On April 21, the Hudson River Park Advisory Council met to discuss, among other things, the latest on plans to permit the sale of air rights from the Hudson River Park to allow increased development inland. This air rights transfer scheme, made possible by State legislation passed last summer, would generate income for the Hudson River Park Trust, the City/State agency that runs the park. Passed very quickly in the final days of the 2013 legislative session with almost no public consultation or discussion, the measure was introduced by local State Assemblymembers Deborah Glick and Richard Gottfried, and supported by local State Senators Brad Hoylman and Daniel Squadron. It has been the subject of intense scrutiny – and controversy – from the beginning.
The Hudson River Park Trust lobbied for the legislation, claiming that it faced a serious financial shortfall which the sale of air rights was the only way to address. Several sections of the park have not been built, and funding for the park is supposed to come from sites within the park where commercial uses and development are allowed, such as Pier 40 (Clarkson Street), Chelsea Piers, and Pier 84 (Circle Line). However, plans to develop Pier 40, such as the grandiose and resoundingly defeated “Vegas-on-the-Hudson” entertainment complex scheme, as well as proposals for residential and hotel development on the pier, have never come to fruition.
The new air rights legislation leaves an enormous number of important questions unanswered, and basically gives a blank check to the Trust and to the city’s notorious ‘ULURP’ (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure) process to decide how, when, and where the air rights can be used. This is the same ULURP process which in the recent past greenlighted NYU’s massive expansion plan, rezoned St. Vincent’s Hospital for Rudin’s luxury condo development, and upzoned Chelsea Market to allow huge office additions to be built atop the historic complex.
The ULURP process is controlled by the Mayor and the City Council (over whom the Speaker exerts an outsized degree of influence), with the local community board and even the Borough President only having an advisory role in the decision-making process. Even the local City Councilmember only gets one vote out of 51 in the City Council. While deference is often given to local City Councilmembers on land use issues such as these, sometimes it is not – the Council can, and has been known to, vote against the local member on ULURPs.
The Hudson River Park Trust, the other decision-making entity in the air rights transfer process, is controlled by forces even further away from our neighborhood. Its board consists of a majority of members appointed by the Mayor and the Governor – officials over whom we, as a local community, have little leverage.
So what exactly is the danger of potential air rights transfers from the Hudson River Park?
The greatest danger is that they will enable and result in vastly increased development along the western edge of our neighborhood (the legislation allows air rights to be transferred “one block inland” from the park, which we know means as far east as 9th Avenue in at least one case, anywhere between Chambers and 59th Streets). The legislation makes this source of funding for the park dependent upon selling additional development rights for use inland, which means the Trust only makes money when a developer is given more square feet to build a bigger building in our neighborhood.
Additionally, how many square feet of building rights does the Trust have to potentially sell to developers? We don’t know yet, and apparently neither does the Trust nor the elected officials who wrote or passed the legislation. So far, the best estimate they have given is that the park has about 1.6 million square feet of space, or the equivalent of more than six Trump SoHos. So that’s more than six additional Trump SoHos worth of space that air rights transfers from the park could potentially allow to be built in our neighborhood, on top of the millions of square feet of development that current zoning – including several huge rezonings the city passed in recent years through the ULURP process –allows right now to be built in our neighborhood and elsewhere between Chambers and 59th Streets.
In response, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation has been working with a coalition of two dozen Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, SoHo, and Tribeca groups to try to help ensure that this air rights provision is not abused and misused in the future, and does not lead to overdevelopment of our neighborhoods. First and foremost, we would like a system set up to define and test “financial need” for the Trust. If the purported purpose of the legislation is to address the park’s financial needs, a mechanism should be created to ensure that air rights can only be sold if and when there is a demonstrated need and benefit for the park, and not simply a benefit for well-connected developers.
Secondly, we want upzoning of our neighborhood (i.e. allowing an increased size of development) to be a last resort for generating revenue for the park, not a first resort. Though not currently envisioned as part of this process, air rights can be sold without resulting in increased size and scale of new development in our neighborhoods. This can be done by pairing any air rights sales with a downzoning (i.e. decreasing the allowable size of new development, and allowing developers to purchase air rights in order to increase the size of allowable development back up to the original size) and/or by linking the air rights sales to changes in the allowable types of development, as opposed to changes in the scale of development (i.e. allowing a developer who purchases air rights to build a 10-story residential building on a site that would otherwise only allow a 10-story hotel).
Also, the City should establish a mechanism similar to those set up in other parts of the City whereby all new development within a certain zone has to pay a fee towards supporting the park. This would generate additional revenue (making air rights sales less necessary) and would not be dependent upon making development in our neighborhood larger – it would simply mean that any new development generates revenue for the park, regardless of its size.
Finally, we need absolute clarity about how many air rights the park has and what parts of the park generate those air rights. Amazingly, after months of asking this question, we still only have incomplete and in some cases contradictory answers to this question.
The April 21 Hudson River Park Advisory Committee meeting did not break much new ground or provide many new answers. The Trust says it is still trying to calculate the number of air rights it has, and has been meeting with the Department of City Planning (which will help create the process for allowing air rights to be transferred), but says those conversations are still only very preliminary. It was announced that Borough President Brewer was interested in putting together a body for looking at proposals for how to regulate and allow the transfer of air rights between Chambers and 59th Streets, but the particulars of that have not yet been worked out.
In the meantime, we are continuing to raise questions about the air rights transfers and offer reasonable alternatives, while we wait for answers and further movement from our city and state officials and the Hudson River Park Trust.
Rather than spending $85 million to fix the supports under Pier 40, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to do landfill under and around it. Create an even larger land mass with our garbage the way the lower tip of Manhattan and the east side was created. (Pearl St. was once on the East River shore!) Same with the dirt from WTC. Let’s fill under the pier and incorp the piers on each side and create acres more of the HRP land.