[Continued from yesterday’s Part 5 and the preceding Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.]
By: David A. Smith
Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt. – Phaedrus.
As we’ve seen in the preceding parts, once the Puerto Ricans had been cleared out of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) in 1967, the site had become a political vacuum that many constituencies sought to fill with their own vision of what it should be, and for whom. This was a moving target, because as the decades passed, the neighborhood changed from liability to asset; the resident population diversified beyond anybody’s imagining, and the symbolism of ‘affordable housing’ changed from ‘the worst of public housing’ to ‘middle-class people trying to stay in gentrifying Manhattan’.
The most valuable parking lots in Manhattan? The SPURA site, probably 2005 or so
Sources used in this post
New York Times (March 23, 2014): the story damning Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Silver
New York Times (September 25, 2013; green font): Mr. Rapfogel’s indictment
New York Times (September 17, 2013; blue font): Announcement of development
New York Times Letter to the Editor, November 29, 1989; red font); Local opposition
A beloved neighborhood amenity? The Essex Street Retail market
Those pressures, and the facilitation referenced in yesterday’s Part 4, led in October, 2012 to “a unanimous vote 47 years in the making”, which then led to a development tender and a winning bidder, as reported in the New York Times (September 17, 2013; blue font):
After a three-year effort to forge a compromise, the Bloomberg administration plans to announce on Wednesday that it has selected developers to erect a complex called Essex Crossing at the location, long known as the Seward Park urban renewal area. The development would include retail markets, restaurants, office space, a movie theater, parks, an Andy Warhol Museum and 1,000 apartments. Half of the apartments would be for low-, moderate- and middle-income families.
The expanded and evolving conception of affordable housing changed from concrete shoeboxes for the indolent featherbedding on welfare, but havens of urban accessibility for the middle-income.
Sheldon Silver, 2008
Designed by SHoP Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle, the glassy, six-acre complex would be built over the next decade by a consortium on nine city-owned lots in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that was once home to working-class Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans and Ukrainians.
As a result, affordable housing evolved from political pariah to political prize
Mr. Silver gave the guidelines his blessing.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” – John Maynard Keynes.
Longtime advocates went along, seeing a portion of something as better than all of nothing.
Perhaps they too had migrated up the income pyramid.
To reach this point, the administration engaged in an unprecedented collaboration with the local community board and a task force starting in 2008.
It says something about the death of as-of-right zoning that the property approval process took ‘only’ five years.
Wouldn’t want to make a mistake
During the recession, late in 2008, Dominic Berg, then the chairman of Community Board 3, convened a committee to try to reach a consensus. “People were tired of looking at empty lots,” Mr. Berg said.
Changing faces of a neighborhood: Mr. Berg, his partner Daniel Pisciotta, and their children
At the same time, Madelyn Wils and David Quart, executive vice presidents at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, also began working on creating a ground-up development plan for the largest city-owned site below 96th Street. Her bosses were skeptical, but gave them the go-ahead.
Where there’s a Wils there’s a way
If Essex Crossing is built, it would also represent the culmination of compromises by various factions in the neighborhood and by the city itself.
Edward Delgado, who was a teenager in 1967 when his family was forced to relocate, said he had always wanted housing for families of limited and modest means built on the site. “We had to go along with 50 percent affordable and 50 percent market-rate,” he said, “or we would’ve had another 50 years of empty lots.”
Eventually the parties did find a compromise, as to use and as to income levels.
The income mix, rendered graphically
(by an opponent of including market-rate housing)
Both sides drew representatives of disparate neighborhood groups to come up with a set of development principles, which eventually included mixed-income housing, an emphasis on artisanal retail rather than big-box stores, office space that included incubators for budding entrepreneurs, parks and a new Essex Street Market that would still have vendors that provided goods for many of the low-income residents of the neighborhood.
But they did not reach a consensus until after John Shapiro, chairman of the Center for Planning and the Environment at the Pratt Institute, conducted private sessions in which proponents of opposing visions, who had never sat at the same table, were asked for solutions that everyone could live with.
Mr. Shapiro (center) at an AIA panel on public spaces
“One thing that made this so hard,” Mr. Shapiro said, “is that all the players around the table wanted assurances that if they agreed to something, the terms of the deal would not change 5 or 10 years down the line.”
That’s perfectly reasonable, given the Atlantic Yards experience. That gives rise to the need for community legitimacy:
Developers bidding for the Seward Park site were required to team up with a local nonprofit. Mr. Ratner chose Mr. Rapfogel’s Met Council.
Friends help friends – and in any case, friends in helpful positions (as the Met Council undoubtedly was) are the best friends to have.
As the process was nearing a close last year, Mr. Rapfogel was arrested.
A man who knows his life will never be the same
Mr. Rapfogel has been indicted, we note, for personal crimes that are not yet connected to any political machinations regarding real estate development. From the New York Times (September 25, 2013; green font):
Shortly after William E. Rapfogel became the leader of one of New York City’s most influential social service organizations in 1992, prosecutors say, he began to steal.
He received envelope after envelope, stuffed with skimmed cash kickbacks, according to a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday. Also cited were a $27,000 check written to a contractor working on his apartment, roughly $100,000 to help his son buy a home, and a campaign finance scheme that manipulated the city’s matching-funds formula, fraudulently increasing campaign contributions to favored city politicians who provided government grants to his organization.
“It’s always sad and shocking when we discover that someone used a charity as their own personal piggy bank — but even more so when that scheme involves someone well respected in government and his community,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a news release announcing the charges.
“One must be honest even with evil, there is no other good course”—Jorn the Apostle, in Cities in Flight¸ page 546.
All right, Devil, you’re going to help me build a church
I just hope that with Mr. Rapfogel, unlike Michael McLaughlin, it is not falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus. (But I fear the worst for him.)
Meanwhile, as reported in the New York Times, September 24, 2013:
On Sept. 18, another bidder was selected.
The change of bidder apparently made no difference to the eventual affordability mix.
In announcing the new plan, the city said priority would be given to some of the mostly Puerto Rican families displaced four decades ago. Construction is expected to begin next year.
The redevelopment would tap into the past by giving priority to some of the 2,000, largely Puerto Rican families displaced four decades ago, and into the future by creating a neighborhood hub with badly needed housing, small-scale retail and office space for tech companies and budding entrepreneurs.
Four and a half decades too late, the Puerto Ricans are acknowledged as equal denizens of the Lower East Side.
Mr. Delgado says he has kept in touch with some former neighborhood occupants, and though most are scattered apart and elderly, he hopes their children will have a chance to return.
Mr. Silver has steadfastly stood by Judy Rapfogel. But as to his long alliance with Mr. Rapfogel, that is done. “Let’s be clear,” he said in a recent interview, “I have nothing to do with Willie Rapfogel.”
Was it all a political plot? Or was it the unintended demilitarized zone of a five-decade fight about cities and neighborhoods and ethnicity and income mixing, all personified by visions of housing alternatives?
Mr. Koch is dead.
Okay, so I’m dead … but how’m I doing?
Mr. Rapfogel is indicted.
A tragic face: Mr. Rapfogel at his arraignment
Mr. Silver still reigns in Albany … but for how much longer?
Uneasy sits the head? Mr. Silver in Albany