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April 12, 2007
My View: Pave paradise, put up a parking lot
MetroNY
Jasper Goldman from the Municipal Art Society explains the problem with Bruce Ratner's plan to level blocks-o-buildings to put up a parking lot and wonders how in the hell this fits in with Mayor Bloomberg's plans for a sustainable city and environmental innitiatives:
For those who haven’t been following this, Forest City Ratner wants to demolish two city blocks (including historic buildings) to create more than 7 acres of surface parking lots for construction workers and, ultimately, arena patrons. (That’s about twice the size of Union Square Park.) The developer calls the lots “temporary,” because they ultimately plan to build the second phase of the project on top of them. But “temporary” could become permanent. Even members of the developer’s own team believe that the second phase of the project won’t be built for 15 to 20 years — if it’s built at all. Historically, they’re right. In Long Island City, Queens West is still being built nearly 30 years after construction started. In Downtown Brooklyn, MetroTech took three times longer to build than planned. You get the idea.
The reality is that the city and state are letting Forest City Ratner demolish blocks for parking lots that will be with us for a generation or longer.
Parking lots aren’t just a huge blight on the surrounding neighborhoods. They are also an invitation to drive — leading to worse traffic, air quality and quality of life for Brooklynites, to say nothing of carbon emissions and the impact on climate change. Building parking lots in dense urban areas flies in the face of sustainability.
And the justifications for the parking lots don’t make any sense either. Do we really need to drive to a project site next to the third largest transit hub in the city? Why has no similar large-scale project in the city — including the former World Trade Center site — ever required the demolition of two city blocks for parking?
Posted by lumi at April 12, 2007 9:25 AM