Presidents Do Clemency, Bloomberg Does Legacy

[don]

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

The Bloomberg administration has been pushing through more than $12 billion worth of real estate projects in its waning days, trying to solidify the mayor’s claim to having transformed the face of New York City and lock in plans before Bill de Blasio takes over Jan. 1.

The gusher of projects recently approved or on track for approval in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s final days include an outlet mall and a giant observation wheel on Staten Island, totaling $580 million, and a relatively modest $16 million building in Manhattan with 55 experimental micro-apartments, as well as a $2 billion residential complex on the Brooklyn waterfront and the country’s largest indoor skating complex, to be built in the Bronx.

Mr. Bloomberg has sought to remake the city’s landscape for the 21st century, pushing for higher-density development and higher-quality design and opening up the city’s vast waterfront to new residential, recreational and commercial uses. Nearly 40 percent of the city has been rezoned during the mayor’s 12 years in office.

The man spearheading the efforts, the deputy mayor Robert K. Steel, and other officials have made it clear to the City Council, as well as to the real estate and construction industries, that they are determined to finish public reviews for a number of “legacy projects” before Mr. Bloomberg leaves office.

The projects, which will begin construction well after Mayor-elect de Blasio takes office in January, also bind the new mayor to the old mayor’s agenda, at least for a while. By Dec. 31, some projects, like a $1.2 billion Hudson Yards office tower and a $1.7 billion Hunter College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center complex, will have reached the point that they cannot be stopped or modified.

Others, like a soccer stadium in the Bronx, a Coney Island amphitheater and a residential complex at the former Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn, could still be halted or changed. The Domino project has won widespread support, but Mr. de Blasio has expressed “serious concerns” about a proposed $350 million soccer stadium near Yankee Stadium because the Bloomberg administration planned to provide the soccer team’s wealthy owners with public resources, including tax exemptions.

The Bloomberg administration has also granted tax breaks worth tens of millions of dollars for the first phase of the $3 billion Willets Point project in Queens, for a proposed office tower on the West Side of Manhattan and for the outlet mall on Staten Island.

Dubai does New York via Da Bloomberg

[lektrode]

Re: Presidents Do Clemency, Bloomberg Does Legacy

....

Dubai does New York via Da Bloomberg

DAMN!.... is that.... uhhh... shave-ass-walk-backwards ugly, er what...

[don]

Re: Presidents Do Clemency, Bloomberg Does Legacy

DAMN!.... is that.... uhhh... shave-ass-walk-backwards ugly, er what...

Mr. Bloomberg appreciates your comments and your support.

this is a recording . . . .

[lektrode]

Re: Presidents Do Clemency, Bloomberg Does Legacy

Mr. Bloomberg appreciates your comments and your support.

this is a recording . . . .

uh huh - and eye appreciated having him on sat nite live last night too!

[don]

Re: Presidents Do Clemency, Bloomberg Does Legacy

Jim Kunstler on His Mayorship's Goodbye . . .

The Fate of a City


I was born and raised in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan (with a brief intermezzo in the long Island Suburbs (1954 – 1957) though I have lived upstate, two hundred miles north of the city, for decades since. I go back from time to time to see publishers and get some cosmopolitan thrills. One spring morning a couple of years back, toward the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, I was walking across Central Park from my hotel on West 75th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I had an epiphany.

Which was that Central Park, and indeed much of the city, had never been in such good condition in my lifetime. The heart of New York had gone through a phenomenal restoration. When I was a child in the 1960s, districts like Tribeca, Soho, and the Bowery were the realms of winos and cockroaches. The brutes who worked in the meatpacking district had never seen a supermodel. Brooklyn was as remote and benighted as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. The Central Park Zoo was like a set from Riot in Cellblock D, and the park itself was desecrated with the aging detritus of Robert Moses’s awful experiments in chain-link fencing as a decorative motif. Then, of course, came the grafitti-plagued 1970s summed up by the infamous newspaper headline [President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.

Now, the park was sparkling. The sheep’s meadow was lovingly re-sodded, many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original structures, the dairy, the bow bridge, the Bethesda Fountain, were restored. Million dollar condos were selling on the Bowery. Where trucks once unloaded flyblown cattle carcasses was now the hangout of movie and fashion celebrities. Brooklyn was a New Jerusalem of the lively arts. And my parents could never have afforded the 2BR/2bath apartment (with working fireplace) that I grew up in on East 68^th Street.

The catch to all this was that the glorious rebirth of New York City was entirely due to the financialization of the economy. Untold billions had streamed into this special little corner of the USA since the 1980s, into the bank accounts of countless vampire squidlets engaged in the asset-stripping of the rest of the nation. So, in case you were wondering, all the wealth of places like Detroit, Akron, Peoria, Waukegan, Chattanooga, Omaha, Hartford, and scores of other towns that had been gutted and retrofitted for suburban chain-store imperialism, or served up to the racketeers of “Eds and Meds,” or just left for dead — all that action had been converted, abracadabra, into the renovation of a few square miles near the Atlantic Ocean.

Nobody in the lamebrain New York based media really understands this dynamic, nor do they have a clue what will happen next, which is that the wealth-extraction process is now complete and that New York City has moved over the top of the arc of rebirth and is now headed down a steep, nauseating slope of breakdown and deterioration, starting with the reign of soon-to-be hapless Bill de Blasio.

Mayor Bloomberg was celebrated for, among other things, stimulating a new generation of skyscraper building. There is theory which states that an empire puts up its greatest monumental buildings just before it collapses. I think it is truthful. This is what you are now going to see in New York, especially as regards the empire of Wall Street finance, which is all set to blow up. The many new skyscrapers recently constructed for the fabled “one percent”— the Frank Gehry condos and the Robert A.M. Stern hedge fund aeries — are already obsolete. The buyers don’t know it. In the new era of capital scarcity that we are entering, these giant buildings cannot be maintained (and, believe me, such structures require incessant, meticulous, and expensive upkeep). Splitting up the ownership of mega-structures into condominiums under a homeowners’ association (HOA) is an experiment that has never been tried before and now we are going to watch it fail spectacularly. All those towering monuments to the beneficent genius of Michael Bloomberg will very quickly transform from assets to liabilities.

This is only one feature of a breakdown in mega-cities that will astonish those who think the trend of hypergrowth is bound to just continue indefinitely.