TEN (10) REASONS

TO OPPOSE

IKEA-RED HOOK



  • 275red1 Description: Opponents argue that Ikea-Red Hook is a bad idea not just for Red Hook, but for New York City. Here are some reasons for opposing other big projects as well as Ikea-Red Hook.

    Red Hook, Brooklyn, is a peninsula reaching into New York Harbor, with spectacular views of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. Red Hook has no highway, no subway, and narrow cobblestone streets. Opponents say it may be the least appropriate place in New York City for a big box store. For information about the lawsuit that concerned Red Hook residents and businesses brought on February 10, 2005, represented by attorney Antonia Bryson, see this blog.

    Here are ten reasons, not all of them included in the Ikea-Red Hook lawsuit, why the far-reaching consequences of Ikea-Red Hook will damage not only Red Hook, Brooklyn, but the City of New York.

    1. Ikea – Red Hook will create bad precedent for New York City’s future dealings with big box stores. It will encourage big boxes to pick inappropriate sites and to insist on building blank-walled warehouses, without sidewalk entrances, without show windows, and without any attempt to fit into New York City’s traditional neighborhoods and urban streets.

    2. It will introduce a gigantic suburban transplant into the street grid of Red Hook, Brooklyn. It will tilt the balance in Brooklyn away from New York City’s tradition of transit-oriented neighborhoods and towards suburban automobile-dependency. It will lead inevitably to the demand for additional expressways, with additional suburban sprawl, inside New York City.

    3. It will cause traffic to back up on the already-overburdened, and soon-to-be-rebuilt, Gowanus Expressway. It will so greatly increase traffic on local streets that it will imperil local businesses whose trucks need to use the streets as well as endangering local residents.

    4. It will create bad precedent for New York City’s future treatment of neighborhood planning, encouraging multinational corporations to come into New York City, create their own pressure groups, and use big spending to override community 197-a plans like the Red Hook 197-a plan that the City Planning Commission approved in 1996.

    5. It will blight the historic New York City waterfront with a mammoth billboard for Ikea, visible from the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan.

    6. It will raise real estate values in Red Hook from the modest level for manufacturing, with its high economic multiple, to the level for big retail, which adds little to the local economy, thus increasing demand for re-zoning from manufacturing to retail and driving out manufacturers who lease their space, plus manufacturing jobs. This is just when the Mayor is announcing the importance of manufacturing areas.

    7. It will send local income away from New York City to Ikea headquarters, instead of that income’s flowing through New York City’s banks, professional firms, service businesses and suppliers.

    8. It will deaden the creative synergy of New York’s manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and designers. It will substitute an out-of-town formula for local ingenuity.

    9. It will force local shopkeepers out of business, deaden local shopping streets, and destroy more jobs in local retail stores and distributorships than it creates.

    10. It will tear up cobblestone streets, bulldoze historic structures on the Erie Basin, and incapacitate the historic graving dock. ####

MCG, Why Ikea Red Hook Project Should be Rejected

IKEA-RED HOOK,

HIGH STREETS,

& THE ECONOMY


  • 275red1 [NOTE TO VISITORS: This section of BigCitiesBigBoxes.com is under re-construction.] THIS BLOG CELEBRATES THE VITALITY OF GREAT CITIES AND THEIR HIGH STREETS. IKEA-RED HOOK is a suburban-style big box store, now in litigation, proposed for the Brooklyn waterfront. The Red Hook site, however, is more than one mile from the nearest highway off-ramp. Red Hook has no subway, and it has narrow cobblestone streets. To reach the site, thousands of cars would have to navigate the already-congested Gowanus Expressway and then drive through Red Hook to the waterfront. This is the most inappropriate site in New York City for a big box store.

    All big boxes, including Ikea and Wal-Mart, say that they create jobs and increase tax revenues. These are claims we should not take on faith. I have looked at the evidence. So far as I can see now, the big boxes' promises are largely false: the costs of big boxes to the city, to other businesses and to the environment are huge. They claim to create jobs, but economists' studies show that they actually destroy jobs. I report that research in my Newsday op-ed Superstores Come With Too High a Price.

    There has never been a full public debate in New York City about whether we want to let in big box stores and, if so, what they should have to look like and how they should have to pay their employees. There is an urgent need for public discussion. For my reasons for opposing Ikea in Red Hook, see my Brooklyn Papers op-ed, Why Red Hook Ikea Project Should be Rejected. There are considerations in city planning, aesthetics, urbanism, law, historic preservation and economics to think that an Ikea store is not the right use for the Red Hook waterfront. Read Ten (10) Reasons to Oppose Ikea-Red Hook.

    This blog aims to paint the whole picture. I will be posting all of the court documents in the litigation.

    About me. I am a professional writer and speaker, a business owner and non-practicing lawyer, and I live in Manhattan. I have no personal economic interest in these issues in general or Red Hook in particular. As a citizen, however, I think that we need to constrain the big boxes, make them look like other New York City stores, locate near New York City public transit like other New York City stores, and behave like other New York City employers. Otherwise, I am concerned about what the big boxes will do to our lively New York City high streets and our urban way of life.

    Boilerplate. I am delighted if you want to refer to or even use short excerpts from this site, as long as you credit me and link back to this site. If you want to quote a larger chunk of my material, please send me an e-mail.

    Peace.

    MCG
    Mail to: MCG@BigCitiesBigBoxes.com

PRESS RELEASE

IKEA LAWSUIT

STARTS (2/10/05)


  • PRESS RELEASE

    CONTACT: Antonia Bryson, Esquire
    (212) 483-9120

    RED HOOK GROUP ALLEGES
    IKEA LAND GRAB ILLEGAL

    NEW YORK, February 10, 2005. A diverse group of Brooklyn residents and businesses seeking to promote the waterfront has filed suit in New York Supreme Court to stop Scandinavian retailer Ikea from building its proposed 22-acre tax-subsidized suburban-style superstore project on the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

    According to attorney Antonia Bryson, when the New York City Planning Commission and City Council approved Ikea’s Red Hook superstore project in October 2004, they acted illegally, betraying the commitments they had made to the Red Hook community and to the City--commitments backed up by years of work and planning--to keep the site for maritime use.

    City planners have always considered the Red Hook waterfront a critical piece of New York City’s industrial infrastructure. Over a two-year period between 1992 and 1994, with help that the City Planning Department itself provided, people from all parts of the Red Hook community hammered out a plan for developing and re-populating their isolated Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood, which faces the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. The City Planning Commission ("CPC") sponsored, encouraged, and finally approved the Red Hook plan. As reported in The New York Times and other media, the Red Hook community’s plan was one of the first community plans in New York City under section 197-a of the 1989 New York City Charter, designed to give citizens a voice in development.

    The Red Hook community plan adopted the recommendations of the City Planning Department’s 1992 Waterfront Plan for the site on which Ikea wants to build. The site has unique maritime features, and the plan recommended that it remain zoned and dedicated to continued maritime activity. It also recommended that commercial activity and public waterfront access be fostered in another area of the peninsula nearby, where in fact a new Fairway is about to open.

    In 2001, however, after citizens in both New Rochelle, New York, and nearby Gowanus, Brooklyn, emphatically rejected Ikea’s efforts to build a New York-area superstore in their communities, Ikea next turned its attention to the remote Red Hook peninsula. Although it has no subway, no highway, and narrow cobblestone streets, the Red Hook waterfront will provide tax subsidies to a developer, because it is within a New York State Empire Zone. Such tax subsidies for Ikea are unfair, the petitioners allege, because they come at the expense of local Brooklyn shopping streets and New York City businesses. The City Planning Commission and City Council, however, jumped at this chance to turn the New York City waterfront and the Red Hook community over to Ikea. They examined no alternative uses for this waterfront site.

    The lawsuit asserts that the CPC and the Council exceeded their legal powers when they re-zoned the site to allow Ikea to build its gigantic big box store--probably the largest store in the city--with a 1400-car parking lot in a mall-like setting right on the water, destroying a number of historic structures in the process, including one of the few working graving docks in New York harbor, and vandalizing the City’s waterfront.

    The lawsuit asserts that in order to justify turning the site over to Ikea, the City Planning Commission and City Council used a manifestly faulty environmental review, and an Environmental Impact Statement ("EIS") that employed unrealistic assumptions and specious reasoning in order to minimize the project’s significant environmental impacts, both on the socioeconomic character of the neighborhood, and on traffic conditions in Red Hook and in greater Brooklyn.

    The lawsuit emphasizes that the huge suburban Ikea store will damage the waterfront, bring excessive traffic to Red Hook’s streets, produce gridlock on the major traffic corridors surrounding the neighborhood, including the already-overburdened Gowanus Expressway, and fail to produce any real economic development in Red Hook. The Ikea project will consume 22 acres of industrially-zoned waterfront land that recent trends show is in increasing demand, and that employment trends show will continue to be in demand. On January 19, 2005, in fact, Mayor Bloomberg announced that preserving industrially-zoned land in NewYork City is vitally important.

    Among the failures of the EIS with respect to traffic impacts, meanwhile, is the fact that on a typical Saturday there will be almost 2,000 vehicles driving to and from the Ikea store in the peak hour. The EIS the Commission and City Council relied on, however, contends that these automobiles can be squeezed down the funnel of Red Hook’s narrow streets to the waterfront with no disruption to any part of the neighborhood, including a large, heavily-used park and recreation area just across the street and the City’s new Passenger Ship Terminal being built nearby.

    The lawsuit seeks to annul and vacate the Environmental Impact Statement and the Planning Commission’s and City Council’s actions with respect to the Red Hook site, and to enjoin Ikea and the other defendants from beginning demolition or construction in connection with the project. Petitioners’ court submissions will be posted on the internet.

    ####

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June 14, 2005

Red Hook Residents Demand Department of Environmental Conservation Hearing on Ikea-Red Hook Permit Application: How Big Box Stores Like Wal-Mart and Ikea May Damage the Environment Everywhere

Environmentalists argue that the big box stores like Wal-Mart and Ikea do environmental damage wherever they go. With thanks to ProfessorBainbridge.com, here is a link to an excellent short piece on environmental damage, "The CEO of Wal-Mart Drives a?" on Autospies.com. Sprawl, pollution, damage to ecosystems, culture of disposability, it hits them all.

Meanwhile, back in Red Hook, Ikea has yet to clear a number of legal and regulatory hurdles to building its store, including not only the on-going litigation in the New York State Supreme Court but environmental challenges in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Opponents of the project are writing to the state DEC demanding that the DEC hold a hearing on Ikea's permit applications. Ikea has applied to the DEC for a tidal wetlands permit and a clean water act water quality certification for the proposed Ikea-Red Hook store, but it has not included its proposed ferry dock in its applications. Letters are going to Katherine McGucken, the Project Manager and Environmental Analyst for the Ikea site at NYS Dept of Environmental Conservation.

Attorney Antonia Bryson of the Urban Environmental Law Center, who represents the plaintiffs in the Ikea-Red Hook litigation, says that the standard for holding a public hearing is "if a significant degree of public interest exists." Controversial parts of the permit include the filling of the working graving dock, and the fact that Ikea's application does not include the ferry dock, which is a part of the proposal for the Ikea-Red Hook project.  Critics say, in addition, that Ikea has already demonstrated its indifference to regulations governing reporting of asbestos and demolition of buildings containing asbestos, so that the DEC should subject any claims Ikea makes to extra scrutiny. The Brooklyn Papers has reported extensively on Ikea's violations of rules governing asbestos safety, including the reports here and here.

A brief summary of allegations of Ikea's failures to handle and report asbestos properly appears in the story "Walking Tour Provides Overview From Ground Level," on B61Productions.com. B61 reports, "Building #3, a historic, civil-war era pump house at 11 Beard St., was partially demolished in January. Allegations of mishandling and misreporting of asbestos-contaminated material drew $183,000 in potential fines for IKEA's contractors. After two delays, U.S. Dredging Corporation and Breeze Demolition will answer the charges in front of the Environmental Control Board on July 8."

According to Ms. Bryson, on April 27, DEC declared that Ikea's application for its permit was complete, i.e., DEC could proceed to determine whether to give Ikea the permit and what the permit would contain [a copy of the DEC April 27 announcement is pasted in at the end of this post, together with the DEC web site information on Water Quality Certification]. DEC announced that there would be a meeting on May 18, and that comments were due by May 27. The May 18 meeting, which was not required by law, and which was not a hearing, was to get public participation. I attended that meeting, at PAL-Miccio in Red Hook. People raised what seemed to be excellent questions. I also noted the presence of, there is no other way to put it, two large and aggressive thugs in the back of the room. They interrupted the other participants and shouted out pro-Ikea rejoinders.

Last Friday, June 10, Ms. Bryson wrote a letter to the DEC asking that the comment period on issuing Ikea's DEC permits be extended by publication of a new notice because of a defect in DEC's earlier public notice. In the original notice in the New York Daily News, the address for comments was cut off. 

Thus, concerned citizens can still send their letters requesting a public hearing about Ikea's DEC permit application to Ms. McGucken at DEC. Ms. Bryson says that comments may be directed to any part of the permit.

Opponents of Ikea-Red Hook also ask that the public hearing be held in P.S. 15, not PAL-Miccio. They say that PAL-Miccio, where the DEC held the May 18 meeting, is hard to get to, impossible to park at, and not the nearest venue to the shipyards. In addition, they say that opponents of the Ikea plan are routinely harrassed at PAL-Miccio. Having seen the way the thugs acted at the meeting on May 18, I am ready to believe them.

I promise to treat the Ikea-Red Hook environmental controversy at more length later.

_______________________________________ Region 2 SEQR and Other Notices Region 2 SPDES Renewals ENB Region 2 Completed Applications 04/27/2005 Kings County Applicant: One Beard Street LLC 496 West Germantown Pike Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462 Facility: Ikea Red Hook One Beard St Brooklyn, NY 11231 Application ID: 2-6102-00083/00005 Permit(s) Applied for: Article 25 Tidal Wetlands Section 401 - Clean Water Act Water Quality Certification Project is Located: Brooklyn, Kings County Project Description: One Beard Street, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of IKEA Property, Inc. (the Applicant) has proposed to develop a new retail store, three other smaller retail buildings, a 1,400-space parking lot, and a 6.3 acre public waterfront esplanade on the former Todd Shipyards Corporation site (Block 612, Lot 130) on the Erie Basin in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY (the Project). The large retail store would occupy an approximately 231,000 sq.ft footprint on the northeastern portion of the site. The main roof of the store is planned to rise to a height of approximately 48 feet and would incorporate approximately 1.6 acres of solar paneling and approximately 1.6 acres of “green roof”plantings. The completed project will result in the elimination of discharge of untreated stormwater runoff to the Erie Basin. The site preparation for the project includes: * The removal of a  total of 88,544 sq.ft. of coverage (64,544 sq.ft. of wood decking and piers and  (4) steel floating dry-dock wing walls having a surface coverage of 24,000 sq.ft.) * Replacement of a 10 ft wide x 126 ft long section of the existing wood deck on the southeastern corner of Pier 4 with new concrete plank decking supported by 22 new coated steel concrete piles. * Filling of the graving dock to grade with clean fill material occurring at a time when the dock is dry.  A new retaining wall will be constructed as part of the fill operation. At the conclusion of the wall construction and fill operation the remaining portion of the dock will be flooded via decommissioning of the dewatering pumps to establish 17,107 sq.ft. of permanent open surface water.  The existing caisson will be secured in the open position. * Stabilization of the  existing shoreline using a combination of new sheetpile installation and existing sheetpile removal. * 1,511 linear feet of new steel sheetpile will be installed within 18 inches of the existing steel sheetpile and wood bulkheads. * 723 lin ft of existing sheetpile bulkhead will be removed and replaced with a rip rap slope landward of the toe of the existing bulkhead. * A pile supported platform will extend over the rip rap slope.  This activity will result in the creation of approximately 21,250 sq.ft. of new surface water. The Project site is in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Brownfields Program and is being remediated pursuant to the NYSDEC Remedial Work Plan for the Brownfields Cleanup, US Dredging/IKEA Site Brownfield Site Cleanup Agreement Index No. W2-1023-04-10, Site N. C224043. IKEA has arranged for a public meeting on Wednesday May 18 at 6:30 PM at the PAL Miccio Center, Redhook, Brooklyn, to address comments related to the permits to be issued by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR) Determination: A draft environmental impact statement has been prepared on this project and is on file. SEQR Lead Agency: NYC Dept of City Planning State Historic Preservation Act (SHPA) Determination: A cultural resources survey has been completed. Based on information provided in the survey report, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) has determined that the proposed activity will have an impact on registered or eligible archaeological sites or historic structures. The department must consult further with OPRHP before making a final decision regarding the issuance of the permit. Coastal Management: This project is located in a Coastal Management area and is subject to the Waterfront Revitalization and Coastal Resources Act. Opportunity for Public Comment: Comments on this project must be submitted in writing to the Contact Person no later than May 27 2005. Contact: Kathryn D McGuckin NYSDEC Region 2 Headquarters 47-40 21ST Street Long Island City, NY 11101 (718)482-4997 r2dep@gw.dec.state.ny.us ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Region 2 SEQR and Other Notices Region 2 SPDES Renewals _____________________________________________________     ------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/dcs/streamprotection/protwater2e.htm#top Protection of Waters: Water Quality Certifications for Projects Requiring a Federal Permit More information from this division: Division of Environmental Permits UPA Permits ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Regulated Activities In accordance with Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, applicants for a Federal license or permit for activities (including but not limited to the construction or operation of facilities that may result in any discharge into waters of the United States) are required to apply for and obtain a Water Quality Certification from DEC indicating that the proposed activity will not violate water quality standards. Water Quality Certification is required for: Placing fill or undertaking activities resulting in a discharge to waters of the United States where, for example, a permit is required from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Some examples of activities requiring a Water Quality Certification are: * those activities described above, under each Protection of Waters category, that involve placement of fill in waters of the United States; * temporary discharges of decant waters from dredge material disposal sites or from barges and vessels. Exempt Activities An exemption from the requirement to obtain an individual Water Quality Certification is for certain activities deemed to have an insignificant effect on water quality, which have been issued a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Nationwide 404 Permit and for which DEC has correspondingly issued a blanket statewide Water Quality Certification. Is Your Project Minor or Major? Review time frames, procedures and requirements for public notice for applications are different for Minor and Major projects under the Uniform Procedures Act requirements (6NYCRR Part 621). Generally, Minor projects have shorter review time frames and require less public review. Minor Water Quality Certification projects include those projects which will not exceed the Minor project thresholds for Protection of Waters Permits, Freshwater Wetlands Permits or Tidal Wetlands Permits, and which do not involve the approval of construction and operation of hydroelectric generating facilities. All other projects are Major See UPA Time Frames. Back to top of page

June 14, 2005 in MCG on big box stores |

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