as with the human scale city and today we're going to talk with ben richardson about the giant nine hundred foot tower that's coming up at eighty flatbush and we're also going to talk about the problem of real estate interests taking over the boards of directors of nonprofit organizations that supposedly guide public policy so the issue at hand today is eighty flatbush which you can probably see from behind my head there's a tower there in brooklyn and that is not the tower we're talking about that is already there and then what's the  address of that do you know what what's that what do you call that tower is called the homemade signs on the streets and i'm not sure the exact address but eighty flatbush will be coming up right where that brick building is behind me is that correct correct yes two towers two towers  one is nine hundred feet and the other is ninety six ninety six and five sixty right and to get that high the public will have to transfer something like from norman orders blog three hundred forty two thousand to a million square feet of public airspace will have to be transferred to the developer so that he can build that tall because it's not zoned for that kind of height right now they're basically doing a spot rezoning of that those lots to get that height so to talk about it we have ben richardson who lives in the neighborhood there but before we get into it let's first find out about you've been so are you a new yorker i'd say at this point yes i was born in philadelphia and ready and southern new girlfriend now wife and then in twenty thirteen we moved to fort greene you know two kids right i think correctly that yes so why did you move to fort greene we were sort of looking to move from renting to owning which my wife had rented in the same particular place in cobble hill for twenty years or so and also we wanted to find a place to raise a family and to continue to experience brooklyn in the way that we love to experience it in this sort of  i think i can picture it right yeah i think i walk by and meant that yeah you know so what do you do what kind of work to do i primarily work in digital advertising marketing and media and sales and work you go to college  me extract and all that demographic stuff from you is that there's a lot of urban planners who they say we need to build the city to attract people exactly like you sort of smart people college educated electrical engineering you know what digital this and that and then they want to come to new york and sort of make their lives here and not go to philadelphia where you're from and not go to washington d c or boston and so that we have to build new stuff to put them in so you came in and you moved into an old building right so you're not doing what the planners want you to do what's the matter with you and i said i don't follow the rules so i don't know is there an unwritten rule of me when i you know it's just when you move to new york you don't expect i mean i moved here or you know nineteen or twenty one after college i guess and into then also an old building probably built in the seventy's or sixty's in a roommate not from college shared a five hundred fifty square foot one bedroom that we made into a two bedroom and you know it was far from look serious and but it didn't matter we were in new york we contributed probably forty percent of our take home pay to the rand and that was fine we just wanted to be here and it didn't it wasn't about having kohler fixtures or appliances that was kind of irrelevant for twenty somethings looking to start their career in new york and bring us up to speed about what happened when you first became aware that this new these two new towers are going to be coming up half a block from your house i joined the neighborhood committee of my building which had been established by another resident about a year prior kind of focused on keeping tabs on things going on in the neighborhood and also i think i simultaneously tripped up on a press release  that had come out i want to say a year prior and it was really already baked cake so the press release came out about meaning they said this is a done deal  happening here's the project everything was told in the present tense not in the potential proposed since it was declared as bush is this the project will be that and we've got this elected official and this school principal and this nonprofit giving quotes about how great it is you know this was the release to the public and yet it seemed like the discussions about it had been going on for months if not here's so did the neighborhood set up a structure to fix we have to negotiate over this with talk about it to fight it we have to change it what happened not really i mean the law is technically it depends on what technical means but in the what's understood to be the neighborhood of boerum hill so the boerum hill association and the president of that neighborhood association had been kind of leading the way for several months to get people's attention and to look at it you know just across the street is fort greene which is a large neighborhood with a massive park and the awareness even to this day continues to be which is you know a year after i started paying attention continues to be you know at best ten percent of the people are even aware of the existence of this being in the works often happens to people it's  hour shadow impact of these towers which is incredible that's a lot of shadowing there is a lot of shadowing and this is actually haven't we had a study done by a professor at pratt who works with the shadow it much picchu and so he's can survive anything we can survive anything but the question is should we should we survive anything people do but we don't have to so what do you how do you see the issues and this i think you know there's a lot of talk from norman orders article about the so called public benefits that might accrue with this project and what are they so this project has been shops aggressively  everywhere and anywhere and i call it in you know charm offensive by the developer and they are and the education construction funds shopping the public benefits really focusing on the benefits that they're promoting and they are do you know they do exists so they're offering one new school a new elementary school that would be three hundred fifty seats pre k through fifth grade and so that would be two classes per grade of twenty five seats each ok so very simple would be one of the smallest elementary schools in the district would have a full scale gym in playground it would have a gym touring gym the tourism that would share with the second school in the project  second school would be a rebuild of the existing high school that is on the high school they are currently their facility is not fantastic although i'm not been able to see it personally because we've not been granted requests to tour it but others who have say you know it's in need of assistance it's an old facility wasn't intended for a high school to begin with so so we get a couple of school swinish on an area one renovated and one replacement high school would be three fifty so one of the questions i have for the world at large on this is why are we in a situation in new york city where we can't provide public goods anymore unless we do it in a partnership with a real estate developer who takes a huge amount of our public assets in this case sky light air away from us and in exchange we get a school and they get ninety six percent yield on capital for the luxury condos which will be in the upper ranges of this building i'm sure so so we don't have the political will to other claiming maybe that we don't have the money to build schools anymore ever in new york city that just hopeless like what do you think's going on there i mean they're claiming that the run division of the dia week ok department of education yes ari and so they say that you know this is about building schools and it is a creative to the work of the school construction authority which is the authority that exist cash to put money down that's in a budget to build schools this is more of the charge card version right where you use public financing and access to bonds and debt and sort of creative tax free structures that the  institute of the e c f allows the gives both the developer access to this favorable financing and the city's backing and it also kind of good the school the ability to leverage the developer's capabilities so that's the partnership and they would argue that it's you know this is above and beyond what the city can do on its own so why did this building is going to be huge and just to show a comparison that here we have pictures of is we have the empire state building the chrysler building that's the oh yeah the crypt yeah and then in the middle under the box is this new tower right in hell which is this low rise neighborhood is really shocking and some people call this the architecture of rupture to take up a low rise mid rise neighborhood and you put a giant tower that's just so egregiously different in scale and style and the purpose architectural is to create a sense of rupture and dissonance that you're walking along and you think you're sort of in a harmonious scale and all the sudden bam there's this other thing and the supposed to shock and give you terror sense of terror in even which look to the architectural theorist wanted these tall buildings to create a sense of terror if you use the word terror you know i sort of think maybe that's behind some of the opposition that has more than one hundred people couldn't even get in to at the public hearing to express their opposition that was it was so much overflow during the republican airing and you know why do you think the community doesn't want this well i mean first of all from the get go as we talked to started about in the beginning it was something that was foisted on the community from day one so there was no charette or community discussion or bringing the community into what might be a nice way to you know expand the community respect the people who've been but then as you start to dig into the financial aspects and realize that so much money is being sort of gifted to entities that don't necessarily aren't necessarily desperate for money but kind of come up with the analogy that it's like if you go to the mercedes dealer and you but a mercedes an expensive one but because you have a great lawyer you also get to bentley's for free so you know that's kind of they're buying about three hundred thousand  one of the per person is testifying called it all we get are the neo liberal crumbs from the developer sold is like you're getting this great thing right school one of the schools gets to be rebuilt and you get another one and well i think this is where we're at in new york and i think a lot of the shock here comes from just as a scale is immense this is another photograph taken from another aerial angle of what the building would be right here these two this this one and that one right thirty eight stories and eighty four stories and here it looks like we have another new midtown or lower manhattan arising in downtown brooklyn which in some sense we are but geographically this is sort of pushed right towards low rise form held fort greene and there's a question of where can we you know why don't we delimit an area and say well here's where we're going to put our skyscrapers and here's where we're articulate why it doesn't feel right i mean take it to an extreme and envision would it make sense would it disrupt a neighborhood to put this which is basically the height and the massing of the chrysler building in westchester county in the middle of a forest like would that feel right would people be upset about that and but it's kind of happened in my neighborhood you know i all our low rise historic district and try to back up and god these massive massive eighty one hundred story towers coming up right on the edge sometimes right in the middle and the dissonance and shock value people walk now through it instead of looking at the storage district in the architecture of these city they all look up oh my god look at that the django tower in the cameras go up and it's all tourist doing this you know new yorkers don't usually just kind of scuttle by i don't want to look at it right but i think this is happening everywhere and they could just as easily  put you know a lot of six story buildings and that wouldn't have been so shocking and what had they have the right currently under current zoning to build over rodeo thirty story a single thirty story tower on this lot so response to nine eleven and two thousand and one when a lot of downtown manhattan businesses were right leaving the city and going to new jersey so the idea was to say all right well let's not lose that tax jersey let's bring it to brooklyn i have and that's the armageddon playbook right oh my god something terrible is happening we have to build more and taller here you know and i don't remember what the bad thing is the other aspect about the downtown brooklyn rezoning in this has been documented pretty heavily is that it was the projections and the intent were for office space right it was a place downtown manhattan office space or to give people a place to move your back office if they were worried about another attack right and so the projections and the environmental impact was all about three million or so square feet of office space and maybe at maximum nine hundred thousand or a million square feet of residential so that's a big difference in twenty four hour usage of sewer water infrastructure etc what the reality of what happening in two thousand eighteen is we've got less than a million square feet of office space so the office space didn't materialize and close to twelve or fifteen million square feet of residential and climbing right and that i think that  works it's more profitable for the developers and they get huge return on capital for you i'm sorry condos the higher you go the more money they make and you know it's all taken right out of the public sky like yeah we now we own the sky and then we get sometimes one hundred fifty percent yield on capital for those big views on the higher side it's well one of the things that i sort of wondered about this is that you know why is it that the city doesn't plan and think well what you know we could build out at a human scale of six to eight stories more thickly and we could have just the density we want and i'm wondering why it doesn't do that and then i just sort of want thought about the developer here named del vijay i looked him up and i googled and i found he's one of the people on the board of directors of the van allen institute which is you know one of the sort of highly well regarded non profits that opines about urban design and urban issues in fact their board is just completely dominated by skyscraper developer and skyscraper architects including the people behind big who have done two world trade center well this is a pattern that's happening everywhere i think we've seen it in the men's parts of society and we've seen it in the firm and center which is the real estate think tank at new york university its board of directors is filled with the same people who are the board of governors of the real estate board of new york larry silverstein related and these are nonprofit organizations that we look to to give us advice on how to build and i kind of think if they're dominated by big real estate maybe they're not going to look at an alternative to these towers ation strategies they're going right because that's not profitable for them right and you know building a six story building is profitable to us lower scale developer it's not profitable for the big guys yeah you don't put your stamp on the location in quite the same way that you can't the skyline in the way that they're trying to do it seems yeah i mean ego i think there's a big it's a big part of it but yeah when you're in the suppose you trusted institutions of the think tanks and the research are funded not just funded by but overseen and run by the organization that stands to benefit the most and the industry that stands to benefit the most then you know credibility as your group talked about this issue at all not to that extent i mean we've consulted with some lawyers but you know in terms of the letter of the law there you know they're following what is in place and currents sort of they're going to be saying give us this error so we can build up please even though it's not allowed under the current rules just give it to us correct and exchange will do these things for you ok right and in fact it's almost in there they've we write for long we write the law yeah that's exactly right there's no i mean you know the rule of law is an important thing but if you can rewrite it then that can make your life write better when new york has completely failed to manage density adequately through the use of f a r as its planning tool they are means floor area ratio and it's the it's the play dough of airspace that you give a developer and so you could build anything you want with this quantity of play dough you can make it go tall you can make it go fat but just that's all the play dough you get and it doesn't really translate into direct measures of density that are clear and consistent and you know another way to do is to say well how many people per acre do we want to live have lived here right and at what point do we have too many people per acre and what point do we have not enough people per acre if you want to nuff people for small businesses to have customers and for the there to be a tax base to pay for subway cars or street cars right but at a certain point you know too much density even in a transit area is crazy like i think that's kind of what you know with people coming in through and you know platforms are crowded and all will improve that a little bit but you know it and this has already piling it on so i think one of the problems of the urban planning is they don't think of of unbiased the asian or at least some balance vision coming from different camps about what you know debating what that looks like right as you're building you know getting the spot up zoning and saying that not clear that there's anything to litigate at the moment so the lack of a master plan maybe yeah that's a hard thing to litigate right we're going to wrap up i think that this is you know the end of the line for us we have our time is you came and i wish your group luck and taking on this real estate developer and for the rest of you i think that if you want to protect your neighborhoods you have to stand up and fight