Print
A New City of Towers
“In 10 years, I can’t imagine what Williamsburg-Greenpoint is going to look like,” City Council Land Use Committee Chair Melinda Katz said of the area’s rezoning the other day. But as stated in both the same front-page Times article in which Katz was quoted as well as a recent piece in the Voice, there is an obvious comparison. The area was first threatened by power plants, and now it stands to become another Battery Park City. Either way you slice it, the neighborhood’s creative energy will diminish.
Affordable housing is the project’s main selling point, and there’s been much fanfare over the possibility that 33% of the more than 10,000 slated new units would qualify as affordable. “We’re obviously pleased to see such a high number,” says Stephanie Thayer of the North Brooklyn Alliance’s Height and Bulk Committee. “But it’s important to remember that it’s all incentive-based.” Depending on the specific site, buildings could reach upwards of 33 stories without having any affordable housing at all; with it, the new buildings could reach 40 stories.
The incentives to include affordable housing apparently are so great that everyone from the mayor to housing advocates treats the 33% as the major innovation of the plan. Call me a naysayer, but I don’t believe in any deal that’s nonbinding. Jobs for the local community in the Ikea deal in Red Hook? That’s not in writing. Construction jobs for black and Latino workers in the Jets Stadium deal? Show me the fine print. And now an “irresistible set of incentives” to build (middle-class) affordable housing in Williamsburg and Greenpoint? The developers are laughing all the way to the bank.
—T. Hamm
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Spaces Together: Alternative Sites for Bay Area Arts
by Sophia WangNOV 2017 | Critics Page
I moved to the Bay Area from New York City in 2000, and went straight to the places producing underground music as entry points into arts communities where I’d feel most at home. In New York in the ‘90s, I’d found these communities at techno parties downtown, escaping the New Jersey suburb where I’d lived as a teen and the Morningside Heights dorms where I’d spent my years at Columbia.
Only Connect: A Review of Richard Walker’s Pictures of a Gone City
by Max MoorheadAPR 2018 | Field Notes
By 2100 the San Francisco International Airport will likely see half of its runways submerged in water, reports a New York Times article from March. The study referenced in the article argues that land around the Bay Area that previously had been thought to be sinking at two millimeters per year could in fact be sinking by ten millimeters.
Bay Watch: A Snapshot of the Visual Arts in the Bay Area
by Constance LewallenNOV 2017 | Editor's Message
I have observed the art scene over the many years I have lived in the Bay Area, most of the time as curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Following is a very brief overview of its modern history.
Visions of Resilience: New York City’s Infrastructural Response to Climate Change
by Max MoorheadMAR 2018 | Field Notes
When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, the storm surge rose over thirteen feet in Battery Park, breaking a record set in 1960, and the New York Stock Exchange was forced to close for two days, the longest closure due to weather since 1888.
RSS