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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/n...n-project.html
Why New York State Insists That the Penn Station Area Is ‘Blighted’
The designation gives Gov. Kathy Hochul authority to transform the Manhattan neighborhood and build 10 skyscrapers there. A lawsuit is challenging her claim.
By Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehanPhotographs by Benjamin Norman
Dec. 29, 2022
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The congested, chaotic section of Manhattan near Pennsylvania Station, which teems with tourists, commuters and shoppers, is undeniably drab. Does that make it blighted?
New York State has decreed that it is, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has recently likened the Penn Station area to “a Skid Row neighborhood.” She was defending the controversial plan to allow developers to build 10 towers around the decrepit train station — the busiest transit hub in the nation — in exchange for some of the $7 billion the state needs to renovate it.
If New York State officials deem an urban area to be “blighted,” blocks can be bulldozed and people and businesses can be forced to relocate. And new towers — unbound by limits on size and height as defined by the city’s normal planning rules — can rise.
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The state’s authority to make such a determination and move forward with redevelopment is nearly impossible to contest.
Its ability to intervene was meant to ensure that neglected areas do not languish. But critics say that officials have long abused the power to pry private properties away from their owners, and they accuse Ms. Hochul of continuing the practice with the Penn Station redevelopment project.
Over the years, the state has used the blighted designation to redevelop swaths of New York City. The move was used to clear properties in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, for the Barclays Center; to clean up the banks of the East River to create the Brooklyn Bridge Park; and to condemn a section of Times Square, including adult clubs, as part of a lengthy effort to rebuild and sanitize the district.
More recently, then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo employed it to create Moynihan Train Hall in Midtown and argued for its use in the Penn Station project before he resigned in August 2021, with his successor, Ms. Hochul, continuing the redevelopment.
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Opponents of the Penn Station project, which include a West 30th Street tenants association and the City Club, a civic group, have filed a lawsuit to halt the plan. Community Board 5, which represents the district, said that characterizing the area “as a slum or blight” was offensive and “grossly inaccurate.”
“Blighted is in the eye of the beholder,” said Tom Angotti, professor emeritus of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. “What’s blighted in your eyes could be a perfectly functioning building and neighborhood in mine.”
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The Penn Station neighborhood changes block by block. There are souvenir shops, a McDonald’s on Seventh Avenue that is one of the city’s oldest, a 1,500-spot parking garage and a 19th-century Roman Catholic church. It is home to Apple’s largest office in New York City.
The station itself, with its cavernous underground space, has long attracted homeless people. Last year, a survey by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority found that the vast majority of homeless people in the entire subway system seek shelter in just eight stations, including Penn Station.
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For the Penn Station project, state officials have staked their claims of blight on “substandard and insanitary conditions” and “economic stagnation.” The evidence to support those claims was outlined in a neighborhood study commissioned by Empire State Development, the agency overseeing the project and facing the lawsuit from its opponents, and completed by a civil engineering firm in February 2021.
In the 240-page neighborhood report, the firm explored the exterior and interior conditions of every property in the redevelopment area, assigning ratings for each site. The buildings were found to be older, with many built before 1932, and generating lower rental revenue than their peers in surrounding neighborhoods.
Across the redevelopment area, only one building received the worst rating of “critical condition,” a property with damaged and missing windows, cracked walls and eight unresolved building violations. It is 232 West 31st Street, a four-story service building for Penn Station that is owned by Amtrak.
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Some properties with faulty conditions or unresolved violations are owned by Vornado Realty Trust, the neighborhood’s largest landowner, which the state has said will develop some of the new towers. Vornado, a public company that is among the city’s largest owners of offices, has accumulated more than a dozen properties in the area over the last 20 years, holding onto them in anticipation of a larger redevelopment.
Of the eight sites that would be redeveloped, Vornado owns four of them and a share of another. The sites could give rise to some of the tallest buildings in the city.
Over the years, state projects aimed at eradicating blight have been criticized for rewarding developers whose properties had seemingly contributed to it. A decade ago, critics of a state project in which Columbia University would expand into Manhattanville pointed out that the university owned a large majority of the sites that were later designated as blighted.
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The Penn Station project received the first approval in July that it needed from the state’s three-member Public Authorities Control Board. But the board would have to unanimously approve additional parts of the project for it to move forward. One of its members, State Senator LeRoy Comrie, a Democrat, said in an interview that he had concerns about the development and urged Ms. Hochul to redesign it.
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