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Posted by
Gold_12TH
on Fri Nov 25 00:19:46 2011
edf40wrjww2msgDetail:detailStr fiogf49gjkf0d Visions of a Development Rising From the Sea
The Center for Urban Real Estate says that connecting Lower Manhattan and Governors Island would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the city.
New Yorkers are fond, perhaps overly so, of assembling ever-creative names for newly hot neighborhoods, from NoMad (north of Madison Square Park) to SoBro (the South Bronx) to BoCoCa (Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens).
Now comes LoLo — perhaps the most far-fetched name of all, given that the neighborhood does not actually exist.
LoLo, which stands for Lower Lower Manhattan, is one of the first proposals from the Center for Urban Real Estate, a new research group at Columbia University. The neighborhood would be created by connecting Lower Manhattan and Governors Island with millions of cubic yards of landfill, similar to how Battery Park City was born in the 1970s. Over 20 to 30 years, the center estimates, LoLo would create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion in revenue for the city.
It may be an impossible project, because there are strict regulations on building with landfill. Governors Island has also become a popular destination for recreation and arts events. But the project is the kind of big thinking that New York needs, said Vishaan Chakrabarti, the director of the center and the Marc Holliday associate professor of real estate development at Columbia.
One of the center’s other projects is examining how New York can nurture development by altering zoning regulations. There are nearly four billion square feet of unused development rights in the city, the center says, with more than 765 million square feet in Manhattan alone.
The most common method for developers to create more space is to buy so-called air rights, or the right to build vertically, from adjacent buildings. The center suggests relaxing the city’s zoning rules so that developers can buy air rights from any property owner in the same zoning district rather than limiting them to adjacent plots.
This was the strategy behind the rezoning of the High Line district, which Mr. Chakrabarti helped lead when he was the director of the Manhattan office for the Department of City Planning. Developers in that area have been able to buy air rights from property owners in the neighborhood, regardless of whether the lot was adjacent.
“I believe in the free market,” Mr. Chakrabarti said. “When there is a limited pool of buyers, owners jack up their prices. But if there is a fluid market, the price for air rights will become a more clearly defined thing. It has worked beautifully at the High Line, far beyond our wildest dreams.”
The Center for Urban Real Estate was established this fall at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. In addition to Mr. Chakrabarti, the group has one full-time faculty member and a full-time researcher, and adjunct faculty also participate. It is financed by the Carnegie Corporation and the Open Society Foundations, and also receives financing from the school of architecture. The Durst Organization, which recently gave $4 million to the graduate school and its architecture library, is also financing an annual event where the center will present research.
Before he joined Columbia in 2009, Mr. Chakrabarti was an executive vice president at the Related Companies, the large developer, where he helped oversee the Hudson Yards project and the redevelopment of Moynihan Station. He still serves as a consultant to the company and continues to advise on the projects.
The Center for Urban Real Estate is also beginning work on a report, to be called NYC2040, that will examine New York’s development 30 years out, including broad public policy suggestions and environmental issues. The center hopes to publish preliminary findings in the spring and release a full report in the summer.
As for Governors Island, Mr. Chakrabarti presented some parts of the proposal at a meeting held by the Municipal Arts Society this fall. A full version of the report was unveiled last week at a daylong conference, “Zoning the City,” held by the Department of City Planning.
Mr. Chakrabarti has not yet met with city officials to push them on the LoLo proposal. He says he realizes that it is “an enormous project” that would need a lengthy environmental impact statement as well as regulatory changes.
Despite these challenges, he said it would not be different from the rezoning and development of Hudson Yards and the extension of the No. 7 subway line. Both of those projects went through extensive review processes. They will also take decades to complete and will cost the city billions of dollars.
The center is proposing a 92-acre national historic district on the island, 3.9 million square feet for public buildings like schools and 270 acres of open space. The revenue generated by the development would also pay for the extension of the No. 1 and 6 subway lines to the new neighborhood and for a bridge from Red Hook in Brooklyn.
Robert Pirani, the executive director of the Governors Island Alliance, a civic coalition led by the Regional Plan Association, said he had yet to see the full plan. But when it was described to him, Mr. Pirani questioned whether a land bridge connecting Manhattan to Governors Island would spur development. “The ferry is only eight minutes from Manhattan and relatively cheap to operate,” he said. “So in my mind, the distance from Manhattan isn’t the impediment to development.”
Instead, he said: “The city needs to build better infrastructure on the island, like potable water and public transit so that it can be treated like any other development site rather than an amorphous unknown. Developers want certainty, and that is the missing piece.”
The center also proposes using landfill to create barrier islands in the harbor that would help protect against storm surges, and it proposes removing the existing sea walls around Governors Island and replacing them with so-called soft edges, marshy land that scientists say can better absorb the impact of a storm.
The landfill would come from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is dredging New York Harbor to maintain and deepen shipping channels. Over the next 55 years, the corps is expected to dredge 180 million cubic yards of material, with the vast majority winding up in landfills and abandoned mines across the country.
Before the current regulations for building on top of landfill, the method was often used to expand the city’s footprint, including for Battery Park City, part of which is built on the dirt from the original World Trade Center. It is a popular strategy in other cities around the world. About 250 million cubic yards of landfill was used to create the Hong Kong airport and 6.65 billion cubic yards to create land in Tokyo Bay. The Governors Island proposal is much more modest, using approximately 23 million cubic yards, according to the study.
“Vishaan is thinking globally,” said Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Arts Society of New York, who has seen the Governors Island proposal, “and is unabashed about looking at the kind of things that will move regions like ours forward.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 24, 2011
An article on the Square Feet page on Wednesday about a proposal from a Columbia University research group to link Governors Island to Lower Manhattan with a land bridge referred incorrectly to the source of landfill that created Battery Park City. Twenty-four acres of the project were filled with material excavated during construction of the World Trade Center some 40 years ago — not all 92 acres.
Source: NY Times
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