Remarking on recent trends in New York City’s real estate, urban planner Tom Angotti offers a ten point plan for uniting land and people in New York City.

By Tom Angotti[i]

New York’s landed oligarchy boasts that the city is “The Real Estate Capital of the World.” This popular mythology helps to manufacture consent for the planning, zoning and housing policies that open the gates wide to real estate speculation, megaprojects, and Olympics-sized boondoggles. The myth treats the hundreds of diverse neighborhoods in the city as pawns in the giant Ponzi schemes run by real estate investment trusts, equity funds, mortgage lenders, and hedge funds that treat all land as raw material for speculative profit and not an essential element in of all life.

But real estate’s imperial rule, though still in force, is losing ground to the rising community-based, city-wide, regional and global efforts to take back the land. People are discovering new concepts of community land — land that is outside the speculative marketplace and subject to democratic control that respects principles of economic, social and environmental justice. Community land can include a wide variety of land tenure systems including ownership and control by non-profits, community land trusts, public agencies, and private households in a sufficiently regulated market. Community land may be secured by public land banking, rent and eviction controls, taxation and limits on equity gains from real estate, land use and zoning regulations, and participatory budget-making. New York City is a leader in community-based planning, with around 100 plans large and small, mostly initiated without the support of government. Together these plans reflect the aspiration of people to gain control over land in the places where they live and work.

Challenges to Community Land

Mayor Bloomberg’s West Side Stadium and Olympics 2012 bombs were defused, but there are likely to be many more explosive devices, like Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, that will erode established neighborhoods, use public funding to expand private fortunes, and undermine community plans. In early 2007, Mayor Bloomberg announced a set of principles to guide long-term planning for the city, PlaNYC2030, but omitted any significant role for communities. Touted as a “sustainability plan,” it is really a blueprint for real estate development dressed up in green.[ii] Megaprojects, new luxury enclaves, and big box stores are still on the horizon. While the real estate bubble burst in 2008, this created new opportunities for the scavengers of the investment world whose fortunes rise with other peoples’ miseries. Neighborhoods with people of modest incomes are paying the heaviest price relative to their assets, as we saw in the wholesale abandonment of the 1960s and 70s. All of this may spur more protest and activism and increase the attractiveness of community land and planning as alternatives to real estate as usual.

I hope to contribute to the struggles for a better urban future by offering a brief summary of my ten-point strategy for uniting land and people in New York City.

1. Expand the public trust, consolidate community land
2. Connect land and people
3. Consolidate the urban commons
4. Land bank for the commons
5. Regulate the commons
6. Create More Community Land Trusts
7. Quality of Life Instead of Growth Machine
8. Think Locally, Regionally and Globally
9. Take Comprehensive Planning Back to the Future
10. Think of the Seventh Generation

1)  Expand the Public Trust, Consolidate Community Land

Community land is a powerful instrument for securing affordable housing and fighting displacement and gentrification. It can be a key element in securing long-term benefits for neighborhoods that are successful in reducing and eliminating the concentration of noxious facilities. It can be a powerful tool for environmental justice.

By helping to expand the commons, community planning will confront the global practices of privatization and budgetary austerity that have become the hallmarks of neoliberalism. If we start planning with the assumption that nothing can be implemented unless we find a big private partner (who usually turns out to be the senior partner), we will have relinquished the most powerful tools for controlling the use of land – public and non-profit entities that operate in the public domain. Let the experience with parks be a warning: we have a handful of park conservancies that are well-maintained playgrounds for the wealthy and host profitable concessions, and a Parks Department with a budget under siege that can not adequately maintain parks in most neighborhoods. PILOTs and TIFs, financing schemes like those proposed for West Midtown and Atlantic Yards that use public subsidies for private development, must be stopped; they are bonanzas for private developers and will impoverish public services throughout the city. It is time to revitalize the public sector so it serves the public.

2)  Connect Land and People

The City’s planning bureaucracy has been unable to make the connections between land and people. Environmental concerns are referred to the Department of Environmental Protection, sanitation concerns to the Sanitation Department, transportation to the Department of Transportation. In the real world of neighborhoods and urban living, these are indivisible, but there is no “Department of Neighborhoods” that looks at the whole and not just the parts. We need to plan our transportation network for cleaner air and safer streets, not just to move traffic. We need to plan to reduce waste and its impacts on public health, not just take out the garbage. Daily decisions in government should be informed by an understanding of environmental impacts on people and not just relegated to developer-sponsored environmental impact statements.

While in some ways New York City government has been ahead of the nation’s big cities – in mass transit and affordable housing, for example – it is far behind when it comes to planning for our air, water and food, three basic elements for sustaining life in the city. The federal government’s strict clean air rules for fuel and vehicles helped clean the air significantly since the 1970s, but the City itself did little to improve the air by limiting traffic and energy use. The high density and mass transit that make New York City a pioneer in the fight against urban sprawl are not the result of progressive environmental policy but rather unintended consequences of a dynamic real estate industry, and the City lags when it comes to maximizing the environmental benefits of high density because real estate exerts an inordinate influence on environmental policy.

Federal policy and funding, plus industrial flight, had more to do with securing clean surface water than City policy. The federal government forced the city to build 14 waste water plants – and put up the money for them. The federal government forced the City to stop ocean dumping. Entirely off the radar screen of planners are the polluted underground aquifers in the city — our many natural streams covered with concrete and asphalt. Stewardship of the land should value the water underneath us, in the bay and local rivers, and not just around the upstate reservoirs that supply drinking water, or when someone wants to enhance the value of their land with odorless waterfront views.

The city’s foodshed is tied to its land. But we treat land in the city as alien to the production and quality of food, as if it were external to urban life, the sole responsibility of food conglomerates and supermarkets. Community-assisted agriculture, community gardens, farmers markets, and urban agriculture strengthen our connection with land in and around the city. Foodshed planning is a public health priority because obesity and diabetes, especially among children, have reached epidemic proportions.[iii] Food shed planning plus planning for the transportation, recreational and educational systems can also encourage exercise and help make this a healthy and active city.[iv]

3) Consolidate the Urban Commons

Given the wealth and power of the Trumps and Vornados, isn’t the idea of building an urban commons a quixotic dream? In fact, if we take an inventory of the commons today, it is surprising how much urban land is already in the commons. What remains is to acknowledge it, guarantee its stewardship, and make it better. First, a substantial portion of land in the city is already under some form of public ownership or control and outside the circuit of commodity exchange. About 30% of all land in the city is publicly-owned streets and sidewalks. We can put the public on public streets and end the monopoly of private cars, and we can plan for our stoops and sidewalks so they are high-quality public spaces. Of the remaining 70% of land, about half is used for infrastructure, public institutions, community facilities, and open space, or remains vacant. The other half is already developed, and 5% of that is used for public or non-profit housing. Over half of the city’s developable vacant land is in peripheral areas, especially in Staten Island, where land prices are not yet high enough to produce pressures for significant numbers of new private housing units; some of this land can be put in the public trust (and not just as back yard green space for Staten Islanders). 30% of the city’s developable land is tax-exempt, and though the institutions like universities and hospitals that own much of this land do not necessarily operate in the public interest, and some of them are worse than private developers when it comes to addressing the public interest, a lot of this land will be kept off the market for a long time to come.

4)  Land Bank for the Commons

The good news is that a sizeable urban commons already exists. The bad news is that there is little space left to expand it. With so little land that is privately owned and zoned for development, the pressures remain intense to develop in these central locations and keep them out of the commons. This also increases pressures to shrink the commons, by converting low-cost housing to market-rate housing and upzoning selected outlying areas. The solution that has yet to be tried is for the City to plan in partnership with neighborhoods for a more sustainable, long-range growth strategy that meets local as well as regional needs and at the same time expands the commons.

In the long-term future, however, there is one instrument that could help expand the commons—land banking. The proportion of land owned by the City could have been higher if government had not foolishly divested itself of so many vacant lots over the last 40 years. The City could have retained ownership and leased its land to private or non-profit owners for public purposes, such as low-income housing. The City could have sold the land with deed restrictions that incorporated community objectives—for example, stipulations that housing remain affordable to people with modest incomes in perpetuity. Instead, the City sold much of the land without any serious land use planning. Good land in areas served by subways was given away so that low-density “ticky tacky” could be built following the Charlotte Gardens model. Individual lots in many neighborhoods were auctioned off to the highest bidder with no restrictions.

All of this was done because of an ideological rigidity, promoted by the real estate industry for its own obvious reasons, that saw land banking by the City as practically un-American. The next time around we will have to fight harder against the myth that the City should not land bank because it is bad for development, or because government can not possibly plan. Look at the city of Stockholm, where almost all land was land-banked. This was not a policy dreamed up by the socialists; the city was built on land ceded by the Crown and planned high-density neighborhoods in the suburbs were built around mass transit stops in one of the world’s best examples of orderly planned growth. If we just give away the land to the highest bidder, the bidders will control the future of the city, not the people who will live and work there and must live with the consequences. Community planners in New York City have already demonstrated that when challenged they have lots of good ideas about how to plan for growth, in their neighborhoods and beyond. Publicly-assembled land could, and should, be subject to democratically developed community planning.

5)  Regulate the Commons

Zoning and land use regulation can insure that privately-owned land is used and developed in ways that meet community needs, effectively placing it in the commons. Too often, however, local activists have to spend their time fighting against zoning changes to prevent the worst from happening instead of using land use regulations to make the best happen. In other words, land use regulation is too often reactive, not proactive.

Zoning devices like special districts, special permits, contextual zones, natural districts, mixed use districts, and inclusionary zoning can be used to implement planning objectives, but they are more often set up as defensive measures in reaction to proposed development. The City Planning Department is forever pressing for more “as-of-right” zoning because it follows the myth of market magic and gives greater freedom to developers. But as-of-right regulations only postpone the resolution of disputes over land use and fail to resolve them. Other tools for community planning that are already in place are landmarks preservation districts; city tax policies that now encourage conversions and new construction but could be used to stimulate other types of development or land preservation; tax benefits for elderly homeowners; and the list goes on.

The Department of City Planning aggressively upzones in areas of recent interest to real estate developers following a three-pronged approach founded on the neoliberal principle that social benefits must be tied to private development. The strategy involves: 1) mixed use (MX) zoning, which is applied in a way that instead encourages single-use residential development and produces a de facto residential zone; 2) waterfront zoning, which links the development of waterfront public access to private residential and commercial development and effectively privatizes the waterfront; and 3) inclusionary zoning (IZ), which in New York City is optional and not mandatory, and in practice provides a small number of affordable housing units while effectively displacing many more units. Community planners need to confront this three-headed monster and propose progressive alternatives that preserve and encourage mixed use, create public parks on the waterfront, and mandate new affordable housing while preserving existing affordable units.

6) Create More Community Land Trusts

The community land trust (CLT) is one of the most underutilized instruments for community planning in the nation’s cities. The CLT is a hopeful model for cities like New York because it is a powerful instrument for preserving affordable housing in perpetuity. There are some 160 community land trusts in the U.S., many of which provide low-cost housing in cities.[v][vi] Two land trusts in the city now protect low-income housing by providing low-cost long-term leases to tenant-run mutual housing associations.[vii] In neighborhoods struggling to stop displacement and the homogeny of gentrification, land trusts can be a powerful tool. When the housing is owned and managed by limited-equity cooperatives and government subsidies are used, the cost of the housing portion can also be written down drastically. The question now is how can we get this for everyone who needs it?

In Boston’s Roxbury, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) started a community land trust. But it also achieved something that every neighborhood should have in its tool kit of land use controls. It got the City of Boston’s powerful Redevelopment Authority to delegate to DSNI its power of eminent domain. This enabled DSNI to assemble the vacant lots it needed to build new housing and stop dumping in the neighborhood, and insure that development met the priorities set out in the neighborhood plan.[viii][ix] Unlike its government sponsor, DSNI used eminent domain without displacing people. Our New York City housing agency (HPD), on the other hand, keeps a tight fist on its urban renewal powers, and has given too much away to developers who contribute more to the mayors’ campaigns than the neighborhoods they build in. While in some neighborhoods, HPD acknowledges the priorities of CDCs, community-based organizations should not have to beg for the land that should be theirs, and waste precious resources navigating the arcane land disposition process. The city should cede full control over city-owned vacant land to organizations that will use it in accordance with democratic, community-initiated plans.

7)  Quality of Life Instead of Growth Machine

Community planners need to develop alternatives to the growth machine orthodoxy that makes the number of new jobs and housing units the sole criterion for evaluating plans. We need to re-invent the concept of “quality of life” and define it in very concrete and specific terms, our own terms, not according to the slogans of angry politicians going after homeless people and squeegee men. Our quality of life has to do with the health and well-being of all individuals regardless of where they live and work. As Andre Gorz once noted, economic growth has stopped improving living conditions and higher wages alone will not improve the quality of life:  “Living better depends less and less on individual consumer goods the worker can buy on the market, and more and more on social investments to fight dirt, noise, inadequate housing, crowding on public transportation, and the oppressive and repressive nature of working life.”[x]

What good are more jobs and higher salaries if rents go up, people are forced to move and commute longer distances, and the poorest neighborhoods get dumped on? What good are more affordable housing units if they are overwhelmed by luxury units and force people out of existing affordable units when they neither need nor want to move? If “new jobs” includes low-wage, dead-end jobs without benefits, and moving them from one part of the region to another, how is that “development?” And if more jobs and housing does not also mean meeting neighborhood needs for schools, health care, transportation, and other services, they could instead result in greater burdens on an already stressed infrastructure.

8)  Think Locally, Regionally and Globally

The strongest local strategy is a global one. Nothing that we do in the city will have any durable value unless it is linked in our consciousness and organizing to the world beyond. The administrative boundaries of the City of New York contain less than a third of the population in the New York region, even though the city captures much of the region’s financial resources. Our greatest regional resource is people, not financial markets. Regional coalitions for affordable housing, public transportation, and environmental protection need to grow and challenge the fragmented governmental framework that is unable to plan in the public interest because local elected officials are wedded to narrow local property interests. New York City’s housing crisis is exacerbated by exclusionary zoning in the suburbs. There can be no resolution of the city’s traffic congestion as long as the suburbs continue to add lanes to the expressways that lead into the city. And as long as conservative state legislatures keep a throttle-hold on financing for the central cities, state expenditures will continue to reinforce local economic inequalities.

There is no neat divide between New York City and “the suburbs.” The dualistic central city/suburban, black/white contradictions of the 1960s no longer have much meaning. The majority of New York City’s working class neighborhoods have less in common with the city’s Silk Stocking districts than they do with the scores of smaller cities in the region and growing number of ethnically diverse working class suburbs. The community planning movement can help create the conditions that will break the institutional stagnation of local government planning, and cross the artificial lines of political jurisdiction that keep people from organizing for progressive change.

Urban planners have been looking in the wrong place for solutions to the fragmentation and lack of planning in the New York region. For all of its efforts and corporate support, the Regional Plan Association, working at the regional level, has been unable to unlock the key to regional planning after some 80 years of trying. As demonstrated by the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhood’s city-wide solid waste plan and Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s regional advocacy, for example, progressive community-based planning has every need to engage with regional efforts, and some of the strongest support for regional planning comes from community-based organizations. The race and class divisions in the region, however, are perhaps the most significant obstacle, and progressive community planning has done a better job of confronting these divisions than the professional planners. They are the best hope for regional planning.

9)  Take Comprehensive Planning Back to the Future

Putting all these elements together is still not enough because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Community planning forces dialogues within neighborhoods that look at all aspects of life in the city, region and world. Community planning is resurrecting and transforming the discredited, orthodox rational-comprehensive planning approaches by making comprehensiveness an open, democratic process that is no longer the privileged domain for technocrats. I learned about the value of holistic approaches to planning in my decades of work as a community planner, mostly from community activists whose own daily lives force them to experience the many interrelated aspects of community life. To maximize their political effectiveness, they are also compelled to understand the relationship between their neighborhood and the urban region, national urban policies, and globalized trends. I have often found them more capable of thinking comprehensively, and about questions of global sustainability, than the technocratic urban planners whose sterile world views of cities are formed by looking at aerial photographs and color-coded maps. This is not the rational-comprehensive planning advanced by Baron von Hausmann in his 19th Century plan to wipe out the working class neighborhoods of central Paris. It is a new holistic, progressive community planning.

10) Think of the Seventh Generation

Community planning needs to break away from the narrow paradigms of “strategic planning” that migrated from a business model and is incapable of thinking past the next investment cycle. There are other ways to look at the future. The Great Law of the Iriquois Confederacy, for example, states that, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”

Planning by corporations, City Hall, and communities rarely looks beyond five or ten years, a very short-term horizon in a city where major projects take at least that long from the time they are proposed to the time they get built. The bogus practice of environmental impact assessment, which at most looks ten years into the future, is thoroughly inadequate as a tool except for the planning firms and lawyers for whom it is bread and butter. With a global climate crisis, diminishing energy sources, the uninterrupted disappearance of natural species from the earth, and escalating global inequalities, it is time to change the way decisions about our living environment are made.

True, seven generations is a long time, much more than a century, and no one, including our highly trained professional planners and futurists, can predict how conditions will change or guarantee that their plans will remain valid over such a long period of time. But planning for the Seventh Generation should not be understood as yet another prosaic, modernist tool for “rational” planning based on simplistic linear cause-effect relations; instead, it is a way of thinking that should govern deliberation and decision-making. It means asking the question, “Will our plans meet the needs of the next seven generations?” even if our answers cannot be quantified and verified with any degree of certainty. Right now, no one bothers to ask the question. Had that question been posed before the launch of the oil economy and private automobile almost 100 years ago, we might not be facing global warming or urban environmental and health crises today.

Some cultures may well challenge the whole notion of planning because they do not share the view that the world is divided between past, present and future. If the world is timeless, what fundamental difference is there between human action in all three periods? While modern Western philosophy interprets such thinking as an invitation to paralysis, it could also be an entrée to a new, more humane approach to planning. It calls into question our traditional focus on land, which fetishizes future value, and devalues its past and present.

New York City’s community planning is insignificant if it is not understood as part of a long history of community organizing to gain control over land — both its production and reproduction — and life. The current struggles in post-Katrina New Orleans are an important signal of the resiliency of those who declare “We Won’t Move.” Working people and small businesses in New Orleans are organizing to prevent powerful real estate interests from evicting them permanently from their communities. They are attempting to build a process of democratic planning in which economic and racial justice are not compromised.[xi] To keep these uphill battles in perspective, perhaps we need to think seven generations ahead and ask the question: if the empire fails, as all empires have, then who will control the land?

[ii] See www.nyc.gov/Planyc2030; Angotti, Tom (2007) “Atlantic Yards and the Sustainability Test,” Gotham Gazette. June 2007.

[iii] Slightly less than half of New York City’s elementary school students are obese or over-weight, a higher rate than in the nation as a whole. The proportion of obese children is 24%, but the rate is 31% among Latino children. Pérez-Peña, Richard (2003) “Obesity on Rise in New York Public Schools,” The New York Times. July 9, B1, 6.

[iv] See Progressive Planning issue on “Planning for the Active City,” 157, Fall 2003.

[vi] Greenstein Rosalind and Suyngu-Eryilmaz, Yesim (2005) “Community Land Trusts: Leasing Land for Affordable Housing,” Land Lines. April, 8-10.

[vii] Angotti, Tom, with Cecilia Jagu (2006) Community Land Trusts and Low-Income Multifamily Rental Housing. Cambridge, Mass: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2006.

[ix] See Medoff, Peter and Sklar, Holly (1994) Streets of Hope. Boston: South End Press.

[x] Andre Gorz, Andre (1971) “Labor and the ‘Quality of Life’” in Ecology as Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1980, 133.

[xi] Hartman, Chester and Gregory D. Squires, Eds. (2006) There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster. New York: Routledge.