There’s a term used in selling investment products that comes up when it is necessary to explicate the gap between the rosy projections of any piece of sales literature (that mythical 7-11% return that climbs steadily northward) and what may have actually happened: it’s called hindsight bias — one of the few terms that makes sense independent of financial services jargon. It’s the point where you explain to someone that should you look back and find the absolutely two best points to buy and sell a stock, it cannot be a rational basis for acting now, since it is impossible (sort of like the Heisenberg Principle) to determine if one of those two points is approaching.
It applies to just about any retrospective analysis in life. Real estate and development is another. If you had only moved to X back in Y, you’d be rich, etc. So it takes a certain amount of rigor to analyze an event without coloring conclusions with extraneous information. The folks at the Downtown Express — not the most nonpartisan folks, but they do manage occassional burst of incisive journalism — therefore cannot be entirely blamed for the whitewash they give to Battery Park City, presented on the eve of the final betrayal of public interest, which slips by with they jaded resignation of the sellout. But becoming inured to the corruption with which real estate development happens is not something we should allow journalists.
And so here we have what is trotted out as the signal accomplishment of Manhattan development, an anitdote to Robert Moses, a livable, park-like environment. But we’ll skip right over that residents love it because it’s so unlike Manhattan, and that it was mostly luck and the determined effort of one designer that saved the project from a forest of skyways a la Minneapolis. The bridges connecting the WFC buildings look like an aberration now, but that was the intended goal for the entire project, so that precious ground level space could be freed up for, yep, you guessed it, cars and trucks.
So it’s mostly banal, it never attracted new downtown businesses, and it’s another example of a quasi-private entity that consumes public resources at disproportionate levels (they get to unilaterally make budget decision and simply net expenditures againsts their yearly PILOT numbers), that’s not a failure on the order we come to expect, in a city where things are done big or they aren’t done at all.
Well, we have that too, in monumental quality. Over the 35-year history of the development, the primary goal of Batter Park City was to provide public housing. A number that ranged from 6,000 (including middle-income units) in 1969, to 14,000 in the 80’s to 24,000 in the 90’s (when it was tacitly agreed that building them on-site was not going to jibe with all the flocking rich white folks). Total number constructed? Less, than 2,000 (see the gory details here). It’s crucial to talk about this, not just because it’s another example of how ruthlessly class warfare is perptuated on the lower echelons of our city, but because we are at another critical nexus of planning and investment. To whit, the city has announced another sweeping public housing initiative, coupled with the defunding of big chunks of the homeless shelter program, and they are looking to hand out positively gargantuan sums to sports teams. It was agreed more than once that surplus revenues from the BPC would fund affordable housing. Now it is openly being recommended that the initial funding for Hudson Yard be the surplus funds. That’s right: $600 million for public housing for 22 people, and they don’t even get to sleep there at night.
So let’t not get all misty eyed about how great Battery Park is. When it was being planned there was one restaurant in TriBeCa, places like Independence Plaza were lonely encampments, and the city was looking to hide its low income residents on a perch at the end of Manhattan. But the minute it became clear that it wasn’t going to be a prison, the promise of low income housing was shunted aside. The information is there, but everytime a reporter is dispatched to present fact, turns out their boss has a cozy relationship with a developer (the Times), or is one (the Daily News). And so everyone rolls over and ignores the fact that the wealthy invented class warfare, and the ability of the downtrodden to resist grows weaker each year. You would think that at the very least, the rich would understand without the poor, there would be no mechanism for edifying their egos.
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How do you spell failure? B.P.C.
There’s a term used in selling investment products that comes up when it is necessary to explicate the gap between the rosy projections of any piece of sales literature (that mythical 7-11% return that climbs steadily northward) and what may have actually happened: it’s called hindsight bias — one of the few terms that makes sense independent of financial services jargon. It’s the point where you explain to someone that should you look back and find the absolutely two best points to buy and sell a stock, it cannot be a rational basis for acting now, since it is impossible (sort of like the Heisenberg Principle) to determine if one of those two points is approaching.
It applies to just about any retrospective analysis in life. Real estate and development is another. If you had only moved to X back in Y, you’d be rich, etc. So it takes a certain amount of rigor to analyze an event without coloring conclusions with extraneous information. The folks at the Downtown Express — not the most nonpartisan folks, but they do manage occassional burst of incisive journalism — therefore cannot be entirely blamed for the whitewash they give to Battery Park City, presented on the eve of the final betrayal of public interest, which slips by with they jaded resignation of the sellout. But becoming inured to the corruption with which real estate development happens is not something we should allow journalists.
And so here we have what is trotted out as the signal accomplishment of Manhattan development, an anitdote to Robert Moses, a livable, park-like environment. But we’ll skip right over that residents love it because it’s so unlike Manhattan, and that it was mostly luck and the determined effort of one designer that saved the project from a forest of skyways a la Minneapolis. The bridges connecting the WFC buildings look like an aberration now, but that was the intended goal for the entire project, so that precious ground level space could be freed up for, yep, you guessed it, cars and trucks.
So it’s mostly banal, it never attracted new downtown businesses, and it’s another example of a quasi-private entity that consumes public resources at disproportionate levels (they get to unilaterally make budget decision and simply net expenditures againsts their yearly PILOT numbers), that’s not a failure on the order we come to expect, in a city where things are done big or they aren’t done at all.
Well, we have that too, in monumental quality. Over the 35-year history of the development, the primary goal of Batter Park City was to provide public housing. A number that ranged from 6,000 (including middle-income units) in 1969, to 14,000 in the 80’s to 24,000 in the 90’s (when it was tacitly agreed that building them on-site was not going to jibe with all the flocking rich white folks). Total number constructed? Less, than 2,000 (see the gory details here). It’s crucial to talk about this, not just because it’s another example of how ruthlessly class warfare is perptuated on the lower echelons of our city, but because we are at another critical nexus of planning and investment. To whit, the city has announced another sweeping public housing initiative, coupled with the defunding of big chunks of the homeless shelter program, and they are looking to hand out positively gargantuan sums to sports teams. It was agreed more than once that surplus revenues from the BPC would fund affordable housing. Now it is openly being recommended that the initial funding for Hudson Yard be the surplus funds. That’s right: $600 million for public housing for 22 people, and they don’t even get to sleep there at night.
So let’t not get all misty eyed about how great Battery Park is. When it was being planned there was one restaurant in TriBeCa, places like Independence Plaza were lonely encampments, and the city was looking to hide its low income residents on a perch at the end of Manhattan. But the minute it became clear that it wasn’t going to be a prison, the promise of low income housing was shunted aside. The information is there, but everytime a reporter is dispatched to present fact, turns out their boss has a cozy relationship with a developer (the Times), or is one (the Daily News). And so everyone rolls over and ignores the fact that the wealthy invented class warfare, and the ability of the downtrodden to resist grows weaker each year. You would think that at the very least, the rich would understand without the poor, there would be no mechanism for edifying their egos.