The great $10 apartment sale | Crain's New York Business

The great $10 apartment sale | Crain's New York Business (Quoted Below)

Kind of a cool deal, but its kind of sad how much New York is being developed, especially since Jane Jacobs* fought so hard to have the Lower East Side NOT be redeveloped my Robert Moses**

The great $10 apartment sale

And that's no typo.

By Jeremy Smerd

Buck Ennis

A STEAL: The 1920s building that houses the Mars Bar will be demolished in August. When some tenants return in two years, each will pay $10 (tax free) to buy an apartment in the new building, a 12-story luxury high-rise.

Ten dollars buys two cold Budweisers at the Mars Bar. For those who live above the graffiti-scarred East Village dive, it's the price of a new, luxury apartment.

An octogenarian playwright, a drag queen and a kvetcher provoked nightly by the bar's cacophony are among the nine tenants in two adjoining buildings at the corner of Second Avenue and East First Street who will receive this sweet deal.

At the end of the month, they will vacate their 1920s building, which will be demolished in August. When they return in about two years, each will pay $10 (tax free) to buy an apartment in a 12-story luxury high-rise.

It will not only be the deal of their lives, but among the last of its kind in the area. Still, it's bittersweet. Their new digs will epitomize the change they resisted for so long.

"Look at this stuff all around us, all these high-rises. Everywhere you look. Behind us. West of us," said John Vaccaro, 81, the lone tenant willing to be interviewed. "It bothers me that New York has changed so much. It's not the New York I came to."

The Second Avenue he came to in the late 1950s was lined with Jewish restaurants and jazz musicians, Mr. Vaccaro said. He founded the Playhouse of the Ridiculous Repertory Club in 1966 and moved into his 2,100-square-foot loft 11 years later.

By then the building, once a Yiddish theater, had been seized by the city, as had many others after arsonists-for-hire torched much of the neighborhood. Artists like Mr. Vaccaro reclaimed the abandoned buildings. Eventually, with government subsidies, they were brought up to code and returned to the tax rolls.

Tenants' sweat equity and sheer perseverance were rewarded as the city disposed itself of its portfolio. Many were allowed to buy their units for a nominal fee. Developers, meanwhile, salvaged city-owned buildings and parking lots. Some erected luxury apartments.

But like the walls of the Mars Bar, the blank canvas that once attracted artists to the neighborhood has been covered. Almost no formerly city-owned buildings remain undeveloped.

"It's the end of an era," said Steve Herrick, executive director of the Cooper Square Committee, a community housing organization.

The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development owns fewer than 800 apartments acquired through tax foreclosure, down from 101,000 in 1981.

The last resident-occupied, city-owned building on the Lower East Side is 400 Grand St., Mr. Herrick said. It is part of a 10-parcel, 7-acre site, the largest undeveloped city-owned plot south of 96th Street, to be developed into 1,000 mixed-income units in the next few years.

In the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Area, from the Bowery to Second Avenue and from East Fifth to Stanton streets, one piece of vacant, city-owned land remains: a tiny lot off East Houston Street.

East Village evolution

The area was designated for renewal in 1959, but residents stopped Robert Moses' plans to raze blocks and create a development like Stuyvesant Town on the Lower East Side. Instead, the neighborhood was developed piecemeal.

The final installment came in the last decade, when developer Avalon Bay Communities built four luxury buildings. Whole Foods Market moved into one on East Houston Street in 2007. The other developments surround Mr. Vaccaro's building, 11-17 Second Ave., which the city sold to BFC Partners in 2002. The same year, 9 Second Ave. was sold to the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a housing organization.

The tenants in those two buildings will be among the last in the area to get their apartments for next to nothing. But there is a twist.

With a 1,261-square-foot, two-bedroom across the street renting for $7,955 a month, government subsidies are not needed. It is more economical to build a new building and use market-rate rentals to subsidize free apartments for the tenants than to rehabilitate their five- and three-story structures.

"The neighborhood went from arson to devastation to landlord abandonment to development, where the profits of market-rate housing are strong enough to throw off a little surplus and make some units of affordable housing possible at really no cost to government," said Richard Heitler, chief operating officer of UHAB. "It's a win-win-win."

In the new, 65-unit building, nine of the 13 affordable apartments will go to the tenants in the existing buildings. The other four will be sold by lottery for around $150,000 to people making less than $64,000, according to BFC Partners.

Donald Capoccia, a principal at BFC, said his company was among the first to rehabilitate city-owned property. It renovated 72 E. Third St. in 1980 after acquiring the building for $1. The company grew. More recently, it developed the high-rise Toren condominium in downtown Brooklyn.

"We did probably one of the first ones under the Koch administration," Mr. Capoccia said. "Now, we're doing one of the last ones."

Yuppie scum

Neighborhood blogs have covered the story with the requisite antipathy for yuppie scum. Locals have mostly lamented that the Mars Bar will come down with the building, but the protests of earlier years have given way to resignation. At a February City Planning Commission hearing, no one spoke in opposition.

"The bar's closing. Oh, well," said a Mars Bar bartender named Amy. "You move on. I dislike this neighborhood now."

Mr. Vaccaro, like his building, is old and frail. "I'd rather be young and directing shows," he said while sifting through memorabilia he is giving away. He pays $294 a month but has spent thousands renovating his space.

His kitchen, though, sits on a platform because the floor is unstable. Illuminated by track lighting, it could be the set of one of his plays, with Mr. Vaccaro playing the character who doesn't recognize the neighborhood he calls home.

"I don't know who these people are," he said, motioning to the street below his second-floor loft.
But he knows a good deal when he sees it. "They're giving me a two-bedroom apartment," he said. "That sounds fab."

*Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a great read and has had much impact on urban renewal and reactions against urban development since its publication in the 60s

**More to come on Robert Moses (and Jane Jacobs) later, but basically he was one of the big shapers and planners of modern American cities

Walkable Communities

I walk to work.

I own a cafe on a corner of an intersection in the center of a Portland neighborhood. When I opened this business here, I lived in downtown Portland. I had a choice of how I got to work in the morning. I could take a bus, which took about 30 minutes, I could take a train, which took about the same amount of time. I could also drive, which took about 20 minutes (without heavy traffic) on surface streets, and about the same amount of time on the freeway network, longer if there was rush-hour traffic, and accident, or a stall. I have since moved into the neighborhood with my cafe, my commute being reduced to three minutes on foot.

Before automobiles became the standard mode of transportation, cites had to be dense and zoned uses (commercial, industrial, residential) had to be accessible through the modes which were available (walking, subways, streetcars, animals, etc). Prominent pre-1950 cities (NYC, Chicago, Boston, SF) tend to be denser than cities that rose to prominence after the automobile became the standard mode of transportation (LA, San Jose, Phoenix). In many older cities, the first suburban areas were based around streetcar access. Known as streetcar suburbs, they followed the development pattern of smaller, older cities with a retail strip along the streetcar line, and relatively dense single-family housing surrounding the commercial strip.

Here are a couple of images. The first one is Downtown San Jose, CA. The second one is Manhattan.

Clearly, the Manhattan street scene is bustling with interesting historical architecture, street level shops, and most importantly, people. By contrast, San Jose features soulless glass box modern buildings, wide streets and plazas, massive setbacks and no pedestrians.

So, what makes cities walkable?

First, they must be designed in a pedestrian scale. This means that blocks are small (Portland's 200-foot blocks seem like the ideal size), streets are narrow (2 lanes, unidirectional), and there is a buffer between sidewalk and street. This is usually accomplished through on-street parking. Also, the presence of street trees for shade makes pedestrian travel more appealing in summer months.

Second, there needs to be access. This includes access between zoned uses and access to transportation modes (light rail, bus lines, subways, and bicycle and road networks). The classic American grid makes streets easily navigable, but variations to the grid add interest to monotonous street networks. Either way, there must not be impediments to foot travel (walls, fences, viaducts, etc) within a walkable city.

Third is perceived personal safety. Other pedestrians on the streets provides a sense of safety in numbers, and eyes-on-the-street (which ties in with the fourth concept of walkability), meaning that storefronts and apartment windows facing the street self police activities on the streets. Buffer zones between the street and sidewalk and slow movement of traffic, as well as safe street crossings also contribute to a feeling of safety.

Fourth is design. Blank, monolithic walls butted against sidewalks provides a feeling of lifelessness on streets. Street level retail and restaurants, accessible directly from the sidewalk creates a sense of excitement and activity. Large set-backs, plazas in front of buildings, and parking lots between sidewalk and retail diminish the pedestrian scale. Modern glass structures with blank walls at street level, underground parking entrances, and lack of street-level retail create a sense of blandness, while historic buildings give charm and character to the city.

The fifth concept is amenity. Most people are not going to walk around an abandoned downtown without purpose. There needs to be a reason to stroll about the city. A concentration of retail, food, and entertainment options is needed to make cities viable places to visit. Along with this, there must also be a mix of zoning or combined zoning. The center of the city should not be an exclusively commercial zone. Having residential areas within the center city will enhance the liveliness of the center and provide more of an opportunity for people to meet their daily needs without dependance on automobiles.

Suburban areas and cities that grew largely after WW2 were centered around automobiles. They were not designed on a pedestrian scale. The next post will focus on how suburban and postwar development patterns have led to the degradation of the traditional concept of urban design.

Boarded Up: Fundraiser!

The purpose of this Blog has been to document examples of things gone wrong and things gone right with aging American mainstreets. 

Boarded Up: America's Forgotten Mainstreets is a photographic journey into abandoned and derelict commercial districts of the American Midwest and Rustbelt. The purpose of this project is to document buildings and districts of architectural and historical significance in hopes that revitalization efforts will preserve these commercial centers for the benefit of the communities in which they are located. 

We will juxtapose images of buildings in their current state with found historical images and provide anecdotes of the former glory of these downtowns through interviews and research. We will also document cases where preservation efforts have succeeded in saving historic commercial districts from the wrecking ball and now provide an economic amenity to the community.

The money raised will help finance a road trip to collect images, stories and documentation from the profiled communities, and pay for items such as photographic processing, permissions to reproduce images, editing and layout, and prototype printing.

The finished product will be a large format coffee table book, hardcover, with black and white and color images, with supportive narrative. This book will be at once nostalgic, haunting, and inspiring. 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/706878704/boarded-up-americas-abandoned-mainstreets

Granite City

Granite City, IL is a steel town. It was founded in 1896 by brothers operating a steel-making company in St Louis  who sought to expand their business and focus on an enamel process whereby utensils made of steel could be made to look like granite (hence the name). St Louis blocked the expansion, so they moved across the river, where they could also avoid paying cross-river taxes on coal.

Situated on the Mississippi, about six miles north of East St Louis, Granite City maintains a population of around 30,000. But unlike ESL, Granite City seems to be focusing on restoration of it's crumbing downtown. According to their website, there are efforts underway to repave streets and install street trees to the urban core. This is a good first step into the beautification and eventual rehabilitation and preservation of the downtown.

Here are some Google Earth images:

This overhead shot shows the dominance of industry in the city. Presently, industry is still active but closures of these plants would surely have a devastating effect on the community.

The boarded up remnants of downtown.

A fence here at least tries to hide the vacant lot behind.

An expansive row of boarded up commercial storefronts. It's not hard to imagine how this block would look with the addition of street trees, minor facade upgrades and thriving businesses.

The International Style Steel Works Building looms over this commercial strip, out of character with the surrounding architecture.

This facade could use a face-lift...

Ruins stand amongst the possibilities. A concerted effort needs to be taken to prevent this fate from happening to the surrounding storefronts.

I presume this street is closed for paving, the first step in a revival of this commercial center.

Camden

There's a lot of Camden to do in Camden, NJ if you are interested in the exploration of deteriorating storefronts and business districts. I have never been there personally, but what I gather, it's a scary place. Home to the Campbell Soup Company, Camden's population is 77,000, down from a high in 1950 of around 125,000. The largest employers in the first half of the 20th century were Campbells, RCA Victor, and the shipyards. But racial tension, extremely high crime, loss of industry, and government corruption (three mayors have been convicted on corruption charges) has made Camden a city in decline.

Here are some Google Streetview images from the Bergen Square neighborhood.

There once was life on this block...

Maybe it's the lighting, but this row of storefronts seems bleak and threatening.

At least one shop seems to be doing well....

In better lighting, it's easier to see the potential of this strip.

I find this building interesting. It is so anonymous, yet, the cornices maintain a certain charm. I wonder what is behind that door.

For sale. Cheap. Needs TLC.

Katz's stands alone amongst the urban prairie. Once can only now imagine what this block was like when it was complete. Now, Katz just seems lonely.

What makes a city livable or lovable?

Here is an interesting article from the Financial Times. Are all "liveable" cities lovable?


Here are a few traits that the author, Edwin Heathcote, provides: 


 1) Blend of beauty and ugliness – beauty to lift the soul, ugliness to ensure there are parts of the fabric of the city that can accommodate change.
2) Diversity – if lots of people are wanting to come to a city, there must be something there.
3) Tolerance – the only way diversity works but also an accommodating attitude to sexuality (gay communities are famously successful inner-city regenerators) and religion (there are signs of increasing intolerance towards religious minorities all over the world).
4) Density – density of habitation is crucial in ensuring density of activity, a vibrancy of commerce, residential and cultural activity.
5) Social mix – the close proximity of social and economic classes keeps a city lively.
6) Civility – impossible to measure and slightly against my stated notions about the benefits of friction but critical nevertheless. I once criticised the ingratiating politeness in the US and was told by an American who used to live in Paris that “it’s better to be told to have a nice day by someone who doesn’t mean it than to be told to go f*** yourself by someone who does”. Discounts any Israeli or Russian city from ever getting on the list.


What are your thoughts? What do you think makes a city livable?