Zoned Out
Last Christmas Eve, not a creature was stirring in Downtown Brooklyn: everyone was stuck in traffic. Last minute shoppers, rushing to the mega-mall at Atlantic and Flatbush Aves., moaned with their horns, trapped in useless cars. To travel three blocks in a car took an hour.
In failing thus to tie development to specific transportation commitments for communities-in failing to plan, to anticipate long-range problems and options and set goals for mitigation-city planners are abdicating their fundamental responsibility to make the costly infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate density and ensure the success of the very developers whose schedules they love to please. It's an irony that few notice.
The chief figures in this smoke-and-mirrors show are the Department of City Planning (DCP) and the Economic Development Corporation (EDC), who in an ideal world would be messengers of intelligent urban design. We have therefore drawn up a short list of acts of negligence by DCP and EDC, a list that should serve as a wake-up call not only to Brooklyn's citizens but to all New Yorkers, who in the end will pay the price of government's carelessness if it goes unanswered and unchecked. The future of Downtown Brooklyn is also the city's future: Brooklyn's vast rezoning is touted as City Hall's chief post-9/11 job retention pivot. If Downtown Brooklyn fails, then the jobs may just leave New York altogether.
Count #1: Blindness to the Big Picture. DCP and EDC tend to treat as separate entities the many projects across Brooklyn, as if these projects were being built in vacuums, exerting no pull on one another, having no cumulative effects on communities. It might be helpful here to quantify and characterize these projects, to give a sense of how much development is really going up.
Currently under construction in the Downtown Brooklyn area are at least 12 million square feet of new development approved over the last decade and expected to be completed by 2008. Additional projects announced in the last two years will add three times that amount. This includes everything from the Ikea and Fairway retailers planned for Red Hook; to the 15 million square feet under the rubric of what is known as the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan, which envisions four new office towers on Flatbush Ave. Extension and Boerum Pl., and residential towers on Flatbush Ave. and on Livingston St.; to megadeveloper Bruce Ratner's much-contested Atlantic Yards colossus, eight million square feet of apartments, offices and a sports arena for a basketball reincarnation of the Dodgers, the political selling card.
At first glance, a number of these sites look far-flung and distant: Ikea, for example, way in the south, in Red Hook. But traffic always has spillover effects with far-reaching hidden consequences. In systematically balkanizing Brooklyn's growth patterns, the DCP and EDC even go so far as to absurdly isolate individual intersections, distorting the undeniable domino effects of delay. The agencies get away with assigning huge numbers of vehicles to the already at-capacity Brooklyn-Queens and Gowanus Expressways, but eschew any responsibility to explain or examine this assumption or its consequences (the Gowanus would pretty much cease to move).
This is akin to a doctor arranging 10 different visits for the same patient, each time examining another part of the body while ignoring the results of the previous visit. The inevitable misdiagnosis results in the wrong medicine-or in this case, no medicine at all.
Count #2: Willful Ignorance of the Far Future. It would be reasonable to assume that the mission of the environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan of 2004 was to survey the totality of the effects of all 15 million square feet that the plan approved for rezoning. But reason doesn't apply in Brooklyn. In fact, the EIS for the Downtown plan only analyzed the impacts of seven million square feet, just under half of rezoned development. Why the omission? City planners claim that 10 years is a reasonable planning horizon and that seven million square feet is all that is likely to occur in that time. This unfortunately defies the guidelines in the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) process-as well as regulations of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (which provides DCP and EDC substantial funding)-requiring that an EIS examine the "full build-out" of multi-year projects. Indeed, most planners concerned with infrastructure elsewhere in New York state, e.g., state Department of Transportation analysts, regularly examine project effects 20 to 30 years into the future. (DCP's omissions in the Downtown Brooklyn EIS are no anomaly: in rezoning the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront, the agency is expected to approve approximately 30 million square feet of new development while, again, analyzing only half of it.)
Not only does the EIS for the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan appear to routinely undercount or under-report adverse effects, it is replete with dubious undocumented assumptions and sleight-of-hand calculations that distort real effects. The study assumes, for example, an unrealistically high level of access by subway-70 percent versus 50 percent in prior EIS's for Downtown Brooklyn projects. Auto traffic analyses appear similarly fudged: the study claims that only 12 percent of people will drive to work, as opposed to estimates in prior EIS's of 22 percent or more.
Also ignored are the mandated energy savings and environmental requirements of New York state's 2002 Energy Plan, which requires that New York City at least consider the effect of any action-such as development that generates traffic-on energy demand and global warming. The Energy Plan asks that "energy, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions [become] key factors in developing statewide, regional and urban area plans."
There is clearly a giant disconnect between the city and the state with regard to what is happening in Downtown Brooklyn. The state is calling for a reduction in vehicle travel; Brooklyn's projects will add an estimated 270 million vehicle miles of travel annually. State policy calls for improvements and expansion of transit; the MTA is cutting back services. New York state, via its Energy Plan, is eager to reduce gasoline consumption. New York City apparently is not.
Count #3: Failing to Disclose True Costs vs. Benefits. New development in and around Downtown Brooklyn has a number of benefits, at least in the abstract: new and retained jobs (that might otherwise go to New Jersey); new opportunities; increased cash flow and income for Brooklyn; and increased tax revenues. However, these benefits have yet to be characterized or quantified in any clear specificity by EDC and DCP or by their favored developers. Though we know, by contrast, that Forest City Ratner's arena project depends for success on at least $1 billion in city and state subsidies, according to the National Taxpayers Union.
In the meantime, we can make some assumptions about the traffic costs of development. They are, in a word, staggering, and everyone bears a share in their cost, non-drivers especially. It's another kind of hidden subsidy to developers.
Given the latest official regional forecasts for growth, let's assume that 40 million square feet of new offices and residences and big-box stores will grace the Downtown Brooklyn landscape over the next 25 years. This will increase automobile traffic by at least 115,000 new car and truck trips daily. It should be emphasized that this estimate in automotive traffic adopts the very optimistic assumptions made by the city, that the vast majority of travelers to and from downtown Brooklyn-400,000 additional subway riders and 100,000 new bus riders-will utilize mass transit. (Between 20 and 25 percent of those riders will use the A and C line, the recent disabling of which demonstrates how fragile is the subway system.)
To accommodate these huge influxes of people, Brooklyn will need between $4 billion and $5 billion in transit and road improvements. But New York City and state have budgeted less than a half billion dollars a year for bridge and roadway improvements citywide, and the MTA is showing deficits totaling more than $2 billion a year as soon as 2008. The problem is acutely manifest on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which will have to be increased from the current six lanes to eight lanes to accommodate growth. The state Department of Transportation reports this cannot and will not be done. There is no capacity currently to support 400,000 new subway riders: we need a new subway line in downtown. No line is coming. Meanwhile, MTA is threatening to cut services to Downtown Brooklyn, though city planners assure that they can add new subway cars as demand grows. The fact is that currently the MTA does not have a single spare subway car.
A reduction in transit service will force many more people to drive, further multiplying the social costs of auto use-costs in gridlocked streets and overcrowded subways, more car accidents and worsening air pollution. These are expensive problems. "Congestion losses" in New York City-such as wasted time, lost productivity and increased cost to deliver freight-are predicted to rise as high as $7 billion in 2005.
The problem is also life-threatening: 115,000 extra cars on Brooklyn streets daily means more residents and visitors being hit and maimed or killed by cars-as many as four more fatalities and 500 more injuries annually. There are other, quieter, costs of failing to mitigate auto travel: asthma rates rise; insurance costs soar as more cars get in accidents; people's homes are ruined by the vibration damage from trucks. The total cost to Brooklynites of 40 million square feet in new development and the concomitant explosion in traffic? An estimated $250 million a year, "socialized" onto the backs of residents for the benefit of developers.
One could argue in response that the boon from Brooklyn's expected growth-jobs, tax-rolls, etc.-offsets the costs. So we come full circle, for the city planners haven't bothered to calculate the total benefits, at least not publicly. They simply assume that growth automatically generates benefits. It is high time the city accounted for the real costs and the real benefits in their land use decision-making. Ê
All of this is not to say that creative planning alternatives aren't at least being entertained. In response to community pressure, the city Department of Transportation has begun a Downtown Brooklyn Blueprint study that is supposed to look at the full impacts of development. But budgeted at a mere half-million dollars, without the essential analytic tools and with little meaningful public input, the "blueprint" may be no more than an office-paper "visioning" exercise. A real plan for this level of development would cost between $5 million and $7 million to complete, about what has been spent each on studies for the Hudson Yards stadium project in Manhattan and for the post-9/11 rebuilding around Ground Zero. Until Brooklyn gets equal treatment, no one can believe the city is serious about Downtown Brooklyn's success.
What does Brooklyn need from the city and the state? First, a mapping system that tracks all the development and transportation measures underway. Second, state-of-the-art traffic models to test redesigning street patterns to improve traffic flow on major streets and keep it out of neighborhoods. This must include a commitment to instituting comprehensive transit improvements, borough-wide, to make it easier to reach the downtown core. Brooklyn needs an overhaul of its vast but archaic bus network, which equals Paris' in size but lacks the bells and whistles that attract three times as many Parisians on buses. Ultimately, Brooklyn will need a new transit line between its downtown and Manhattan, which can be accomplished, if done right, by the embryonic extension of the LIRR to Lower Manhattan and JFK, which could serve the over-capacity (and now severely damaged) A and C lines.
There's a proven funding solution to many of these problems in the form of three soaring East River bridges whose spans are every day crowded by drivers looking for free access to Manhattan. Drivers find that cutting across Downtown Brooklyn, whatever the extra delay, is a better fiscal choice than ponying up the $4 toll at the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel; indeed, tens of thousands of motorists daily exploit the loophole. If tolled-with automated E-Z Pass technology this could easily be done-the bridges would generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year of which Brooklyn could demand its fair share for roads and transit. Like London drivers, who pay $7 to enter the city's core, Brooklyn drivers would come to appreciate the benefits of faster travel due to some of their peers switching to transit. More importantly, the streets would be liberated of those tens of thousands of drivers looking for the free ride across the East River.
The entire city and state have a stake in the success of Downtown Brooklyn. But that success, whether founded on 10 million square feet or 20 million or 40 million square feet, depends on honest and courageous planning, not near-term gaming of a system that subsidizes developers at the cost of long-term community. Otherwise, you have growth for growth's sake-what Edward Abbey famously called "the ideology of the cancer cell." Without a dramatic turnaround, it'll be Christmas Eve hell in Brooklyn every day of the year.