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February 5, 2007
Seeing beyond Moses
NY Daily News
By Michael Gecan, the senior organizer for the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.
A guest editorial seeks to dispell the myth being spun by the Bloomberg administration that nothing much was built in NYC after Robert Moses and before Bloomberg. We're linking to this op-ed because Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff use this myth to justify the need for developer-driven mega-projects like Atlantic Yards.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The city is not poised for a second era of major construction, but for a third spurt.
It's the missing - almost invisible - second phase that merits more attention. Without it, the very nature and scale of the city would have become radically reduced, and the coming era of major development would still be gathering dust in the offices of planners and architects.
From 1982 to the present, New York City experienced the most extensive reconstruction of its housing stock of any American city in the modern era. At the start of this period, the city itself was the owner-of-last-resort of more than 100,000 apartments.
Posted by lumi at February 5, 2007 8:08 AM