Mayor's Sustainability Plan

[tmg]

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/09/21/bloomberg-sustainability-announcement/

From Streetsblog:

Bloomberg Sustainability Announcement

As we reported this morning, Mayor Bloomberg is in California with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to make a major policy announcement on a major, long-term, environmental sustainability initiative. The key components of the Mayor's plan include:

* The creation of the Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability.
* The undertaking of a major greenhouse gas inventory for City government and the City overall.
* The appointment of a Sustainability Advisory Board to advise the City on environmentally sound policies and practices.
* The creation of a new partnership with the Earth Institute of Columbia
University to provide the City with scientific research and advice on
environmental and climate change-related issues.

Here are some of the more interesting snippets from the City's press release:

The announcement took place during a visit with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale, California, where the Mayor and Governor talked about the State of California’s groundbreaking sustainability initiatives.

"Now, we intend to make New York City a national leader in meeting the challenge of making ours an environmentally sustainable city. To make New York a truly sustainable city, we need a bold plan to use our land in the smartest way possible," Bloomberg said (Editor: Clearly the Mayor here is referring to this morning's Park(ing) Squat in Midtown).

The Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability is led by Director Rohit T. Aggarwala the Office’s mission is three-fold: to help develop a plan for the City’s long-term growth and development, to integrate sustainability goals and practices into every aspect of that plan; and to make New York City government a “green” organization.

The Mayor announced the launch of an unprecedented effort to measure the entire carbon emissions of New York City. This much broader effort, with a target completion date within six months, will give us the first picture of the total carbon impact of everyone who lives in, works in, or visits New York City.

The Sustainability Advisory Board will be chaired by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding Daniel L. Doctoroff, and its kick-off meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 27th.

Members of the Sustainability Advisory Board include:

* Christine Quinn, Speaker of the New York City Council
* James F. Gennaro, Council Member and Chair of the Committee on Environmental Protection
* Carlton Brown, COO and Founder, Full Spectrum
* Marcia Bystryn, Executive Director, New York League of Conservation Voters
* Robert Fox, Partner, Cook + Fox Architects
* Ester Fuchs, Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs
* Peter Goldmark, Program Director of NYC Office, Environmental Defense
* Ashok Gupta, Program Director of Air and Energy, Natural Resources Defense Council
* Michael Northrop, Program Officer of Sustainable Development, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
* Ed Ott, Executive Director, NYC Central Labor Council
* Elizabeth Girardi Schoen, Senior Director of Environmental Affairs, Pfizer, Inc.
* Peggy Sheppard, Executive and Co-Founder, West Harlem Environmental Action Coalition (WE ACT)
* Daniel Tishman, Chairman and CEO, Tishman Construction Corporation
* Kathryn Wylde, President and CEO, Partnership for New York City
* Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association
* Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director, UPROSE

[Eugenious]

"Now, we intend to make New York City a national leader in meeting the challenge of making ours an environmentally sustainable city. To make New York a truly sustainable city, we need a bold plan to use our land in the smartest way possible," Bloomberg said (Editor: Clearly the Mayor here is referring to this morning's Park(ing) Squat in Midtown).



About goddamn time.

[antinimby]

And this includes increasing density by allowing higher buildings (contrary to NIMBY demands) in and around the urban core areas.

[tmg]

The mayor's announcement of a planning process for NYC in 2030 contains elements of his sustainability initiative:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/html/home/home.shtml

Ten goals for creating a sustainable city over the next 25 years:

1. Create homes for almost a million more New Yorkers, while making housing more affordable and sustainable

2. Improve travel times by adding transit capacity for millions more residents, visitors, and workers

3. Ensure that all New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of a park

4. Develop critical back-up systems for our aging water network to ensure long-term reliability

5. Reach a full “state of good repair” on New York City’s roads, subways,
and rails for the first time in history

6. Provide cleaner, more reliable power for every New Yorker by upgrading our energy infrastructure

7. Reduce global warming emissions by more than 30%

8. Achieve the cleanest air of any big city in America

9. Clean up all contaminated land in New York City

10. Open 90% of our waterways for recreation by reducing water pollution and preserving our natural areas

[tmg]

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2006/12/bloombergs_agenda_anything_but.html#more

New York Magazine
Daily Intelligencer, Dec. 12, 2006
Bloomberg's Agenda Anything But Lame Duck
Michael Bloomberg

Proving that six years of prosperity can get a mayor thinking of posterity, Mayor Bloomberg announced ambitious environmental goals this morning in a speech at Flushing Meadow. Gone is the Bloomberg of December 2001, who chased quick economic fixes, like football stadiums and Olympics. Today Bloomberg wants to balance rising population against rising sea levels. He noted that city planners expect 900,000 more residents here by 2030. "With our administration not beholden to special interests, we now have the freedom to take on obstacles looming and to begin clearing them away," he fairly gloated.

Bloomberg's goals would pursue indisputably good things: get everybody within a ten-minute walk of a park, cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent, make 90 percent of the city's waterways clean enough for recreation, improve all sewers, and invest in regional mass transit to keep travel times stable. As parsed, these goals have less stick than a can of Crisco in City Council chambers. They seem flexible enough to make good business sense, but what will happen in post-Bloomberg New York? Will potential Mayor Dick Parsons funnel them into a big bond package?

For now, PlaNYC belongs to the mayor's new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. Bloomberg promised to solicit ideas from the public via Websites and meetings. Expect lawyers to wrangle the meaning of "ten minutes" and civic groups to want even more input from the public. But don't doubt that Bloomberg will keep at it. "The predicament of our future is also our hope," he said. If he hits one target, sweltering future generations may remember him as something other than the no-fun mayor who banned smoking and invited Republicans to Madison Square Garden. —Alec Appelbaum

[MikeKruger]

All day rush hour? That'd be a nightmare!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/13/nyc.population.ap/index.html

[MikeW]

So? Build more infrastructure.

[lofter1]

New York, Where the Dreamers Are Asleep

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/31/weekinreview/31purnick.650.jpg
Bettmann/Corbis
A VISION, 1949 The British scientist A. M. Low proposed a roof for New York and other cities.

nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/weekinreview/31purnick.html?ref=weekinreview)
Week in Review
By JOYCE PURNICK
December 31, 2006


Happy 2030

NEW YORK, get ready. You are thriving and growing, but aging. Adjust, modernize, it’s later than you think.

So advised Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently, predicting that by 2030, the city will be home to another million people — 9.2 million New Yorkers clogging already congested streets, overtaxing energy supplies, burdening services. Plan for the future now, said the mayor, promising details later.

The mayor’s warnings drew a ho-hum reaction from a tough public focused on daily survival rather than problems a quarter-century away. But the suspicion here is that even if Mr. Bloomberg tried to plan ambitiously for 2010, New Yorkers would cast a skeptical eye.

The city that once lived to dazzle seems no longer able to think big or much past tomorrow. That was for its optimistic youth, when dreamers built Central Park, the marvel of a subway system, the wonder that is the Brooklyn Bridge and an advanced network of reservoirs and water tunnels. A younger New York dared to stage a World’s Fair in the shadow of the Depression.

But the bills came due, bankruptcy loomed, President Gerald R. Ford threatened to leave the city in the lurch and the place turned practical. Today’s New Yorkers want to know what something costs and who will pay. Turning landfill into a park, or building a new basketball arena and apartment-retail complex in Brooklyn if private dollars foot a healthy part of the bill — fine. Risking citywide gridlock to impress the world by playing host to the Olympics? Not so fine.

It’s not as if the mayor’s goal of moving traffic and keeping the lights on are utopian concepts. But the public has learned that New York does not follow a script.

The first plan for reviving a blighted Times Square goes back to the late 1970s. But one plan gave way to another for more than 20 years, until the market took over and created today’s tourist and entertainment magnet.

Westway was a bold government plan in the 1970s to build an underground interstate highway along the Hudson, with housing, commercial development and parks built above. After a decade of legal battles, the government abandoned Westway, and today, to get to waterfront parks later built downtown, pedestrians must navigate dense traffic.

In “Our Changing City,” a series of articles in this newspaper in 1955, officials envisioned a civic plaza in downtown Brooklyn that Robert Moses promised would rival the Piazza San Marco in Venice; a grandiose development over the Sunnyside rail yards in Queens; and a Palace of Progress devoted to world trade atop a new Pennsylvania Station. All that and a Second Avenue subway.

Didn’t happen. Other things that few anticipated did: the recovery of the South Bronx, the gentrification of Harlem, the drop in crime, sturdy growth in the immigrant population, now approaching record levels. Where is the expert who knew that Internet businesses would replace garment factories, that newspapers would fall on hard times, that the meatpacking district would develop cachet, that coffee houses would dominate every corner?

And then there is the starkest example of the unexpected — Sept. 11 and the city’s arc from devastation to renewal.

Projections can go awry, based as they are on assumptions sometimes trumped by the unforeseen. Population predictions are especially tricky, because they can be affected by factors like national and foreign policies, economic swings and politics.

In 1929, the Regional Plan Association predicted that the city would grow to 11.3 million people by 1965 (the figure turned out to be 7.7 million) and that the population in the metropolitan region would double to 20 million over 1,000 square miles. The region grew to 17 million over 2,000 square miles; the association attributed this to a failure to improve the railways.

The city’s population has had a way of taking on a life of its own. Zoning consultants in the 1960s advised city officials that New York’s population would grow to 8.5 million in 1975 — it may well have if not for the fiscal crisis that was at its worst in 1975. Instead, the numbers dropped so sharply — to 7.2 million in 1980 from 8 million in 1970 — that some social scientists advocated “planned shrinkage” in city services.

Then, as if overnight, the city began growing again, to 7.6 million people by 1990, and to more than 8 million in another 10 years — an increase that was also unanticipated. The public schools in some neighborhoods, instead of needing cuts, had to create annexes in prefabricated trailers.

What happened? Washington passed the liberalized Immigration Act of 1965, which encouraged greater immigration. At the same time, baby boomers began having children, and the city was recovering, so more people who might have left for the suburbs stayed.

Now Mr. Bloomberg anticipates more growth, based on city projections of factors like current birth and mortality rates, and aging, migration and disease patterns.

The analysis anticipates, for instance, that Staten Island and Queens will continue to outpace the other boroughs, as they have for years, attracting New Yorkers who might otherwise head to the suburbs. The city’s demographers also expect immigration to continue at a healthy clip, and that people will continue to live long lives.

They could be wrong about any of their assumptions. Maybe Congress will quell immigration and build more walls. Maybe an economic downturn will stall housing development and people will leave for the suburbs instead of moving to Rego Park. Maybe mortality rates will change.

All possible, said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the City Planning Department’s population division. “Are our projections reasonable?” he said. “Absolutely. Accurate? We’ll have to wait until events unfold. It doesn’t mean you don’t go ahead and plan for the future.”

Especially since the future is now. Traffic is already congested, blackouts are increasingly common, the parks too crowded, the air too dirty. It could be that the mayor didn’t generate any excitement with his 2030 announcement because New Yorkers, a practical lot, as noted, don’t see the big deal about their city retooling — as long as Mr. Bloomberg keeps his promise to tell them what it will cost and who pays.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

^ Good article, good plan, good mayor.

[lofter1]

GOTHAMITIS

http://www.newyorker.com/images/printable_logo.gif (http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/)
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COMMENT

newyorker.com (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/070108ta_talk_gopnik)
by Adam Gopnik
Issue of 2007-01-08
Posted 2007-01-01

It is a sign of the times—which, a Greenwich Village bard once told us, change—that two former mayors of New York may run for President next year, and no one thinks that either candidacy is even slightly a joke. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is thinking of running, as a Republican, and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who will be a former by then, may run as a None of the Above. This isn’t just news; it’s news. When, in the early nineteen-seventies, Mayor John Lindsay ran for the Presidency, his candidacy had about all the credibility that George W. Bush’s would have today if he ran for mayor of Baghdad-on-the-Hudson (or Baghdad-on-the-Euphrates, for that matter).

What makes the idea of ascending from City Hall to the White House possible is the transformation of New York in the past twenty years — one of the largest civic transformations in American history, and certainly the most unexpected. (Theories credit everything from bright new waves of immigrants to grim forced marches of incarceration, and the sociologists can’t decide which is right.) Just a few weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg went out to the site of the 1964 World’s Fair and made a peppy speech to introduce a new plan for the city, and what it ought to be like in 2030. He recited the roster of accomplishments that are by now as familiar as the stops on the No. 6 train: unemployment is the lowest it has been in years, the streets have never been cleaner, crime has never, or rarely, been rarer, and the city, which was shrinking, is growing — there will be about nine million New Yorkers a quarter century from now. More kids are graduating from high school, affordable housing is being built — not enough, but more than anywhere else in the country. The city’s bond rating is up, and the money we get from it is going down into a new subway.

It is hard for people who don’t know what the city was like in the seventies or the early eighties to understand not only how different it seemed then but how tragically insoluble its problems were believed to be. (Lindsay’s biography was called “The Ungovernable City.”) As Bloomberg said in his speech, New York’s decline and fall was for a long while taken for granted, as a fact of nature—and it is a useful reminder to pious liberals of the limits of liberal pieties that the unobtainable cure turned out to be a lot less hard to find than those pieties claimed. A series of booms, better policing, an insistence that the city’s problems were things to be solved rather than fled: all this helped the transformation. Despite even 9/11 — which turned out to change almost nothing in the city’s interplay of money and manners — New York is in good shape, and getting better.

Most of the new plan for the future is admirable, and a lot of it is unexpectedly far-seeing and enlightened. The Mayor believes not just in growth but in green growth: the city will now have a Sustainability Advisory Board. We are already cleaning up the pipes that bring water to town from the reservoir, and are fooling around in Queens with soybean-based biofuels to warm our apartments organically. Of the perils of global warming, Bloomberg said, “It’s called global warming, but the impact can be local,” and he detailed a scheme to keep us from being washed away by another Katrina.

What seemed a little odd about the plan, and the speech, though, is that the one thing that leaves many New Yorkers worried, or at least uneasy, was nowhere mentioned — perhaps because the Mayor doesn’t notice it, perhaps because that worry is a little metaphysical and almost poetic, resistant to oratory or city budget numbers. It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other. Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid. In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city — much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond — each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other. Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

New York, as generations have been taught by the late Jane Jacobs, is a self-organizing place that fixes itself. But let the additional truth be told that though the life of the block is self-organizing, the block itself that lets life happen was made by the hand of a city planner. As the Mayor said, and knows, what we want the city to look like in 2030 will depend on the rules we make now. Aggressive policies for housing, especially low-income housing; a reasonable process of review to help neighborhoods remain neighborhoods; a less passive welcome to every form of monster store; more support for tenants and small merchants — all of these things are worth arguing for, and legislating for, too. This mayor, who came to power as the ultimate entrepreneurial capitalist, has been willing to impose rules — from banning smoking in bars to cutting out the trans fats in pastries — that make the city the kind of place he thinks it ought to be. The New York we imagine in 2030 is bound to be as different as this one is from the city we had in 1976, but we want it to be recognizably New York, mixed up, fragrant, and hopeful — middle-class in character, avant-garde in invitation, a place for plain people and pilgrims and plutocrats alike.

The Mayor has promised a “major public outreach effort” to hear what people want, and one of the things that most ordinary New Yorkers want is to feel at home in their city, and only the regulating structure of the city itself can make that possible. It would not be the least of ironies in this still ironic but no longer entirely cynical city if this most capitalist-minded and free-market of mayors left as his legacy a reminder of the inestimable value of good government.

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