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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August 30, 2005

Tax-Subsidies for Wal-Mart?

In an editorial headlined "Socking NYC Shoppers," on Sunday, August 28, the New York Post winds up arguing that New Yorkers can afford to subsidize the medical costs of Wal-Mart's workers. The Post starts out in frontal attack mode, blasting the unions for arguing that the increased taxes New Yorkers will need to pay for Wal-Mart's employees' public assistance will be greater than the amount they may save by shopping at Wal-Mart. "In truth," says the Post, "this is a fight over the price of groceries." Really? Then tell us whether the cost of a health-care subsidy for Wal-Mart is or is not greater than the savings on groceries.

First, the Post concedes that "only a bit more than half of Wal-Mart's workers take the company's health insurance." Then it echoes the Wal-Mart company line: many of the others have already got coverage. Interesting. Then why does Wal-Mart have a lower percentage of covered workers than other employers?

Next, in a tactic that would make logicians blush, the Post attacks not the statistics about Wal-Mart workers' using public assistance, but the people who quoted the statistics. "As for any Wal-Mart workers on public assistance," says the Post, the figures the unions use come exclusively from labor-friendly sources (like the staffers of pro-union House Democrats) and are completely unreliable." Does the Post have any reason for saying the numbers are unreliable? Or is it just slinging mud? I have read some of those reports, as the editors of the Post appearently have not. The statistics I read came from University of California economists and other respectable sources. Similar statistics turn up in other states, including Georgia. Many of Wal-Mart's workers earn so little that they qualify for publicly-subsidized medical treatment. Does the Post deny that? Does it have its own studies to offer? No? Then shame on the New York Post.

Next, the Post makes the remarkable argument that California's taxpayers can afford to subsidize Wal-Mart. "One union-cited study found that California provides roughly $20 million a year in medical care to Wal-Mart employees in that state. That may sound like a lot, but California's Medicaid budget is $30 billion." Thanks a lot, New York Post. I'm sure that the taxpayers of California will like your trivializing their tax bills. Especially if it is for the sake of cheaper paper towels, which the Post seems to think is more important than lowering taxes.

But wait. The Post also thinks New York's taxpayers can afford to subsidize Wal-Mart. "New York," the Post says, "leads the nation in Medicaid spending, at $45 billion a year. Supposedly impoverished Wal-Mart staff would never make up even a hint of a speck of a drop in New York's Medicaid bucket." So now the Post is trivializing New Yorkers' tax bills. Leaving aside the fact that Medicaid is only one form of public assistance, does the Post really think that cheaper groceries are more important than lower taxes? Was that supposed to be what the Post was arguing? I thought it started out to say that the unions' claims were false. Apparently not.

The Post's final Marie Antoinette touch is to say that in "Oakland, Calif., recently, some 11,000 people applied for just 400 Wal-Mart jobs when a new store opened." The Post's conclusion? That maybe there is something wrong with the American economy? No, no. The Post concludes that "some job-hunters don't think Wal-Mart is such a monstrous place." Yes, and some of the poor want to sleep under bridges. What is the point? That people are so desperate they will even work at Wal-Mart?

If the only jobs the once-mighty New York City economy has to offer are jobs at Wal-Mart, that ought to be the subject of the Post's outrage. Where is the will to rebuild New York City's port and industry? That is a fit subject for the Post. Where is the will to strengthen our neighborhood shopping streets, rather than letting Wal-Mart suck them dry? Where is the will to control the use of automobiles, rather than letting Wal-Mart make owning a car a necessity for every New Yorker, exacerbating a problem we should have solved years ago and stranding our old and poor? The Post should be ashamed of using its power to strengthen the Frankenmarts, rather than to strengthen New York City.

August 30, 2005 in MCG on big box stores |

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