quarter to $1,171,552, Elliman said.

Brokers say the main reason for the difference is foreign buyers, who are virtually banned from the co-op market, since co-op boards often won't approve them and the overseas rich don't want to reveal their financials.

Plus, foreign buyers prefer the newly built, gleaming glass condo towers to the prewar co-op apartments of the past.

If luxury condos are what everyone presumably wants, then why do we need to subsidize their construction? Especially since it's not even people in need of housing that are buying them?

Urban farmers?

From the NY Post:

More than 1,500 city residents are getting federal farm subsidies, 374 on the Upper East Side alone.

The recipients include some “farmers” who already have their own well-cultivated money trees, among them Mark F. Rockefeller.

“That should really make people wonder what on earth has happened to the farm program,” said Craig Cox, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the Environmental Working Group, which maintains a national database of farm-subsidy recipients.

“Payments are going to people in Manhattan who simply have invested in farmland and are about as far away from farmers as one could imagine.”

Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the family and the younger son of late Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, has gotten $342,634 in taxpayer handouts from 2001 through 2011 for thousands of acres of unused farmland he owns in Bonneville County, Idaho. The payments are made so that he does not farm, to allow the land to return to its natural state.

His subsidy is for conservation purposes. Other subsidies come in the form of disaster payments, which allow farmers to recoup losses from drought, frost, hurricanes or tornadoes, or commodity payments, to regulate the prices for crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat.

Red Cross workers living large

From the Huffington Post:

The American Red Cross has come under fire for its slow response to certain areas hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, and now critics have a new complaint against the relief organization: It’s paying $181,000 for volunteers to stay at a swanky downtown Manhattan hotel.

The Red Cross, which has raised $131 million in Sandy relief as of Tuesday, recently fired back at critics, calling its disaster response effort “near flawless.” But struggling Sandy survivors allege Red Cross volunteers aren’t visible in their towns, and many have said they don’t understand where the organization's dollars could be going.

The nonprofit revealed to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that one big-ticket Sandy relief item is hotel stays for volunteers. Since New York City is packed with tourists and facing a housing crisis, the Red Cross has taken 45 rooms at the upscale Soho Grand Hotel –- at a discounted rate -- which will end up costing $181,000, spokeswoman Laura Howe told the Journal.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also taken three rooms at the Soho Grand since Sandy hit, according to the paper.

That was one huge zoning mistake...

From the NY Times:

...the scene speaks to something so obvious it is often overlooked: The waterfront in New York City has never been a suitable place to live. And yet in recent years affluent New Yorkers have been encouraged to colonize it with great fervor. The trend began in the late ’60s and ’70s, with the development of Battery Park City and its high rises, on landfill. Dumbo started to emerge in the ’90s and has since become one of the costliest neighborhoods in the city. The real momentum, though, did not take hold until the Bloomberg administration reimagined the city’s debilitated industrial waterfront as a winding ribbon of good living — a cornerstone of its legacy.

There are expensive condominiums now where factories once stood in Williamsburg, and residential and commercial real estate is coming to a decommissioned naval base in Staten Island. A condominium and hotel complex, with vast family-size apartments, is planned for the northern end of Brooklyn Bridge Park which the storm’s force for a short time rendered indistinguishable from the river itself. The Bloomberg public-private model earmarks money for waterfront green space that in turn lures developers who provide a tax base to support operating costs. But the paradigm rests on an assumption that living on the water will remain an infinitely desirable thing. Our increasingly intimidating weather patterns would suggest that the idea is now vulnerable to challenge.

It is obvious that infrastructural changes need to be made for expansion to sustain itself — crucially, the rethinking of parks and wetland development as infrastructure, which would work to absorb the effects of rising sea levels. But new building ideologies need to prevail as well.

Historically, in many cities of course, elevation has held cachet.

It’s the needy who have been sequestered downward. Not long ago, Ms. Drake, a landscape architect, curious about the placement of New York City’s public housing, devised a map to find out how much of it was built on flood zones. The answer, she discovered, was, most of it. Public housing lines the waterfront in Coney Island, on the Lower East Side, in the Rockaways. This is not the result of progressive and munificent city planning aimed at enhancing the day-to-day aesthetic experience of the poor. Instead it was the result of low-lying waterfront land available at a cheap price.

All this has gotten me to thinking about what a great urban planner that Amanda Burden is!

Rich folk leaving USA in droves

From the NY Post:

Startling new data from Uncle Sam show that defections by Americans are expected to double this year, largely to avoid any stiff tax bills resulting from the proposed 55 percent hike on the rich — as well as the likely expiration on Dec. 31 of the Bush era tax cuts.

As many as 8,000 US citizens are projected by immigration officials to renounce in 2012, or about 154 a week, versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week.

“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” said Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy.

“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said.

“Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Duggan. “But largely it’s an economic decision.”

Other neighborhoods need parks too

From the Politicker:

Whether the High Line’s pristine restoration has ruined its allure as one of the city’s last wild escapes remains a matter of some dispute. But as the city opened the second section this week, the celebrated rail trellis has come to be seen by some critics as a symbol of the new New York for the Bloomberg era, a place that privileges high-end enchantments and requires steady dollops of fashion, celebrity and financial philanthropy for anything to move the municipal bureaucracy.

“The biggest blockbuster opening of the summer isn’t The Hangover Part II—it is the High Line Part 2,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a ceremonial groundbreaking this week, where he announced a $5 million gift to the park from the Tiffany Foundation and a matching gift from the philanthropists Donald Pels and Wendy Keys. “And when I say blockbuster I mean every block from 20th to 30th Street!”

“All the High Line really proves is that wealthy, connected people simply have better access to government and are able to do this kind of thing,” said Geoffrey Croft, executive director of New York City Park Advocates. “I give everyone a lot of credit for seeing this through, but let’s be honest—I’ve been working for years and years to get a tiny piece of park land out in Maspeth, and these guys are able to get a $100 million park in a very short period of time.”