January 10, 2005
NYC council tweaks Hudson Yards plan
Details are still filtering in, but it looks like the New York city council land use committee has re-written Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $2.8 billion Hudson Yards development proposal - the one with the subway line that would lead to a new Jets stadium - in ways that are significant in some respects, and utterly irrelevant in others. Among the new provisions voted on today:
- The council committee scaled back the commercial paper program that was to fund the project in its early years, instead voting to just use money out of the general treasury instead. If that's the sort of talk that makes your eyes glaze over - who cares where the money comes from if it's taxpayer funds regardless? - here's something that should wake you up: The city Independent Budget Office has estimated that directly funding Hudson Yards instead of using commercial paper would save taxpayers $1.3 billion over time, by reducing financing costs. So that's a plus - though, given that the whole reason deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff proposed the convoluted commercial-paper plan in the first place was to avoid having to risk a council vote, it's not like the council is really showing him up by saying, "Oh, yeah? Well, in that case we'll just approve your plan but use a different financing method! So there!"
- The plan now includes a commitment that 25% (some sources say 28%) of the housing in the Hudson Yards district will go to low- and middle-income New Yorkers, which a spokesperson for the Hell's Kitchen/Hudson Yards Alliance called "an unprecedented commitment for a zoning plan." Well, sorta - typical subsidized developments in the city are required to retain 20% of apartments for low-income residents, so the "unprecedented" bit is that another 5% would be held for "middle-income" tenants - and as we've seen before, middle-income can mean different things to different people.
- The council added amendments that the rezoning plan won't include the proposed Jets stadium site on the west side of 11th Avenue, and that money from the project can't be used to finance the stadium - but then, that was always the case with the original Hudson Yards plan. This was about building a subway line to get fans to and from games, not directly providing the public's $600 million share of stadium funds, which remains somewhat of a mystery.
The Hudson Yards zoning bill goes to the full council next week, where it's widely expected to pass. The question then will be whether the council gets another crack at voting on the stadium project itself, or whether Bloomberg's end run will be successful. Like so much else about New York's most expensive development project ever, this is looking increasingly likely to be settled not at a ballot box, but in court.
