Blight is now a city planning tool

From City Journal:

In New York, this creative definition of blight is the new central-planning model. Consultants have also cited “underutilization” in West Harlem, where the city’s Economic Development Corporation wants to take land from private owners and hand it to Columbia University for an expansion project. Says Norman Siegel, who represents the owners: “A private property owner has the right to determine the best productive use of his property. It’s not a right to be ceded to any government.”

And in Queens, the Bloomberg administration is preparing a similar argument to grab swaths of Willets Point, an area adjacent to Citi Field that’s populated with auto-repair shops. The city’s recent “request for qualifications” from would-be developers drew a sharp response from the people who owned the land: “We . . . hold the most significant qualification of all: we own the properties. We are motivated to improve and use our own properties, consistent with the American free market system. We would have done so in spectacular fashion already, had the city upheld its end of the bargain by providing our neighborhood with essential services and infrastructure.” Instead, the city has done the opposite, letting streets disintegrate into ditches to bolster its blight finding. The perversity is astonishing: rather than doing its own job of maintaining public infrastructure and public safety, the government wants to do the private sector’s job—and is going about it by starving that private sector of public resources.

The Iron Man of the Iron Triangle

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From Last Exit Magazine:

Situated in the shadows of Citi Field in Queens — the home ballpark of the New York Mets — Willets Point, aka The Iron Triangle, is a series of junkyards and auto body shops that has been neglected for over 75 years by the city of New York. Though all the owners pay a hefty property tax, the local government has refused to provide adequate sewers, street lights, and sidewalks. The extreme neglect by local officials has forced the area to become a blight making it eligible for eminent domain.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has decided to move forward with its ten-year plan to buy up the entire property, whether the owners like it or not, in order to build luxury condos, a hotel, and a convention center—putting thousands of workers out of a job. Though the NYCEDC has offered educational classes, the pay rate associated with the degrees is insufficient as a replacement salary.

Joe Ardizzone was born here and remains the only resident and voting person in the district. After 76 years of residency in the house he was born in, he continues to fight for his rightful land and the lives of the surrounding workers.

Ketcham: City's Willets Point EIS and ramp study don't jibe

From Crains:

The traffic engineer who helped kill Westway, the massive West Side highway project proposed during the Koch administration, now has his sights set on derailing the city’s redevelopment of Willets Point.

Local property owners fighting the project are banking on traffic engineer Brian Ketcham’s study that shows two proposed ramps would increase traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway and have made it a key element of their lawsuit challenging the project’s environmental impact statement.

The Bloomberg administration has argued that the ramps are necessary to prevent a traffic nightmare at the site.

The original environmental impact statement, or EIS, showed the massive Willets Point project would generate heavy traffic, but a recent report on the proposed ramps showed a much sunnier picture. The ramp study—an “access modification report,” or AMR, which is technical documentation to support federal and state decisions on whether to approve the ramps—is being redone after Mr. Ketcham used traffic data from the environmental impact statement to demonstrate that the ramps would make a bad situation worse. The entire redevelopment, with 9 million buildable square feet, is projected to generate 80,000 vehicle trips daily.

“Our problem is that [the ramp study] is so incredibly different from the environmental impact statement,” Mr. Ketcham wrote in an e-mail message. “The EIS reports Willets Point will create gridlock throughout community; AMR reports free-flow traffic. An incredible contrast.”

The access modification report was submitted last summer; Mr. Ketcham noted his objections in a letter last month.

Mr. Ketcham is being paid by project opponents, but his assessment that the access modification report underestimates the traffic impact stems from common modeling software that the state Department of Transportation trusts. The opponents see the department as a potential ally because the agency cannot afford to build all the new road capacity demanded of it.

The ramps require state and federal approval, and it is possible that without the ramps, the project would not proceed. Project opponents are meeting Thursday with the Federal Highway Administration and will ask for an independent review of the ramp report that is now being revised by a private consultant on behalf of the Bloomberg administration.

“We will be submitting a revised draft in the upcoming weeks that is responsive to the comments and issues raised by state DOT and the Federal Highway Administration, as well as those from Willets Point opponents,” said David Lombino, a spokesman for the Bloomberg administration’s Economic Development Corp., the lead agency on Willets Point.

“At the very least, we have put this off by six months,” claimed Richard Lipsky, the lobbyist for the property owners’ group Willets Point United.

Why using blight for eminent domain just isn't right

From the NY Post:

New York's real blights today are government's fault -- like the old Deutsche Bank building at Ground Zero, owned by the city and state since 9/11, whose "deconstruction" is still underway.

Eminent-domain abuse is a symptom of a deeper problem: The belief that central planning is superior to free-market competition. To cure yourself of this notion, stroll around Atlantic Yards, past three-story clapboard homes nestled near corniced row houses -- "blighted" residences. You'll peer up at [Daniel] Goldstein's nearly empty apartment house, scheduled to be destroyed.

And you'll see how Ratner's wrecking balls have made the neighborhood gap-toothed. A vacant lot now sprawls where the historic Ward Bakery was.

Today, Prospect Heights displays what the state wants everyone to see: decay. But it's isn't the work of callous markets that left the neighborhood to perish. It's the work of a developer wielding state power to press property owners to sell their land "voluntarily." Meanwhile, true private investment has been choked off, since everyone knows the state's aiming to hand everything to Ratner.

Free markets aren't perfect, but they're better than the blight of arbitrary government.

"Build these ramps, and Willets Point, Corona and Flushing will get screwed."

"Build these ramps, and Willets Point, Corona and Flushing will get screwed. And, as our modeling shows, so will every motorist traveling through north central Queens." -- Brian Ketcham, Traffic Engineer

On January 27, 2010, WPU members testified in opposition to federal recertification of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC).

NYMTC recently amended the Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), to include the proposed construction of two new controversial Van Wyck Expressway access ramps. According to the City's own study, these proposed ramps will inflict severe adverse traffic impacts upon popular Queens roadways, and upon residents and commuters who rely on those roadways. WPU believes that NYMTC's amendment of the TIP to include the proposed Van Wyck ramps is an abdication of NYMTC's responsibility to ensure that transportation projects conform to accepted standards and do not harm the communities where they occur.

The New York State Department of Transportation now is considering whether or not to approve the proposed Van Wyck ramps, based upon a deficient report submitted by the New York City Economic Development Corporation which blatantly low-balls the traffic impacts, and contradicts the findings of the Environmental Impact Statement.

For in-depth information pertaining to the proposed Van Wyck access ramps, their severe adverse traffic impacts, and what you can do now to prevent their construction, visit: www.trafficnightmare.org.

Richard Lipsky:
"... the review of the ramp approval has been tainted ..."



Brian Ketcham:
"Build these ramps, and Willets Point, Corona and Flushing will get screwed."



Irene Presti:
"... a very serious error that harms the people of Queens ..."



Joseph Ardizzone:
"It's nothing but traffic gridlock."



Chris Petrizzo:
"... it's been negligently approved ..."

WPU's traffic expert to meet with DOT

From the Neighborhood Retail Alliance:

Representatives of Willets Point United-joined by traffic expert Brian Ketcham-will be meeting with the regional staff of NYSDOT today to discuss just why the group believes that the agency shouldn't approve the city's (actually EDC's) application to build ramps off of the Van Wyck Expressway. This should be quite an interesting get together.

Initially, NYSDOT had cancelled the originally scheduled meeting when it found out that representatives of state elected officials planned to attend in order to learn more about why WPU felt that the ramps were not feasible. The implication for the cancellation was that the meeting was becoming, "too political."

This is a situation that genuinely puzzled us. In close to thirty years of lobbying city and state agencies, we have never seen such skittishness about who's coming to a meeting-and the need to micromanage who should or shouldn't be there. Subsequent to the original cancellation, NYSDOT has tried to further restrict attendance-claiming that we shouldn't be there because the meeting is purely, "technical." Yet EDC, the lead political agency for the development, will be represented.

So what's motivating this need to restrict? In our view, it appears that EDC is playing an overbearing role-and if what we suspect is true, than the above board nature of the approval process is thrown into doubt. Now we know that NYSDOT doesn't have the in-house capacity to evaluate the work of URS, EDC's traffic consultants. And in the absence of that capacity, the agency is normally inclined to (relatively) uncritically accept the proffered work.

WPU has thrown the proverbial monkey wrench into the normal review process by submitting-with today's power point presentation by forty year veteran Ketcham-a detailed rebuttal to the URS assertions. And the flawed nature of the submission will be revealed in an extremely harsh light. Put simply, the traffic ramp report (AMR) so thoroughly contradicts the original traffic study done for the ULURP EIS, that the good intentions of EDC must be called into question.

Convention center questionable (aka more lies from EDC)

From the Queens Courier:

In an effort to connect with small businesses in the area, newly-elected Queens City Councilmembers recently met with members of the Queens Chamber of Commerce at the organization’s Jackson Heights headquarters.

Some of the issues they discussed included the loss of area hospitals, the Aqueduct Racino project and the possible altering of the original Willets Point revitalization project.

When the meeting touched on the Economic Development Corporation’s possible abandoning of the proposed Willets Point convention center, Councilmember Karen Koslowitz, of District 29, said that dropping that aspect in particular would be disastrous to the local economy.

“To abandon the original plan would be terrible,” said Koslowitz. “What they are doing is taking away jobs and money from us.”

As Queens Crap points out:

The entire project was based on

a) the site being too polluted to stay that way (therefore the entire thing needed to be remediated at once)
b) jobs, jobs, jobs anchored by the convention center.

Part a) was tossed out the window when they went to a phased approach and part b) is on its way out, probably because TDC doesn't think they can build a convention center or it won't be profitable enough for them.

Amazing how the city can approve one plan and then replace it with something entirely different without any elected official raising hell or an investigation being commenced. And the best part is that the City, via Claire Shulman, continues to lobby itself (as well as the state and feds which need to sign off on their disastrous Van Wyck ramp plan) with our tax money even now that we are broke with the electorate begging for crumbs.

Gotta love this city! Developers are ALWAYS the priority!

We couldn't have said it better ourselves!