Do real estate developers control New York City's land use in the de Blasio administration ?

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A lack of democracy in New York City's land use process

"It's a lie anyway." To some progressive activists, seeing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s land-lease proposal to construct buildings on the property of the New York City Housing Authority following so closely on the sale of several NYCHA Section 8 buildings, with plans for further expansion of land-lease opportunities on NYCHA lands, amounts to a full-throttle assault to privatize large parts of NYCHA, essentially opening the floodgates for private real estate developers to stampede toward a land rush of city real property in exchange for the administration receiving credit for the construction a miniscule number of new affordable housing units. It seems like a huge price to pay for perhaps constructing an initial 500 new affordable housing units within a larger goal of creating 80,000 units over a ten-year span. These and other major city land use decisions are not being made with prior public input, much less without a specific mandate from voters. Although more and more tenants and activists are recognizing Mayor de Blasio’s pro-real estate agenda, what is missing is tenant and activist consensus about what to do about this. Some activists have been fighting the sale of public library branches to real estate developers, thinking that each sale is a singular transaction, independent onto itself, and not part of a larger, pro-real estate agenda by the de Blasio administration. Activists think that if they can just defeat the sale of one library, then the larger cause can be won. Efforts by developers and city planning officials to subject small fights to the arduous ULURP process, while sidestepping larger projects, has the impact of narrowing activists’ focus at the same time that they can be worn down. About the role of Community Boards in allowing the public to participate in New York City's land use process, the Brooklyn tenant activist Alicia Boyd said, “It’s a lie, anyway, but we know politically that the political machine needs that lie .... They need the lie. They need the lie, so that the people will not stand up and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute ! That means that we have no power ? There’s no democracy here ?’ They need the lie.” As activists look to hold the administration accountable to activists’ expectations for a course for a post-Occupy Wall Street city that was not aligned with big business, there are many issues to consider. Firstly, how do activists plan to educate each other on a complete and accurate picture of how much of the political landscape in the de Blasio administration has been influenced by the real estate industry ? Secondly, will activists reject Mayor de Blasio’s incremental and inadequate remedy to the affordable housing crisis, and, if so, what can the community demand in its place ? And thirdly, what should be done about the veal pen nonprofit groups, which willingly deëscalate calls for political, social, and economic reform, based on the messaging emanating from City Hall ? Other issues undoubtedly also exist, but organizing cannot take shape about where we want to go as a city until everybody first agrees on what is actually happening now.

RELATED A Special Investigation : A lack of democracy in New York City's land use process (Progress Queens) Michael Hayes, LMT, has practiced massage for more than 20 years as a licensed massage therapist in New York City.

Rousing 2011 #OWS speech reminds us of role of St. Vincent's Hospital on 9/11

Read your lipservice on 9/11, but we have no full-service hospital below 14th Street since St. Vincent's closed. #Rudin @Partnership4NYC

— Louis Flores (@maslowsneeds) September 11, 2014

New TV Ad Blames Christine Quinn For St. Vincent's Hospital Closing

The latest ad by New York City is Not for Sale 2013 blames Christine Quinn for her role in St. Vincent’s Hospital closure.

A group of citizen activists has previewed an advance look at a new TV advertisement that blames New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn for the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital.

The TV ad, released by the group known as NYC Is Not For Sale 2013, exposes how there has been an appearance of a quid-pro-quo between Speaker Quinn and Rudin Management Company, the real estate developer, which foreclosed on St. Vincent's Hospital. Members of the Rudin family, who own the billion-dollar Rudin Management Company enterprise, donated $30,000 to Speaker Quinn, who conveniently later supported a zoning change that paved the way for the Greenwich Village hospital to close.

Read more : SEE IT: New ad blasts Christine Quinn for role in closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital

In exchange for $30,000 in campaign donations, did New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn sell out her community ?

Do the political campaign donations by Beth R. DeWoody, Madeleine R. Johnson, Eric C. Rudin, Jack Rudin, Katherine Rudin, and William C. Rudin, who each donated $4,950 to Christine Quinn's presumed 2013 mayoral campaign, amount to influence peddling ? After all, since even before St. Vincent's Hospital closed, Speaker Quinn has been toeing the Rudin family line : close down St. Vincent's and replace it with an inferior urgent care center.

Not only did Speaker Quinn say that we only needed an urgent care center to replace St. Vincent's, but she approved the Rudin family's plan, allowing St. Vincent's Hospital to be rezoned into luxury condos. Since 2010, the Rudin family has been trying to get approval for a billion-dollar real estate development plan for the buildings that belong to the bankruptcy estate of St. Vincent's Hospital. Since the Rudin family wants to build luxury high-rise condos on the site of St. Vincent's, and since they needed City Council approval from Speaker Quinn, do these large campaign donations explain why Speaker Quinn did nothing to restore a Level I trauma center and full-service hospital to the former St. Vincent's site ? Does Speaker Quinn's official acts come as a result of sizable campaign donations from the likes of the Rudin family ?

To Preet Bharara : Do @chriscquinn's official acts come as a result of campaign donations ? christine-quinn-sold-out.blogspot.com/2011/02/rudin-… #StVincentsHospital

— Stop Christine Quinn (@stopchrisquinn) April 4, 2013

Rudin Gets Zoned Up ; Hospitals Get Closed Down

2011-11-30 Bill Rudin St Vincents Hospital City Planning Commission Hearing

Transcript of shady City Planning Meeting officiated by Amanda the People's Burden in possible/developing pay-to-play scandal, after Bill Rudin and his family donated almost $30,000 to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to look the other way, so that Rudin Management Company could harvest the real estate assets of St. Vincent's Hospital for pennies on the dollar.

Stop Rudin Condos Petition

Health Petition : Mayor Michael Bloomberg : Stop the Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Plan

Sign Our Petition ! The Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Plan will set a dangerous public health precedent. City politicians would be saying that a top 1% real estate developer can make hundreds of millions of dollars in private profit by converting the charitable public real estate buildings of the former St. Vincent's Hospital, whilst the 99% have no replacement Level One Trauma Center or Full-Service Hospital. If Rudin's Condo Plan is approved, Mayor Bloomberg would be saying that it is O.K. for an entire section of New York City to have no full-service hospital. How can this be a responsible public health care policy ? Mayor Bloomberg needs to stop the Rudin Condo Plan for St. Vincent's Hospital until a full-service hospital is created.

St. Vincent's Activists Will Visit Scott Stringer

2011-11-14 St Vincent's Activists Will Visit Scott Stringer

Bill Rudin St. Vincent's Activists Meeting

2011-11-14 St Vincents Activists - Bill Rudin Invitation (St. Vincent's)

Jason Mansfield #OccupyCB2

You are invited to participate in the enactment of a mass civilian trauma exercise on the sidewalk outside St. Vincent's Hospital.

Watch this YouTube documentary for background information about the controversial Rudin condo conversion plan for St. Vincent's Hospital :

Join community members as they plan to organise a field hospital on the sidewalks, form into make-shift blood donation lines, visualise what it would look like to set up alternative decontamination showers, help each other to tie on surgical masks to protect each other from air-bourne particles, and finally to think through what steps would need to be taken to request provisional mass casualty tents.

Some of the participants will ''not make it,'' because there is no Level 1 Trauma Center below 14th Street. And it probably takes ambulances over 30 minutes to respond to the Lower West Side of Manhattan, and then it would probably take another 30 minutes for ambulances to drive through busy cross-town traffic to any of the hospitals on the East Side. The ''survivors'' will have to figure out what to do with the “injured” participants.

Then, a team of survivors will walk over to Grace Church, 86 Fourth Ave., Tuttle Hall, to ask for help from Jason Mansfield, the chair of Manhattan Community Board 2's Environment, Public Safety & Public Health Committee. Community Board 2 is about to approve the rezoning of St. Vincent's to allow the billionaire Rudin Family to convert the hospital into luxury condos. Community residents hope that this civilian trauma exercise will educate and mobilise the public to stop CB2 from approving the dangerous Rudin condo conversion plan for St. Vincent's Hospital.

The community's goal is to keep the real estate zoning intact, to attract new hospital investors to restore a full-service hospital at the former site of St. Vincent's.

2011 10 17 RE ACT OccupyCB2 Flyer
2011-10-17 Stop the Rezoning of St. Vincent's Hospital Flyer #OccupyCB2

Sarge Shriver is Rolling in his Grave

Melanie Meyers, a real estate partner at the former law firm of Sarge Shriver, makes part of her case in this excerpt of her FAR Rezoning presentation before Manhattan Community Board 2 on behalf of the billionaire Rudin Family. Ms. Meyers is lobbying, on behalf of William Rudin, to demolish many of the buildings that comprise the St. Vincent's Hospital campus, so that Mr. Rudin may build luxury condos in the heart of the West Village.

Decades ago, Greenwich Village survived plans by Robert Moses to demolish a wide swath across the Village as part of his foolish plan to construct a cross-town highway to the East Side. Now comes Mr. Rudin, with his heartless desires to gut the core of the Village and replace it with more useless luxury condos.

Rudin Family Peninsula Hospital

Is the Rudin Family eyeing their next real estate harvesting operation on the dead carcass of the Peninsula Hospital Center in Queens ?

After he's done with St. Vincent's Hospital, it has been heard on the street that William Rudin is considering another real estate harvesting operation, this time at the Peninsula Hospital Center in Queens.

Meet at St. Vincent's Hospital at 2 pm on April 30 for a Rally to Demand a New Hospital

Join us at 2 pm on April 30 at St. Vincent's for a rally to demand a new hospital for our community. Register to attend our rally on Facebook.

If the Rudin real estate development company and North Shore-LIJ can find $125 million and can use a building that was donated for free to build a clinic, then, with a little more pressure from the community, we can use those resources toward restoring a hospital to the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

Community activist Yetta Kurland gave an interview about how it is possible to restore a hospital at the former site of St. Vincent's. In this video, she urges everybody to join us for the April 30 rally to mark the one year anniversary of the wrongful closing of St. Vincent's.

A year ago, we were told that there was no money for a hospital. Look at what resources Rudin and North Shore-LIJ have found, thanks to your efforts. Keep up the good work. Thank you for all that you do.

For Luxury Condo Conversion of St. Vincent's, William Rudin Hires Rentboy of New York City Politics : Ed Koch

Quid Pro Quo : After City Council Speaker Christine Quinn renames the Queensboro Bridge after former Mayor Ed Koch, the former mayor all of a sudden turns up as the temp-to-hire chairman of an astroturf-front group being paid for by the Rudin family, not unlike evil Wisconsin front groups that are union-busters.

In a brilliant YouTube video, the artist and political commentator Suzannah B. Troy compares former mayor Ed Koch to Snooki, seeing as how each celebrity can be hired to show up at night club parties -- or at luxury condo conversions of St. Vincent's Hospital -- if the price is right.

If you haven't yet checked it out, look at how the Rudin family has already managed to rent Christine Quinn.

North Shore-Rudin PR Campaign ?

The community of the Lower West Side of Manhattan are outraged over a deceptive political campaign brochure that was mailed to residents in connection with a proposed first aid clinic that may replace St. Vincent's Hospital.

Community anger has reached a new high, such that one member has launched a new blog, Every Minute Matters, to counter the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent by North Shore-LIJ and the Rudin family, to make sure that their greedy hundred million dollar condo conversion deal goes through.

The slick mass mailer is an act of political subterfuge, community residents say, because it is being mailed by a front group calling itself the ''Westside Healthcare Coalition.'' (A WhoIs search on Network Solutions today showed that the website for the front group is registered to Mehigan, Bellone & Associates, Inc.) The intention of this fake political brochure can only be to intentionally confuse the public between the front group and the real group called the Coälition For A New Village Hospital. The real group has been fighting for over one year to, at first, save St. Vincent's Hospital from closing. Then, once the hospital closed under shady conditions, the real Coälition has been fighting in court to save the hospital buildings and zoning, so that a new hospital can open on the location of the former St. Vincent's site.

Here is an anonymous line item review of what some community members describe as deceptive advertising that is printed on the controversial political brochure, which was mailed through the U.S. Postal Service :

West Side Healthcare Coalition is a Lie

The community isn't surprised that the axis of evil (aka North Shore-LIJ-Rudin Family) would resort to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sick and twisted public relations stunt ; the Rudin family stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's Hospital. Even in the face of these deceptive political advertisements that are being mailed to city residents, the community continues to be likewise outraged by the veil of silence around City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who have taken no concrete actions to save St. Vincent's.

In North Shore-LIJ and Christine Quinn Plan for St. Vincent's, a Fear of Union-Busting

OP-ED : Update on Community Effort to Create a Hospital to Replace St. Vincent's in the Lower West Side of Manhattan

When a deal was announced for the transfer of bankruptcy assets from the 501(c)(3) charity that was St. Vincent's Hospital to the private real estate developer tycoon William Rudin at values that may not fairly represent the full market value, the bankruptcy assets transfer was hailed as a health care miracle, because it would replace the Level 1 Trauma Center that was St. Vincent's with a first aid clinic.

But just a mere examination, at first blush, of the beneficial transfer of assets to insider creditors, the jobs that it would create, and the services it would provide, show that this deal is fraught with potential legal challenges.

The transfer of St. Vincent's principal assets -- its real estate -- to the Rudin family, who has always had an ''inside track'' on condo-conversion plans -- may be fraudulent, if the transfer does not happen at full market value prices. There is also community concern that the North Shore-LIJ landlord taking over the first aid clinic is going to hire only non-union employees for the 400 jobs that are expected to be created at the first aid clinic, and that the new clinic will forbid any efforts at collective-bargaining ; presently, only approximately 36 per cent of North Shore-LIJ employees receive union benefits. The services to be provided by the first aid clinic will not be able to treat ''women in labor, patients with severe trauma such as gunshot wounds or open fractures, or those requiring immediate surgery or cardiac interventions.'' In the face of the lack of life-saving services to be provided by the first aid clinic, and even the dishonest comparison of ambulance response times between 2008 and 2009 (even though St. Vincent's closed in 2010), predictably Deputy Mayor Christine Quinn can still be ''encouraged'' by the flimsy outpatient center.

Meanwhile, here is a video of a press conference outside Friday's appellate court hearing in connection with a freedom of information lawsuit.

Why Are They Closing St. Vincent's Hospital? (Pt. 23) - Freedom of Information from g. sosa on Vimeo.

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Christine Quinn try to destroy the social safety net by trying to close firehouses, shut down senior citizen centers, cut childcare, layoff teachers, pretend like votes don't go missing, build luxury condos on the hallowed ground of St. Vincent's Hospital, make money from government information, and end Progressive Era reforms, we are left to wonder. When will the focus of irresponsible real estate development at the expense of the middle class spark a voter backlash, that will lead to mass protests at the city's legislature, or a revolution of the likes that have been happening elsewhere ? What will be the spark that will trigger mass protests in New York ?

(Christine Quinn is Speaker of the New York City Council, but she has made her bed alongside Mayor Bloomberg on many controversial issues that often times she acts more and more like his Deputy Mayor than an independent voice for Democratic Party ideals.)

Remnants of St. Vincent's Hospital To Become Luxury Condos

Christine Quinn Sells St. Vincent's Hospital to Rudin Family ; Jane Jacobs is Turning in Her Grave. :'(

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn continues her campaign to sell New York City landmarks to real estate developers, activists say. Witness the latest announcement involving the historic real estate of the former St. Vincent's Hospital.

From Curbed :

If this graphic looks familiar, it's because we've seen it before, back when the Landmarks Presrevation Commission approved the highly controversial St. Vincent's redevelopment plan. In the intervening months, the hospital's closure took that redevelopment plan off the table, and the great St. Vincent's sell-off began. And then this bombshell: the Observer reports that, actually, the sawtooth O'Toole Building will be retrofitted and reopened as an emergency medical facility, with assistance from Rudin Management, the developer behind the previous plan, and North Shore-LIJ hospital. A victory for preservationists? Yes and no.

One thing the preservationists didn't want was the construction of an FX Fowle-designed residential building on Seventh Avenue South. Win some, lose some: that aspect of the old plan is back in a big way (as is the Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates makeover of St. Vincent's Triangle). The building will contain 450 units of luxury condos. Last time the subject came up, the LPC ordered the 233-foot building cut down a few stories, so we don't know what the final version will look like. We're guessing the architectural surgeons will still end up with something similar to the last design.

The rumour amongst activists it that, for an encore, Speaker Quinn will join forces with Mayor Bloomberg, to bust the unions of public employees, like teachers.

Rudin Management Exposé On St. Vincent's Real Estate Carcass Picking

Rudin Interview on New York Real Estate Harvesting From Bankrupt Hospitals.

William Rudin, chief executive officer at Rudin Management Co., talks about New York City's real estate and the outlook for commercial property, including the millions the family stands to make from the carcass picking of the real estate property of St. Vincent's Hospital. Watch at 5:40.

To add insult to injury, naturally this interview was broadcast on Bloomberg Opinion, in keeping with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's worldview of starving the beast until it dies in the back of an ambulance, stuck in crosstown traffic.