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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February 08, 2005

Affidavit of Thomas Angotti in Support of Petition

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK
-------------------------------------------------------------------------x
COALITION TO REVITALIZE THE WATERFRONT NOW,
JOHN MCGETTRICK, et al. Index No.
Petitioners-Plaintiffs,

For a judgment pursuant to Article 78 of the
Civil Practice Law and Rules AFFIDAVIT OF THOMAS ANGOTTI IN SUPPORT OF THE VERIFIED PETITION

-against-

CITY OF NEW YORK, NEW YORK CITY PLANNING
COMMISSION, AMANDA M. BURDEN as Chairman of the
New York City Planning Commission, NEW YORK
DEPARTMENT OF CITY PLANNING, NEW YORK
CITY COUNCIL, IKEA PROPERTY, INC., and
UNITED STATES DREDGING CORPORATION,

Respondents-Defendants.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------x

STATE OF NEW YORK )
: SS:
COUNTY OF KINGS )

THOMAS ANGOTTI, being sworn, says:


1. I am a Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College of the City University of New York.. I have an undergraduate degree in Arts and Sciences, a Masters in City and Regional Planning, and Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy Development. I have been a professional planner for over 30 years and have worked on community-based planning in the New York City area for the last 15 years. For six years I was professor and chair of the Pratt Institute Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment in Brooklyn. I am a founding member of the New York City Task Force on Community-based Planning and have written in professional journals on the subject of community-based planning and community development. I am editor of the journal Planning Practice and Research and Progressive Planning Magazine.


2. From 1988 to 1994 I was a senior planner with the Brooklyn Office of the New York Department of City Planning and prior to that I was a senior planner with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development for a period of two years. During my employment with the Department of City Planning, I was responsible for studies of the Brooklyn waterfront and industry. I served as technical advisor to the sub-committee of Brooklyn Community Board 6 that developed a 197-a Plan for the Red Hook community. A copy of my curriculum vitae is annexed hereto.


3. I submit this affidavit in support of the Verified Petition that seeks to invalidate approvals for land use changes granted by the New York City Planning Commission (CPC) and the New York City Council. These approvals re-zone a 22-acre parcel and otherwise enable the construction of a 416,000 square foot retail shopping mall on the waterfront in Erie Basin in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and are entirely inconsistent with the 197-a Plan that was developed by the sub-committee and subsequently approved by the Community Board and the CPC. This affidavit is based on my personal knowledge and my review of the documents referenced and discussed herein.


Section 197-a of the New York City Charter


4. Section 197-a of the New York City Charter is headed "Plans" and provides that plans for "the development, growth, and improvement of the city and of its boroughs and community districts" may be proposed by any of several different layers of government. Among those entities authorized to prepare such plans (but only with respect to land located within the district) are the City’s 59 community boards. A community board that prepares a plan shall submit it to the CPC, and the CPC, if it finds that the plan meets CPC standards and "is consistent with sound planning policy," must approve, approve with modifications, or disapprove the plan.


5. Section 197-a has two important effects on the framework for land use planning in the City. First, it authorizes the creation of a plan to guide future land use decision-making. Traditional planning doctrine favors the creation of a plan containing the goals of the community against which to propose and assess zoning and other land use decisions in the community. Second, Section 197-a authorizes such planning to take place at the community level, rather than centralizing it solely at the Department of City Planning. It is my understanding that this endorsement of community-based planning followed New York City’s history of failed efforts to develop and approve a Citywide Master Plan. Thus, plans submitted by community boards for approval under Section 197-a essentially serve as master plans for defined areas of the city.


6. Section 197-a is the sole section of the Charter that authorizes general land use planning in New York City. Since the Charter was changed in 1989 to explicitly allow community boards to prepare plans, eight plans have been adopted by the CPC under Section 197-a, all but one of them submitted by community boards. In effect, the only general land use plans produced in New York City and adopted by the CPC in the last decade since the city’s Waterfront Plan in 1992 have been by community boards.


Development of the Red Hook 197-a Plan


7. Red Hook is a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood located on a peninsula in south Brooklyn, a community of 11,000 people, most of them in public housing, and 200 industries and small retail businesses. Robert Moses era planning made for an expressway that cut the community in pieces, separated the Red Hook peninsula from upland areas, concentrated the population in public housing, and killed off the maritime industry. Planning for the new containerport in Red Hook encouraged land speculation and residential decline.


8. Yet Red Hook has unique advantages. Red Hook is a paramount waterfront community, surrounded by water on three sides. Few places in the City can offer so powerful a combination of extensive shoreline and breathtaking vistas. Red Hook’s proximity to the central harbor and lower Manhattan makes it an ideal location for new maritime activities including small boat storage and repair, a ferry stop, excursion boats, and other water-related and water-enhancing activities. See Exhibit , Red Hook: A Plan for Community Regeneration, p. 47.


9. In 1992, when Red Hook began its effort to develop a 197-a plan, only one community board, Community Board 3 in the Bronx, had been successful in getting a plan approved. Red Hook had spent years fighting the proliferation of waste transfer stations in the neighborhood, and there was a feeling that the creation of a plan could help move the community from protest to development. Planning would transform Red Hook from a community that always has to say no to things, and build a consensus about what it wants.


10. The Red Hook 197-a Plan (Plan) was developed over a two-year period through a process that brought together the neighborhood’s diverse residents and businesses. It was adopted by Brooklyn Community Board 6 on June 8, 1994, and approved, with modifications, by the City Planning Commission on August 21, 1996. The Plan projected a vision of a mixed residential/industrial community without separate waterfront enclaves. At the time, it was widely praised by Red Hook’s civic leaders and featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. Although changes were made by the CPC during the two years it took to analyze and approve the plan, the basic principle of mixed use, integrated development remained intact.


11. The Plan (as originally approved by the Community Board) calls for a doubling of the population to its 1950 level, better access to mass transit, public access along the waterfront, two greenways that tie together all sections of the community, contextual low-rise housing development, preservation of the mixed use pattern and industrial revitalization. It is a unique mixture of long-range visions, middle-range plans, and short-term proposals. It is comprehensive in that it combines physical, social and economic planning across many sectors, but is also unlike traditional cook-book master plans. The Plan arose from the expressed needs and desires of Red Hook residents and not from the pre-conceived notions of planners.


12. The Plan envisaged the construction of new housing, the fostering of mixed commercial/industrial/residential areas, the creation of new community facilities and open spaces that would be located so as to knit together sections of the community, the support of existing industrial activity and the enlistment of economic development resources that would revive dormant or underutilized industrial areas, and the improvement of transportation routes and public transit in the neighborhood.


13. All of the waterfront areas would remain zoned for industrial use, with the exception of two vacant areas that would be turned into open space. Residential uses would be continued and expanded in the core of the peninsula, and the areas between the residential core and the industrial perimeter would become mixed use neighborhoods that would support light industrial and manufacturing, commercial and residential uses. Ibid, p. 49.


14. With respect to the future of industrial activity in Red Hook, the Plan stated


We wish to promote industry that is compatible with the residential community while maintaining the historic mixture of housing and industry.

Ibid, p. 55. For Erie Basin and the New York Shipyard site, the location on which the IKEA Retail Center will be built, the Plan supported the preservation and upgrading of the Erie Basin as a maritime area. It noted that the City’s own Waterfront Plan, enacted in 1992, and the City’s Waterfront Revitalization Plan, designated the Erie Basin as a "Significant Industrial and Maritime Area." In furtherance of this, it recommended that a strategy be developed, with the assistance of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, to use the New York Shipyard site more intensively. It suggested that the relocation of the New York Wholesale Flower Market to the Shipyard might be an appropriate use. Ibid., pp. 62-63, 70.


15. During the process of plan development, the issue arose on several occasions of possible use of Erie Basin for residential or commercial uses. In my capacity as a senior planner with the Department of City Planning, I informed the members of the 197-a Committee and other community participants in the planning process that as the City’s recently-completed Waterfront Plan had been developed there was a good deal of consensus in the Department that Erie Basin was one of the few areas left in the city that was ideally suited to be preserved as a Significant Industrial and Maritime Area. Many formerly industrial stretches of the waterfront were being converted to non-industrial and non-maritime uses, and the most appropriate areas for conversion were designated in the Waterfront Plan for development. There were two major reasons for preserving Erie Basin as a Significant Industrial and Maritime Area. First, Erie Basin is the only fully protected deep-water facility along the Brooklyn waterfront and therefore ideal for a number of maritime uses including shipping, and boat repair. Secondly, the Department anticipated that areas with deep-water access such as Erie Basin would be needed in the future for shipping, the installation of waste facilities, and other water-dependent uses.


16. As a result of the four-year process of discussing the Plan, consensus emerged to agree to the official designation of Erie Basin as a Significant Industrial and Maritime Area. The 197-a Committee of CB 6 came to the conclusion that other areas along the Red Hook waterfront would be more appropriate for non-industrial and non-maritime uses. It was specifically recommended in the original 197-a Plan document that residential zoning be extended to the waterfront only at Van Brunt Street.


17. The City Planning Commission modified the Plan in several major respects, but did not change the recommendations for maintaining Erie Basin as an industrial and maritime area. The Commission noted that the Plan required the assistance of City agencies and other entities in implementation, and it called on the Borough President to spearhead coordination of the implementation. The Commission scaled back the Plan’s recommendation for new housing units, and eliminated a provision that would have provided capital funding for jobs training. It deleted the recommendations for new truck routes and changed some of the zoning recommendations in a way that did not significantly affect the overall objectives, principles, and land use patterns in the Plan.


18. When the CPC approved the zoning change and special permits that would allow the IKEA Retail Center to locate on the New York Shipyard site in the Erie Basin, it explained its deviation from the approved 197-a Plan by saying that the IKEA Retail Center is "consistent with a number of the goals expressed in these documents," including waterfront access, promoting economic development, improving transportation access and circulation, and supporting maritime industrial use of the waterfront. Exhibit , pp. 42-43. However, a large retail establishment is not an industrial use, it shifts the character of Red Hook perceptibly towards commercialization, it does not derive any benefit from its waterfront location, its support of maritime use is miniscule compared to its impact in replacing such uses, and the improved transportation access will be only on weekends and for the benefit of the store. The CPC apparently concluded that any development that will improve the property and create jobs is better than no development.


19. The IKEA proposal ignored the 197-a Plan for Red Hook. After the Plan was approved by the CPC and the City Council, the City took no responsibility for implementing it. It was put on a shelf and forgotten. Once the IKEA proposal came along, the City should have redirected IKEA to downtown locations where the transit infrastructure is adequate, and preserved this section of the Red Hook waterfront for industrial and maritime uses.


20. The CPC has consistently flaunted other 197-a plans, violating its most fundamental Charter responsibility to develop and approve plans that guide the use of land in the City. The CPC approved the Greenpoint 197-a Plan and Williamsburg 197-a Plan in 2001, yet in 2004 issued a proposal for rezoning of these communities that explicitly violates the principles of mixed use, contextual waterfront development enunciated in those plans. In these cases and in Red Hook, it is not a question of the CPC changing its mind or making a serious evaluation that circumstances had changed. The CPC’s own avowals that they considered the plans and believed that their most recent actions were consistent with the plans were the result of a failure to seriously analyze and evaluate the plans. They simply put the plans on a shelf and ignored them, all the while making public statements that they had considered the plans to cover for their lack of rigor as professional planners, their arbitrary actions, and their capricious disregard for established planning policies.


____________________________
THOMAS ANGOTTI


Sworn to before me this day of February 2005

__________________________________
Notary Public

February 08, 2005 in #3: (2/8/05) Affidavit of Thomas Angotti |

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