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March 21, 2009
Your Building, Too, Could Be Declared “Blight”
The Preservationist
This article points out the importance of the blight study presented by Forest City Ratner's tool, the Empire State Development Corporation. What has been especially surprising for those involved with the Atlantic Yards fight is how much broader New York State's definition is for "blight" compared to most people's definition.
To most of us, “urban blight” means abandoned buildings, broken windows, and rubble-strewn vacant lots. But a number of other, seemingly minor, things can cause a property to be declared “blight” under existing law. One of the most surprising blight factors is “underutilization.”
An official “Blight Study” can be a devastating tool in the hands of the state – especially when it wants to seize private property for a politically favored project. A cynical architect friend of mine, wise in the ways of urban development, declared: “Show me an urban block – any block — and I can write a report that will show that it is “blighted.”
This reality became painfully clear to a group of us who have been trying to block an obscenely over-scaled $4-billion mega-development that a private developer – allied with politically powerful forces in New York State – has been trying to impose on brownstone Brooklyn. To provide a basis for the public subsidies needed to prop up the mega-project, a key legal tool of the Empire State Development Corp. – acting in concert with the developer — has been the official “Blight Study.” The Blight Study was used to condemn an area that was already undergoing revitalization through renovations being carried out by individual property owners. But the pace and scale of neighborhood rejuvenation was deemed not sufficiently grandiose by state planners and the private developer. And thus the $4-billion Atlantic Yards project was suddenly presented to the community as a “done deal.”
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Brownstone Brooklyn is now left with the ultimate irony: All the buildings that were “blight” only in the eyes of New York State’s lawyers are demolished. They have been replaced by vast swaths of state-sanctioned urban wasteland (see photo) that is clearly “blight” by anyone’s definition. And this legal eyesore will now disfigure the urban landscape for the foreseeable future. Something is wrong with this picture!
Posted by steve at March 21, 2009 7:38 AM