Community Development and the Mega City Pt.1

Today's conversation is going to be about urban growth and regeneration. It's about the future development of our neighborhoods, our business districts, our park land and our entire city. One thing you'll hear this morning, I am not stealing any thunders that demographers have concluded that by 2030 we are going to add one million people to our city bringing our total population to nine million people by the year 2030. And the questions that the city and the Mayor and Dan Doctoroff and his team will be addressing is what will be need for the livability of our city, what will the mean for our parks, what will this mean for our business districts, transportation systems, school systems. And how to make all that a more vibrant and livable city. During the past year the Bloomberg Administration created a plan to guide the city growth for decades to come and last Sunday at the Museum of Natural History, the Mayor presented more than a 100 different initiatives that make up this plan. PlaNYC, I don't know how to say this, PlaNYC thank you, PlaNYC 20- right there PlaNYC. They have a great deal of substance and will keep policy professionals and students such as we have here at the Model school busy for decades thinking about it, debating it and trying to understand how to make it work even better. And this growth is really already underway. This growth and this plan is inline with the Mayor's current support for a large scale development and that fits that fits very well within the 2030 plan. Well before going any further I want to introduce and thank Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff for joining us today to present more aspects about this plan. As many of you know Dan Doctoroff is the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding in the City of New York. He has overseen most of the Bloomberg administration's large scale projects and exemplifies this administration's commitment to innovation and forward thinking and a rethinking of our Government. He has guided a number of visionary projects including water for neighborhoods, major rezoning and even the courageous bid for the 2012 Olympics. This man thinks big and he also has a reputation of motivating his staff to think out of the box, to think imaginatively and to think quickly. So he will open today's conversation and then will have some brief questions, then we will move on to our panel and the panel will be moderated by Earl Lewis of the Daily News and our goal this morning is to learn more about the more detail about the Mayor's plan and discuss what this means for our city's neighborhood and what this means for the non-profit community development sector. Our program today is organized by two entities within the Milano School, one, the Center for New York City Affairs and the Community Development Finance Project. The Center for New York Affairs, which is directed by Andrew White, is an institute that's been dedicated for many years to researching the impact of public policy on the ground than in communities. Its work focuses on neighborhood issues and solutions to urban poverty and the center staff organized many such firms like this we have a really a rich dialogue this becomes somewhat of a hallmark of both Milano and the New School. The Community Urban Finance Project, our other sponsor equips students with financial and management skills as well as the policy expertise to tackle this issues and put them into implementation. Both these both of these projects both the Center for New York City Affairs and the Community Development Finance Project are a kind of cornerstones for the kind of work we try to do at Milano in terms of understanding the issues coming up with innovative ideas working through their implementation and seeing their impact both intended and unintended. I would like to acknowledge just a couple of people in the audience and then we will get started. We have Emily Youssouf where is - Emily who is a proud alum and President of New York City Housing Development Corporation. Mark Willis where is he and Mark Willis who is with JPMorgan Chase and he is been a board member for many, many years. And we have some our sponsors here from Edison Parking, Steve Nislick, Michael Field and Gary DeBode where are they? They are being shy, okay. I want to thank them. I also want to thank HSBC Bank and Brian Segal who is working with Community Development Finance Project and a number of friends from the Rockefeller Foundation they have also - also been very helpful. So with that let me introduce Dan Doctoroff to get started and thank you for joining us. Thank you very much Fred. Something with my slides here I am going to do the more than - need -more than two hands for a team trying to manage the slides but I want to thank you all for being here today and talk a lot about what the Mayor actually proposed on Sunday. You hear a lot about this plan, you hear a lot about one specific element of it. But what I want to do for you today is really talk about the plan as a whole and make sure that everybody really understands what this really is about. So the mayor actually on Sunday did something extraordinary. He actually told the truth about the future. We don't expect that from politicians or elected officials. But that's what the Mayor did. He called it like he saw it as we looked forward over the course of the next several decades. Not only did he call it like he saw it, but more importantly he said what he could do about it. And he asked New Yorkers to join him in what hopefully will be a crusade to prepare our city compete with other cities around the world but also to make our city a cleaner, healthier, more livable city despite the fact that we are as Fred said, "Going to grow." Now in some ways, this plan has been 30 years in the making. If you think back to the terrible days of the 1970s ever since the city has just been recovering from where we were. We have been rebuilding, but we can stand here today and say, no longer. We don't have to just rebuild, refill, replace what was lost during the terrible time of the 70s and early 80s instead we can proudly declare that it is time to move forward. But think about where we have come. The subways once broken down and dangerous are now at near record ridership. Our parks, once dumping grounds, are now cleaner than they have been for decades. Our housing was burnt, torched, abandoned. Now we can barely keep up with demand. Our water front had been filled with decaying industrial lots, abandoned peers, wharfs, crumbling today more than 60 miles of development is taking place mostly for parks and housing along our water fronts. So it's actually an amazing time for New York. We just announced last week that unemployment in New York City had hit an all time record law. We are the safest big city in America. You saw yesterday our graduation rates among high school students while still too, too low are at the highest levels they have been at in decades. We have a record high bond rating and today the Mayor will announce a surplus for 2007 of $4 billion. We have record numbers of tourists coming to this city and maybe the single most important statistic of all, our resurgence has attracted a record number of residents, 8.2 million and more and more are coming. We project that by 2030 the population of this city will rise to 9.1 million people. Over the next 20 years or so we will add 900,000 people. 900,000 is just to put it in context the equivalent of the populations of Boston and Miami combined crammed into our five little, five Burroughs. Now its not just people coming here to live but our growth will also bring other benefits. 750000 new jobs, 22 million additional visitors to our city every year and all of that produces billions of dollars of additional tax revenues that we can reinvest in our city. However we all know from our daily lives that adding a million more people all those additional jobs and all those additional residents to New York City also pose challenges that can prove to be paralyzing. Parks that are overcrowded, streets already chocked with traffic completely congested, trains crammed beyond capacity, dirtier air, more polluted water and above all New York City being an even greater contributor to perhaps the most significant challenge of all, climate change. So that's why we started work over a year ago on a plan. A plan that would address the challenges and it served a way forward that was bold and specific. Our goal was to prepare for the growth but we soon realized that you couldn't just talk about land which was the initial focus of our efforts, instead if you are going to think about land and how you use it. You also have to think about transportation, you have to think about air quality you can't think about transportation without thinking about its impact on air quality. When you think about air quality, one of the major contributors of core air quality is energy. All of you are thinking about land, air, water and transport, I mean, transportation you obviously have to think about water. And the one thing that we discovered is that one common denominator of all of those things is that if you don't deal with them they all contribute to the global warning crisis that is blooming. Each one of those issues is interconnected and that's why back in December the Mayor announced a plan to achieve 10 key goals, to create a sustainable city by 2030. With respect to land to create enough housing for our growing population, to ensure New Yorkers, all New Yorkers have parks within walking distance. To clean up all of the contaminated land in New York City, to develop water systems, water network back up systems, to open up 90 percent of our water ways to recreation, to improve travel times by adding transit capacity despite the fact that they were going to be adding millions of people to the city, residents, visitors and workers. To finally, for the first time ever, achieve a state of good repair on our transportation system, to upgrade our woefully outmoded energy infrastructure to provide clean energy, to achieve the cleanest air of any big city in America and most importantly to reduce global warming emissions by 30 percent. Now we knew couldn't do it alone, so we brought in experts from all over the city and in fact all over the world. We formed a Sustainability Advisory Board, we reached out since announcing these goals across the city. We held town meetings in every single Burroughs, we had dozens and dozens of presentations met with hundreds of community and advocacy and other civic groups as well as virtually every major elected official in the city. We received thousands and thousands of comments, suggestions as how to meet these goals on our website. Some like Don from Washington Heights were incredible stupid. Don suggested that we could solve our energy problem by harnessing the energy from the subway turn styles. However most were remarkably thoughtful. So the result, the result is what we believe is the most sweeping, the most detailed plan to strengthen New York's urban environment that the city has never undertaken. In fact it is arguable whether this is the most detailed and comprehensive plan to strengthen an urban environment ever undertaken by any city. We believe it is the plan. Not just a blue print but a plan to create the first environmentally sustainable 21st century city. And that's because feel free to clap. We got a little one going there. Wait till you will hear the details and you can really clap. And the reason we say that is because it is the first time anybody has attempted to deal with the five key dimensions of a city's environment. Land, air, water, energy and transportation all at the same time and as Fred said we are doing it with a 127 specific initiatives. The first one is going to be turning off cell phones. Now clap for that too. So let's start actually with our most basic resource land. One thing about land you know is that they aren't making any more of it. That's just a fact and as we started this exercise, what we realized was we got to deal with this issue because we kept running every time we wanted to do something we kept running into a constraint. There is no place to put in. so we need to be so much smarter about our approach to land and that's why the mayor established three goals. One as I mentioned create homes for almost a million more New Yorkers and make housing more affordable. Second ensure that New Yorkers live within a 10 minute walk of a park and three clean up all of the contaminated land in the city. Now we have come up with a master plan to do that. This may be a little bit hard to see. So I won't go into it in great detail. But fundamentally the problem we have in the city is - we need to create 265,000 additional units of housing over the next two decades. Well right now if you look at the way the city is rezoned is zoned, we only have capacity for about 400,000. When you have that close a relationship between supply and demand only one thing can happen. The price of land can rise and when the price of land which is the single most important contributor to housing prices goes up, housing prices go up. 64 percent of them told us that major factor in their decision to leave New York was the lack of affordability of housing. So what does our plan do? It calls for a doubling of our capacity for housing. Instead of having 400,000 units of potential housing available, we are bringing that up to almost 800,000 or so. We are going to do that by rezoning aggressively all across the city. We are doing that by decking over rail yards and high ways were its appropriate. We are going to do it by having by exhaustively looking at government owned land and using it much more efficiently than we have. And by doing that, by increasing supply, by doubling supply we think we can actually moderate the price of land and hopefully make housing much more affordable in New York City. Now we are also going to do it in a way that enables us to sorry, to do it all near transit. Today in New York 70 percent of New Yorkers actually live within walking distance of a subway. Of all of these initiatives here, of all of them there 96 percent of that extra 400,000 potential units, 96 percent will be near a subway stop. Why do we do that? Because those are the areas that are best able to handle the density and those are the areas where we can grow and still do it in a way that is friendly to our environment because people don't need cars. We also can find lots of additional land by reclaiming our brownfields. We have 7600 acres of brownfields in this city, contaminated land that is under utilized or vacant today. Just to put that in perspective 7600 acres is one quarter of all the park land we have in New York City today just wasted just wasted. Today we do not have the strategies, the systems, the processes in place in order to actually reclaim those brownfields it takes forever. So what you will see us do, what is part of that 127 initiatives are proposals to work more efficiently with the state to create city specific agencies focused on brownfields with city specific rules that recognize the city is different than udacah. to establish a revolving loan fund, to encourage owners of property to put their property back to use, to deal with one of the most vexing problems of all which as the perverse, disincentive people have not to even test their land to see if it's contaminated because if they do they can be held liable but if they do nothing, nothing happens. We will provide insurance for them that if they test and find something they will be okay. Lot of our brownfields will not only become housing but they will also become open space. In the last five years we have added 300 acres to the biggest and best park system in the nation. With spectacular resources like fresh kills which we will turn from the largest dump in the world to the city's largest park. But still more than two million New Yorkers don't live within walking distance of a park. The series of initiatives that the Mayor proposed will put 99 percent of New Yorkers within a 10 minute walk of a park. How we are going to do that, not by finding more land but by using what we have got more efficiently. For example, we will open up 290 play grounds which have currently closed to the public after school. We will open them up so they can be used by the local communities. We are going to increase the hours at 39 fields by installing lights. We are going to cover 25 asphalt fields with artificial turf and we are going to undertake the most ambitious street greening program in New York City's history. A $250 million investment to plant one million trees every single place on a street where it's possible to plant a tree we will plant a tree. We are going to take take back unused roadways and create new public plazas in every single community. But, you know, parks aren't the only place to find recreational opportunities. As we focus on reclaiming the water front we must also reclaim the water itself. We must also make sure that our water supply to the city stays clean and reliable and that's why we have established two water goals. Developer our water network backups systems and open 90 percent of our water ways, today only 52 percent are open and protect natural areas. In terms of critical backup systems we face a major challenge, we must be build redundancy for our aqueducts and water tunnels which is why we will complete water tunnel number three which has been under construction since 1969. We also have a major problem getting water in from the city. Our major aqueduct which brings water from upstate, the Delaware Aqueduct, provides 50 percent of our water, it's leaking. It's not only leaking, it leaks 750 million gallons of water a year and we can't fix it because we don't have the redundancy. So our plan calls for a series of actions to create that redundancy. A bigger issue however is water quality as I mentioned just about half of the tributaries not the waters, not the big bay but those inlets that come in our communities, half of them are so polluted that we can't even boat in them. 50 percent are that polluted. By 2030 however, we believe that we can make nearly all of them fit for recreation. I will do that again just so you can see it. You can see red all over the city, if you can see that those are our polluted tributaries. Red turned to blue, safe for recreation nearly all of them will be safe for recreation. To do that we'll spend $10 billion in upgrades for our sewage treatment facilities but that's not enough, the big investments and heavy infrastructure won't get there. Instead what we have got to do is we have got to prevent rain water run-off that triggers sewage overflow because our system here takes both sewage and rain water through the same pipes and when it rains not all of our sewage gets treated and as a result two billion gallons of raw sewage gets dumped into those tributaries every single year. You know why that whale died in Gowanus Canal the other day because of the sewage that was dumped on them after the rain fall. So what are we going to do, we are going to use systems that have being pioneered around the world more effectively to more - to drain more of that rain water off so it doesn't go into our sewers. Things like blue belts and green streets program where we plant more of the streets with green, promoting green roofs even planting believe it or not water cleansing mollusks. Our proposals for air are no less ambitious and no less important. We live in a city where child asthma hospitalization rates are two times the national average and in certain communities like the Bronx and Harlem and Brooklyn child asthma hospitalization rates are four times the national average. So our goal is a simple one, our goal is to have the cleanest air quality of any big city in America. That's why the Department of Health will mount an unprecedented campaign of monitoring and pin- pointing local air quality across the city. It will map our progress in an ambitious attack on deadly air pollution. The most aggressive attack our city has ever amounted. We are going to also attack the sources of local air pollution. We'll require the use of higher grades of fuel oils to heat homes, schools and places of businesses, we I will talk in a moment, we will mount an unprecedented energy efficiency effort and you can't deal with air pollution, you cannot deal with air pollution unless you deal with the issue of transportation. Every day that we don't address the issue of transportation, too many of our children especially in our poorest communities suffer the consequences. Transportation itself raised thousands and thousands of tones of soot every year. We will reduce through this combination of efforts, local source emissions of soot and other harmful contaminants by 40 percent by 2030. As I said transportation is a major contributor, more than a quarter of our local air pollution comes from transportation. And as the city continues to grow the cause of congestion to our health to our environment and to our economy are only growing to get worse. The question isn't whether we want to pay, the question is, how are we going to pay for this cause of congestion? Are we going to continue to pay in increased asthma rates? Are we going to continue to pay with more green house gases, with more wasted time, lost businesses, higher prices. Or the real question is do we charge in modest fee to encourage more people to take mass transit. And as a result as you all know, as a test run the Mayor will seek state authority for a three year pilot project. Here is the way it would work. If you drive into a congestion zone, the congestion zone which we have defined is 86 Street and South in Manhattan excluding the FTR Drive or the West Side Highway you'll pay $8. However if you drive only within the zone, it's half prize. If you come over any toll facility, that toll is deducted from the $8. And if you pay a toll coming in and going out they are both deducted. This would only apply week days 6 am to 6 pm. So no night times, no weekends. And the reality is is that most New Yorkers will not be affected at all. Here is the statistic that I found most shocking. If you look at the transportation patterns and commuting patterns of New Yorkers, and say of everybody who lives and works in New York how do they get to work, what percentage of them do you think actually drive into Manhattan for work. Have you had a guess? 4.6 percent 4.6 percent of New Yorkers travel to the Central Business District by car. And remember a lot of those come over tolled facilities. But it's not just that only 4.6 percent will pay this. But what really happens to the other 94 percent. Well one of the beauties of congestion pricing is that what we are going to do with the funds from congestion pricing is implement a wide range of mass transit improvements especially to our least served neighborhoods. So what that means is that if you are one of those 94 percent who don't drive into Manhattan but maybe drive some where else or take mass transit either to Manhattan or somewhere else you will benefit from billions of dollars of enhancements to our mass transit system and our road network. And if you are one of those 4.6 percent or so you will have your choice. You can pay a little bit more, I don't mean to minimize it, in some people's minds it will be a lot more. But you will have better mass transit options and no matter what, you will have a faster commute because the experience of every city that has tried it, is the same. Congestion goes down significantly and you can almost track the improvements in air quality to the implementation of congestion pricing. We can't just deal with this through one piece which is congestion pricing but instead we have to have a holistic solution. Look at our subways, okay. Our sub ways today are congested. 11 out of 26 subway lines are unacceptably congested. But if we look forward, if we don't act, 23 out of 26 subway lines will be congested. Overall New Yorkers have the longest commutes of anybody in the country. Of out of 231 large counties in the United States the four with the longest commutes are Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Staten Island. And despite enormous progress of the last 25 years our system is still billions of dollars away from being in a state of good repair. That means that when you stand on a platform unlike many other cities you don't know when the next train is coming. It means we can't run as many trains through our system as we could because the signalization technology is 50-years old. It means that 60 percent of our subways still have not been subway stations still have not been prepared. And that's why our two transportation goals are to reach a state of good repair on the region's roads, subways and rails for the first time in history and to improve travel times by adding capacity from millions more residents, visitors and workers. We know how we can solve the congestion problem. We know how we can bring the system up to a state of good repair. There is an identified series of projects that will solve our problem. But the problem is is that they face a $30 billion funding gap. What's our answer? Our answer is something we call the smart financing authority which will be funded from revenues, from congestion pricing, in unprecedented city commitment and a match from the state. Those three sources of revenues will then be used to raise the money to fund this full $30 billion gap. This new authority wouldn't run anything, would just take the money in and would provide matching grants to the transportation authorities. But the benefit of making this investment could not be clear. It basically will turn all of this red to green. The answer is clear. Now we can't ignore another essential infrastructural network which is energy. As we saw in Queens last summer our aging grid can't handle the demands of the 21st century. That's why we committed to provide cleaner, more reliable power to ensure every New Yorker of an upgraded energy infrastructure, here is the problem. Without action every form of energy consumption will rise dramatically. The city's total energy bill between now and 2015 will rise by $3 billion and because our infrastructure is old and uses 20th century mid 20th century technology we emit enormous amounts of green house gases and our air quality suffers. So to achieve our goal we will expand our sources of clean energy and keep our demand constant even as we grow. Something no other city has ever done. To increase supply we will build, do clean burning power plants through guaranteed contracts. We will promote upgrades of existing plants. We will create a market for renewable energy. To stabilize demand we will target our largest energy consumers through incentives. And we will change the city charter to require the 10 percent of the city's energy bill, city of New York's Energy Bill to be spent retrofitting city buildings to improve their efficiency. This will be the single largest energy conservation effort ever undertaken by an American city. And city government will be the one leading the way. We will reduce the city's energy consumption by 30 percent over the next 10 years. In order to make all of this happen New York City needs a voice in energy planning. We don't have that today. And so we have proposed the creation of a New York City Energy Planning Board. That single entity will be accountable for an energy policy that considers both supply and demand. By asking consumers to spend just a little bit more of the next few years $2 or so a month, we think the average household in New York will be able to save $240 a year by 2015. Now as I indicated earlier, all of these different initiatives really sum up to one. They sum up to the single biggest attack and what in fact is the greatest challenge of them all global warming. And that's why we have set a goal to reduce our city's global warming emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Here is what happens if we have business as usual. We will go from emitting 58.3 million metric tons of green house gases into the environment, one percent of everything emitted in the United States to 74 million metric tons by 2030 if we just keep going along the way we are going along. Our plan doesn't call from a - for a 30 percent reduction from that 74 million metric tons at the end of the dotted line. It calls for a 30 percent reduction from where we are today down to 41 million metric tones. And if we do all the things we have talked about, if we actually deal with our energy problem, our transportation problem, if we use land more efficiently then we can actually do it and we can be a model for other cities around the world. Now long term investments like these, usually don't make for great politics and that's why they usually aren't made but they do make great cities great and they have made our city, what I think, we'd all like to think is the best city in the world. So what I would like to do before opening up for some questions is ask you to put yourself back in history, put yourself back to say 1850 or so when plans were drawn up for an enormous central park. Many, many people argued it's too big. How will we ever, ever use that much space? Besides its way north, the population of the city doesn't even go beyond 23rd street. Ask yourself, how would you have voted on that? Maybe fast-forward another couple generations of the late 1890s when New York began considering a subway. Plans were drawn up to extend the subway all the way to Northern Manhattan into the farm lands of Harlem. What would you have said? Should we do it, should we spend the money? Fast- forward two more generations we are in the middle of the great depression. 1931, very, very depth of the depression and John D. Rockefeller Jr. unveiled plans for a new mid-town mega project. Everybody laughed. There is a famous Gershwin song, line in a Gershwin song They All Laughed at Rockefeller Center. Would you have laughed? Can you imagine New York City without Rockefeller Center today? It's not just building subways and parks. Our great water supply system, our arterial highway network, our bridges and tunnels and parks, they were all built by a city of people who were looking forward. That's our challenge today and as the Mayor asked on Sunday, if we don't do it now, if we don't do it when we have go independence in City Hall, when we have budget surpluses, when we are feeling confident about our future, if we don't do it now, who will? So I respectfully submit to you that right now it's our turn and we ask you to join us in this crusade to make New York the world's first 21st Century sustainable city. Thank you very much and I will take some questions.