Finding vast wealth hidden in your own backyard sounds like a good thing, but not when the wealth is claimed by somebody else and you have to cope with the chaos that its discovery unleashes. This may be the dilemma that Lower Manhattan will face if real estate developers ever gain control of the campus of Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC).
BMCC occupies 4.3 acres of land overlooking the Hudson River, in Tribeca. The campus runs along West Street, from Chambers Street to Harrison Street, to North Moore Street, with a 10,000 square-foot skybridge over Harrison Street that contains four levels and multiple classrooms. The “super-block” that campus occupies was created in the 1960s, as part of what was then known as the Washington Street Urban Renewal Project. This reconfiguration of the streetscape absorbed and erased Reade, Duane, Jay, and Franklin Streets, between West and Greenwich Streets. This makes the BMCC’s campus six square blocks.
What is likely to catch the eye of City Hall and Albany, however, is the potential value of this land. For perspective, in 2013, a partnership of developers purchased a much smaller plot of land nearby: the parcel at the northwest corner of Murray and West Streets. This area of this property is slightly more than half an acre. The developers paid $223 million for it, and plan to erect a large condominium tower there.
BMCC’s campus occupies 4.3 acres in Tribeca. which might be worth more than $1 billion, and could be used to develop thousands of new apartments.
The land occupied by BMCC is more than eight times the size of the property at West and Murray. Extrapolating from this ratio indicates that BMCC’s land could be worth slightly more than $1.8 billion. But it might also be worth much more. Unlike the property at West and Murray, which is subject to restrictions on building height and floor size, BMCC’s property (as a former component of an urban renewal project) falls outside the jurisdiction of local zoning codes. This regulatory quirk means that a developer who came to control the site could theoretically choose to erect a complex of buildings of almost any size, restricted only by what engineers and bankers might be willing to approve.
In 2013, the Related Companies development group offered BMCC 1.1 million square feet of new facility space in a project that the company is developing in Midtown, behind Penn Station. In exchange, it proposed to take over BMCC’s current campus, in Tribeca. For taking possession of this large tract of land, Related offered to pay nothing.
Although this deal was never consummated, it evokes unfortunate history for Lower Manhattan residents. In the decade after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bloomberg Administration turned over multiple large parcels of land in Tribeca, the Financial District, and the Seaport neighborhood) to developers, for residential projects. In order to mollify local opposition, City Hall promised to build new schools to accommodate the children these projects would bring to Lower Manhattan.
“Three things happened,” observes Eric Greenleaf, a Tribeca parent who has served for almost a decade on the School Overcrowding Task Force, a panel jointly chaired by a coalition of elected official representing Lower Manhattan. “First, the City got a lot of money for selling the land. Second, the developers were made very happy. And third, the City made a lot of additional money from real estate taxes, on property that would otherwise never have existed, and real estate transaction fees. Add up the difference from the sale, plus the taxes and transaction fees, and that’s a nine-figure sum, which could be used to build a nice new school.” But the nine figures disappeared into the City’s budget, while funds to build new schools have remained perpetually scarce.
In this context, there may be reason to fear that any deal to redevelop BMCC’s campus would bring more than a billion dollars to the budgets of State and City government, with no assurances that any of it would be spent to improve quality of life in Lower Manhattan. At the same time, the thousands of new apartments would increase the burden on local schools, parks, transit systems, and other forms of civic infrastructure, by several orders of magnitude. For perspective, BMCC’s campus is the same size as the adjacent Independence Plaza development, which contains 1,332 apartments. The campus is approximately the same size as the Southbridge Towers complex, which contains 1,651 apartments. And it is only slightly smaller than the Gateway Towers development, which contains more than 1,700 apartments.
At a discussion of BMCC’s future at the December 21 meeting of Community Board 1 (CB1), Jeff Erlich, a member of the Tribeca Committee, said, “BMCC is not zoned. If it gets bought up, anything could be built there as-of-right if the site is redeveloped.”
CB1 chair Tammy Meltzer reflected, “we have to advocate to save BMCC and keep it at that site.”
CB1 chair Anthony Notaro said, “we are not going to advocate for BMCC specifically, but instead talk about the zoning for that site. Those are two different battles.”
Mr. Erlich then recalled a 2013 resolution by the board, which noted that BMCC is now the largest community college in the City University of New York system, with roughly 25,000 students in degree programs and 12,000 more in continuing education programs, and concluded, “CB1 strongly urges that BMCC continue to stay downtown in Tribeca and the Financial District.”