Quote:
Originally Posted by NYer34
The "blightedness" of this area is highly, highly exaggerated.
This is a thriving, busy area. There's little vacancy (compare it to Madison btw 60th and 90th! how's that for blighted?). It's bustling. There are some homely buildings - but there are also gems like Napoleon LeBrun's Church of St. John the Baptist, one of the most beautiful churches in the city.
One of the most "blighted" strips has recently been razed and is being redeveloped (34th right off 8th). The biggest landholder in the area is Vornado, which intentionally underinvests in its buildings for years and years (sometimes decades) to then tear them down and - in many cases - walk away from the tear-down (look at what it did to the historic Filene's Building in Boston).
Right now, Vornado is intentionally turning the historic and once world-famous Hotel Pennsylvania into a dump ... so it can claim the area is "blighted."
I'd support a designation that forcibly takes all the land in the area away from Vornado, the creator of whatever "blight" there is. Would Cuomo's bill do this? NO! This is mind-numbing - it would actually give Vornado more land, more power.
This is a pretty sick and starch display of cronyism and borderline corruption: A developer chronically and consciously turns its holdings to crap to get the in-cahoots state to call the area blighted, and give more real estate to the source of blight. This is worth getting mad at.
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I agree with you to a point, but what's a
legal solution? Are you seriously suggesting New York State government spend billions on Eminent Domain just to seize Vornado's properties without a clear and compelling public purpose? That's a non-starter. I believe a large part of this is the unintended consequences of NYC's zoning. Let's assume everything you said is true. Vornado wouldn't have to intentionally turn its properties into a dump so they can be declared blighted and demolished if there was other development sites that could be redeveloped at greater densities to meet the real estate needs in Manhattan.
Right now zoning encourages the demolition of buildings like the Penn Hotel because it has the development rights to build a much more profitable building. At a minimum, NYC should have an easy process that encourages Transferable Development Rights from an older building like the Penn hotel to any parking lot or underutilized land, with a further incentive to use a part of that revenue to renovate and preserve the older building.
Developers need to also be at the table when discussing what works if the goal is to preserve older buildings from razing. Instead, we have city planners that think they know it all that write these zoning regulations that are resulting in really crappy outcomes.
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