Takes One To Know One

For further proof that all real estate developers want to do is pave the world, see the most recent report from Columbia University's Center for Urban Real Estate. In it, the center recommends connecting Lower Manhattan with Governors Island, the former military base that the city has niftily turned into an outdoor and arts destination, by putting 23 million cubic yards of landfill in the city's harbor and creating a new neighborhood called, of all things, "LoLo." Disrupt the harbor, create mammoth but perhaps ultimately solvable infrastructure problems, spend billions planning for this? Why not? It will create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion of tax revenue for the city.

Now let's assume that these two projections are correct -- even though in the great tradition of consultants they rarely are -- and this new connection solves all of New York's looming demographic, development and fiscal problems in one decades-long swoop. Everything else about is totally ridiculous: When perhaps the greatest problem facing the urban built environment in the early 21st century is the effect of climate change and rising seas on massive coastal populations, this idea decides to place hundreds of thousands more people at very close to, if not below, sea level. In addition, it promises to disturb coastal tides and marine wildlife for generations, when they're already likely to be warped by climate change. Most absurdly, the same center, according to the Times' report, has found that there are four billion square feet of unused development rights in New York, 765 million of which are in Manhattan! If the city were to effectively encourage redevelopment of the land it already has, the 88 million that would come from an environmental wreck would be irrelevant.

When Robert Moses is remembered wistfully, it's for all that he did -- new state parks, highways, bridges, housing, etc -- in the span of about 40 years. He had visions and executed them, which is very difficult to do now that every proposal, no matter how modest it seems, has an abutters' lawsuit following right behind it. The Center for Urban Real Estate's proposal is the most spectacular version of Moses-like thinking I've seen in awhile. Grand and bold, it promises something different. But it's a different kind of utopia, geared toward development rights, not the higher kind of living that Howard, Le Corbusier and many others all dreamed of (and didn't realize). Speed is also falsely alluring: Often enough, there are good reasons why the government shouldn't be able to embark on 10 new highways or a massive landfill project to connect two islands and finish it within five years. China might be able to build an entirely new subway system for Beijing in several years while New York takes decades to create a line for Second Avenue, as Thomas Friedman often likes to remind us, but then again, to oppose such a project in Beijing could also likely land you in jail.

The development opportunities that New York needs are much more likely to be latent in its existing landmass than in new landfill. They need creativity and patience to access, not lots of new permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. Maybe I'm being damagingly simplistic here and sure, it's very worthwhile to think boldly. But doesn't this contradict everything we've learned over the past 50 years about what comprises sensitive, reasonable and successful approaches to development, planning and politics?