During the past 30 years, residents of successful historic cities such as New York have lived through escalating battles over demolition of old buildings and over the scale and design of new towers in their historic core neighborhoods. Residents cry “overdevelopment.” They lament the loss of the city’s spectacular economic and social diversity, the loss of a once-dizzying array of unique small businesses, and the destruction of historic architecture that connected residents to the city’s rich past. Someone is killing the thing we love.
The real estate industry and its dependent technocrats insist that the concerns of residents are mere nostalgic nonsense. They hurl contempt at what they deem a misguided desire of an uneducated citizenry to “pre serve the city in amber.”
In New York City, residents mostly lose these battles. The industry clobbers the opposition with an embarrassingly simple playbook. First, it dangles the promise of more construction jobs and “more and higher real estate taxes.” Then it delivers the battle’s coup de grace by uttering the magic phrase “affordable housing.” At the sound of that phrase, all remaining waffling politicians miraculously fold. Lax campaign finance laws and a profitable revolving door between city hall and real estate make these industry victories laughably predictable. Politicians know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.
From my home in Lower Manhattan, I have witnessed and participated in many frontline battles about overdevelopment in all five of New York’s boroughs. During that time, I sat through over a hundred public hearings. I presented testimony in nearly as many and learned that these are not fair fights. Anyone can see that the real estate industry has mustered into permanent war footing a vast army of highly paid publicists, lobbyists, lawyers, architects, technocrats, planners, builders, dependent labor unions and even a new pretend grassroots lobby group called “Open New York.”
This real estate army demands the right to build a new city of bristling towers of immense height. They insist that their vision of a new tower city — one inspired by Dubai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore — is the only way to infinitely grow New York and make it attractive to the world’s wealthy. Towerization, they insist, is the only way to make New York City competitive in what they tell politicians is a Darwinian battle to attract corporate headquarters and, in the familiar coup de grace, the only way to make the city “affordable.” I call their towerization vision “hyper-density.” Its proponents are intent on remaking already dense New York into a city that conforms to their vision, a place akin to the Disney fantasy city depicted in the film Tomorrowland.
On the losing side of the battlefield is a disorganized array of under-funded, under-organized volunteer residents of the city’s human-scale neighborhoods. They are voters, taxpayers, renters, homeowners and lovers of New York’s uniqueness. They arrive on the field of conflict armed with little more than metaphorical pitchforks and a vague, nearly folk memory of Jane Jacobs’s fight with Robert Moses in the 1950s.
They have no staff and no money. They put together weak, volunteer-based neighborhood organizations. Tiny, understaffed, nonprofit organizations operating on minuscule budgets stand with them from time to time. The volunteer residents who respond to the call to arms for any given development fight have little time to dedicate to it. They work at other jobs and are busy paying their rents and mortgages. Many are raising kids. They do not have the budget to hire lobbyists or lawyers. Theirs is an army of Davids without the means or time to play the long game against a well- funded, patient Goliath.
Nevertheless, even though they keep losing, New York residents show up for these battles in the hundreds. They love their historic and human-scaled city and want to protect it. They pay taxes, vote, join local political clubs, clean up their parks, plant tulips, and are appalled at the spectacle of corruption around real estate fights, corruption they only find out about too late. They are good people. They raise their kids in the urban world and worry about public schools. They want their children to grow up in the city and make their future homes in the city that they know and love — and fear losing to irrational overdevelopment. Few have country homes to escape to. They are not the wealthy elite of the city.
The real estate lobby likes to portray these New Yorkers as narrow-minded, greedy homeowners obsessively trying to raise and protect their property values. That insulting narrative is so prevalent that public hearings have lost their link to a democratic process and have become pointless theater: The politicians are either absent or don’t even pretend to listen as they text away on smartphones behind their protected tables during the proceedings, clearly conducting more pressing business. But residents stick it out, waiting patiently, often for many hours, for their turn to speak for their legally allotted two minutes, to speak to an empty council or hearing chamber. Newcomers to these fights imagine idealistically that someone is listening. More experienced hands are resigned to speak their bit to some future historian who might listen to the archived recordings of the hearings.
The sad truth is that New Yorkers have never been more marginalized in city politics — and incorrectly and insultingly — dismissed as NIMBYs (“Not In My Backyard”) and categorized as selfish obstructionists who do not understand the greater good that the real estate industry is fostering upon the city. To anyone who pays close attention, the accusation is absurdly false. In fact, the solutions residents offer to the city’s problems are often clever, considered and better than the plans the real estate developers offer or the feeble, superficial compromises that the politicians devise.
Residents in New York City favoring a human-scaled vision of development rarely reject new construction. Instead, they seek a human-scaled, incremental build-out of the city, inspired by the great examples of the vast, dense, four- to eight-story historic neighborhoods they have seen in Paris, Barcelona, the Edwardian parts of London and in their own historic neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, SoHo, Park Slope, Inwood or the Lower East Side.
They want their city to support the thriving of ordinary residents. They understand that thriving depends on the presence of a great public realm of schools and parks and swimming pools and a great subway system. Their vision includes places that support children, small businesses, plants, and animals. It is the very opposite of the towerized hyper-dense proposals of the real estate industry. Listening to their testimony, it is obvious that the human- scaled city supporters are the descendants of the great urbanist writer Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” defended New York against its demolishers and which celebrated beauty and life in the historic city.
At the heart of these endless battles is a conflict over competing visions of what a city should be and what an urban way of life should look like.
Human-scale city supporters know there is a balance to be struck: Nobody wants to be packed in like sardines, and at the same time, nobody wants to live in the grassy, car- dependent suburbs. They seek a Goldilocks “just right” density and height. They want to share the sky as a public asset rather than hand it over to developers. They value historic preservation and would rather advocate for adaptive reuse of old buildings than mourn their demolition. They favor incremental projects on small sites rather than massive rebuilding on huge sites. They want to stop the endless displacement of anyone who is not rich. They want an end to the misguided “luxury city” policy that New York’s politicians formally adopted when Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. These men and women want a vibrant public common made up of sky, parks, sidewalks, schools, libraries, streets, and plazas. They seek an end to the privatization of those spaces. They believe the city’s public schools and universities ought to rival the renowned private institutions for the city’s rich. And they want great public transit.
The real estate industry’s vision of the city could not be more different. Theirs is a world filled with rich people working in tech or finance walking to work from clean, shiny new glass towers while sending their kids to private schools and not burdening the public education system. It markets each tower as a separate, suburban world onto itself with dazzling, utterly private “amenities” such as swimming pools, bowling alleys and private parks for the tower’s wealthy residents, a world of internal gated communities where the messiness of real urban life is absent.
To the real estate industry, the old urban life of yore that Jane Jacobs wrote about, the one that took place in the public realm, is irrelevant to their hyper-dense tower vision. They just give lip service to that older, human-scale vision.