Making first homes in the world’s second home

While City Hall tries to brand New York City as “The World’s Second Home,” the median price of a Manhattan apartment continues to spiral up beyond last year’s threshold of one million dollars.

In cities where median incomes are out of whack with the cost of a first home, city planners will try to catch up any way they can. Usually, this amounts to offering developers density bonuses, fee waivers, and streamlined permit processes in exchange for projects with affordable units. However, the problem in Manhattan—as in just about everywhere else this approach is tried—is that voluntary incentives never seem to be enough to attract actual affordable housing projects from actual developers.

Typically, after voluntary incentives are given a few years to fail, the planners’ next suggestion will be to make affordable housing mandatory. That is where New York City is at today.

Last week, I was in the audience at a panel discussion on inclusionary zoning presented by Community Board 8, my local board in the Upper East Side. “Inclusionary zoning” refers to zoning regulations designed to achieve affordable housing as a primary by-product of market-rate development. Panelists for the discussion included Brad Lander of the Pratt Institute, Tom Angotti, professor at Hunter College, and Joshua Kahr, a developer and consultant.

Long-term planning usually refers to a process of envisioning 20 or 25 years down the road and designing a plan that incrementally meets the challenge. For New York, that challenge will include producing homes for a projected 2.3 million new residents. The panelists agreed that even an unlikely 15,000 new units per year would fall short of the long-term demand.

Many housing advocates consider mandatory inclusionary zoning a necessary tool to meet the long term housing challenge. Its attraction is that if anything gets built at all, a portion of the development must be made affordable. That’s considerably better than what we have now, which is nothing affordable being built at all.

However, in additional to meeting the housing demand, inclusionary zoning advocates also promote “integration and mitigation.” Sensitive to the harm done by the segregated public housing projects of an earlier era, planners want income “integration” to be a feature of any newly mandated affordable housing. By this, they mean housing for a range of income groups should be an integrated feature of new projects or neighborhoods. In addition, redevelopment in New York should include “mitigation” for the people displaced by new high-priced market rate housing by providing equivalent new housing in or near the new development.

Mr. Kahr was the lone panel member with a developer’s background, and he did a good job providing a balance of opinion on the issue of inclusionary zoning. Essentially, he found several flaws with inclusionary zoning, and questioned what would be wrong to allow private developers to build market rate housing at the highest acceptable density and for the city to collect fees to address the issue of affordability.

In practice, inclusionary zoning amounts to a development tax on market-rate units, since market-rate costs must absorb the subsidy needed to create the mandated affordable units. Mr. Kahr asked if it would make sense to reduce the number of market-rate units in order to build affordable units within the same project. Inclusionary zoning would do exactly that, thereby reducing the number of market rate units available for subsidizing the cost of affordable housing construction. Mr. Kahr suggested that revenue generated for affordable housing should be spent efficiently, which probably shouldn’t include building affordable units in luxury Manhattan high rises. For that kind of money, two or three units could be built in Queens for every one in Manhattan.

Furthermore, a policy that would trades two units in Queens for one unit in Manhattan amounts to denying affordable housing for at other needy households. Goals such as economic integration of housing may be well intentioned, but, if housing is akin to a right, it should be the city’s priority to create as much housing as possible with whatever scarce resources are available.

Mr. Kahr questioned the integrity of a zoning code that has two acceptable densities, one for market-rate housing and a higher density for affordable housing. Wouldn’t an honest zoning code have only one acceptable density—the higher of the two?

If market rate housing could be built at the highest acceptable density, revenues from an enhanced development tax would be available to be used as creatively as the city wanted: non-profits could be funded to build integrated units, existing buildings could be bought up and turned over to tenants, and even some new condominiums could be bought to economically integrate Manhattan.

I left the Community Board 8 panel discussion with the feeling that if the city’s goal is to house 2.3 million new residents over the next twenty-some years, then planners can’t afford to encode any disincentives to development or get distracted from priorities. I hope Mr. Kahr’s questions are given the kind of consideration that inclusionary zoning is receiving from certain quarters these days.

On the Soho Expressway to Boozy

Boozy is an off-off Broadway play about a public official who pulled the strings of power in New York. For decades he rebuilt New York according to his own design. With an insatiable hunger for large public projects he had the prowess to be all but unstoppable.

Robert Moses held contempt for notions of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In the end, he toppled from power when a group of community activists challenged his plan to build an expressway in their beloved Soho. He met his match in Jane Jacobs, emeritus community planner of Greenwhich Village. Jacobs stood by the group and lent her insights in meeting rooms and courtrooms.

Boozy is a production of an Obie award-winning theater company, Les Freres Corbusier. The full title of the play is Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses.

The title has the ironic attitude found throughout the play, which uses all manner of schtick and parody. The top irony was that the play opened at the Ohio Theater, one of the buildings that was to be cleared away by the Soho Expressway.

Today the neighborhood Moses threatened is protected as the Soho Cast Iron Historic District. It contains the best collection of buildings from the brief golden age of a transformative era in American architecture. It preceded the muscular era of reinforced concrete and steel that followed when builders would become capable of piercing the sky, spanning a river, or crisscrossing a city with an expressway.

For much of the 20th century, urban planning was practiced in New York on wholly undemocratic principles. One unelected public official could flex his politically juiced muscles and whole communities of people would be dispersed to allow his rivers of concrete to pour.

The neighborhood with the quaint façades was not turned into an expressway after all. Seeing Boozy reminds me that it took tough community action to save the legacies we enjoy today.

Open Air Art #5: At the Unfurling of the Gates

It is Saturday morning in Central Park. Like many others, I am tantalizingly drawn here for the unfurling of The Gates. Some of us are at the trail by the frozen lake near 77th Street when we see about a half-dozen gray-vested volunteers arriving. We gather around as one volunteer lifts a pole to hook the orange nylon loop hanging from one of the gates. With a pull of the ribbon, a pleated nylon curtain is unfurled, the first we’ve seen this morning. Some people clap, one small girl squeals in delight. As the morning moves on, a hundred gates are unfurled and then a thousand. Helicopters are buzzing above but there no announcements; no other sounds except a city park’s cold breeze and the mingled voices of conversations.

As the unfurling proceeds, I begin to gain a feeling of the scope of the artist’s vision now that I can move around in it. The span of gates proportionately fills the scale of this generous swath of natural landscape within its global city. Elegantly conceived and simple to the eye, gate after gate is unfurled and the installation begins to exert its force of connectiveness within the park

I stop at a bench and take in some of the particulars. The installation does not seem to stand still. Within each vibrantly colored vinyl frame an atmospheric performance is taking place: the pleated nylon curtain will hang still momentarily, then breezily float or billow in an updraft, partially lit by fleeting sunlight.

I sense a feeling that this show is meant to be enjoyed right now. Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s vision and execution and New York’s accommodation have combined for a fully successful art-happening. Any questions about artistic pretensions, city precedents, aesthetic intentions, revenue generators, etcetera, seem like just a lot of talk.

For me, it feels unusual in today’s corporate era to be granted this simple freedom to contemplate an artist’s efforts completely unstuck from any hint of commercialism or outside promotion. I am reminded of when I visited Portugal in 2003 and saw the astonishing display of ancient petrographic art in the Coa Valley. Obviously, there was no commercial intent when those rock outcroppings were etched so beautifully with their images of animals and symbols.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are demonstrating that public space, even at one of the world’s busiest crossroads, is yet to be considered for purely artistic visioning and expression. In 1981, New York cited the fear of precedent in denying approval for the original Gates proposal. That finding is now completely turned over. The Gates can be viewed in context to its antecedents, reaching all the way back to the post Ice Age.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with their thirty-plus years of experience, probably intuited precisely how long this installation could retain its stimulating sense as an art-happening event. Its brevity is part of its art. The Gates will be in Central Park for 16 days and then removed and recycled, as if plowed back into the earth, insuring that its lasting images will be unfazed from time and familiarity. The Gates will retain much from its first impressions, never needing repair or restoration.

Open Air Art #4: Hoisting the gates

On Wednesday the air was smooth and cool in Central Park, not quite holding back the rain which fell in a light sprinkle. I did my warm-ups by a gnarly tree by the reservoir, pushing against the trunk to stretch my Achilles, propping my foot on the bumpy knothole for my hamstring.

The workers in gray vests were midway through the chore of hoisting the gates for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation. They seemed to outnumber the regular park users, the dog walkers and strollers, cell phoning wanderers, and people in running clothes like me.

In the distance, groups of unfurled gates snaked through the hills, partially obscured by bare branches. Christo had originally requested a fall schedule for the installation, but in the leafless winter season much more can be taken in with a single glance.

Three workers guided a hand-trolley carrying 10 or so vinyl gates. An electric cart, with a couple of supervisors doing the rounds, cruised by the opposite direction. I started my run along the roads and trails from the reservoir to below Sheep Meadow, witnessing different stages of the installation along the way.

In one area, I saw two workers tilt the steel bases with a heavy steel bar and remove the flat plastic safety triangles. The bases were brought into the park by loaders last month, and the triangles were put at both ends, 30,000 triangles in all. It’s difficult not to think about this event alongside its big record-breaking numbers: the millions of pounds of steel, the million yards of fabric, the tens of millions of dollars of costs and so forth. One Central Park Conservatory board member compared The Gates to Haley’s comet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an artwork compared to a celestial object before.

Recently, I read an online interview with the sculptor Richard Serra where he spoke about his experience with open air artwork. “If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused,” Serra said, “but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.”

In an area where none of the workers had yet been, I glimpsed at one base covered with colored chalk as I ran by. It looked like the artwork of a small child who was granted permission by an adult caretaker. It was surprising, after having passed hundreds of gray steel bases, to come across this brightly colored one. A sculpture in a museum doesn’t get used as a child’s chalkboard like that.

If I understand Serra, the public’s evaluation of this artwork will come in the way people walk through and around it or see it from the roof of the Metropolitan or a mid-town hotel window. The child with the colored chalk was a preliminary acknowledger of sorts, had made an initial, visible comment with no reference to the bigness of this artwork, no reference to the stupendous feat it represents for the artist and the city. Others will be confronting it in their own ways after it is unfurled tomorrow. Running through the park this week, I felt like a hidden dimension of the artwork was beginning to take shape. The Gates was going up in Central Park. It was coming out in the open air.

Open Air Art #3: Intuitively Creative Thinking and Central Park

Christo and Jean-Claude seem to embrace the concept of their installation as a sort of performance piece: here today and gone tomorrow. In the New York Times last Saturday, Jean-Claude was probably wise to discuss its meaning in purely Sienfeldian terms: “What is it for? It’s for nothing. It’s only a work of art. Nothing more,” she said.

A city is the combined energy of the many. In New York, energy is generated from an unfathomable depth of creative and entrepreneurial activities. Examples of intuitively creative thinking might be media heralded, like Christo and Jean-Claude. Or it might not be perceived as coming from the same wellspring as the artistic class. For example, in the 1980s, intuitively creative thinking resurrected a dying Central Park. Unlike the ephemeral installation we will be enjoying next week, the park advocates of the 1980s created something deeply purposeful and lasting.

Central Park is the gem of New York City not only because of its size but also because of its centrality. If it was being planned with today’s public review processes, traffic engineers would warn us of terrible gridlock to come from such centrality. Yet, today there are only five transverse streets along the seven-mile length of Central Park, and, in my experience, the buses seem to glide through the park at all hours without a traffic jam. Central Park seems to fit in place like a diamond in a Tiffany setting.

Central Park is shaped in a rectangle proportionate to the shape of Manhattan island itself. It’s a walkable distance from a wide range of neighborhoods. For example, from my home in Yorkville near 1st Avenue, it’s a brisk walk to the E. 85th St. entry. If someone living near Times Square, another person near Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and I all walked to Central Park at the same time, we’d each arrive at the same park in about 10 minutes, in spite of coming from neighborhoods that are miles apart. It’s open space that feels like it’s a part of the city, not an escape from the city.

Today, I rode through Central Park on the 96th St. cross-town bus. From the window, I saw what looked like orange football goalposts lined up in the melting patches of snow. Christo’s and Jean-Claude’s crew of workers had begun raising the gates which will be unfurled at week’s end.

Christo’s and Jean-Claude’s full name for their installation is The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979-2005. This 26-year period marks the span of time from when they proposed the project to when it will finally come to exist. However, the full title shouldn’t be mistaken as a tale about the slow wheels of government and the persistence of visionary art. Instead, it is homage to the fact that in 26 years Central Park was reborn.

Back in 1980, Central Park was in no shape to be turned over to Christo and Jean-Claude. Central Park had gone to seed. Its bridges and fountains were defaced and in disrepair, its landscaping and trails wasted from neglect.

Fortunately, park advocates had their priorities straight. Mounting an audacious art installation was not an idea whose time had come. When the City rejected the request to build The Gates in 1981, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis concluded in his report that it was “in the wrong place…at the wrong time…and in the wrong scale.”

In 1980, the Central Park Conservancy was formed. Over the years came the fundraising and rehabilitation. First things first required focusing on the resodding of the lawns, repairing the fountains, and thousands of other tasks. Piece by piece, the park was returned from ruin to a new splendor.

In 2003, in the Wall St. Journal, Gordon Davis praised the first Central Park administrator, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and the first chairman of the Central Park Conservancy Bill Beinecke as key figures in the park’s resurrection.

It was a good, quick ride through the park on the 96th St. bus today. Christo and Jean-Claude have done their tasks well, and their crews are raising the gates as planned. The work-of-art-in-progress is in its final stage. For the rest of us, all we’ll have to do is come out and enjoy it. As Jean-Claude said, “It’s only a work of art. Nothing more.”

It is a paradox of sorts, but by pushing forward with the singular intuitive vision to fully restore these acres of open space, the park’s advocates helped release the spirits of urban revitalization that today can be felt in every corner of the city.