Defender of Downtown’s Public Realm Makes the Case for Human-Scale Development
“Decades ago, when I first moved to New York after graduate school,” Lynn Ellsworth recalls, “I lived in single-room occupancy [SRO] dwellings, while I waited tables. One of them was run by a YMCA on West 34th Street. They weren’t luxurious, but they were safe, clean, and very affordable. Today, however, the brownstone that had an SRO for women on one floor has been converted into a single-family mansion owned by a hedge-fund billionaire, and the former YMCA has become a luxury condo.” A Lower Manhattan resident, community leader, and PhD economist, Ms. Ellsworth has written a new book, “Wonder City: How to Reclaim Human-Scale Urban Life,” which draws insights from many of the local battles she has waged.
Ms. Ellsworth, who has founded or co-founded organizations including the Friends of Duane Park, Tribeca Trust, and Empire Station Coalition, says, “Lower Manhattan, and New York generally, are falling under the spell of a supply-side ideology I call ‘hyper-density.’ For example, going back half a century, the Real Estate Board of New York wanted to transform the area thought of as the Tribeca South historic district into Wall Street North. It meant demolishing our history, a human-scale neighborhood, and replacing it with massive steel and glass modernist towers. That process is solidly underway in the area south of Chambers all the way to Barclay Street.”
“This process of ‘towerization’ springs from the real estate industry, which wants to monetize airspace,” she says. But, “there is no empirical evidence that large building projects cause cities to grow economically. Towerizaton as an economic development strategy is foolish. It takes away from what actually helps cities flourish: high-quality public education; inexpensive and reliable public transit; investment in the public realm, the so-called ‘third places’ where people gather and communities coalesce; and investment in small businesses, which are the engines of job creation. You have to make cities places where people want to live and raise their children.”
“When government focuses on large building projects, all four of these priorities suffer,” she says. “Building more luxury housing in the urban core of New York is all about allowing rich people to live within walking distance of where they work, so they don’t care about transit. Those same people send their children to private schools, so public education suffers. Places that are supposed to be public spaces become privatized, as we have seen over and over in Lower Manhattan. And small businesses are driven out of the community, because new developments charge premium rents that only large, corporate tenants can afford.”
Another indispensable component of a thriving urban environment, Ms. Ellsworth says, is affordable housing. “But developers want to replace tenements, which are mostly rent stabilized and affordable by definition, with luxury towers. They also purchase air rights to build taller than zoning will allow, then promise to include some affordable housing in exchange. But this generates only a trivial amount of housing. The truth is, they don’t want affordable housing, because it’s not profitable for them. The free market is never going to build social housing like they do in Europe.”
She laments, “cities around the country have bought into this supply-side mythology about housing, which says that if we just keep building without limits, that will increase the supply of housing, and then at some undefined point in the future, prices will eventually decline. No city has embraced this free-market, anti-regulatory ideology more than New York. But decades later, we have found that the trickle-down theory is simply not true.”
“There are only two ways to get affordable housing,” she says. “The first step is to stop destroying the affordable housing we already have, like small tenement buildings. The second is to build new, 100 percent affordable housing with government support. But both of these fly in the face of the hyper-density orthodoxy.”
The erosion of public space is another problem cited by Ms. Ellsworth: “Developers have repeatedly pitched erecting tall towers on Governors Island, which is supposed to be a park. And think of all those useless public-private plazas that litter Lower Manhattan, in particular. They were created in exchange for allowing buildings to go higher. And now the building owners are trying to take them back and turn them into commercial space. They’re absolutely a total giveaway and are not an adequate return to the public for allowing excessive height.”
For a solution, she says, “we’re going to need a new generation of politicians who understand these problems, because the current technocrats running things are never going to change. They’re too much in bed with big real estate, and most of them are hoping to work for that industry, in one way or another, after they leave government.”