Is Two Bridges Going Too Far?

City Council member Margaret Chin is pushing back against a wave of super-tall residential development on the Lower East Side, while also working to close a loophole that help trigger the avalanche of development now engulfing the East River waterfront, between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.

In December, the City Council unanimously passed her legislation that will, for the first time, require the City government to provide notice to affected communities when urban renewal plans are expiring, along with other information, such as the status of current or former master plans. These seemingly basic accommodations may prove crucial for neighborhoods that wish to resist (or at least manage) the tidal wave of speculative real estate investment gentrification that sometimes swamps an area where urban renewal plans have lapsed.

The Two Bridges community on the Lower East Side is a case in point. In 1967, the five square blocks bounded by South, Montgomery, Cherry, and Market Streets were designated an urban renewal area by the City. This meant that the City used eminent domain to acquire all of the land in the area, with the intention of partnering with private developers, by selling them the recently seized acreage at below-market prices, in exchange for which they would create new housing, at below-market prices.

The avowed goal of the Two Bridge’s Urban Renewal Area’s designation (first proposed in 1961) was, “to improve the economic balance of the community by attracting more middle-income families” to the 14-acre waterfront district. At the time, according to a City report from that era, the district had, “only 20 dwelling units in six buildings, and a population of approximately 100. The general quality of the residential structures is poor. Redevelopment within [then-current] standards would permit a substantial net increase of approximately 1,450 dwelling units.”

For almost 20 years, this plan was gradually implemented with developments like Two Bridges Tower, a building near Rutgers and South Streets that was sponsored by two local non-profits — the Settlement Housing Fund and the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council. Together, they created 198 apartments for a mix of low- and moderate-income working families, integrated with formerly homeless people. Another pair of public housing development, called Lands End I and Land Ends II, were sponsored by the federal government, to provide subsided housing to disadvantaged populations, such as the elderly or the handicapped. Further north, near Montgomery and South Streets, the New work City Housing Authority built the Two Bridges Houses, with 250 units for low-income residents.

The prevailing design ethos of the years in which all of these structures were built (along with regulations that gave this vision the force of law) meant that many of these developments had large parking lots. For example, the master plan for the Two Bridges Urban Renewal Area called for a supermarket, to be sited on a riverfront site, bounded by South, Pike, Cherry, and Rutgers Streets, on the north side of the Manhattan Bridge.

Government agencies and community leaders set out to entice Pathmark to open a store there in 1983, when there were no supermarkets in Lower Manhattan. (This was part of the broader push to lure low- and middle-income residents to Lower Manhattan.) In a complex arrangement, the land was purchased for a token price by real estate investors Fred and Gary Spindler, who leased it to Pathmark on favorable terms. Pathmark built a large market, along with a parking lot big enough for several hundred cars. The agreement that governed the property required both the owners and their tenants to operate a supermarket there through the year 2049.

But what no public official seemed to notice at the time, or in the years that followed, was that the charter of the Two Bridges Urban Renewal Project was set to expire in mid-2007, unless renewed. Two decades later, the Bloomberg administration quietly chose not to extend its charter, and thus the Two Bridges Urban Renewal Area officially ceased to exist in June of that year. This lapse took legal force away from the agreement requiring the 2.6-acre site be used for a supermarket. As a result, the Spindlers ownership of the site was no longer encumbered in any way. They now owned outright a site they had purchased from the taxpayers at an artificially discounted price, reflecting its limited value as a supermarket location.

In 2013, the Spindlers sold their ownership of the land to Extell for $175 million, and that company in turn paid Pathmark another $75 million. (Approximately $50 million of this amount was to take over the lease, and another $25 million compensated Pathmark for vacating the site.) Community activists argued that the windfall, which benefited both the landowners and their tenants (along with the subsequent windfall that the new developers stand to make) are thus coming at public expense. Extell is now nearing completion on One Manhattan Square, an 800-foot tall apartment building that dwarfs the nearby towers of the Manhattan Bridge.

This set off a stampede among other developers, all of whom eyed acquisitively the development potential of the parking lots surrounding other buildings within the former Two Bridges Urban Renewal Area. Each was, by then aware, that the demise of the Urban Renewal designation had taken legal force away from restrictions on height and use for property in the area, and had freed up for development the parking lots surrounding local buildings. Thus, in the last four years, a cavalcade of builders have paid prices running into hundreds of millions of dollars for other properties within the 14 acres that once comprised the Urban Renewal zone.

These developers currently plan four additional towers, ranging between 700 and 1,000 feet in height, which will bring many thousands of new apartments to a community with few schools or parks, and not a single subway station. On a more encouraging note, each of these builders plans to set aside approximately 25 percent of the apartments they will construct with some kind of affordability protection.

But concerns remain. Ms. Chin’s bill will require the City to notify communities in advance (via the local Community Board, the City Council representative, and the Borough President) when Urban Renewal Areas are coming up for extension or expiration. It passed the City Council unanimously in mid-December. (More than 150 of these districts were created throughout the five boroughs in the 1960s and 70s.) This will give residents, community leaders, and local elected officials time to consider the possible effects of Urban Renewal regulations and master plans losing their legal force, and perhaps to mobilize support for extending them.

Ms. Chin’s bill cannot, however, have any retroactive effect on the development now taking place along the East River waterfront, between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. On this front, she has partnered with Manhattan Borough president Gale Brewer to demand that the four residential towers currently in the planning phase be subjected to the full legal scrutiny of the City’s “uniform land-use review procedure” (ULURP). (Such a move would not affect the Extell buildings, which is expected to open within months.)

If successful, this push could enable the community and its representatives to negotiate (either with developers, or with the City, or both) for amenities and infrastructure needed to support a rapidly expanding residential population. Such negotiations might also result in scaled-back plans, and smaller buildings. But such an outcome is far from assured. In 2016, Carl Weisbrod, the de Blasio administration then City Planning chief said that under existing zoning laws, these four super-tall apartment towers qualify as “minor modifications” to the existing parking lots on which they are slated to be built. This interpretation would allow all four buildings to skip ULURP and comply only with the far-less rigorous requirements of submitting an “enhanced environmental impact statement.” Unlike ULURP, the environmental impact statement process does not provide for any City veto power over a proposed development.

“The lack of public access to urban renewal plans has left too many communities in the dark about their impact on neighborhood preservation,” Ms. Chin says. “When these plans expire, it can open the door for enormous development to threaten vulnerable neighborhoods.”

“We see this happening in Two Bridges, where I am actively working with residents to create tools to fight back against out-of-scale luxury development,” she added. “By requiring public notification for expiring urban renewal areas and a publicly accessible website with information about currently and formerly designated urban renewal areas, this legislation would empower more communities to take action to protect their neighborhoods.”