If the mayor—a longstanding proponent of density—has been upfront about his belief that the city must facilitate the construction of big, closely packed buildings to accommodate affordable housing, he’s been less forthright on the politically toxic question of which neighborhoods in this city should gird themselves to accommodate that density.
There's no shortage of advice on the matter.
“You could do it entirely in major corridors," said John Shapiro, the chair of Pratt Institute's Center for Planning and the Environment, naming by way of example, Fourth Avenue, Northern Boulevard, Coney Island Avenue, Queens Boulevard, and Atlantic Avenue, the latter a corridor one knowledgeable source told me the de Blasio administration has also discussed.
If there's plenty of room to reshape New York City's envelope to allow for taller buildings replete with affordable housing, there's also plenty of existing floor area that has yet to be used. That's the argument put forth by another urban thinker, Joan Byron, the director of policy at the Pratt Center for Community Development.
She points out that the Bloomberg administration already rezoned a lot of the city (120 rezonings, to be precise), and a lot of the extra buildable square footage those rezonings created has yet to be used, thanks in part to the recession.
According to a preliminary Pratt Center analysis, there is 57 million square feet of unused, high-density residential zoning floor area in the Bronx, 24 million in Brooklyn, 56 million in Manhattan, and 8 million in Queens.
“We have lots of railyards and highways that you can build on right now,” he said, pointing by way of example to the railyards in Sunnyside and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which has a below-grade cut separating the Columbia Street Waterfront District from Carroll Gardens.
11 comments:
How is this overbuilding?
Why not build on top of Sunnyside Yards?
More people= more crime+ less cops= 1970's
Considering that Western Queens has hardly any parkland, it doesn't make sense to add more people where there's open space.
Why not build on top of Sunnyside Yards?
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Sure nitwit, do to western Queens what Co-op City did to the Bronx.
The point here is when the people in western Queens demand new massive developments give it to them.
Until then, tell Jimmy No Brainer to go and work for the Vallones.
What exactly would be the advantage of having more people in NYC?
Have any of these so-called planers ever been to Corona, Elmhurst or Flushing?
Queens is already the dumping ground of the minimum-wage slave class. Do we really need more overcrowded schools, trains and buses? Do we need more litter?
Remember the overcrowded rat experiments? They resorted to cannibalism.
Is there any quality-of-life left in Queens other than in little civilized pockets?
These planers should be forced to live here before they spout their bullshit theories!
Sure nitwit, do to western Queens what Co-op City did to the Bronx.
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Not totally fair. Co-op City was built at a time of population decline and, as a result, accelerated the gutting of the Bronx, as families decamped there.
Also, it was overbuilt, built in the middle of nowhere, far from Manhattan, not on a subway line and on environmentally sensitive land. And yet, despite all this, today it manages to provide stable, truly affordable housing to actual working class people.
Nothing is black and white. There was a good article in the Times recently about how, if cities were to build what is necessary to generate true affordable housing, a lot of people would really not like the result.
Co-op City is a far from perfect, as would be any residential development on top of Sunnyside Yards, but it would be really unlikely to cause the depopulation of surrounding neighborhoods.
And, if it did, what would be the harm in the reduction of 10 families cramming into turn-of-the-century wood frame houses in Elmhurst designed for one family? Isn't that what we are always complaining about?
We keep building "affordable" housing and people still cram into basements in Elmhurst. That's obviously not the answer.
We keep building "affordable" housing and people still cram into basements in Elmhurst. That's obviously not the answer.
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Not true. We talk about building affordable housing all the time, but we don't really actually build all that much of it. A lot of what we do is "preserve" existing affordable housing.
Also, if you are in the mood to be tortured, check out the city's website to see the tangled maze you must navigate in order to secure the affordable housing that does exist; and the extremely specific minimum and maximum income guidelines for such housing (which vary by property). It's a joke.
The massive rental and co-op developments that were built in the city mid-century, and the Mitchell-Lama program that followed is probably the only truly effective affordable housing programs this city ever had (many built or backed by insurance companies or unions, not public funds (other than tax breaks). And yet, if such a program was to be undertaken now, people would gasp at the scale, the ugliness, the cost and the obliteration of existing properties (all valid concerns).
Lift rent regulations, give everyone a fair playing field. About 1/2 the city's supply currently is not on the open market, which drives up market rates. Increase available supply to meet demand instead of allowing a handful of people to benefit from rent regulation.
Little doubt the the shopping districts on Queens Blvd and Steinway would be effectively destroyed by building mega malls over the Sunnyside Yards.
To put in the infrastructure you have to bleed the surrounding communities the way that Vallone did for the waterfront that caused that blackout in Astoria.
Besides, who the hell wants to live above a train yard. Those fumes have to go somewhere and you can be sure it will be junior's bedroom.
Finally, who wants to raise a family when railcars full of potentially explosive cargo are under your feet.
The whole idea is nuts and conceived by someone who will not be living there.
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