Pratt Center for Community Development

Planning, Building, & Educating for Change.

How PlaNYC Can Grow

On April 22, Earth Day, Mayor Bloomberg released PlaNYC external link icon, the Administration's agenda for the city's development over the next 25 years. ReDefining Economic Development is working on its own Blueprint for the city's future development that will offer specific recommendations for how the city can not only achieve environmental sustainability, but how it can also build an economy that works for all New Yorkers.

The City plan includes some groundbreaking proposals that are consistent with RED NYC's principles for New York City's growth and development. As one of the three lead organizations convening ReDefining Economic Development, the Pratt Center for Community Development offers the following analysis of the Mayor's plan and how it measures up to RED NYC's agenda:

The Bloomberg administration is taking long-term leadership on creating a sustainable city, including significant investments in the infrastructure we all depend on for transportation, water and energy. Especially bold is the City's plan to introduce congestion pricing in Manhattan on weekdays--a flat fee for all vehicles entering the borough below 86th Street.

Congestion pricing promises to bring enormous benefits to the vast majority of New Yorkers. Red Hook and Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, offer an example. There, just 3 percent of commuters drive into Manhattan's business districts to work; at just over 1,700 drivers, they are little more than 1 percent of the neighborhood's population. The other 99 percent of the area's residents will benefit from the revenues created by congestion fees, which will be reinvested into mass transit improvements, and from cleaner air resulting from fewer vehicles going through their neighborhoods on the way into Manhattan.

The same patterns hold for other outer-borough neighborhoods, even those far from subways, like Sheepshead Bay and Marine Park, Brooklyn, Soundview in the Bronx, and Southeastern Queens. Citywide, an average of 4.5% of commuters now drive to Manhattan.

What's in the City's Plan

Among other noteworthy new initiatives that the Pratt Center follow RED NYC's principles, according to the Pratt Center:

  • A commitment to use rezonings to expand opportunities for housing creation, and to use inclusionary zoning to assure that some of that new housing is affordable.
  • A new city office for brownfields, efforts to make cleanup and reuse more feasible, and measures to improve community participation in brownfields redevelopment.
  • An assurance that every New Yorker will live within a half-mile of a park. The City plans to improve school yards in underserved areas and open them to the public.
  • "Repowering" of electricity-generating plants, making them less polluting and more efficient. The City plans to establish an Energy Planning Board that would help facilitate financing.
  • Greening the city: initiatives include requiring tree plantings on all parking lots and new incentives for green roofs.
  • Cuts to emissions: The City is moving to reduce diesel emissions from its own vehicles and use regulations and incentives to reduce pollution from private vehicles.
  • Neighborhood-level air quality monitoring. The State currently measures air quality at just 24 sites citywide. The City is now moving to monitor air quality in all neighborhoods and track it over time to gauge the impact of new development, traffic and other changes.

RED NYC was among the dozens of advocacy organizations around the city that weighed in on PlaNYC this winter. Based on your input at the March 12 event at Judson Memorial Church, "PlaNYC: Sustainability, Equity and Opportunity?" RED NYC made more than 30 recommendations to the Mayor's Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability on ways the city could promote affordable housing, a environmental justice and good jobs for New Yorkers.

The city's newly released plan reflects a lot of those ideas. Yet it also leaves out vital measures that will also be necessary to make New York a sustainable city--one where everyone will be able to participate in the economy. As PlaNYC notes in introducing its housing initiatives: "Not all growth is equal."

Growing inequality threatens New York City's ability to meet these ambitious and essential planning goals. New housing development pushes lower-income residents out of the neighborhood and even the city. A lack of living-wage job opportunities prevents too many New Yorkers from affording the basic necessities--not just housing, but also transportation, energy and some of the vital but increasingly costly resources the city aims to invest in improving. And environmental burdens, including waste disposal and power generation, will continue to weigh most heavily on low-income communities.

Many of PlaNYC's elements--creating and maintaining new parks, green roofs and green streets to capture stormwater, and retrofitting existing buildings to conserve energy--will depend on the availability of a skilled green-collar workforce. The mayor ended his speech by promising to "swing for the fences." If the plan’s public investment strategies are linked to commitments to building a new base of living-wage jobs, he will indeed have the ball out of the park.

What's Missing

Here are some recommendations you made on March 12 that are not reflected in the city's plans:

Affordable Housing:

  • Strengthen rent regulations and repeal vacancy decontrol.
  • Protect tenants against harassment and displacement.
  • Include existing residents in transparent and accountable planning processes for their neighborhoods.

The City restated its commitment to ensuring continued affordability of government-sponsored housing, such as Mitchell-Lama apartments, but announced no new efforts. And the Bloomberg Administration is not taking measures to make rent regulations and other tenant protections effective. As PlaNYC itself acknowledges, building new units will not in itself make housing more affordable. The City's new pledge to use inclusionary zoning where it deems it feasible is an important step, but meanwhile New Yorkers are rapidly losing affordable rent-regulated units.

Environmental Justice:

  • Create a comprehensive inventory of environmental burdens and establish goals and timetables for reducing those burdens in low-income neighborhoods.
  • When choosing locations for new facilities, consider of the cumulative impact of all infrastructure burdens in a neighborhood.
  • Increase use of rail and water for freight.

The Bloomberg Administration has come up with the most ambitious agenda ever to improve a city's environment and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. With a new initiative to measure and model air pollutants in neighborhoods citywide, it is also beginning to accept that it will need to focus not only on the city's entire environmental impact but also on the burdens each community will bear. However, the city needs to take further measures to ensure that neighborhoods that have historically been burdened with polluting infrastructure, like waste transfer stations and power plants, don't continue to carry more than their fair share of the load. Trucks are the fastest-growing part of New York City's traffic, driving a disproportionate share of their miles in low-income areas near industrial zones. The plan needs to do more to keep them off the road, including measures to build a Cross Harbor tunnel that would allow freight to enter Brooklyn and Queens via rail.

Economic Opportunity:

  • Create living-wage jobs through environmental initiatives and at businesses receiving assistance from the city.
  • Channel growth to the people and places where opportunity is needed.
  • Invest in job training and link training to the growth of targeted economic sectors.
  • Ensure that financial services companies practice fair lending.
  • Expand communities' decision-making power related to economic development.

Fairness needs to extend to the economic impact of the tens of billions of dollars of environmental investments New York City plans to make. The Mayor's plan will create enormous new business opportunities for Wall Street banks, which will finance PlaNYC's new investment funds for transportation and energy. It will even create jobs for mollusks, which the City proposes using to clean up waterways. But the plan says nothing about how New York City will do all the hard work of overhauling the city's infrastructure--whether it will not only environmentally but economically sustainable, providing living wages and benefits. The Bloomberg Administration will have to make meaningful commitments.

What RED NYC is Doing

ReDefining Economic Development is mobilizing to get the City to act on all of these fronts. Working groups have been convening to develop an economic development blueprint.

Job Creation & Sectoral Development/Planning:
Coordinator: Annette Bernhardt, Brennan Center for Justice

Housing and Neighborhood Development
Coordinator: Laine Romero-Alston, Urban Justice Center

Environment, Infrastructure and Transportation Planning
Coordinator: Joan Byron, Pratt Center for Community Development

Economic Security and Business Development
Coordinator: Mark Winston Griffith, Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project

Workforce Development
Coordinator: Michelle de la Uz, Fifth Avenue Committee

Community Spaces
Coordinator: Brad Lander, Pratt Center for Community Development

Meanwhile, the Pratt Center for Community Development will soon be reaching out to organizations around the city with a presentation showing why the city's future development needs to be not only environmentally sustainable but economically equitable. The input we get on the presentation in the coming months will help ReDefining Economic Development inform New Yorkers about ways to make the city's growth work for them.

For more information on working groups or hosting a ReDefining Economic Development presentation at your organization, please contact Bikku Kuruvila of Jobs with Justice at 646-452-5638, [Sorry, display of this email address requires a Javascript-aware browser, in order to deter spam. Please use the general contact page instead.].

Other News

RED NYC is not the only effort out there trying to influence the direction of the Mayor's environmental plan. Participants may be interested in the Manhattan Institute's upcoming May 17 forum on environmental planning, which will explore ways to diminish land use regulations even as the City seeks to strengthen them.

Rethinking Environmental Review external link icon

For more on ReDefining Economic Development, please visit our website.

ReDefining Economic Development NYC is a collaborative project of dozens of community, civic, religious, business, and labor organizations, coordinated by the Pratt Center for Community Development, NY Jobs With Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice. To join or learn more, please contact: [Sorry, display of this email address requires a Javascript-aware browser, in order to deter spam. Please use the general contact page instead.].