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July 28, 2007
On complex land-use choices and "land monopoly"
Atlantic Yards Report delves into Robert Fitch's 1993 book The Assassination of New York.
Fitch's single-focus analysis meant critics in even the left-wing Nation and Monthly Review found the book's explanations--for example, of the decline in manufacturing or the city's struggles--incomplete. But they also found the book valuable, and there are some passages of particular resonance today.Beyond Jane Jacobs
Hence this pointed observation, which substitutes a Rockefeller for the usual culprit, Moses, and raises a larger point about current land-use battles in Brooklyn and beyond:
When David Rockefeller tried to run the Lower Manhattan Expressway through Washington Square Park, you didn't have to have a degree in planning from MIT to know it was destructive. Jane Jacobs led the charge and miraculously sent the establishmentarians back to their Westchester redoubts. But land-use choices involving housing vs. jobs; the mix of income in a housing project; the question of which jobs are really viable in an urban setting; what's the best location for manufacturing--these issues don't lend themselves to such clear-cut resistance. Everyone grasps that it is people who decide where highways go. But the notion that strictly objective force, like technology and markets, the "logic of capital," determine factory and office locations is disarming. Ideas count. (Emphasis added)Indeed. And the issue is also the way incentives shape markets; why, for example, has Downtown Brooklyn become a home for housing, when that was not anticipated in the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning? Because tax breaks make the projects that much more attractive.
Posted by amy at July 28, 2007 11:51 AM