The Daily News does a really shoddy job covering the planned conversion of an industrial builing on Kent street in Williamsburg. The owner of building, which is not fully residential, and is situated in an area that is still overwhelmingly industrial (the recently closed Domino factory is nearby, and you have to get up really early in the morning to work up some sexy industrial chic love for that place; it’s the uber-eyesore), wants to convert the entire building to condominiums. The residents are being forced suddenly to stretch their legs and learn the language of socialism — which isn’t so much an anathema, since the state, in the form of their parents, has funded their pseudo artsist lifestyle all along anyway (I’ve been in this building and they are going to have a hell of time finding the li’l old lady paying $24 rent on a fixed income) — and are crying foul. Hey, kids, this is what being being at the center of hipness is all about. A local assemblyman is ticked because he expects an 80/20 ratio of affordable housing and the owner is offering $355,000 and a ‘renovated waterfront’ (the building sits tranverse to the water and there isn’t that much frontage to renovate), of which it is not clear how it would do much besides drive prices up. Instead of asking how many units (the building is massive and the conversion requires a variance, including new construction) the owner is proposing, and estimating just how paltry the $355K actually is, the News gets some canned bullshit quote from what I assume is the center for real estate shills at NYU, to the effect of ‘whoa, dude, making apartments in New York is hard‘ and that we shouldn’t pressure owners too much. There might be synergy to all this discontent, but I doubt the cadre of angry hipsters realize that they aren’t the people anyone has in mind when one says ‘affordable housing.’ But, you know, it’s true. The real estate market is brutal. That’s why there aren’t any apartments being constructed and it’s so hard to sell a place these days. Maybe we need some tax breaks or something, before New York becomes a real estate wasteland.
Where the heart is, if not the funding.
Mayor Bloomberg formally announced the plan to revise the city’s strategy for homelessness in a speech yesterday. As an exercise in rhetoric, there are a number of admirable points made. The speech clearly recognizes that distinct issues surrounding the ‘chronic homeless’ population (mostly men, mostly with sustance abuse and/or mental illness problems), and commits to services exclusive of housing that may prove transformative. He also calls for an immedate increase in the amount of supportive housing (which aids the chronic population and those segments in need of services that go beyond economic hardship), though he is unfortunately vague about funding. With a current shelter population numbering 38,000, being fuzzy on the math (the current target for supporting housing is 5,000, meaning the gap is well over statistically significant) is a crucial issue.
What is clearly lacking from the speech is a strong mandate to address the other chronic need in this city: affordable housing. The Times
quotes a statistic not in the speech, to the effect that is costs the city $25,000 to house a family in a shelter each year. Why this cannot be translated into a direct subsidy an interesting question (though it would be useful to frame the discussion by breaking those numbers down; even marginally homeless populations require services, and any long term transitional housing subsidy should be accompanied by education, job training, etc.). The mayor also dances around the fact that the courts still hold sway of most of the emergency housing services, since successful lawsuits demonstrated that the previous administration was none too enlightened on how to deal with the largest homeless population in decades. The simple answer is that the city needs to develop affordable housing (which is mentioned in the speech, but I haven’t seen 65,000 apartments under development, have you?) for a core segment of its population, and it needs to be done outside of federal funding (unless some miracle happens, one that exceeds even the election of a Democratic president) so we can have a humane way of dealing with the most extraordinary income and housing cost gaps in the country. This may rankle the aspiring professionals and creative industry wage slaves that flock to the city each year, willing to live in ridiculous conditions at outrageous rates. But their overall economic and social circumstances and outlook are radically different, and their penury is elective (and at times, embarassingly self-aggrandizing). Compared to any other ‘world class’ city, New York has the least effective (as a matter of design or social programming) affordable housing policy. If we embrace the need to spend (privately or publicly) a half a billion dollars on a single musuem renovation, or a billion and a half on a stadium, we can squeeze out a billion or two for a 21st century Stuyvesant Town, can’t we?
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No clay feet here.
The Observer serves up an incisive retrospective the reign of Prince Herbert.
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FAR away, so close-minded.
The upside to this blog thing is the ability to immediately declaim error. And we are the kind of people who find our feet fit best in our mouths. So a short mea cupla regarding the potential ‘qualities’ of the Hudson Yards plan released yesterday. This is not to promise that yet another opinion won’t be offered another day hence, but this one feels pretty right, situated in the comfortable zone indoctrinated by study, practice and living, one that takes the simplistic position that a plan on this scale is a surrender to big real estate interests, lacking any understanding or respect for the successes of Manhattan neighborhoods, and even a pound foolish surrender of public resources. And with a little analysis, it doesn’t seem all that off the mark. It’s a big plan, and still (yes, we couldn’t read 6,000 pages overnight) being digested, so we will deassemble this fiasco in comestible chunks. Today’s segment will be on FAR, the Floor Area Ratio.
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A rail line here. A stadium there. Pretty soon, we are talking about real money.
Roll up your sleeves and get out your Anti-Westway tee-shirts, for the ‘Hudson Yards’ gauntlet has been thrown down, the form of a 6,000 page environmental impact statement. Now, the foes are varied, and, currently, not unified. So I’m not representing some consensus vision of why the ‘Hudson Yards’ plan is flawed, or hopeless on its face. I’m just looking to stick a knife into this goofball stadium plan. Let’s see a unifed cost benefit analysis, broken out by segement (housing, train line, etc.). Because though I am sure some groups opposed the renovation plan in toto, maybe the overall vision isn’t entirely foolhardy, only the stadium. And I suspect that is the position of many of the detractors. One of the justifications is that the covering of the rail yards adjoining Grand Central Station made Park Avenue what it is today. That’s a somewhat specious and simplistic claim, but we’ll accept it for the point of this discussion. I don’t know if you have been there recently, but Shea Stadium is not sitting at the foot of Park Avenue. The boulevard they are proposing is not achored in any way by the stadium. Visually is not an argument. We can have that trampy Thomas Krens build a museum there. Programmatically, economically and socially, the stadium does nothing for a new business/residential district in that area. The only evidence that exists indicates that stadiums actually serve as detriments to this type of development. There are other problematic elements to the plan (scale, scale, scale; distribution of housing, perhaps too much a public subsidy for the eventual return, if one looks at Battery Park City — where we are still waiting for that windfall that will supply all that housing Bloomberg needs for the homeless now that he will be charging rent for shelters — as a comparator), but I’m going to make a good faith effort to digest the plan (if I can even get my hands on it) before addressing them. In mean time, remember, that stadium is snake oil, no matter how you mix it.
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Sambo.
One cannot say enough about Sam Mockbee. Mockbee, who founded the Rural Studio while teaching at Auburn in 1993, a year-long studio where students would meet low-income clients, and then design and construct homes for them on budgets that rivaled what some Manhattan apartments cost for a month. The transformative impact of their work, for both clients and anyone who is inspired to think that design and creative labor can improve lives without outscaled investement, can not be understated.
While a student, I had the good fortune to meet Sam. A friend and I hijacked him during a lecture visit and took him to dinner. I’ve met only a limited number of luminaries in the architecture world, and seen a larger number speak. Mockbee stood out for years in my mind as the kindest person I’ve ever met who called architecture a passion. And his life, as he presented it, was a continual challenge to my own frustrations (at one point, we was living in his office because he couldn’t afford an apartment). That he continued to find ways to bring meaning and a better quality of life to more people as he continued to grow his practice is humbling, proof that carping only the rich can afford to buy or practice architecture is sometimes simply self-serving rationalization.
If you are anywhere near Washington DC over the summer, the National Building Museum is featuring a show (through September 6th) on the work of the Rural Studio. It is beautiful, and not simply because of the quiet grace of the intentions of the program’s social goals, but also because the of rigor with which the practioners engaged the belief that a client is deserving of the highest order of design, regardless of means. The Architect’s Newspaper (print only), offers a review in their current issue.
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All Family Court Buildings are unhappy in their own way.
Even though it seems like public facilities construction takes forever in Manhattan (I swear that Public Service Administration building on Avenue C and 8th Street was under construction for six years), the renovation of the Family Court Building at 60 Lafayette (just north of Foley Square) is at a unique stage worth taking in. The renovation, which comprises some interior renovations and a new exterior, is at the point where all the existing cladding has been removed, leaving a not smooth, but compelling poured concrete substructure, with tie backs sticking out like a fine fur. I can’t remember the last time I saw this building without some temprorary repair or patch applied, and it always had the dingy air of poorly maintained public facility. Now, its unapologetic brutalist roots are on striking display. It even looks a little like the Diller, Scofidio & Renfro reworking of Alice Tully Hall. Let’s hope that whatever new materials Mitchell/Giurgola specify will have greater longevity, and not work against what is a decent, but not spectacular, form.
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But I hear that plaza is real nice.
They haven’t passed a budget, or done much else apparently, but the New York State Assembly is holding hearings regardling the West Side Stadium proposal. NY1 says it will give supporters and opponents a chance to make their voice heard, but I think it should read “shills for supporters and opponents” since we’re all going to have to yell awful loud to be heard all the way up in Albany.
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It wasn’t because of his diminutive stature, right?
You’ve all seen it, now prepare for the welter of meta-analysis. Since there are folks out there that do this better, I’m not going to delve too much into the reportage (except to say that even though this might be presumed to be another example of the reputed skills of Nina Libeskind, on balance, it is not the most flattering item, and there seems to have been little co-operation from the Libeskind camp). The one point where I think the piece could have really added to the dialog would have been providing a thorough recounting of how Libeskind was picked over the THINK team. The reason being is that Libeskind is given a great deal of credit for his ‘visionary’ approach, though the article notes (and is confirmed by an Port Authority mouthpiece) that his plan was formally the most consistent by the Beyer Blinder Belle concepts (which were presented as massing and site planning concepts only). I was not fan of the THINK proposal, but, after all the hand-wringing about dialog and the will of the people, the most popular design was cast aside (I have heard the Vinoly is even publishing a book of their entry to remind people of this slight). Perhaps we should look more critically at Libeskind’s intentions and actions. Given that most of his lamentedly discarded ‘visionary’ elements were either fabrications (the Wedge of Light) or near impossible (keeping the slurry wall exposed), it seems he provided little more than the charismatic sheen for a plan that was fait accompli. And he collected over $2 million dollars in the process. Given his propensity for speaking, if not bluntly, then at least with some rhetorical flourish, it is interesting how tempered his behavior is now. He has a large book of business elsewhere (indeed, after three decades, his economic propects are positively rosy), and it is the kind of work that wouldn’t be damaged by his going straight at the con job being run downtown right now. And really, it’s unlikely he would find much work in this town anyway (our best local talent hasn’t completed a project in Manhattan in twenty years). Though the Times stops well short of “Little Danny, unhappy at last” we should still be careful about painting him as the victim here.
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The new hotness for the Jitney crowd.
Architectural Record has a short write-up and few photos of the first completed house, the innocuously named ‘Sagaponac House-43’ (Lot number 43, obviously) from Hariri & Hariri, at the Houses at Sagaponac. The official site lists the house at 5000sf. According to Record, product placement (!) helped keep construction costs down to a reasonable $250/sf. Allowing for, oh, $750,000 for site acquisition and prep, carrying costs and fees, that means the markup is still a cool $1 million. Now who says architecture doesn’t pay?