The Best Way To Develop Atlantic Yards & Hudson Yards

RICHARD BRODSKY and I have been saying the same thing: why aren't more people listening to our words of wisdom?

The Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards sites are being developed in the wrong way: instead of selling them to mega-developers like Forest City Ratner and Tishman Speyer (who are both having trouble coming up with the cash), we should develop them the way New York was traditionally developed. That means platting the streets and blocks, and selling lots on those blocks. No eminent domain would be involved.

If the New York City Planning Department decides the highest and best use for the land being sold is rowhouses, they can sell lots sized and coded for rowhouses. If they want office towers or apartment buildings, they can sell lots sized and coded for those. Obviously a modern office building requires a larger lot than a rowhouse, and its lower floors should be coded for retail. If the market changes, the lot sizes can be changed if the codes are properly done.

Of course, rowhouses aren't what should be built on either of the railyard sites, because the infrastructure to build over the yards is too expensive: you need larger buildings to share the expense. And Atlantic Avenue is a wide and important street that should be shaped by taller buildings on both sides of the avenue.

This is the way most of the best parts of New York have developed. The streets and blocks of Manhattan were platted in 1811. The streets and blocks of Brooklyn were platted in 1837. Neighborhoods like the Upper East Side and Park Slope were later made by developers and builders buying lots, often individual lots, and building an assemblage of buildings that gave the neighborhoods their character.

Good superprojects like Rockefeller Center are rare, the exceptions that prove the rule. The norm for these superprojects are the monolithic, boring developments that Robert Moses built in all five boroughs. These are not just the megalithic housing projects that have been such a blight on their neighborhoods and communities, but also the developments like Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

Deputy Mayor Doctoroff, now gone, was a friend an ally of the developers like Bruce Ratner who want to build new superprojects. It's rumored he saw himself as a new Robert Moses. But these egotistical displays of macho power are not what have made the neighborhoods. It's time to get back to the time-proven methods that have built the best neighborhoods and communities, building at the scale of the block and the lot.

Robert Moses was wrong. Jane Jacobs was right.

PS: Norman Oder tells me there has long been support for involving multiple developers, including in the Unity Plan. He sent me some links about that from his blog, so I've got to say that the general press either hasn't understood that or for one reason or another hasn't said much on the subject.

Second, there's a matter of scale here that's worth discussing. When someone talks about involving multiple developers, they could mean, for example, that 3 developers would get 2 blocks each. That's still different than the way the city was traditionally developed, or is typically developed today. Most buildings in the city only fill a small portion of the block they're on. For example, look at the two buildings going up near my apartment, the Lucida and the Brompton. The Lucida fills one end of the block that runs between Lexington and Third Avenues and 86th and 85th Streets. The Brompton is on the corner of Third Avenue and 86th Streets. The majority of each block is filled by a range of buildings, with smaller buildings on 85th Street than on the wider avenues and 86th Street, which is as wide as an avenue. If a single building filled those blocks, the effect on the neighborhood would be very different.

In other words, until Le Corbusier, Robert Moses and Urban Removal came along, New York's development was typically by the lot rather than by the block, the superblock or the mega-project. In today's economic environment, it's difficult or impossible to get financing for a large project — when Jerry Speyer can't raise enough financing for the Hudson Yards project, you realize that perhaps no one can. But banks still give loans for individual buildings, of the type that are going up all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

That says that Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards are more likely to go ahead by selling lots than by trying to sell the whole project at once. That process is also more likely to produce more money for the MTA, and a better city for all of us.

PPS: Paris and Rockefeller Center used a different model. But why they succeeded when Atlantic Yards fails is another story.