Pratt Center for Community Development

Planning, Building, & Educating for Change.

Pratt Center eNews, Spring 2007

In this Issue:

How to Build a Truly Sustainable City

Photo of Brad Lander

A message from Pratt Center Director Brad Lander

In conference rooms and meeting halls in every borough, thousands of New Yorkers have been weighing in on an unexpectedly urgent question: How will we grow?

This winter, the Bloomberg Administration's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability brought a presentation on PlaNYC 2030, the City's goals for future development, to groups of New Yorkers concerned about how the city will evolve in the coming decades to accommodate ongoing increases in population and commerce and ever-greater demands on our subways, streets, open spaces, and systems for energy and waste.

One of the last stops of the PlaNYC 2030 tour was Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where the Pratt Center, NY Jobs with Justice, the Brennan Center for Justice, and 50 other community, labor, and religious groups met with Mayor Bloomberg's staff to discuss an agenda for the next 25 years. See an account below.

Mayor Bloomberg deserves credit and support for his efforts to revitalize the city's infrastructure, reduce pollution, and plan for more housing and better transportation. He is taking real leadership with his commitment to reduce the city's carbon emissions, clean up brownfields, create new open spaces, and hopefully to seriously address traffic and congestion (though we wish he would also recognize the critical issue of growing truck traffic, projected to double by 2030, a critical traffic and health issue that appears absent from the plans). The mayor will need the support of citizens and communities throughout the city to move forward on these important goals--and we plan to be part of the effort.

But the Administration's presentation was incomplete. Mayor Bloomberg commendably seeks to revitalize the city's infrastructure, reduce pollution, and plan for more housing and better transportation. Yet the challenges of growth are not simply physical ones. In a city that is becoming more and more unequal, we need to plan ways to share both the prosperity and the burdens that growth will bring. If it is to succeed, PlaNYC 2030 has to address how growth will affect middle- and lower-income New Yorkers who are already struggling with its consequences.

Real estate development is obliterating affordable housing, small businesses, and viable blue-collar job opportunities. Private dollars are paying for major new parks in some wealthy areas, but too many communities lack the spaces for community and family life--not only parks and playgrounds, but also child care, senior, arts, culture, and community centers, the spaces that make our neighborhoods great places to live. And poorer communities are still more likely to contend with truck exhaust, power plant emissions and other fallout from increased demand for resources. New Yorkers want more choices than pollution and brownfields on the one hand, or rising prices that push them out of gentrifying neighborhoods on the other.

For New York City to truly become sustainable by 2030, we'll also have to stop squeezing millions of the city's residents into untenable living and working conditions. We need not only to endure growth, but to grow a city with opportunity built into the infrastructure and the economy, a city with more spaces for communities to thrive. We hope that Mayor Bloomberg will see his upcoming sustainability plan as a place to start.

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Jamaica Weighs In

As the Department of City Planning prepares a large-scale rezoning of Jamaica, Queens, Pratt Center planners are working with Queens Community Board 12 to help neighborhood residents weigh in on the future shape of their neighborhood.

In February, the city presented a detailed draft of the changesexternal link icon it envisions making to 368 blocks of downtown Jamaica and bordering neighborhoods. One of the biggest rezonings the city has ever attempted, the Jamaica plan would allow new development of more than 4.5 million square feet of commercial and retail space and more than 5,000 units of new housing. City Planning announced urban renewal plans for the area immediately surrounding Jamaica's Long Island Rail Road/AirTrain/subway transit hub, where officials have said they are prepared to use eminent domain to acquire any property that the City cannot successfully purchase.

The City proposes rezoning major thoroughfares, especially Hillside Avenue, to allow for bigger apartment buildings while reducing the size of development allowed on side streets in residential areas. The Department of City Planning is also offering an "affordable housing alternative" version of the plan, which includes a framework for inclusionary zoning in the parts of Jamaica under consideration for higher-density development. It would allow apartment-building developers in those sections who make 20 percent of their space permanently affordable to lower-income households to construct buildings one-third larger than those who do not.

With Pratt Center planners' technical guidance, a Community Board 12 committee is now drafting its own proposals for the area, in preparation for forthcoming public hearings on the city's plan.

Learn about Jamaica's concerns and Pratt Center solutions

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PlaNYC: Sustainability, Equity and Opportunity?

With NY Jobs with Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice, the Pratt Center is coordinating ReDefining Economic Development NYC, a collaborative project of dozens of community, civic, religious, business, and labor organizations. On March 12, ReDefining Economic Development NYC invited Rohit Aggarwala, the director of the Mayor's Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, to a special forum at Greenwich Village's Judson Memorial Church.

Participants in "PlanNYC: Sustainability, Equity and Opportunity?" recommended that the mayor's office broaden its goals for PlaNYC 2030--the city's agenda for development over the coming decades--to include the promotion of economic opportunity, so all New Yorkers can benefit from future growth.

The more than 100 attendees represented a wide cross-section of New Yorkers concerned about barriers to economic opportunities people in their communities face every day and the city's widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else. They included environmental advocates, religious leaders, community organizers, labor union staff, social workers, philanthropists, emergency food providers, advocates for small business, aides to elected officials, and housing developers.

"What kind of New York do you want to live in in 2030?" Aggarwala asked the forum. "And how do we get there?"

Three leaders of organizations involved in ReDefining Economic Development posed their own answers to that question, to set the stage for group discussions and recommendations on ways to promote affordable housing, environmental justice and economic opportunity.

See ReDefining Economic Development's advice to PlaNYC

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Cypress Hills Seeks Room to Grow

In northeast Brooklyn, Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation (CHLDC) has built or rehabilitated nearly 100 homes and apartments in the last five years alone. Now the CHLDC is a victim of its own success: it is running out of development sites. Teaming up with Pratt Institute's graduate programs in planning and preservation, the Pratt Center is helping Cypress Hills LDC find ways to build a significant amount of new housing while preserving the area's affordability and established communities. Board, staff and constituents of the CHLDC recognize and appreciate that the neighborhood's blocks of historic rowhouses have architectural and aesthetic value, but they also see the increasingly urgent need to house recent immigrants and low-income families who are quickly being priced out of the neighborhood.

The Pratt Center staff and graduate students are currently surveying 20 census tracts in the area, lot by lot, property by property, to identify vacant land, derelict buildings, and other potential locations for new or rehabilitated homes. The property survey is part of a larger planning study to identify strategies for neighborhood redevelopment in Cypress Hills, which is tucked between East New York and Evergreen Cemetery. One of the issues the community is contending with is the illegal conversion of single-family homes into apartments, including basement residences. The study, to be completed this fall, will identify possible solutions for CHLDC, including approaches to zoning and historic preservation. Students in the Pratt Institute's Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment surveyed Cypress Hills residents to determine housing conditions and find out what kinds of resources and services need expansion or improvement, including schools, transportation, employment services, and shopping. The survey also reached out to residents of the nearby Cypress Hills and Pink Houses public housing projects, who rely on CHLDC's services including its Cypress Hills Community School.

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Preserving the Future of Fulton Mall

The Pratt Center is teaming up with Minerva Partners, an organization that promotes the preservation ofcultural heritage via the built environment, in an effort to preserve and enhance both historic buildings and the cultural vibrancy on Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn. The Mall's old department store buildings, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are still occupied by retail establishments on their ground floors and retain rich architectural details, but many upstairs floors are now vacant and boarded up. This second phase of the Pratt Center's Fulton Mall Project will produce "preservation-oriented development" plans for several sites--financial models for the buildings' productive reuse, and designs for commercial and residential spaces that build on the Mall's existing strengths.

The project, supported by the J.M. Kaplan Fund, seeks to preserve more than the street's physical structures. Fulton Street Mall, Brooklyn's biggest retail district, is in a precarious moment. Three years ago, the Department of City Planning rezoned the surrounding area to promote the development of new office and retail space, which threatens historic buildings and small retail establishments alike. As surrounding neighborhoods become increasingly gentrified, interest has grown in bringing new, higher-end stores to an area that has long been a retail and cultural destination for African American and Caribbean shoppers.

Last year, the Pratt Center surveyed Fulton Street shoppers, workers and other visitors and found that they value the mall as an important place, which they count on as much for social networking as for shopping. More than two-thirds considered Fulton Mall "an important place that could be improved." Shoppers said they wanted more diverse shopping options on a corridor that has seen long-popular clothing and jewelry stores replaced by cell phone shops.

The Pratt Center's planning and design work will help ensure that longtime Fulton Street shoppers get an improved commercial strip that serves their needs and preserves the Fulton Street Mall's role as a crossroads for Brooklynites from all over the borough. The Pratt Center's work will also assist small businesses, many run by immigrants, in remaining an essential part of the area's retail mix.

See how Fulton Mall can better serve Brooklyn

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Gratz Green Roof Grows Again

This spring, workers from Greener By Design are atop the Gratz Industries building in Long Island City, replanting New York City's most ambitious industrial green roof. At 11,000 square feet, the roof, which will be three-quarters covered with varieties of hardy sedum plants, provides an important opportunity to study the effects of rooftop planting on mitigating climate change. (The remaining quarter will be left unplanted for comparison.) Situated within view of the Queensboro Bridge and tens of thousands of road and rail commuters, the roof is also a highly visible billboard for the possibilities of greening the city.

Once planting of the roof is complete, researchers from Earth Pledgeexternal link icon will monitor the plantings' oxygen emissions, and thus the roof's capacity for countering global warming. "If enough buildings of this size had this," says Pratt Center Architectural Director E. Perry Winston of the Gratz Industries green roof, "it would create a microclimate. There is great potential in industrial buildings with large footprints and therefore large roofs."

The monitoring will also track the plants' capacity to absorb rainwater, which would otherwise deluge the city's strained sewage facilities. Increasingly, architectural guidelines under city government-sponsored programs are requiring builders to take measures to slow and reduce drainage from rooftops, and the city Department of Environmental Protection, which operates the sewer system, has expressed interest in the project's findings.

The Gratz Industries Green Roof, designed by Balmori Associates, is funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and property owner and urbanist Roberta Brandes Gratz, whose family business, an architectural metal fabricator, occupies the interior of the one-story structure.

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Upcoming Events

April 14: Panel: Understanding Housing Policies in the Bronx. With Eduardo LaGuerre, Linda Cunningham and Pratt Center's Joan Byron. Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse (165th Street), 2 to 4 p.m., free.

April 19: Conference: Trends in New York City Land Use. New York Law School, 47 Worth Street, Manhattan, 2 to 6 p.m., $40. More informationexternal link icon.

April 26: Discussion: Community Development and the Mega City. With Daniel Doctoroff, Errol Louis, Sheena Wright, Kathryn Wylde. Lang Center, The New School, 55 West 13th Street 2nd floor, Manhattan, 8:15 to 10:30 a.m., free. Reservations required: 212-229-5418.

May 23: Rally: New York Is Our Home, 5 p.m., in front of Stuyvesant Town, 1st Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets, Manhattan. For more information contact Chloe Tribich, 718-246-7900 x250.

May 17, 24 and 31
ABCs of Community Development
A three-day orientation to the institutions that help New York's neighborhoods thrive
Pratt Institute
Manhattan Center
144 West 14th Street

In partnership with the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, the Pratt Center is excited to launch an orientation for new staff and volunteers at community-based organizations. "The ABCs of Community Development in NYC" is a series of three all-day sessions introducing the players and tools of community development in New York City. Participants will learn about the evolution of the movement in New York, meet practitioners, and come away with an understanding of how organizations use a range of strategies--including affordable housing development, workforce training, and economic development, community organizing, social services, and environmental justice advocacy--to help New York's neighborhoods and their residents thrive. The ABCs of Community Development is made possible through the generous support of Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Enterprise Foundation.

More information on the ABCs of Community Development

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Contribute

Please support the Pratt Center for Community Development's vital work to help New York City's communities plan and build their own futures. Your gift enables us to continue supporting community organizations in pursuit of their visions, and to link their efforts to opportunities to influence city and state policies. To help us, visit our secure online donation page.

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