The Battle for Gotham Read Online Free PDF Page A

over to new private owners with tax breaks and other incentives.
    These are only a few Moses-style projects being promoted as the next best “regenerative” plan (as discussed in the conclusion). These projects rely heavily on the strength of the real estate market, adding a vulnerability that over the years has seen much cleared land sit untouched and unproductive for decades after clearance is completed. The promise is always of jobs, taxes, and, these days, affordable housing, but no one calculates the jobs, taxes, and affordable commercial and residential units lost in the process. Demolition sweeps away uncalculated numbers of jobs, housing units, and other uses in a diverse urban district.
    Moses relied on real estate and government funding; Jacobs looked to the energy, innovation, and commitment of citizens. For too long, developers and corporations either threaten to leave or promise Oz-like goodies will come of their projects. New York’s long-standing policy of giving them subsidies and tax incentives is unrelenting.

    ENDURING CHANGE STARTS SMALLER
    At the same time that these big projects are promoted and fought, escalate in costs, and, for the most part, fail, modest but meaningful things are actually happening, bringing positive change and showing the ongoing potential of big change achieved incrementally. The opportunity to nurture and build on such successes is lost because they are officially undervalued, sometimes hardly recognized, and too often stymied. Small upgrades are happening in every conceivable neighborhood, not because of any helpful official policy but because the appeal of urban life has accelerated in recent years and the opportunities to enjoy city life have expanded. In fact, independent of public policies, new areas of economic activity are occurring where civic resourcefulness, ingenuity, and improvisation are not interrupted. Occasionally, smart public policy follows these bottom-up initiatives.
    The immigrant-filled neighborhoods that had been experiencing high vacancy rates not long ago bring new entrepreneurs and local vitality. New industries—food preparation, custom furniture, movie production, green products, and renovation and restoration services—have emerged just when the available industrial space is shrinking owing to upzoning and overdevelopment. Artfully converted empty buildings have been salvaged and upgraded with new creative uses in neighborhoods long declared dead by “experts” who have no real understanding of the authentic urban process.
    As Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava have noted:
    Fifty years after Jane Jacobs’ advocacy work in Manhattan, policy-makers and planning departments have yet to acknowledge what local knowledge and expertise can contribute to the planning process. Ignoring local actors comes at a high cost, accompanied as it is by strong op-positions, and more often than not resulting in inadequate urban development. It is only with a paradigm shift in the way we conceive of cities that we can actually tap into local intelligence and its productive capacity. In an age of “information” where billions of people are exchanging bits and data across platforms and boundaries, we should no longer rely on the master-planner’s map and the one-way PowerPoint presentations that pass off for community involvement. 14
    Individual catalysts have altered whole neighborhoods. The diversity of those catalysts is as rich as the work they do and illustrates, once again, how big change comes in varying ways dispersed around the city. Beat cop-turned-developer Gregory O’Connell, for example, has transformed Brooklyn’s Red Hook in the fifteen years since he started converting Civil War warehouses on the waterfront that the city wanted to demolish. He created space for 150 businesses and 1,200 workers and always has a waiting list for available space. He was the catalyst for the explosion of economic activity in Red Hook.
    Common Ground, an