Hudson Yards: All is not quiet on the western front

By Andrew Berman

The five bids for development of the West Side rail yards, covering approximately 30 acres between 10th and 12th Avenues and 30th and 33rd Streets, are now in. They’re being displayed and presented through various forums around town, with feedback being solicited from the public. Unfortunately, in most respects, one plan is more horrible than the next. And if any of them are built as currently configured, it will be devastating for our neighborhoods and, I believe, for the City as a whole.

The basic problem stems not from the individual proposals but from the entire premise of the bidding process. The MTA has more or less required developers to propose 12 million square feet of development on the yards – the equivalent of about five or six Empire State Buildings – and nearly all of it commercial or luxury residential development. There is no requirement for affordable or middle-income housing, which our city and our neighborhoods sorely need, and as a result the bids contain little or none of it.

The effect could be tremendous. Twelve million square feet of development will generate a tremendous amount of traffic, pollution and strain on services like mass transit, sewage, police, fire and hospitals in our area. There is no traffic mitigation plan currently attached to this project, and frankly one has to wonder how the traffic generated by so much development could possibly be mitigated. Traffic in the area is already often at a dangerous snarl, and as a result we have some of the highest asthma rates around. And while the No. 7 line is supposed to be extended to this site, the No. 7, like much of the rest of the subway system, is already horribly overcrowded and overburdened, and the single-stop extension of the line scarcely seems like it will address this problem.

And these are hardly the only problems with the bids. The process itself is quite deceptive in that the bidders, if selected, are not actually obligated to stick to the designs they are currently presenting. So, what is built could bear very little resemblance to what we are being shown, which makes one wonder about the sincerity of the invitations for public input. Figures about the amount of affordable housing which would be included are deceptive as well. While several developers refer to “20 percent affordable housing,” what they really mean is that 20 percent of just the rental housing would be affordable under the State’s 80/20 program. But in fact the percentage of housing which will actually be rentals is as yet undetermined, and condos could end up being most or all of the housing produced, none of which would be affordable. Beyond that, in most bids the housing is only a fraction of the total development envisioned on the yards (in some cases a pretty small fraction), thus making the “20 percent” figure all the more misleading.

Letting five real estate developers, or even the MTA, have such control over the future of our neighborhoods and our city is a mistake. And in many ways I do not think the developers – whose job, after all, is to make money – or the MTA – whose job is to run our mass transit system, and find funding to do so – are really to blame. But the MTA is more or less controlled by the Governor and the Mayor, and they must exert their influence here to make this a rational process. And these projects can’t be built without zoning changes that must be approved by the City Planning Commission and the City Council, and so these bodies must also exert their influence to ensure that the livability of our neighborhoods, and our city, are paramount in the decision-making process as well.

When the area surrounding the rail yards was rezoned in 2004, the potential for 24 million square feet of development was created. The rezoning of West Chelsea in 2005 also created the potential for several million square feet of new development. Add in the millions of square feet of development currently being proposed around Penn Station and on top of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and you have the equivalent of the entire downtowns of several medium-sized U.S. cities being added to the West Side in the coming years. One would think we were swimming in open space needing to be filled, or at the very least adding infrastructure to keep pace with the gargantuan development we are creating.

But in fact we are not. Instead, those deciding the fate of development in our city seem more interested in having New York try to keep pace with Dubai and Shanghai than to keep our city livable and affordable. Many of us fought very hard to prevent a stadium from being built on the rail yards because of the terrible impacts it would have on our neighborhood on game days. We need to make sure we do not get those very same impacts, every day of the week, from the current massive plans for the rail yards.

Andrew Berman is a board member of Save Chelsea, the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association, the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition, and the West Side Neighborhood Alliance.