The Battle for Gotham (36 page)

Now, Portland has an expanding twenty-mile network of bike boulevards, and a growing number of custom-made bike builders. These are the import replacements Jacobs cited as crucial to expanding a local economy. An estimated 10 small shops produce high-end handmade bikes, and approximately 125 bike-related businesses produce racks, components for manufacturers, and clothes. Bike sales and bike tourism keep growing as the city increases bike lanes and bike-friendly amenities. A cycling industry and its offshoots now account for an annual one hundred million dollars and a thousand jobs in the local economy. Ten years ago, a small number of those employees were working for retailers selling mass-produced bikes—the imports in the process Jacobs described.

The public health- and environment-minded city government recognized an emerging new industrial sector. Now it is working with the small number of bike builders to improve business and accounting skills as well as hosting handmade bicycle trade shows. This is government at its best, nurturing spontaneous and genuine economic development. Often, assisting small businesses in marketing, accounting, and joint advertising is more beneficial than tax breaks or incentives. For genuine economic growth, nurturing the homegrown business beats luring the mature one from elsewhere with tax breaks and other expensive incentives.

Unplanned economic growth has occurred in New York City over the years, but in most cases that growth has been nurtured by not-for-profit developers or under-the-radar small entrepreneurs, especially in the furniture-making industry.
²¹
The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center started by David Sweeney, for example, rehabilitated five vacant North Brooklyn buildings containing five hundred thousand square feet, creating space for more than a hundred firms. Officially, this spontaneous new growth has been handicapped at best and stifled at worst.

OFFICIAL LOGIC IS ELUSIVE

The current official approach to industrial districts in New York is schizophrenic. Officials go through the motions of protecting them, and then undermine them with erroneous planning and zoning policies. On the one hand, for example, the mayor created the Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses and charged it with creating sixteen special Industrial Business Zones offering industries additional services but no legal zoning protection. Zoning in manufacturing districts still allows hotels and big boxes that erode needed space. Land values escalate because of proximity to new residential and commercial development that the upzoning encourages. Industry continues to be priced out. Incentives are available to relocate into an industrial zone but not to survive if you are already there.

A 2008 study revealed that big boxes are like big vacuums, sucking up local retail dollars and sending them to home offices out of the city.
²²
In addition, they are huge automobile and truck traffic generators, low-wage job creators, and magnets for more vehicular-dependent businesses. In manufacturing districts, they squeeze out industry. Take, for example, the city-approved—actually encouraged and subsidized—Ikea superstore, the largest in the country, on Brooklyn’s waterfront in Red Hook.
²³
Why, one might ask, would the city want to encourage a mile-long site with spectacular harbor views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan to be given over to a windowless superstore surrounded by parking?
²⁴
But that is the least of questionable notions apparent in this project.

Peninsula-shaped Red Hook once formed the heart of Brooklyn’s rough-and-tumble working waterfront with multiple cargo piers, location for the immortal film,
On the Waterfront
(actually filmed in Hoboken). Here is the Erie Basin, the southern terminus of the Erie Canal, and the reason for its vibrant shipping history. In the 1930s, bustling streets and solid housing were cleared to build the Red Hook Houses, a twenty-eight-building public housing complex with 8,000 residents, the city’s biggest and most insular. A combination of two- and six-story redbrick buildings, this was the country’s first high-density public housing and Brooklyn’s largest. Another eighty acres were cleared for an enormous containerport. But after many buildings were demolished and businesses displaced, the project was considerably downsized and land left vacant. To accelerate the area’s demise, also under the direction of Robert Moses, the Gowanus Parkway was built on the pillars of the former elevated BMT subway line, bisecting South Brooklyn along Third Avenue. The once job-rich waterfront was cut off from the upland neighborhoods and the rest of the borough. More than 1,300 families and 100 businesses were erased and the area sent into a permanent downward spiral.

After the war, federally subsidized mortgages and the new suburbs did the rest to undermine Red Hook. The 1990 census showed 11,000 people living where 22,000 lived in 1950. Most of them were then and still are on public assistance. Containerization and the Port Authority’s shifting of waterfront work to New Jersey accelerated the decline. The most imaginative idea city planners could come up with for this view-rich acreage of waterfront was luxury high-rises with ferry access to Manhattan so residents didn’t have to pass through the rough neighborhood.

While city planners plotted rezoning scenarios, one man had a different vision. Greg O’Connell, a former cop, started buying Civil War-era warehouses on abandoned piers in the late 1980s. He renovated and slowly converted them for small businesses hungry for the space. Rejected for financing by banks and with no public money and, in fact, in the face of official government skepticism, O’Connell single-handedly proved experts wrong. More than 120 businesses and 1,250 jobs occupy O’Connell’s seven buildings, everything from a glassworks to a music set-making studio.

I first encountered O’Connell in the 1990s while researching
Cities Back from the Edge
, and I included the beginning of his story in that 1998 book. But O’Connell, probably the star example of the civic-minded developer, was really just beginning then. He had transformed only the first warehouse, a nineteenth-century massive brick structure with heavy timber frames, some with terra-cotta arches. Subsequently, he renovated more waterfront warehouses and other spaces, gave free space to community groups and community activities, built a public park and walkways along the water using all recycled materials and solar night-lights, and renovated neglected inland residential properties for affordable housing.

Slowly, officials and the public took notice. Artists were moving into Red Hook, priced out of the string of earlier successful artist neighborhoods. Then O’Connell redeveloped a former warehouse for the city’s premier fresh food market, Fairway, founded on the Upper West Side in the 1940s. The plan was both brilliant and community sensitive: supermarket on the first floor, prepared-food operations with jobs for local residents on the second floor, and live-work spaces on two floors above. And since Red Hook is nowhere near a subway stop and is served poorly by bus service, Fairway—at O’Connell’s insistence—developed a shuttle bus going to the public housing where few residents had cars. The city has since improved regular bus service, and a water taxi stops at its waterfront entrance.

By then, it was all over for Red Hook as a fairly priced, remote outpost of the city. Red Hook was on the map. Ikea landed the next choice site. But a very significant and historic business remained on this twenty-two-acre site—a Civil War-era graving dock, one of the few working graving docks left in New York Harbor. Graving docks are used for ship repair and are based on relatively simple technology—a ship floats in, a door closes behind it, and the water is pumped out, leaving the hull exposed for repair. Red Hook’s dock was in continuous use from 1866 until evicted by Ikea. In fact, it was where the city’s own sanitation and sludge-removing vessels were repaired and one uniquely large enough to handle a 750-foot vessel where others can’t.

Ikea went through the motion—pro forma, of course, for every new development—of promising jobs, “500 or 600” of them, none of which would be promised for local residents. Understandably, even the remote prospect of jobs was enough of an enticement to excite the local job-seeking population.

Now this was curious. This 346,000-square foot facility would be Ikea’s largest in the country. But the 311,000-square-foot Ikea in New Haven, Connecticut, has only 350 employees. Why the Brooklyn store would need 50 percent more than that number of employees is inexplicable indeed. (Ikea refuses to disclose the actual number of jobs created and how many are local.) Nearby neighborhood businesses see the Ikea traffic go by, but none of it also comes to them.

Speaking of jobs. The graving dock had 100 well-paying skilled jobs with additional ones added when a supersize ship repair came in. Apart from their own inherent value and higher pay scale, these kind of jobs are better than retail jobs as an economic multiplier for goods and services in the community. Certainly, no economic growth will emerge from Ikea, no innovations or new work. That all happened years ago in Sweden, Ikea’s home country. Instead, what is emerging is more big box development nearby where a fabulous old manufacturing building sits. It will probably be demolished instead of creatively reused.

So first we have a spectacular waterfront site given over to a big box. Then we have a singular and significant operating business displaced. Then we lose 100 solid skilled jobs. But there is more, much more.

The graving dock is paved over for a 1,400 car parking lot
even though
two alternative designs showed how Ikea could have the same parking lot just as conveniently on the store’s other side, sparing the graving dock. This parking supplements generous parking under the building. Here is yet another classic example of where the city could have had both,
not
either-or, but both big box
and
big boats. Officials chose not to force Ikea to move the parking lot to achieve both. As of April 2009, the parking lot has been full twice!
²⁵
Most weekdays it is completely empty.

Also on the site were two significant rows of historic redbrick warehouse buildings, of the same Civil War vintage as the O’Connell buildings and several designated city landmarks elsewhere on the Brooklyn waterfront. In these buildings could have been the kind of innovative new businesses incubated in O’Connell’s buildings and more economically beneficial.

That the graving dock was of great local and national historical significance apparently made no difference to city officials who treat preservation lightly. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Preservation League of New York State, the city’s Municipal Art Society, and other similarly prestigious organizations appealed to city officials to intervene but were ignored. In fact, it was pointed out that the whole Ikea project was contrary to the Planning Department’s own 1992 Waterfront Plan for the site, which strongly called for this piece of the waterfront to remain zoned and dedicated to continued maritime activity. Public access and commercial activity were to happen in other areas of the peninsula, including where Fairway opened. So much for official “plans” and officially protected economic uses.

All this comes while the city is expanding its use of the waterways for commuting, commerce, garbage transport, ocean liners, and park development. Where will the ferries, tugs, passenger ships, and other vessels be maintained and repaired? The city is reportedly investing a half-billion dollars for new passenger ship terminals, ferry landings, and transfer stations, yet eliminated a functioning graving dock. In fact, now the city is reportedly looking to create three new graving docks.
²⁶
Where is the logic in that? A Maritime Support Services Location Study, begun in the summer of 2006 by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, noted that the “port has experienced a resurgence in waterborne transportation” and a considerable increase in the barge and tugboat fleets in recent years.

So many of these development conflicts are presented erroneously as either-or, take-it-or-leave-it proposals. Invariably, alternatives offered by the public make possible a better combination. But without pressure from city officials or the city council that rubber-stamps these Planning Commission approvals, Ikea and all developers hold fast. The fallacy of designating protection zones while destroying viable places has never been satisfactorily explained. “Conformity and monotony, even when they are embellished with a froth of novelty, are not attributes of developing and economically vigorous cities,” Jacobs wrote. “They are attributes of stagnant settlements.”

In the press, the favorite themes are jobs versus home owners, gentrifiers versus the poor, affordable housing versus historic preservation, all individually legitimate issues made out to look like they are in intractable conflict, a competition among worthy values. These are easy, formulaic interpretations that include some truths but miss the bigger picture, the picture that illustrates the potential for balance that achieves multiple goals, not just blind development goals. Ironically, this comes at a time when new fields for innovation are clear and in need of the space to incubate. Products and processes are in demand to address the market for green products, environmental cleanup, new sources of energy, building restoration. Space for these economic opportunities continues to diminish. Jane Jacobs foresaw this potential in 1969 at the end of
The Economy of Cities
: “In highly developed future economies, there will be more kinds of work to do than today, not fewer. And many people in great, growing cities of the future will be engaged in the unroutine business of economic trial and error. They will be faced with acute practical problems which we cannot now imagine. They will add new work to older work.”

Less and less of this is possible in New York City.