While I acknowledge the losses and cruelties caused by gentrification, I'd like to point out that in my childhood and adolescence, Inwood was a safe, clean, quiet haven with a largely Irish and Jewish population, ranging from the bottom to the top of what was once an actual middle class. And then, poor Dominicans moved in. Fairly or not, this was viewed as an onslaught. Though the new people were warm and kind, many seemed to litter everywhere, blare their music from ill-tuned stations, park their cars partly on the sidewalk, and in general, live and work on the streets. Established residents with enough money or youth left. Others felt trapped and betrayed. Whether refugees from slums or Hitler, their haven had vanished.
17
Ultimately long-term renters really have no say in how a neighborhood should "be". No one group does, and that should include REBNY/developers and the short-sighted/uncaring city-planners in league with them. Areas become how they are through the collective outcome of a lot of individual effort: NE Queens is largely Korean in places because Koreans moved there, BOUGHT homes, and CREATED businesses. It will probably stay Korean for a long time to come for those reasons. A neighborhood of tens of thousands has too many competing interests and too many literally un-invested small parties to cater to any one particular group. If Dominicans wanted to have a "hood of their own"...they should've bought it.
6
Understand the Bait and Switch by this Mayor-the henchman for REBNY mega-developers.
After lying about NYCHA lead in public housing water harming so many-he has the unmitigated gall to give away heretofore 'affordable housing' (well that's another phony ruse for another column!) commitments of a NYCHA parking lot to a luxury private developer to build. You cannot make this stuff up...!
That is what this mayor is doing along with his complicit City Planning Commission & the City Council turncoats to the community such as Ydanis Rodriguez...just to name one of many pushing the MIH developer ploy.
Folks-please don't drink the 'greater good' deceptive KoolAid-it's all about REBNY-developers who own this Mayor and call the shots.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-public-land-luxury-apartmen...
5
“For Mr. Rojas, that shift is already underway. He and his fiancée, Anamiledys Rosario, 33, a clinical social worker who moved to New York from the Dominican Republic in 1990, were recently displaced from their rent-stabilized Inwood apartment.
The couple was going to pay nearly $1,800 for a one-bedroom apartment on Dyckman Street, but chose to move in with Mr. Rojas’ parents in Inwood to save money to buy a home.”
As written, this doesn’t explain how they were “displaced”. It reads as they made a “decision”.
8
I moved to upper Manhattan in the spring of 1977 and lived there until the spring of 2004 -
In 1977 - there were no Dominicans living there - none - at all --
The population in the area where I lived was still primarily German-Jewish - immigrants who had resettled there after the war --
Further up - in the real Inwood section - the population was 99% working-class Irish --
Where I lived there were German bakeries and one could hear German spoken in the hallways of one's apartment building -
Up in Inwood - there were Irish pubs and many people who had come from "The Other Side" - as it was referred to back then --
In 1977, my roommate and I - musicians just out of conservatory - found a two-bedroom apartment for $200 a month -- (do you suppose that might qualify as "affordable housing" ?) --
There was no Latino presence between 168th - 207th street -- and up on Ft. Washington Ave, you could see the orthodox Jews walking to temple on Saturdays and taking their Sunday strolls in FT. Tryon Park --
Dr. Ruth Westheimer lived there for many years - and we'd see her taking a stroll with friends -
There is a little park on Ft Washington Ave at 173rd St - which was a favorite gathering place for the little old Jewish ladies sitting on the park benches -
There were no sidewalk vendors - no playing of loud music by passing cars or through open windows -
Yes - the neighborhood was once very diverse - but undiscovered by politicians and greedy real estate developers...
7
This is terrible! Developers, enabled by the city, are going to kick out all the residents, destroy all those low rise buildings and then turn the area into a new 57Th St.
Except that’s not what’s happening. There’s a ton of underused, formerly industrial land close to good transportation. That can be redeveloped for housing. And those that live nearby are afraid that that will cause a change in the local vibe.
New York is a dynamic place. To expect it to never change and to not allow it to grow and prosper is absurd. Those Dominicans no more own the vibe than did the Jews and Irish there before them.
7
Do the authors work for the NYT or The Economic Development Corporation & Mayor DiBlasio? This reads more like a lobbying press release rather than investigative journalism
5
Third Avenue, Webster Avenue and Jerome Avenue were all rezoned in the Bronx. I am still waiting for the hipsters.
2
From all the people protesting against the change here, none of them have mentioned that point: if the new tall buildings are not built, where will the rich people renting/buying them go? Because surely they will still exist, price out someone else somewhere else (where it is also an issue that people are priced out), will park their cars somewhere else (where parking also is lacking), use transports somewhere else (where the subway is also overcrowded at peak hour), and crowd the street somewhere else. The only response that seems to be implied here is “I don’t care: let them be another neighborhood’s problem”. Unless you can explain where these people would go, it is hard to argue that your protest is not NIMBYism.
Also you can’t complain on overcrowding AND on gentrification (prices rising) at the same time. There will always be a market to buy or rent a place if you put the price to it, so people can always come. The only way they will stop coming (and/or will leave) is if prices become too high. It’s one or the other, you can’t expect to have an affordable place in an attractive city where people won’t want to go… New developments means more crowding (because lower prices means less people leaving the area), no development means more gentrification.
I moved to Hamilton Heights 14 years ago having been priced out of the LES, so I know what it’s like to have to move due to gentrification. Ham Hgts, like Inwood, has shorter buildings, mostly black and Dominican neighbors who grew up there, and businesses that cater to them. I was among the first white people, and an agent refused to show me apartments if I was only moving there for the lower rent, so I found the place myself by inquiring building to building.
I waited for gentrification. And waited. Finally, mostly due to the enormous new Columbia campus adjacent to us it’s happening. And I love it. New stores and bars/restaurants that let me feel like it’s my home too. When I visit them, the patrons are not all white, but it’s a very mixed crowd, and it’s fun, with people coming from downtown, which must be good economically for the neighborhood. Now there is a nice mix of businesses, and a diverse array of languages and cultures.
Maybe it’s just Ham Hgts, but while I know rents keep going up, my black and Dominican neighbors are still living in my rent-controlled building that went condo 8 years ago. Frankly while an $1,800 rent seems OK to me, some of the folks who grew up in my building are still paying as low as $500 for a 2-bedroom. It’s fair since I was a late-comer.
If Hamilton Heights is an indication of what can go right for Inwood, look to your neighbor to the south, people. You will appreciate the diversity once different people are able to live among you.
1
Only collective groups of like-minded capital/land/business owning individuals ever really have any say in how a neighborhood should "be". And realistically in nyc those like minded individuals are usually part of the REBNY/developer collective in league with short-sighted/uncaring city-planners.
Areas become how they are through the usually unintentionally aligned outcomes of many instances of individual effort: NE Queens is largely Korean in places because Koreans moved there, bought homes and/or created businesses (Korean-oriented or otherwise). It was a slow process that took at least two decades and is still in effect. It will probably stay Korean for a long time to come for those reasons. Lots of other similar examples still pepper the outer boroughs, usually around ethnic lines but also sometimes aspirational class-based ones, too.
A neighborhood like Inwood with easily tens of thousands short and medium term renters (people and businesses) just has too many competing interests and too many literally un-invested small parties for any consensus to coalesce around the long-term health of the area: remaining affordable, diverse, humble/accessible/whatever. Absent any such emergence versus the powerful monolithic interests of exterior lobbyists/builders/etc, large scale change is inevitable.
If the Dominican et al residents interviewed wanted to have a "hood of their own"...they should've bought and created it...
2
I moved to Hamilton Heights 14 years ago having been priced out of the LES, so I know what it’s like to have to move due to gentrification. Ham Hgts, like Inwood, has shorter buildings, mostly black and Dominican neighbors who grew up there, and businesses that cater to them. I was among the first white people, and an agent refused to show me apartments if I was only moving there for the lower rent, so I found the place myself by inquiring building to building.
I waited for gentrification. And waited. Finally, mostly due to the enormous new Columbia campus adjacent to us it’s happening. And I love it. New stores and bars/restaurants that let me feel like it’s my home too. When I visit them, the patrons are not all white, but it’s a very mixed crowd, and it’s fun, with people coming from downtown, which must be good economically for the neighborhood. Now there is a nice mix of businesses, and a diverse array of languages and cultures.
Maybe it’s just Ham Hgts, but while I know rents keep going up, my black and Dominican neighbors are still living in my rent-controlled building that went condo 8 years ago. Frankly while an $1,800 rent seems OK to me, some of the folks who grew up in my building are still paying as low as $500 for a 2-bedroom. It’s fair since I was a late-comer.
If Hamilton Heights is an indication of what can go right for Inwood, look to your neighbor to the south, people. You will appreciate the diversity once different people are able to live among you.
Make no mistake... follow the money. The real estate and landlord's dream. Uber-density will never reduce rents, merely exacerbate them. It is all about the money. It always is.
6
Rezoning won't change the reality that Manhattan is an overcrowded island that cannot accommodate all the people who want to live there. But with plans like this, the current homeless/housing crisis will only get worse before it gets better. Developers only care about market rate and luxury properties. They will build the minimum affordable units required and as seen in Brooklyn, Queens, and even the Bronx, those units will go up at a snails pace.
Look at Brooklyn. The few times a year I go to BK I'm amazed that the buildings with apartments in the 2.5-6K a month range are finished in months/a year. Meanwhile the city has a contract in BK with a developer to build 2250 affordable apartments in Pacific park by 2025! They broke ground on this project in 2014 and last year completed only 300 units, 100 of which they held for higher income earners. Many high income people turned down the apartments because the rent was more than what they were already paying elsewhere. 93K people applied for 300 units.
There is no shortage of luxury or market rate housing. So why hold a full third of the units for only high income residents? Because real estate developers own NYC politicians.
5
My parents and grandparents grew up in Inwood and lived on Park Terrace West. I remember fondly walking Broadway as a kid, my dentist was there (a cousin), the terrific butcher shops, the marvelous parks even a pickle store. It was a terrific neighborhood and still is. When my parents lived there it was a German neighborhood and everyone knew each other. Best wishes to all that live in that very wonderful place. BTW not long ago I had the pleasure of eating at A New Leaf Restaurant in Fort Tryon Park- wow!
2
A little honesty and common sense will provide clarity in the current controversy over "rezoning Inwood". What is called "Inwood" is really three enclaves. They share a common southern border, Dyckman Street, but are divided, south to north, into three sections: west of Broadway to the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, east of Broadway to 10th Avenue, and east of 10th Avenue to the Harlem River. Their physical and social ecologies are markedly different. Zoning law changes that respect these differences should both reinforce the strengths of the enclave west of Broadway, lead to upgrading of existing housing between Broadway and 10th Avenue, and bring about the wholesale replacement of most of what is east of 10th Avenue. These differences have historical roots, mostly the introduction of the #1 and A trains in the first third of the 29th century, especially the elevated route of the #1 and the underground route of the A. Any ham-handed changes in zoning that are not carefully crafted with respect to the differing characteristics of the three enclaves will be destructive.
2
People complain about rents going up and gentrification. Why aren't more people out demanding a $20/hr minimum wage? Where's my Trickle Down ? I'm at the bottom of the hill and it's raining. I think it's rain.
2
Thank you for writing the story. We need the times to shed more light on these land-use issues.
This project is totally irrational, other than to benefit real estate developers and city council members who get donations from the real estate lobby. Enough is enough .
2
Up in Inwood its very hilly and the river and Jersey Palisades views are wonderful and can be seen at street level. Even though it's narrow, views are blocked/ enhanced by the hills of the neighborhood. Don't destroy the natural and human scale of the neighborhood with too many heavy public buildings and soaring glass needles that the rich will only use for Christmas shopping.
2
It's frustrating to continue to hear from people who have lived in a certain neighborhood for 5, 10 or 20 years who think they have more rights than another citizen of the same city but a different neighborhood.
7
Many of the comments here are jumping on the common narrative of thinking anyone against the rezoning is somehow against development, or wants homeless people to stay on the street, or things nothing should ever change.
Please.
Rezonings are complex, and this one has been especially tortured. If you read what the proposal does, and understand the history of it, you might see the flaws. It is possible to be against a rezoning plan because the plan itself is bad, even if the overall intention (redevelop underutilized land for housing) is good.
To give but one example, alternate plans were submitted to the city through the supposedly democratic ULURP process that asked for slightly lower zoning designations and fewer carve-outs for special interests that prevented housing development. The city said such plans would meet the overall goals and produce fewer negative impacts than their own plan, but rejected them because they yielded slightly fewer housing units (possibly not even true given the flawed projection criteria the city used).
And yet, at the last minute and without any input, the city last week removed three major commercial corridors from the rezoning entirely. This lowered housing projections below what the alternate plans would have produced yet somehow this mess of a plan was now ok whereas the well thought out cohesive ones earlier were not?
That's what makes this so frustrating -- it's a political rezoning plan, not an urban planners rezoning plan.
2
To me, it sounds as if the 'new' Inwood should be renamed as Out-wouldn't. The jam-cram plans make as much sense.
I moved to upper Manhattan in the spring of 1977 and lived there until the spring of 2004 -
In 1977 - there were no Dominicans living there - none - at all --
The population in the area where I lived was still primarily German-Jewish - immigrants who had resettled there after the war --
Further up - in the real Inwood section - the population was 99% working-class Irish --
Where I lived there were German bakeries and one could hear German spoken in the hallways of one's apartment building -
Up in Inwood - there were Irish pubs and many people who had come from "The Other Side" - as it was referred to back then --
In 1977, my roommate and I - musicians just out of conservatory - found a two-bedroom apartment for $200 a month -- (do you suppose that might qualify as "affordable housing" ?) --
There was no Latino presence between 168th - 207th street -- and up on Ft. Washington Ave, you could see the orthodox Jews walking to temple on Saturdays and taking their Sunday strolls in FT. Tryon Park --
Dr. Ruth Westheimer lived there for many years - and we'd see her taking a stroll with friends -
There is a little park on Ft Washington Ave at 173rd St - which was a favorite gathering place for the little old Jewish ladies sitting on the park benches -
There were no sidewalk vendors - no playing of loud music by passing cars or through open windows -
Yes - the neighborhood was once very diverse - but undiscovered by politicians and greedy real estate developers...
7
Naive question __ who,what where is this new money. All I keep hearing is wages in America are stagnated, mine included. So can someone tell me where I can be part of this new Money crowd so I can stay and live in the city I was born and raised in and continue to do so.
6
Gentrification will continue to happen, whether or not new units are built, but this plan is massive, and the changes will be both very fast and devastating. I love the neighborhood, but development is inevitable. Communities adapt, given time and an appropriate scale. This plan would in very short order triple the population of the neighborhood, with no commensurate increase in infrastructure. That's a plan for disaster--Inwood is hardly a country town now.
In the New York that some of us remember--it's not very long ago--there was in much of the city a rough democracy. Thee were disparities of income, but in most neighborhoods anybody who worked in the neighborhood could afford to live there. That's still true of Inwood, and it's what makes it what it is. Those recent traditional neighborhoods were multilingual, by the way, tho the languages were more often chinese, yiddish or italian. I hope that the difference in the minds of many of those who've written isn't conditioned by that change.
1
I'm sorry, but keeping the existing ethnic or linguistic mix of a neighborhood is not a legitimate goal. Before Dominicans moved into Inwood, it was largely Irish. If we were looking at people saying, "Keep the Irish character of Inwood," wouldn't it be obvious why that's illegitimate?
The city needs more housing. Refusing to see new housing built will never solve the problem.
I live in Inwood.
12
I live in Harlem, in a building built in 2007 with a 421a tax abatement that requires the entire building to remain rent regulated until 2036; rent increases a capped. However, the whole thing is meaningless. The real estate lobby has found a way to take the tax break AND charge market rate rents for such buildings. My legal rent for my 2 bedroom is $8,900. Preferential rent $4,300.
The same kind of "affordable" housing is coming to Inwood. Don't let them. There is no true affordable housing in NYC. The entire NYS legislature and Cuomo are sold to the real estate industry.
2
I'm really torn here. I've lived in New York for 30 years, for the last 15 in Washington Heights. Never have I felt less welcomed in any neighborhood than when I moved to this one. I'm a gay artist and I was called things I wasn't even called where I grew up in the Deep South. I was terrorized by my DR neighbors for years. However, i stuck it out. I now have a rent-controlled low-rent apartment that I love very much. I love this neighborhood, the friends I've made up here are incredible - it's a special corner of the world. Plus, I haven't been called a maricon in almost a year! Things change. Neighborhoods change. The city changed many years ago and now it's our turn to be part of the brunt of that. Hopefully the gentrification won't hit too hard. but in some form or another, it's coming whether we like it or not.
5
It makes no sense to increase development in the floodplain along the Harlem River south of the 207th Street bridge. This area flooded during Sandy, no doubt it'll flood again. Inwood really can't handle such an influx of people without significantly improving transit and other services.
3
It's Manhattan, people. Gentrification is an economic force that cannot be stopped, but at least tempered with the addition of affordable housing units. Most of the focus is on a derelict part of the neighborhood east of 10th avenue. Have you walked in that area? It's totally underdeveloped and neglected, unless you love viveros and auto shops. Let that area have 14 story buildings. The Dyckman projects are just as tall in that section of Inwood, anyway.
Ethnic enclaves in this city are transient. Spare me the Dominican nostalgia. Astoria is no longer Greek. Inwood is no longer Irish. Neighborhoods in this city change demographically over the decades. Deal with it and let the city set policy that can keep those current Inwood resident, below the poverty line, in their apartments with increased city services.
6
In thd first place New York is being overbuilt. There are too many new super tall buidlings. I am not sure we will be able to afford the schools hospitals and transportation to all thse new New Yorkers. I suspect the percent of low and moderat housing gives landlords free reign over other housing so everthing else is luxury. I cant see how a vibrant middle class can develop in such a rich-poor distribution. City housing should try to raise a vibrant middle class so we can have yet another generation of creative and educated workers.
Another case of deBlasio paying back his donors from the Real Estate Board of NY.
Frankly, there are loads of buildings in Manhattan that should have been torn down and replaced..... and then there are those large parking lots in the city projects --waste of land... a huge topic. Guess Kushner is taking over the Lower Eastside.
There are loads of million $$$ apts. empty -- owned by wealthy foreigners. This article frankly simplifies things. Inwood is practically the Bronx which at 207th might be a preferred place to live.
The Irish were up here before the Dominicans. Let the city develop east of 10th Ave. We could use the housing and better shopping up here...
2
There is tremendous objection to this plan. No matter what it looks like, Inwood is in effect being thrown to the developers, and the working and middle class residents be damned. Since when are any of these gentrification plans "for" the neighborhood? It's for the politicians and the developers. Affordable housing is the excuse but it's so little as to be negligible. Token housing it should be called. The number of displaced residents will far exceed that. If you really wanted to develop Inwood, you'd start by preserving the air, the breeze on a warm day, the view, the sun. Tall buildings will ruin the climate of Inwood, holding in the heat, blocking the view of the trees and the sky, and the "last affordable neighborhood in Manhattan" will be no more. It will be turned over to the rich. Does everything have to be pushed through for the developers? Do the politicians always need to make up excuses for something they intend to do that nobody wants? For God's sake! Listen to the Community of Inwood. We don't want this plan.
1
Excuse me, but Inwood is in Manhattan.
And the proposed ratio of affordable to market rate housing will result in current residents being driven out.
If you don’t build any new housing, then of course it stops the gentrification. Just look at San Francisco.
2
Increase in public service is a joke. We somehow lost two days of sanitation services. We used to have alternate side street cleaning Monday Thursday and Tuesday Friday. Now we only have it Monday/Tuesday, and no street cleaning the rest of the week. This is a busy neighborhood. The other part of that situation is that people from other neighborhoods south of us, and some from NJ, park up here to avoid the alternate side on the UWS.
The infrastructure cannot accommodate an increase in population. The A train is packed from the 190th Street stop during morning rush, and buses make slow progress south on Broadway. We want to keep the character of our neighborhood without forcing out residents and the local shops.
Every time I've been to Inwood (and it's a lot, over a 10 plus year period) the neighborhood looked fine. Lots of small independent store owners (i.e., not too many banks, corporate stores like CVS and Rite Aide), affordable places to eat, a wonderful variety of age, income and ethnicity, not too crowded streets and lots of great sight lines and parks. The area under development, 10th Ave mostly (N of Dyckman St), E of Bway, is filled with great small businesses like auto repair, barber shops, small restaurants, bakeries, and bars that serve the community. To say this area needs 'redevelopment' reeks of class bias. It's a fully functioning, vibrant working class neighborhood. The only reason, to me at least, to develop this area is to make growth machine interests (real estate, construction, banks, land owners) happy in order to better fund machine politicians at the expense of hard working 'Pop and Mom" local (not corporate) businesses. . It's a land grab for the wealthy clothed in some dubious affordable housing/neighborhood redevelopment claims. If I could, I'd lobby my elected officials to veto no...often.
2
"Because fewer than 200 new units of housing have been built in Inwood over the last 20 years versus the 67,000 built in Manhattan..."
In other words, less than one third of 1% of new Manhattan construction has occurred in Inwood. Other neighborhoods have changed, but they refuse to let their neighborhood change. Even as the city continues to break new population records.
Let developers develop responsibly and make them set aside units for affordable housing. It can be a win-win.
The Dominicans would have nothing to complain about if they would assimilate, as other immigrants do. Instead, they ruin the neighborhoods they take over with their ear-splitting music, drug trafficking, and garbage piles outside their windows. At least, that's how it was in the 1980s and 90s in Hamilton Heights.
My friends who lived in Inwood were okay on the high ground, but anyone lower down and closer to the Dominicans was miserable. Is it any better now? If any community deserved to be replaced it is them. But more affordable housing is hardly going to ruin a mixed-income neighborhood. Hamilton Heights has better transportation, so it should be rezoned between Broadway and St. Nicholas. Housing costs are ruining New York for everyone. A curb on profits for developers and landlords must be put in place. Ten percent should be more than enough for any investor/owner.
3
"The rezoning will also bring $200 million in public investments to the neighborhood such as more than $50 million in improvements to the George Washington Educational Campus, including a new science, technology, engineering and mathematics curriculum."
Question: What does the rezoning have to do with the responsibility of the Department of Education to provide an up to date science, technology, engineering and mathematics curriculum to ANY New York City high school?
Answer: Absolutely nothing.
This idea of public investments in Washington Heights as a result of REZONING is a complete scam. Either NYC chooses to educate its students or not.
1
This article keeps contrasting rates of various things between Inwood and Manhattan. But of course Inwood is IN Manhattan so I am not sure what that even means. Does it mean the rest of Manhattan, excluding Inwood?
This is deBlasio's idea of solving "two cities": to destroy neighborhoods by giving carte blanche to the real estate moguls? This is Democratic Socialism?
This thinly reported article reads like a press release for Mayor de Blasio's agenda, with a "change is inevitable" sop for anyone who disagrees with it.
The piece gives no attention to the dubious "affordability" of the "affordable" housing units the plan promises to create. It provides no objective reporting on how the increased population density the plan will bring will affect both natural resources, such as Inwood Hill Park, which is already maxed out on summer weekends, and infrastructure, such as the already overcrowded at rush hour number 1 and A trains.
As a decades-long resident of Inwood, I can't help wondering how long the reporters actually spent in the neighborhood. My guess is not long.
Recently the Times ran a well researched series on profiteering landlords in the city's gentrifying neighborhoods. That series and this article might as well have been published in alternate universes.
Stay out of central/eastern Queens. It is the only home I know. And it is far away from everything cool. And by cool I mean the subway.
Inwood is not diverse. The article states 3/4 of the population is Dominican. I lived west of Broadway in the "diverse" part of Inwood and my building was 85% Dominican. East of Broadway was well known to be over 95% Dominican.
I moved to Queens for actual diversity.
6
This is a debate that gets lost in the confusion of cause vs. correlation. The fundamental fact, like the sun rising to the East, is that as more people move into the city than leave, demand for housing will cause rents to rise. That makes this city barely affordable to all but the top 1%.
In the long run, the only way to combat lack of affordability is by building more supply. And yes, today that supply will still be expensive, because there remains a MASSIVE housing shortage in this city.
But the answer is certainly not to build less housing. The people moving to Inwood are only doing so because they’ve already been priced out of everywhere else. Without new supply, where are they supposed to go?
If you want your neighborhood to be just like living in the D.R., then move to the D.R. This is the most diverse city in the world, and it didn’t get this way by building walls to outsiders, whether they be immigrants fleeing the D.R. or Williamsburg. Both groups are economically motivated. Who lived there before it was Dominican? The Irish. I’m sure they thought it was just like living in Dublin.
In a free society, you can’t socially engineer where people live, and establish ethnic quotas for neighborhoods. This is NYC, and the only constant is change. That’s the reason everybody moved here to begin with - if it was static and had built walls to keep others out, there would be no opportunity here for anybody but the Dutch.
3
I wish the article provided some explanation as to the alleged "increase in public services"... For example, what is planned so that the A and 1 trains are able to handle the additional populations that will come into the neighborhood? These lines are already saturated and completely unreliable.
By pitting nostalgic Dominicans against the forces of change and progress, the article doesn't do justice to complex issues involved by "rezoning". Public services in the area could be improved without leaving an entire neighnorhood be the prey of greedy developers who will have little to no concern for the welfare of the people already living in Inwood.
32
There are no improvements. A rezoning is a change to a map that controls density, shape and use. Anything else promised, like transportation, is nonbinding and unrelated.
When has re-zoning any neighborhood in NYC left it primary residents (who often happen to be middle class) better off? Show me one neighborhood that still has 50% of its original residents in place after re-zoning.
@PL I was wondering about the subways, too. The A is usually pretty full by 145th Street during rush hour (though during summer there's a bit of a break.) With the MTA shutting down weekend A service above 168th Street on a regular basis, how are those additional residents going to get around? More shuttle buses? Yikes!
The article should have included a map and indicated the locations of the pictures.
What is happening in Washington Heights, where I grew up?
11
@turbot The city never provided a map that explained the sizes of the new buildings in the rezoning, so tough for the newspapers to.
Here is an image showing the rezoning envelope that residents made to try to understand what was being proposed.
https://ibb.co/ntbvLe
6
This article speaks of the diversity of this neighborhood but then goes on to say that 3/4 of the residents are Latino. And this is diverse?
70
Latino is a general term, not an ethnic group, which can cover many many nationalities each with distinct characteristics.
@ddcat you obviously have never been here. If you had, you'd know there is also a rich jewish and Irish community, as well a newcomers from all walks of life.
“You really lose the culture of the neighborhood, the character of the neighborhood,” said Josmar Rojas, 39, a personal trainer who moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic and has lived in Inwood since 1992. “It’s not going to be the same individuals living here.”
So what is this? Certain people have a lock on a neighborhood simply because they've chosen to live there for a long time, due to cheap rents or whatever, and anyone else who chooses to move into the area is an 'interloper?' It just doesn't make sense. All this talk about culture and wanting to 'keep things the same,' how 'the others' will 'change our way of life' seems provincial.
Population in NYC continues to grow. Should certain neighborhoods put out a 'no vacancy' sign under the guise of maintaining a certain cultural hegemony? Is that even right?
75
This article misses the purpose of the rezoning. It incentivizes luxury developers with tax rebates to build high rise luxury towers. The only requirement is that they set aside 20 percent of the units at below market rents - but far more than current residents can afford. It is a giveaway to developers and real estate interests while declaring war on a working class largely immigrant community. Even talk of rezoning increases land value, which is why rents have increased in Inwood over the past years as the article notes. Increased land values leads to tenant harassment, predatory equity schemes, evictions and homelessness. That de Blasio and CM Rodriguez call themselves “progressive” is Orwellian double-speak.
Rodriguez keeps talking about all the services that will be brought to the community with the rezoning. But the services have nothing to do with rezoning. Wouldn’t it have been better to bring services to the hard-working immigrant community that adds so much to this city? Instead CM Rodriguez wants to create conditions so that current residents must leave and provide services for the 14,000 people who will be able to afford luxury apartments along the waterfront.
CM Moya, chair of the CC Subcommittee on Zoning, has called for a moratorium on all rezonings because of the violence it brings upon working class immigration communities like Inwood.
This is a poorly researched and reported article.
63
How is it okay to say that it would change the character of the neighborhood it would no longer have the Dominican feel would it it be okay to say I don't want change because it would ruin the white feel if my neighborhood it is ridiculous. You don't have the right to stop change because your group likes it the way it is now. Gentrification is good more taxes being collected less public services being paid out. Grow up how many New Yorkers have had to move because their neighborhood changed for better or worse.
57
As a white dude who was born in Indianapolis and whose ancestors fought in the revolutionary war, I can tell you. We white people don’t have culture. Citibanks and Duane Reade’s are not culture. And as someone who has seen small businesses wiped out in the last 20 years in NYC I do sympathize with these sentiments. They are real. The only thing more disturbing is how self proclaimed “progressive” politicians still pass NO legislation to actually protect tenants, all tenants, from harassment in any form.
I live across from 535 Carlton. Google it. I was laughing with my mail man as I was signing certified letters of eviction for myself and my neighbors. They’re baseless but these greedy landlords try everything. The mailman says to me “I bring a stack every month” pointing to the new affordable housing building. It’s all a scam that hides contribution and probably suitcases of cold cash to our state and city politicians of ALL stripes...
2
@EAH Bad comparison: "Dominican" is not comparable to "white." Try comparing it to another immigrant ethnicity instead. Would it be okay to say I don't want change in Little Italy because it would ruin the Italian feel? Maybe, maybe not, but it sure doesn't sound anything like "the white feel."
Also: this proposal includes a huge *increase* in public services and tax abatements to developers who are. Even its supporters are not claiming that it will save money for the city.
There are valid arguments on both sides of this issue, but these two aren't among them.
As a white dude who was born in Indianapolis and whose ancestors fought in the revolutionary war, I can tell you. We white people don’t have culture. Citibanks and Duane Reade’s are not culture. And as someone who has seen small businesses wiped out in the last 20 years in NYC I do sympathize with these sentiments. They are real. The only thing more disturbing is how self proclaimed “progressive” politicians still pass NO legislation to actually protect tenants, all tenants, from harassment in any form.
I live across from 535 Carlton. Google it. I was laughing with my mail man as I was signing certified letters of eviction for myself and my neighbors. They’re baseless but these greedy landlords try everything. The mailman says to me “I bring a stack every month” pointing to the new affordable housing building. It’s all a scam that hides contribution and probably suitcases of cold cash to our state and city politicians of ALL stripes...
Haven't we seen this before, all over New York? Neighborhoods torn apart by new money.
Anyway, the Times did a fine job reporting this but for one thing. This paragraph troubles me:
"The rezoning will also bring $200 million in public investments to the neighborhood such as more than $50 million in improvements to the George Washington Educational Campus, including a new science, technology, engineering and mathematics curriculum."
That reads like it's ripped straight from a press release. It sounds good but it's damningly unspecific. What does it actually mean? Will the city spend $200 million that it otherwise wouldn't in Inwood? What will the money be spent on? Why does the GW campus need a new curriculum? What was wrong with the old one?
42
@Locho Good catch. First of all, that high school campus is not even in Inwood. Many of the promised goodies are not for the rezoning area, and an awful lot of them were already funded and happening regardless, like the Broadway Bridge rehab or rebuilding intersections for Vision Zero. The $200 million is indeed ripped from a press release the city put out to try and win the favor of residents, even though none of the non-binding promises are related to the act of a changing the zoning map.
28
However Di Blasio and his fellow advocates of this rezoning want to spin it, this is really about getting the low income ethnic people out of the neighborhood as has been happening all over the City. That's what gentrification is.
27
Misrepresentations of 'affordable housing' are discussed with wonder by former tenants of 152,000 LOST regulated apts with Vacancy Decontrol-but REBNY was thrilled. Even more are in harm's way in Inwood-let's be real clear.
The Mandatory Inclusionary Housing that deBlasio & the City Council enacted in 2016 (after the Mayor gave them an unheard of 32% raise the month before the vote!) relies on an AMI that's deceptive. It's a standard that says that incomes can reflect Westchester salaries in determining 'affordability'. It's a scam and a cruel chase for the struggling who're lied to as they scramble for a roof over their heads.
But...it's heralded as for the 'greater good'. Syndicators like Goldman Sachs take tax write offs...so-called affordable housing non-profits w/ Directors getting outsized salaries & best of all- developers are free to get rezoned anything- goes height/density in exchange for these unaffordable 'affordable' apts. A ruse designed & perfected by greed w/complicit City Council Members /CPC
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrific...
"...average New Yorker now works harder than ever, for less and less-in 2016 the official poverty rate was still 19.5 percent, or nearly one in every five New Yorkers. When the “near poverty” rate—those making up to $47,634 a year for a family of four—is thrown in, it means that almost half the city is living what has become a marginal existence, just one paycheck away from disaster. "
26
This is simple supply and demand here. Much of the reason NYC has such high housing costs is because NIMBYs torpedo any large scale attempts to address a shortage in stock, thus sealing their own fates. Make the sacrifice, Inwood, it'll further the greater good.
17
@CNJ Who are you kidding? This is how the forces of gentrification work, promises, promises which are clearly broken and in favor of the developers and banks. It is a lose-lose for the community.
24
@CNJ This is not a NIMBY fight. Inwood is already host to a lot of stuff other people didn't want in their backyards and people generally don't have a problem with rezoning and new development either. The issue is the plan, whose flaws are too numerous to fully explain here.
17
"Because fewer than 200 new units of housing have been built in Inwood over the last 20 years versus the 67,000 built in Manhattan" Inwood is in Manhattan. You mean in the "rest of Manhattan"?
There's nothing in the plan about building more public transportation infrastructure. The A train is crowded and unreliable and the 1 train is impossible.
36
@Rick van Valkenburg I completely agree. There is no plan for public transportation infrastructure, schools, or medical services. Additionally, there have been no environmental studies, which is appalling considering that they are planning on building in a flood zone and that Inwood is home to the last salt march and the last swath of natural woods in Manhattan. This plan needs a lot more work on innumerable angles.
22
@Anna: The FEIS can be found here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/oec/environmental-quality-review/17DME007M.page
All rezoning proposals require environmental review under CEQR.
@Rick van Valkenburg Same thing happened in downtown Brooklyn--lots of new high rises, no new schools, trains overcrowded. Plus we lost a crucial hospital, Long Island College Hospital, which served people from Brooklyn Heights to Red Hook. We voted for Di Blasio because he said he would save it. It's condos now.
Inwood, 12 years here.
Here's the kicker statement from the article:
"We know everyone here. It feels like we’re in D.R."
Some of us don't want to live in the D.R. We want diversity - that's why we came to NYC from our little towns of same-same. We want to live among whites, blacks, latinos, muslims, Jews, catholics, gays, straights, all of it. We want libraries, we want movie houses that don't show the latest blockbuster but instead indie movies and documentaries. We want a bunch of local venues where musicians can jam instead of having to to Williamsburg to Pete's Candy Store.
Moving to Inwood from Park Slope wasn't a choice, and when my wife and I moved to Inwood, we spent all our time either in Westchester (we had a car) midtown, the Upper West Side, East and West Village, and Harlem. We didn't feel welcome in our own neighborhood.
Know before you go, people.
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@CharlesFrankenberry
As soon as new high rises go up in the "undeveloped" parts of Inwood, followed by the ability to buy $5.00 lattes on Dyckman Street from an Oberlin graduate with a ring in his nose, it will be a more "welcoming" place. For a while.
Then eventually you will have no choice, again, to move farther from midtown, but maybe to a place where everyone is more to your liking.
21
@CharlesFrankenberry
"Some of us don't want to live in the D.R. We want diversity - that's why we came to NYC from our little towns of same-same. We want to live among whites, blacks, latinos, muslims, Jews, catholics, gays, straights, all of it."
You moved (not by choice) from a neighborhood that's 77.5% white. Because you didn't move by choice, I assume you would prefer to still be in a neighborhood that's 77.5% white.
Moving into a largely community of color (which, Latinx is a broad category that includes a lot of different types of people, including catholic, jewish, black, white, gay, straight, etc.) from a mostly white community and bemoaning the lack of diversity comes across as extremely disingenuous.
@CharlesFrankenberry
I live in Inwood, too.
Yes, we want all those things, and less noise (the car music is ridiculous: I can't hear my own radio with the window CLOSED)
But in NYC, when the nice indie movies and music venues come, the rents go sky high.
Unless they change the rules that allow landlords to up the rents to ridiculous "market rates" when people go, it's always going to be that way.
It already is!
1
There isn't anyone on the City Council or in the State Legislature, of every race, color and creed, who does not receive under-the-table "gratuities" from the real estate industry, aside from the ample "above-board" contributions. It's the only possible explanation for the almost universal selling-out of their constituents. They all meet the Tammany Hall definition of an honest politician: someone who stays bought.
22
We all know what's going to happen here, because we've all seen it before.
This is what happens when the lobbied New York real-estate interests waltz over the interests of a community in order to make a buck; which is also why those of us who've been intently watching this fight transpire, also knew the writing was on the wall when Inwood was being hailed as the last 'affordable community in Manhattan'.
How Governor Cuomo and proponents of the mainly state-operated Rent Gudelines Board can watch this happen safely from afar, while still counting on being re-elected is a sure sign of just how far removed they are from life here in our city.
New Yorkers would be well advise to remember this on Election Day and the fact that soon they too may be next on the chopping block.
34
Can someone please give me one example of where rezoning has helped either the creative or the immigrant classes? Williamsburg? Nope. Long Island City? Nope. For artists, most of New York City has become a banal if necessary evil. Although most purchasers of art can afford to live well here, actual artists (and I don't mean being corporately creative, such as a creative director at an ad agency) who create art can no longer call the city their creative home. Immigrants, I fear, also suffer that fate now. There is no place for anyone other that white, homogenous purchasers who value convenience and fetish over community and diversity.
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@JR
Why should "the creative of the immigrant" classes be a priority? This neighborhood's location in the A train makes it simply too valuable not to be developed. Community and Diversity are totally irrelevant.
18
@JR The creative and immigrant classes have traditionally lived where no one wanted to live (that’s how you get the cheapest prices), while developments are where people want to live. So of course they don’t go together, that doesn’t mean that the developments chased the immigrants and the artists.
Even without developments, if the “white, homogeneous” purchasers want to live in an area, they will, and the immigrants and artists will still have to leave. But at least if you’ve built 1,000 new units there are 1,000 less “white, homogeneous” households who will price out immigrants and artists in another area of town. How many Brooklyn (and Queens) neighborhoods would have not been gentrified if we could have housed all the newcomers in Williamsburg and Manhattan?
3
@JR why should rezoning be a “necessary evil?”
I hope these people are planning on where to move because nothing will stop the Cuomo construction machine. Inwood is lucky to have ducked this for this long. Nothing is safe or to be trusted or counted on.
25
3 fundamental parts of No To Inwood Rezoning:
1. We advocate for 100% affordable housing
2. None of the ‘improvements’ proposed require rezoning
3. Rezoning will absolutely incentivize landlords to displace residents.
This is a wholesale land grab by DeBlasio/EDC/Rodriguez et al and victimizes the working poor and persons of color. The rezoning plan must be stopped and a new plan developed with community involvement. The majority of inwood has spoken. No to Inwood Rezoning.
41
@Bernadette Elkind By definition affordable housing is not for anyone to get: if you offer housing at below market price, you necessarily have excess demand. So how do you decide who gets the housing?
To get an example of how these allocations can go wrong, have a look at “HDFC” housing in Manhattan (income-restricted housing, made to be affordable) on any property website, look at the prices and at the income restrictions (and the fact that some of them only accept 100% cash offers) in the ad. It becomes clear that many of these apartments are now not sold to and occupied by poor people. But do you know who would qualify? An expat who hasn’t filed taxes in the US in the last years (yes: incredibly enough your foreign incomes do not count towards the total if they do not appear on a US tax form). Or a kid with rich parents to front the money (fully or partially, the kid might have just finished university and started a nice job, again only previous tax forms and not current income go into the calculation). Oh, and keep in mind these buildings can be coops, so the board decides behind closed doors on who deserves to get that HDFC present.
Basically if affordable housing is just for the most downtrodden with clear income restrictions and a transparent process it can work fine. But if you are planning to have 100% affordable housing, then basically everyone and their dog qualify but few get it. That is a recipe for unfair practices…
12
Land grab? I see no eminent domain here. This is about private property rights and market forces. If you want to try centrally planned living, I’d suggest moving to Caracas and seeing how that works out.
@Bob Robert--while I agree with you on how the structure of HDFCs today often excludes those they are a meant to help, I agree with Bernadette too. In the past, developers did build developments that were wholly affordable to middle and lower income residents. Think Stuytown, Peter Cooper Village, and any of the limited equity coops that used to be fairly common. Don't get me wrong...most of these developments involved their own controversies and claims that they were displacing the underserved. BUT they were intended in general for workers, not the wealthy.
One last comment--if NYC was serious about improving the quality of life for all, they should improve the infrastructure first and only then allow upzoning.
The terms used to be simply "housing" and "luxury housing." That was when the market-rate was the norm, i.e., affordable "housing." Now it's reversed -- market-rate = "luxury," "affordable" = throwing a few tidbits to the middle class, and dwindling units for the poor. This real estate model is unsustainable. How and when is this inequality going to end?
32
@Diane it will end when NYC ceases to be a melting pot because only rich elites can afford to live here. It’s the diversity that makes the city different than the same-same another commenter says is everywhere else. The whole city is becoming white-washed and boring.
For the record, rezoning was not required to redevelop the Inwood Library. Sunset Park in Brooklyn did the same with a similar zoning to what Inwood has now. However, when "workshops" were held it wasn't even an option for participants to vote on to redevelop under existing zoning.
The city was determined from the start to use the library as a lever to crack the existing zoning and typical area density, something not done in any other library/housing redevelopment in North America. And why would that be? Because in NYC all zoning depends on the local councilmember, and in Inwood they saw a chance to aggressively upzone and obtain for the Mayor as many units as possible for his next press release.
So now Inwood gets a single block of 14 story buildings containing the library surrounded by a sea of 6 story buildings. Brilliant urban planning it is not. That 145 ft tall blank side wall facing southbound traffic on Broadway will be an eyesore for decades to come, and it was all completely unnecessary.
26
@North
And that single block of 14 story buildings is what I will see out my window, instead of the big sky that I want to kiss every morning when I wake up in this beautiful place.
Rezoning Inwood has become an "immediate" issue for a variety of reasons, one of which is that real estate values have escalated faster than in other parts of Manhattan... and longtime residents are being forced from their homes to bring apartments up to "market rate."
Residents are questioning the process, demanding answers of elected officials. Demanding impact studies be done before changing the urban landscape. Traffic studies. Environmental studies. Studies that address THEIR concerns, not just those of developers anxious to exploit the upper third of an island on which the lower two-thirds have been ruthlessly, and aggressively, exploited.
Everyone wants "affordable" housing ("affordable" in NYC is well above average wages of the largely immigrant population). What folks in Upper Manhattan are now trying to tell officials is this: don't do this so that developers get all the breaks.
Don't woo officials with multi-million-dollar deals to improve schools and libraries (shouldn't have been tied to any Council vote). Make development deals contingent on housing that's truly affordable - 50% minimum of all new units - and identify traffic, transportation, electrical, sanitary, water & education challenges which must be implemented before any deal made.
Draw a line with developers NOW. Make sure Environmental Impact Statements are part of every single decision... because whatever development takes place will, literally, be set in stone for generations to come.
28
@RoughAcres Why do you think that building housing in an area that is well-connected to public transportation would increase traffic? If you don’t build housing, the people who would create the traffic do not disappear, they just live elsewhere. Traffic in general is not the result of how many housing units you are building, but (mostly) at how much access the population has to public transport: unless you can find a better area for these people to live in that would result in less traffic your argument is moot.
So less traffic, and people living in more recent and hence more energy-efficient apartments; how would that be bad for the environment? Taller buildings also means less ground space used for each household, meaning more ground space available for parks or green spaces.
In the end it is easy to criticize the problems that redeveloping causes (problems that quite often have actually been thought about already), but what is the alternative to taller buildings if we want more housing? What is the alternative to have cheaper housing than having more supply? If there is a shortage, just deciding that housing will only be offered at 50% of the market price does not solve the issue. If you do that there will be obviously literally hundreds of thousands of people who will want to live there; how do you decide who gets that 50% discount, and who pays for that discount?
11
@Bob Robert
To clarify:
1. There is no parking left in Inwood. Alt-side is musical cars now. Increase units and increase cars needing to be parked.
2. Inwood has ONE major north-south street. And traffic is NOW bumper-to-bumper.
3. There are 2 lines going to Inwood, but both are extremely crowded now, with few elevators (and deep stations) or escalators, many of which don't work well.
4. 50% AFFORDABLE. Right now, it's only 20% affordable of all new units. If you replace 60 affordable units with 120 units, only 20% of which are affordable... you lose 36 affordable units. Math never lies.
3
@Bob Robert building in a flood zone and formal industrial zones that were also sites of rubbish disposal without doing an environmental assessment might be considered to be problematic by some.
2
Inwood is unusual in having vast areas of industrial zoning that can now be turned into housing, and many have been waiting some years for something like this to happen. The problem is not seeing these areas developed, the problem is the overscaling of that development and the extremely non-transparent process the city ran for three years in an effort to push through their pre-ordained plan.
The city wasted two years on "workshops" where they asked meaningless questions like "do you like parks?" all while refusing to reveal the trade-offs. Only in the final year, when the ULURP process officially began, did the city reveal the actual zoning designations. There was no willingness to change the zoning at that point, and all comments asking for alternatives were dismissed. Even at the final presentations the city never showed what they actually meant in terms of FAR or heights for proposed zonings -- residents had to figure that out for themselves and build their own 3D models and read the fine print about 295 ft towers along the river.
The plan has serious flaws that overstress and underdeliver, but all the city wants to do is talk about their bribes for accepting the rezoning - many of which are not in Inwood, are already funded, or should have happened long ago regardless of zoning. It's a hack job at this point, an embarrassment to proper planning, and residents (who live in the very city that invented zoning) are right to criticize it.
20
@North
Hear, hear! The current "plan" is so vastly different from what CB12 considered as to make that body's participation moot.
The industrial section needs long-range planning, with complete community input - not some rushed-through nod to developers who lust for waterfront high rises and their corresponding "market" rents.
15
The crime especially in parts of Marble Hill is the 'elephant in the room' when talking about these neighborhoods. At tiny bit of gentrification would not be a bad thing.
30
@K Henderson Thirty years
Inwood has already seen more than "a tiny bit of gentrification" over the past decade. It has been a mixed bag, and rents have been rising fast, but so far it's not a disaster. But with regard to this rezoning, we're not talking about "a tiny bit of gentrification." We are talking about massive gentrification and massive displacement.
Furthermore, Inwood is by no means a high crime area.
I don't get the impression you know much about Inwood OR the rezoning plan.
14
The city has been anxious for this sort of “redevelopment “ for decades, ever since the tough end of the 34th Precinct was split off into the 33rd, take no its high index crime numbers with it.
@K Henderson Over the last ten years, at least, Inwood has had lower rates of violent crime than other Manhattan neighborhoods where the population is far wealthier and land values are much higher.
You don't know what you're talking about.
The 67,000 new units built in Manhattan haven't seemed to do much to curtail the cost of rising rents here. I wonder why that is?
I think there's more to affordability than "build more to end gentrification; you live in this neighborhood and are seeing everything that's happening, but you just don't get it. Everyone else knows better than you."
Condescending much?
This article, i think, unfairly downplays serious concerns residents hold about the influx of expensive market-rate units and what that means for area rents, and instead paints the many in a NIMBYish light.
It's also worth reiterating that community activists are for building but are demanding greater affordability than what exists in the proposed rezoning.
They're wise to do so. Developers, at the end of the day, are more concerned about profit than they are the community. Wouldn't you be worried too, if you were facing down the barrel of that gun?
24
The logic behind the lack of supply being the cause of high prices is quite obvious, so I think it is quite normal to be condescending towards those who deny it. After all being a local does not make you a reliable source on how to deal with housing: everyone is a local somewhere. And pointing to Manhattan isn’t an argument if you cannot prove that prices wouldn’t have risen even more without the additional supply. Which you obviously cannot, and I would point towards San Francisco where housing restrictions are much stronger than in NYC, with a resulting inflation that is even worse.
Now I explained in s comment below why expensive market-rate units are still decreasing prices everywhere: the problem is not that the apartments that are built are too nice (they are actually of very average quality quite often). The problem is that there are people that are ready to pay these expensive market rates. Remove the apartments and you still have that demand, and that now-unmet demand will slowly but surely gentrify your area anyway: they will just buy apartments where poorer people used to live, and renovate them.
And housing at sub-market prices is necessary for a society, but it is basically subsidized housing (whether it is paid by the public or by the developers). If the fundamental problem is the lack of supply, subsidizing demand will only inflate prices more.
16
@Bob Robert You're talking about the law of supply and demand in terms of New York real estate? I've got news for you. With all the subsidies, rebates, tax dodges, anonymity, pay-to-play zoning and other perverse incentives, that law was repealed long ago in the NY real estate market. There is a huge oversupply of luxury apartments in NYC, and the huge deficit of affordable housing continues to worsen.
7
@elle Actually rents in Manhattan have been stable for the past 3-4 years, due in part to all the new units.
Same old, same old… People just don’t understand that more housing means lower prices, which means less gentrification. The people who would buy the apartments in the new skyscrapers will not disappear if you don’t build these skyscrapers. They will buy/rent something else, elsewhere or in Inwood. These people have a lot of money and will displace poorer people wherever they live: that’s how gentrification works. But if you build them an apartment that was not there before, they are not displacing anyone and there is no gentrification. Businesses get the same patrons as before, and actually maybe the newcomers too.
Conversely if you don’t build (in Inwood, or wherever locals fear for the “unique character” of their neighborhood, which is everywhere), you just end up with worst gentrification, just not as visible because the same newcomers live in old-looking (sometimes actually half-decrepit) apartment blocks. Just like in many neighborhoods of Brooklyn, London or Paris where apartments of poor quality are long past affordable.
In many cases here the new developments are actually keeping the same number of affordable housing units, so where is the problem? If you replace 20 units of affordable housing by 20 units of affordable housing + 40 of market-price housing, how is that not correcting the demand/supply imbalance?
When planning anything in a city, you can listen to the locals, but never let them decide…
38
@Bob Robert The "locals" in Inwood are not generally against building more housing, and quite densely -- after all, the existing residential areas are uniformly quite dense and work quite well. (Note - Inwood is different from other parts of Manhattan in being a consistent 6 to 8 stories on all blocks rather than tall avenues and shorter sidestreets. It's not low-density by any means).
However, the city is not cutting and pasting existing Inwood into the former industrial areas. They are putting in extremely large buildings along with some vacant sites for economic development and really make a mess of things. There is a difference between building ad hoc and building according to a smart urban plan. If you read the details of the proposed rezoning, you will see that it is poorly planned, with an awful lot of politics involved.
When planning anything in a city, you can listen to the elected officials, but never let them decide...
13
@Bob Robert
You have commented a number of times about "more housing means lower prices.."
In what area of New York City are housing prices lower as a result of heavy development?
Not in Downtown Brooklyn, on the Flatbush corridor.
Not in Long Island City in Queens West and around the Queens Plaza/Court Square area. Not in Williamsburg, or the West Village, or Tribeca, or the Lower East Side.
Aside from a major depression causing reversal of real estate values, development in New York has always brought higher prices to the surrounding neighborhoods. Always.
The people who live in or adjacent to areas that are slated for "redevelopment" are always the ones who are forced to eventually leave.
12
@Michael c Conversely look at Astoria and many places in Queens: there has been very little new development, yet prices have gone very high too. Same for London that for all the fuss about some towers here and there still mostly looks like a giant suburban area. And prices are up. Same in Paris.
Even Brooklyn for the most part is underdeveloped and not very dense. And many parts of Queens and the Bronx. Prices might not have gone down despite the developments, but that’s like saying saving water is useless because places in the world with the strictest water-saving measures are where water is the scarcest… You are not proving at all that developments made the places more expensive, and are just confusing correlation with causality here. While I would have thought that the fact that housing inflation was caused by higher demand while supply was not catching up was quite obvious…
3
The residents quoted in this article acknowledge that newcomers looking for lower housing costs already are moving to Inwood. That will continue there, and in other NYC neighborhoods. Blocking new housing only will raise the prices and rents of existing housing. The least bad solution is de Blasio's: build as much housing as possible and preserve existing low cost apartments. Do those opposed to the plan really want to say to the homeless, those doubled up in apartments, and those paying ever more of their income in rent: too bad, we'd rather keep our beauty salon than let homes be built for you. Do they really think abandoned factories look better than high rise apartment towers?
38
@Richard Lachmann No one is trying to block new housing. The problem is that the city is taking some lots and preventing housing from being built on them, like the area being reserved for 27 stories of "institutional use" (read: NYP) and then saying you need 27 story buildings next to it for housing because gosh, we need more housing. How about no secret hospital expansion, put housing on the entire area at say 10 to 14 stories, and everybody wins? (Except the behind-closed-doors dealmakers.)
7
No sarcasm - I do prefer the look of old brick factory buildings as opposed to the new condos. A lot of new construction ages terribly. Even after 5 years a Meier building can look shabby. Sadly we don’t have an Ugly Tax or architecture/ aesthetics police.
@North
You are right, it would be better to devote all those acres to housing and not expand the hospital. NYC has too many hospitals and too many hospital beds already. There is no reason to give away public lands to allow one politically-connected hospital to poach patients from others.