Rendering for Flushing Commons, from inhabitat.com

The beauty of development in New York is that there is always another layer. Today, it’s the argument about plans for Flushing Commons, the 5.5-acre mixed-use development slated for Flushing, Queens.

As we reported a few weeks ago, Streetsblog.com has voiced its opposition to the plan, citing it as an example of the Bloomberg administration not following through on its PlaNYC commitment to transit-oriented development. The plan will add 500,000 square feet of vehicle storage, which the transportation-advocacy blog says will encourage more driving rather than green transit. But yesterday an article on the Queens Neighborhood Retail Alliance blog added several more shades of nuance to the argument.

About 80 small businesses showed up to the City Planning Commission meeting last week to protest the project. They argued the project could seriously harm their businesses, the increased housing and retail could choke traffic and that the city had not offered the proper contingency plans should the plan stall or fail.

“Something doesn’t add up,” said Flushing BID Chairman James Gerson, “and I guess the biggest issue that concerns us is that these negotiations and this change to the plan took place without any community input whatsoever.”

Here are a few of the issues of concern to those following the project:

*Streetsblog says adding parking will worsen congestion, and ignores the PlaNYC goal to reduce transportation emissions by 44 percent by 2030.

*The Neighborhood Retail Alliance reports that in fact, locals are calling for more parking in the crowded neighborhood.

*According to the Alliance, nearly everyone agrees that parking or no, the development will exacerbate congestion.

*BID Chairman James Gerson also wonders about the plans to distribute $2 million in assistance to local businesses, saying there is no real plan for allocation and that the money may fall short.

*Then there is the contingency plan, or lack thereof, in the case that the project should fail. It’s not unreasonable to expect that the city provide some contingency plan so that we don’t get stuck with a hole in the ground,” said Gerson, “and so far the issue has not been addressed at all.”

*Ever suggestive, Curbed has noted that someone must “really” want the plan to go through given that opposition from all sides has not stymied the project, which almost died in 2007 but was reborn last January. Know who is pulling strings? We’d love to hear.

And so, other thoughts on Flushing Commons? More questions to add about the plan? Do you think that it will bring something needed to the neighborhood? Let us know….

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg put together PlaNYC in 2007, he made brownfields one of the three overarching themes of his land use initiatives. But what is a brownfield, and what can brownfields do to help make New York a “greener” city?

A brownfield is an abandoned or underused industrial site available to be used or developed. Often, contamination from a previous use has left these buildings and properties polluted. “Brownfield” is a bit of a misnomer: these sites range from old auto body shops and pharmaceutical plants to factories and generating stations. In Brooklyn, dozens of these site dot the neighborhoods, particularly areas along the waterfront once home to heavy industry.

The following  slide show is a portrait of the “life” of one brownfield, which in 2004 was included in the New York State’s Brownfield Cleanup Program. The property, now called “Gowanus Village,” is a 2.4 acre site along Brooklyn’s notorious Gowanus Canal. The towering brick building on the property was once a power plant owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Over the past two decades, it became a favorite spot for graffiti writers and squatters, who called it “the Bat Cave.” This is the story of industry, development and growth through one building, on one brownfield, in New York City.

Click on the thumbnail to view the slide show.

You can find a map of with details of the city’s brownfield sites at Habit Map.

The slogan of Earth Day New York, "I am E," took over many of the ads in Times Square.

As we mentioned last week, today New York City celebrated the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day and the 3^rd anniversary of PlaNYC 2030 with a slew of speakers and musical performances in Times Square. The event drew only a small crowd, mainly school children, tourists, and corporate sponsors, but the speakers were enthusiastic in promoting greener habits and congratulating Mayor Bloomberg for being a leader in green cities.

Dennis Hayes, the national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970, kicked off the event. “New York has become one of the greenest cities in the planet and is continuing to march forward really aggressively under a pretty green mayor,” he said. Ironically, the New York Times quoted Hayes in a story Wednesday about how Earth Day celebrations have become a commercialized marketing platform for many companies. “This ridiculous perverted marketing has cheapened the concept of what is really green. It is tragic,” Hayes told the Times. Continue Reading

Photo credit: mercurialn from flickr

As the Gotham Gazette reminded us recently,  there’s less than a week left until PlaNYC 2030 turns 3 years old. The initiatives have to be reviewed every four years, and there have been a number of suggestions for updates recently – from Scott Stringer’s food plan to interviews we’ve done here at Explain The Plan about solid waste.

And two days after Tom Angotti pushed for more inclusion and community input into the plan in the Gotham Gazette, the Bloomberg administration and City Council announced a brand new set of goals: the Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy (WAVES).

Rather, they announced that new goals are in the works from the Department of City Planning. They’ll be released at the end of this year, and they’ll be divided into two stages: Continue Reading

Photo from Klaus Debrito's Flickr photostream.

The state budget (now a week late) isn’t the only fiscal mire around here. The city budget is also a bog of cuts, trims and lay-offs. What does that mean for PlaNYC? Probably more of same, according to the January 2010 Financial Plan.

Last week, the Mayor’s right-hand man and the architect of PlaNYC 2030 announced he’d be stepping down for a job in California. Rohit Aggarwala, who also heads the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, isn’t the only cut (nor are the Section 8 affordable housing vouchers that are said to be canned, more on that later). Here are a few mentions of budget shuffling and hiring freezes (otherwise known as PEGs, Program to Eliminate the Gap):

and…

So what’s out? Along with a “revised” timetable for PlaNYC Regional Parks and Greenstreets, there will be a delay in hiring 88 full-time and 11 seasonal staff. 16 other PlaNYC positions will be switched to the ARRA, otherwise known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (federal funding). And finally, the Brownfields Fund will be cut by 4 percent in 2010 and then 8 percent after that.

The Regional Parks and Greenstreets includes plans to establish eight regional parks in NYC: Calvert Vaux Park (Brooklyn), McCarren Park (Brooklyn), Fort Washington Park (Manhattan), The High Bridge (Bronx and Manhattan), Soundview Park (Bronx), Highland Park (Queens), Rockaway Park (Queens), and Ocean Breeze Park (Staten Island).

Affordable housing also took a blow this week, with reports that up to 10,000 vouchers for Section 8 affordable housing for low-income families could be revoked. The announcement, from the NYC Housing Authority, is another step back for the mayor’s overall vision of creating more affordable housing to accomodate around 700,000 more residents by 2030.

In these tough times, what’s the solution to pushing PlaNYC ahead while dealing with smaller budgets? Readers, what do you think?

Steven Shooman (right), a homeowner in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn got some information about energy efficiency from a ConEd representative. Photo by Alana Casanova-Burgess

Whew, I’ve got quite a huge backup here at the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce’s Real Estate & Development (RED) Committee’s “Meet The Experts on Energy” event at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. There’s a lot of info forthcoming about how to get energy efficiency grants for your businesses and homes… as well as video clips from event organizers and on the presentation from Brooklyn Bowl, a LEED-certified business in Williamsburg.

Now Up: (1:59 p.m.) : Andrew Giancola and Dan Orr talking about The Silhouette, a residential building in Brooklyn. Andrew is talking about his family’s history of residential buildings in Brooklyn. (It feels great to have connectivity in here, I’ll try to get the rest of the material from the last few hours up here as soon as possible).

2:02 p.m.: “The condensation is going to form on the outside of the building, instead of on the inside of the wall.” Andrew details how the insulation system at The Silhouette doesn’t allow mold to grow inside the wall. Architects on the project: Caleb Frawford – Annie Coggan. The condo is the first LEED Platinum and Energy Star certified  low-rise building in New York, and is located in South Park Slope.

Continue Reading

Jenny Carel wasn’t going to pay Home Depot more than $60 for all the plants she needed for her garden this year. So, Carel, 40 a part-time teacher from Riverdale, used her ingenuity. She took some milk cartons, an old fish tank light and $3 worth of seeds she bought off line to start her own nursery garden.

A few weeks later the seedlings are a few inches tall and the hobby is a hit with her 11-year-old daughter, Sera. “It’s fun to see them grow,” she said. The two were at the newly established Bronx Hydro and Garden to buy a spray bottle and some extra seeds.

Carel’s gardening is one we learned about in grade school, but hydroponics – soilless gardening – is not just for green thumbs anymore. Specializing in this process, the store sells equipment for simple, cost-effective indoor gardening. The process has a few steps: water is infused with nutrients and then pumped through a system, which oxygenates the water; this is necessary for plants to grow and explains why stagnant water in a bucket just grows algae.

PlaNYC has initiatives on greening the city like MillionTreesNYC, reforesting parkland, and planting roadside gardens. But no rooftop gardens or hydroponics.  The city provides GreeNYC tips to encourage residents to be more environmentally conscious, by buying local produce, eating organic, and planting trees.

Aaron Morre, 27, opened the store last November and is opening another one in the Greenpoint, Brooklyn later this month.  Morre grew up on a farm in Orangeburg, South Carolina and moved to Brooklyn in 2001 to study Economics. He graduated from Brooklyn college in 2005. His store sells everything you need to start your own indoor garden.

Here’s some  audio of Mr. Morre, talking about his store.  ”This is the green economy….”

morre_1-2

Here’s a video of Aaron Edell of Bronx Hydro and Garden explaining some different kinds of hydroponics options.

Are you looking to give back to the community while making New York City a greener place to live? Well, you could donate and/or buy a tree.

As stated in previous posts, MillionTreesNYC is one of the mayor’s 127 PlaNYC 2030 initiatives to make New York City a greener and more livable place. To date, the city has planted 315,979 trees.

Below are the rates for donating a tree.

For more information check out the New York Restoration Project’s website.

Oil slicks shimmer on the surface of the Gowanus Canal. Image from the New York Press.

Explain the Plan reported on the designation of the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund, but what’s been happening at the site since then? Take a look at some of the resources and reporting below to see what’s new.

National Grid created a website dedicated to its clean up of the Metropolitan former Manufactured Gas Site. The company posts weekly updates of the clean up progress, as well as the history of the site, details of the process, documents specific to the site, and ways community members can communicate with the company.

The Brooklyn Paper has an ongoing series “Cleaning the Gowanus“. This week they reported that investigations have begun at a site near the canal on 12th Street, home to a Pathmark and Lowe’s home improvement store. Two weeks ago, they wrote about a Park Slope resident with an idea that could fix the city’s combined sewage overflow problem.

TIME magazine wrote, “The EPA’s decision and the stigma that comes with it have deferred dreams of a Gowanus renaissance, if not quashed them altogether.”

In its weekly column of trivia and observations, The Brooklyn Eagle notes that pollution in the Gowanus Canal has been in the news for over a century.  As early as the late 1800s, Harper’s Weekly magazine described the scene at the canal as “numbing because of all the oil refineries along the water’s edge spewing forth thick smoke.”

New York Press reported on a rather expensive, but interesting way to get rid of the toxic sludge – by turning it into glass.

On the 14th, The New York Times printed a letter from Bill Appel, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation. In his letter, he expressed his disappointment in the Superfund designation.

Metro mapped out toxic sites across the city, with a brief description of the issues with each.

If there’s anything we missed, leave a comment and let us know.

A group of greenthumbs have put out a call to Mayor Michael Bloomberg–they want a garden outside New York’s city hall. If they get the green light, they hope to create a garden tended by public school students that “will represent the vision of a more sustainable, livable City for all New Yorkers, and will contribute to achieving the intents of PlaNYC by 2030.” Check out their blog.

Explain the Plan went to the Go Green Expo this weekend. Take a look at some of our coverage, like this video with Riverkeeper‘s Craig Michaels. You can find more on the Expo here and here.

Streetsblog this week had a rather scandalous piece on, of all things, transit budgets. It looks at how funds from the city have been reallocated for upstate transit rather than to addressing the MTA’s myriad budget woes. Would the $100 million Streetsblog says should have gone to the MTA have helped stave off the end of student Metrocards or rolling out this new sign that got shelved? Would it have saved the V train? It’s hard to know…

Despite the at least 100 rezonings passed in the city since Mayor Bloomberg took office, a new report from NYU’s Furman Center says the city has created room for only 200,000 new people–the city anticipates 1 million more residents by 2030. Check out the article, and graphic, at the NYTimes.