By Chris Lombardi

Representatives of the five real estate developers vying to develop the Hudson Rail Yards met a wall of criticism at a forum held by a West Side coalition of community groups at the Hudson Guild last Monday.

Some 300 local residents and members of community groups that are part of the Hudson Yards Community Advisory Committee (HYCAC) packed the Guild’s Dan Carpenter Room to hear presentations and evaluate the developers’ proposals. Most found the plans inadequate in essential ways.

Representatives of all five developers gave shortened versions of their proposals, only to hear that their green space might be nice but their buildings were way too big, and their visions for affordable housing were completely inadequate.

Just as at community meetings last fall and spring, affordable housing topped the community’s list of concerns, though residents were more strident this time out, demanding a rethinking of the project’s core goals set by the MTA last summer, and finding inadequate the basket of sweeteners aimed at promoting such housing, mostly through the state’s 80/20 program.

Second on the list of concerns was “good jobs at a living wage”: Residents believe the construction phase and the development itself should generate jobs for locals. The High Line took a back seat to those priorities, ranking a bit lower on the list, while still very much on people’s minds.

Meanwhile, HYCAC board members consulted this week by Chelsea Now said the community has as much right as anyone to set the terms for what will be built in their neighborhood.

“We’re transit riders, and we certainly understand why the MTA set the terms it did,” said John Raskin of Housing Conservation Coordinators, in a Wednesday phone conversation. “But they can’t balance their entire budget with this one act, especially not if it creates an unsustainable community.”

Raskin’s comment was directed both at the builders’ affordable-housing provisions, which he termed “insufficient,” and the requirement that the project pay for itself through 12 million square feet of development. Last Monday, as the HYCAC forum audience came to terms with what such development amounted to, the crowd grew more and more animated in its objections.

“It’s all too big,” said Joseph Restuccia, co-chair of Community Board 4’s Hell’s Kitchen Land Use Committee, just before the forum began. “The scale you’re looking at, you can’t comprehend it. It’s Hong Kong on the Hudson.”

This is what democracy looks like

The Hudson Guild’s Dan Carpenter Room was lined with glossy panel-boards from the developers, each bearing images from the competing plans. HYCAC members milled around the room’s edges. Some asked questions of the dark-suited young men and women who stood by the panels; others just murmured to one another. “I just wanna know where their school is,” said one woman, staring at Tishman Speyer’s lavish renderings.

“Right now, I’m just trying to deal with the urban design aspect,” Restuccia told Chelsea Now. When all is said and done, he said, “the whole housing thing will be resolved, and the open space has gotta work. But for an overall site plan, I don’t want something that’s just an island. “I see a lot of islands around here,” said Restuccia, gesturing to the shiny boards.

The forum then began, first with comments from local elected officials, including Assemblymember Richard Gottfried and State Senator Thomas Duane. “This community is amazing,” said Duane. “Normally, you’d have to have a toxic waste dump planned to get this many people out on a cold night.”

Then it was down to business. HYCAC co-chair Anna Hayes Levin flashed a map of the site and went over the requirements of the MTA’s request for proposals (RFPs). “They [the yards] belong to the MTA and are part of their capital plan,” said Levin, “which is important to all of us.” The agency’s goals, she said, “are number one, too maximize the value they can get to help their budget; number two, ensure continuous train service throughout the construction; number three, excellence in design; and number four, sustainability.”

To make the project self-supporting, said Levin, the MTA had included in their RFP 12 million square feet of commercial development, “or approximately six Time Warner Centers.” She waited for the groaning to stop before concluding with: “Please remember that our priorities are not necessarily the same as the MTA’s.”

How can we make it part of the city?

The developers’ representatives then stepped up, with less time to explain their proposals that ever before. (“We asked them to do the impossible, and they came through,” Levin told Chelsea Now afterward.) As each team came forward to summarize their proposals in 10-minute Powerpoint sessions, they seemed like a row of anxious suitors, all responding to the same online personal ad.

For the Extell Corporation, Chris McVoy stressed his company’s unprecedented 19.5-acre park running “all the way through the city” with a view of the Empire State Building, as well as the complex’ music commons and sculpture park. “This feels like a time,” he said, “similar to the moment they made Central Park.” The Durst/Vornado team also emphasized its park, noting that its tallest office building, on 10th Avenue, “is embraced by the two large plazas, public gathering places linked to the park.”

Brookfield Properties’ James Corner crisply emphasized his company’s unique re-imposition of the Manhattan street grid. “In breaking up the super-block…our main concern was, How can we integrate the site to the city?” The answer, he said, was “public rights-of-way, streets and avenues—not something open at the center, which we consider would be nothing but a wind tunnel.” Brookfield’s goal included a minimum 400 units of affordable housing, he said, and “the northern High Line would be like the rest of it, an elegant throughway.”

The Related Companies took a slightly different tack, going point by point through the HYCAC principles. Saying that “affordable housing is really our specialty,” Related’s presenters said that residential buildings would be 50 percent rentals built under the state’s 80/20 program [in which the state offers preferential financing to buildings that reserve 20 percent of units for low-income residents], with 400 units permanently affordable. They added that the planned News Corporation media center would “invigorate” the public space, and that Hudson River Park and would be “well-connected to Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen streets and sidewalks.”

Finally, Tishhman-Speyer’s reps promised that in addition to its new headquarters for Morgan Stanley, its residential buildings would be threaded with “smaller, intimate neighborhood parks, still open but with things for children.” The Tishman suitors even brought roses for the occasion: Their project’s grand “New York Steps” plaza, an echo of Rome’s Spanish Steps, would have at its eastern edge continuously replaced flowers—“a floral entry, something elegant and very fine.”

It’s real-estate economics 101

The suitors then retreated, waiting patiently as the attendees clustered at tables to consider what they had heard, armed with fact sheets that gave numbers to how each proposal met HYCAC’s demands. Each table had a moderator from one of HYCAC’s constituent groups, who tried simultaneously to sort out information and elicit opinions.

At the group moderated by Meredith Taylor of Friends of the High Line, one woman lobbied for dynamic architecture: “If it’s all going to be so large,” she said “at least let it be interesting.” Another pointed out that on the issue of open space, “a chance to create something big doesn’t come along that often.” In another group Danielle Decerbo, aide to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and members of Local 6 of the SEIU talked a lot about “union jobs” at the site, echoing others who wanted to ensure that all who work in the proposed buildings earn a living wage.

But many more emphasized the concerns raised in the group moderated by Corey Johnson of CB 4: the glaring lack of any guarantee of affordable housing. “The developers say, with some justification, that it’s so far off and how do they know what they can afford to build? But that’s not good enough, and we know it,” said one member.

West Side resident Eric Rosen bemoaned the possible ripple effect on Chelsea and Clinton’s already inflated housing market. “It’s real-estate economics 101,” said Rosen. “It’ll push up property values and displace people in all the surrounding areas.”

And a tall man in a ten-gallon hat added that the lack of information on the financing in the proposals was a serious problem, given the MTA’s interest in “maximum value.” The latter concern was echoed over and over in many groups, including that moderated by Duane aide Colin Casey, whose group hoped that “money is not everything in these bids.” Casey added that his team was concerned about the “fortress-like” quality of many of the buildings.

For many, the issue was not only how much affordable housing but of what type, with most urging a mix of low-, moderate- and middle-income units. Some proposed a new version of the Mitchell-Lama state-subsidized housing program, one that would be open to people of moderate incomes. “I think we’re have gonna go back to Albany to make that happen,” said Anna Hayes Levin.

Affordable housing is expensive

This week, as they prepared their letter for the MTA, HYCAC’s board was determined to turn the forum’s sentiments, which former CB 4 board chairperson Lee Compton called “an unusual amount of consensus,” into concrete action. HCC’s Raskin, who had spent the forum urging attendees to voice their concerns—“You know more than most people, honest!”—said on Wednesday by phone that the message was particularly clear on mixed-income housing.

“The governor and the MTA could actually mandate the kind of affordable housing we want with a snap of their fingers,” said Raskin. “But that hasn’t happened, and what we heard last week was that we need to do more.”

Levin, like her CB 4 colleague Joe Restuccia, sounded less exasperated than simply practical about what had to be done. “I don’t think the MTA was stubborn,” Levin told Chelsea Now. “Affordable housing is expensive. And nothing motivates the MTA to go talk to the Housing Finance Agency and say, ‘We got a state housing program we need to develop,’ unless we get them to do it.” Using its own land at the rail yards, she said, New York State could create financing vehicles that make affordable housing profitable for builders,but only if the community exerted pressure in the right way, with the right allies.

“Affordable housing, lower density, all the things that make a development nice for a community—they all cost money,” said Levin. “And we have to fight for it.”