 understreets that are named after Dr. Martin Luther King, which is the name for 120th history. It intersects with three other African-American icons, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Frederick Douglass, Adam Claim Powell, and Malcolm X. And I think it's the only place in the country where you have four iconic African-American leaders where they all seem to come together. And it makes sense that they would come together on 125th Street. So, with all these wonderful images, what happened to Harlem? Well, I'm gonna take you back a bit. We know that Harlem underwent a significant physical change, but it wasn't always the case. That's the same street corner taken in 2004. And you can see how that particular parcel sort of devolved into a deteriorated state. Harlem's population grew significantly in the early part of the 20th century, but especially during the 1930 to 1960 period. At that time, we saw people migrating from the rural South as well as coming in from the Caribbean as well. Many folks were attracted to Harlem because of its reputation of a community that was where an African-American could stay and where they could prosper. Also, it was a place where the Harlem Renaissance took place and we spoke about that in my earlier remarks. But also because of segregation, Harlem was one of the few places where African-Americans could rent apartments. And because of that, it led to a place of significant demands on the community in terms of its infrastructure, in terms of its community resources. And at one time, Harlem really grew to more than maybe 300,000 people or so, maybe even more than that. It placed a significant stress on buildings which were basically tenement style buildings at that time. In an effort to provide better living conditions, the federal government passed legislation both in 1936 and 1954, which basically facilitated the development of public housing. This image shows where public housing was built in both East, Central and West Harlem. You can see the Manhattanville houses here, the General Grant houses here, St. Nicholas houses here. And over here are the Robert Wagner houses, as well as some of the houses that are built between Lenox Avenue, which is not the next boulevard with the Martin Luther King Junior houses, and the Jefferson houses located here in East Harlem. This provided a significant improvement in living conditions for many people that lived in overcrowded conditions. One of the things was that, and this image shows the site plan, and you can show the relationship between open space and the building footprints comprising of public housing campus. And the provision of open space provided more light and air in places where people could have passive and active recreation opportunities. And this was a significant improvement over many of the living conditions that people had to deal with at that time. This photograph shows a pathway within, I believe, St. Nicholas Park. You can see the relationship between the open space, you can see the grass, you can see this landscape. Thankfully, many of these original trees are still there, so they have matured, and we're talking about trees that were planted in the early to mid 1950s. This is now 2020, it's a lovely, lovely green space. And really, many nitric campuses really don't get what they're doing, first how they were planted, how they were landscaped, particularly under the 1954 legislation. But there were issues. One was public housing required significant amounts of site clearance. This area shows a significant amount of public housing, both in Central Harlem, which is located just west of Fifth Avenue, and public housing located in East Harlem, located here. This is 112th Street. This is 115th Street. And you can see that this entire section of Harlem is developed with high-rise public housing. These basically were formerly blocks, probably maybe three blocks per super block, where you had row houses and tenement style buildings on these blocks. Residents in these buildings had to be relocated. The houses were demolished to create the super blocks, which facilitated development of these large housing projects. And you can also see that here between Lexington and Park Avenue along here, as well as between Park and Madison Avenue along here. Super block public housing really redefined many areas within East and Central Harlem. So the issue here was displacement and disruption of the pre-existing urban fabric. Another reason is that public housing tends to be significantly taller and larger in terms of building scale than the pre-existing built context. These are the general grand houses, which are located in West Harlem between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. And you can see that these buildings rise to about 20 stories. And the predominant built context was basically five to six-story buildings. And you can see there's a significant difference between the grand houses and the surrounding five to six-story houses that were on neighboring blocks and that were occupied these blocks upon which these houses were built. So even with the passage of legislation in the 1950s to facilitate the construction of public housing, Harlem continued to spiral downward in terms of physical abandonment, physical disinvestment and financial disinvestment. There were many reasons for that. These are some of the reasons, not all the reasons, because the community started to deteriorate. We saw the middle-class leave partially because they had the ability to leave because they were making enough money to live elsewhere, but also because of changes in federal housing laws, implementing of anti-discrimination laws, people that could not live elsewhere, black Americans, African-American Americans that could not live elsewhere had the opportunity to move and leave Harlem. With the flight of the middle class, a black middle class, you also had private disinvestment, local businesses, barber shops, bakeries, dry cleaners, the types of uses and types of establishments that support and strengthen that community and server community they left. And because of that, the local tax base began to diminish and shrink and disappear. Because we had people leaving the community, there was a reduction in municipal services. And so things like street lights and sidewalks, we saw them deteriorate as well. And also with all of this, there was a similar or sort of a consecutive or complimentary decrease in the quality of life, we saw a rise in the negative social indicators and all the things that are listed on the slide, welfare dependency, crime, during our delinquency, we saw them rise as well. Public policy also helped shape the spiral of Harlem in many, many ways. Urban renewal program was used with vigor in East and Central Harlem. And that program used a lot of acquisition of property and clearance of property. What you see here is a full block site in East Harlem that was cleared in anticipation of an urban renewal project. Generally in the 1960s, sites would be cleared for development and they would be developed. By 1970, the urban renewal program was basically eliminated. So sites that were cleared in anticipation of development did not have the resources to be built and as a result, they remained vacant. Many of the sites that were cleared in the 1970s remained vacant for nearly 30 years, 25 to 30 years, well into the early to mid 1990s. And that was basically true with this site here. This site remained vacant for about 25 years or so. Here's another shot that shows urban renewal site clearance. Again, you can see this is a full block site that's clear. You can see some clearance here and demolition here, some clearance here and some clearance here. You can see a significant interruption in the urban fabric and with that comes a disruption in the quality of life for the residents that live in this community. Private property owners, seeing that the surrounding community had fallen into decay, tried to get out and many of them basically stopped paying taxes on their properties. As a result of that, the city would take over the property, residential property through tax foreclosure. Other landlords were more vigorous in trying to dispose of their property and some of them, many of them resulted to arson. This image shows buildings that were set on fire and arson was a major problem in the city, in Harlem as well as in the South Bronx in the mid to late 1970s. What's chilling about the image on the right is that we see young people playing basketball and we see a group of young people looking at a structure that's on fire as almost like it's a daily normal occurrence. And in fact, it was a fairly frequent occurrence. The most notable thing that comes to mind is that when the World Series was played, I believe in 1977 or so, from Yankee Stadium, Howard Cosell, who was a sportscaster for ABC, said, you know, the Bronx is burning and the camera would pan away from Yankee Stadium and look towards what's happening on neighboring blocks and you can see smoke rising from those blocks. So arson was a significant problem. Some landlords would even set the buildings on fire with the residents or the tenants in them. So many tenants had to basically run for their lives to leave these structures that were torched. The city, in many instances, would demolish these buildings rather than having a large five or six-story vacant building, but that creates another problem. You create a vacant lot and there was no money to develop vacant parcels. So you were then basically increasing the degree of light by doing so. So due to private property, the abandonment of private property, the tax foreclosure, urban renewal clearance, as well as acquisition through eminent domain, the city in the 70s, right up to about 1981 or so, took control of 60% of Harlem's real estate and that included more than 1,000 buildings. That's anywhere from 12 to 15,000 apartments that the city had control of. This shows all the blighted property in Harlem. This was done roughly in 1986 or so, and this was done by hand. Back in the old days, we did not have ArcGIS or MAP Info or any of the mapping software that we have available now. We did everything by hand, and I did this map. We basically did an aerial and we got some colored sort of graphic material and literally pasted on the vacant properties this red tape and then photographed it. So it's a very old school way, but the image is still quite staggering, seeing the degree of blight and abandonment throughout Harlem. The city in an effort to get rid of its vacant property would resort to public auction and they would have a real estate auction, roughly four times a year, once a quarter, and a vacant property, vacant city owned property would be offered for purchase. There were three problems with this. One is that an individual may purchase a vacant city a lot and then find that they cannot get the financing because of the lots of location to build on it. So they would basically walk away from the property, the city would take it over and auction it again and the same thing would happen. The second issue would be that a person would purchase a property at auction and then maybe invest some money to build it but find that they were over a head. They did not have enough resources to complete their vision and they would walk away from it and the city would take it over and they would re-auction the property. The third scenario is when someone would purchase the property in auction and not do anything with it at all. They would sit on the property, they would pay taxes, but it would not develop it. And as a resident in an affected community, the outcome was still the same. You had vacant property, you had a vacant lot on your block, on your street, next to where you lived and nothing was happening to improve the built condition of your neighborhood at that time. So public auction really wasn't the best way to incentivize development in these distressed communities especially in Harlem. So the city got involved and developed a redevelopment strategy. The effort was basically to sort of like the multipoint approach identify multiple blighted areas for simultaneous redevelopment, focus primarily on rehabbing vacant building as well as fixing up occupied buildings, having a mix of incomes moving into these areas which basically would ensure that these communities especially Harlem would be more economically stable and self-supporting. In 1986, Mayor Koch announced the 10-year housing plan and the plan was to renovate every vacant building that was owned by the city. It was a very, very ambitious plan. And the Department of City Planning in 1992 had a series of studies, what we call land disposition studies. We identified 26 areas in the city which had the highest concentrations of vacant city-owned property. Harlem, East Harlem and Central Harlem had significant amounts of city-owned property as in Brownsville and East New York and Southeast Queens, Jamaica and for Rockaway. And the goal was to basically not dispose of the property through auction but to come up with a comprehensive land disposition strategy where the larger parcels would be held in land banked so that when a housing program would be put together by the city and when the funding would be in place, we would have the parcels available for new construction. In the case of Staten Island, which is located here, this area of Staten Island is not developed and has a lot of marshland and woodland but was city-owned. So the goal there was to not develop it at all but to create a blue belt system which is in place to this day to better control storm water and rainwater and better control flooding. It was found that a blue belt approach is more efficient than putting, you know, expending millions of dollars for complicated sewers and storm sewers and stuff like that. Well, the takeaway from this slide is that the Department of City Planning came up with a company has a strategy to land bank the larger parcels and to sell off maybe some of the smaller parcels, you know, 1600 square feet or so to an adjacent property owner so they can have a garden or sort of a side yard next to their building. This map shows what I did back in 1992 in the Manhattan office. This shows all the vacant land in Harlem from 110th Street to 124th Street from Morningside Park to Fifth Avenue. Everything that's colored on this map is vacant. So here, this is Malcolm X Boulevard. This is 116th Street. This is a vacant land. This is all vacant land. These are vacant buildings. You can see the properties on both sides of the street are all vacant as well as on 122nd Street. Everything here is vacant as well as along Frederick Douglass Boulevard which is Fifth Avenue. Tremendous amount of bait in say, as late as 1992 in Central Harlem, South Central Harlem and we saw the same land use pattern north of here from 120th Street up to 150th Street was essentially the same thing. So the first thing we did, we identified areas that could where rehab could take place and these are the streets that had the highest concentration of vacant buildings. The goal was not to do as in the past to demolish but to fix up buildings and bring them into a state of good repair. And these are some before and after photos of rehabilitation. You can see that these buildings even in their deteriorated state, some of them were quite marvelous looking architecturally and we couldn't build anything like that new. So it made more sense to rehab them and bring them into a good state of repair so they can be reoccupied. Can I ask a question? Sure. This is so fascinating, also thank you but who is doing the rehabbing or how did the contracting process work? How involved was the city in kind of the details? I'm ignorant of this. Well, these buildings were primarily city owned buildings and thank you for your question. The buildings, many of them had to go through a public review process as a condition of disposition. So they went through EURP which involves the vetting by the community boards and by the Borough Presidency Planning Commission. So it was an opportunity for the community to see these buildings, hear about the plans for them to be redeveloped, renovated. And then the city, HPD, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development would select a developer and dispose of these buildings to the developer to renovate these buildings. When these buildings were built, there was a set-aside, a local area preference where 50% of the units would have to go to Harlem Residence and the residents were selected through a lottery which was managed by HPD. Did that answer your question? Yes, sorry. I was telling no to a kindergartner, not to. That's okay. Thank you for your question. Thank you very much. And this is a conversation also. So if anybody has a question, please, please let us know. I have a circle of follow-up question. In terms of the financing structure for this, generally, how was it set up? If you know that knowledge, that would be greatly appreciated. Well, the financing came out of the city's capital funds at that time when these buildings were built. So the Department of Housing Preservation and Development set aside money to renovate these buildings. Do you know if they use historic tax credits on them at all or? The tax credits like 421A would come later, mostly for new construction, for the most part. So we started seeing that type of funding mechanism used for a lot of new construction stuff that we would see happen in Harlem. But for the early renovation stuff, the money came out of the city's capital funds. Okay, thank you. Amazing times when public funds would actually pay for rehab straight up. Well, it was. It's amazing that we did. But there was a challenge with this. When these buildings were rehabbed, the city's homeless population had grown significantly. And in fact, there was a series of court judgments against the city and requiring the city that they must house the homeless. Many of the homeless were put in large concrete facilities such as armories, like the Bedford Avenue Armory in Brooklyn, the Kingsbridge Armory and the Bronx, for example. And then nonprofits would also offer space and redevelop buildings for the homeless. But the issue for us was that since Harlem had a significant amount of vacant sitting-owned buildings, we were afraid that many of the homeless that were transitioning or being taken out of the shelters would be placed into these vacant buildings. And the community did not want to see a significant amount of the community's housing stock being renovated for homeless housing. But they recognized that the homeless needed a place to live. So a transitional housing plan was put together. And what that means is that as people transition from the homeless shelters into regular housing, they would spend time in these transitional residential facilities. As it became clear that the homeless needed permanent housing, the city came up with a program called the Vacant Building RFP Program. And in that program, 80% of the units would be made permanent for those that were low-income or moderate-income and 20% of the units would be made available for people coming directly out of the shelter system. So there's always this, when we talk about affordable housing, there's just a large category of constituencies that are buying for that. And we grapple with that very early on, back in the late 80s or the early 90s. And this is an ongoing challenge for not only planners, but also our colleagues in HPD and the New York City Housing Authority, among other places. So we talked about vacant buildings being renovated. And we identified streets where there are significant numbers of vacant buildings that circled into red. But there was one area in Harlem that was just so devastated and so heavily physically distressed that it required a comprehensive planning approach different than what was done in the past through prior urban renewal of protocol and practice. The Bradhurst Community Plan came out of a collaboration between churches in Harlem called the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, HCCI. And this was the beginning of what we saw and an uptick in faith-based organizations coming together to create and facilitate community redevelopment plans. We will see the same thing in Southeast Queens with Alan Amy Church. And we've seen the same thing in Brooklyn, East Brooklyn churches with Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood and Father Gigante in the Bronx, in the South Bronx. Harlem has had a history of faith-based organizations working to provide housing. Canaan Baptist Church, Reverend Y.T. Walker was behind that back in the 70s and the 80s. So HCCI basically came together a number of congregations came together to come up with a plan to redevelop Bradhurst. And Bradhurst is the area generally bounded by 140th Street and then 150th Street to the North from Bradhurst Avenue over to Adam Powell Boulevard. These are photographs that I took of the Bradhurst area. I took these in 1996. And one of the things as planners we try to document the existing built condition and we do that in photographs. We now have cameras, video cameras. But it's always good, particularly when you're trying to promote development or incentivize development. Just take a snapshot and make a record of what the conditions were like before. This is 145th Street looking east towards Adam Powell Boulevard towards the 7th Avenue. This is a corner of Bradhurst Avenue and 145th Street. You can see this entire assemblage of buildings are vacant. They're vacant a lot here. And you can see the buildings, the budding, the vacant lot, all of them are vacant. So the Bradhurst plan identified sites where new construction could take place. But also, like we saw in the previous images, the plan was not to demolish buildings. The community was very sensitive about the demolition of buildings. So to the extent practicable, buildings that could be saved were saved. Here's a before and after. This is on Bradhurst Avenue. And you can see that, and this is a work in progress, but in the old days, these buildings would have been demolished, but they were fixed up and they were continuing to be worked on. And it sort of looks like something you would find in Europe, actually. They're really, there's a really nice, handsome world of houses here. And you find this type of built character throughout Harlem. And it's so great to see that many of these buildings were saved. Now, this is a new construction project. Like this is on 117th Street between Lenox and Adam Powell Boulevard. The entire blockfront, both sides of the street, were vacant and cleared. These are two-story, two-and-a-half-story brownstone townhouses. These were built in the early 2000s. These are two-family houses. And what's cool about this is that the owner can rent out a unit, the second unit to help offset the monthly carry-in costs. This was built by HPD in collaboration with the New York Housing Partnership, which underwrote the cost of many of the new construction that we saw in Harlem. The thing at the time was people that were renting wanted an opportunity to own something. They wanted to own the house and what they were with. So HPD expanded home ownership opportunity and provided through many of the projects that were built an opportunity for people to own where they live. That's a good thing. The downside is that we can't build at this density anymore. This is too low and we have a housing problem. We could not and we would not build at this density in 2020. But in 2002, this is what the community was asking for. And you can see that the building, the facade of the building, basically tries to replicate many elements of what you see in many of the brownstones that you see throughout Harlem. Again, in current home ownership, we see a before and after in the old days, this building would have been demolished. It was fixed up again through an HPD program to bring it to a good state of repair and occupancy. Another example, anytime when you do a field survey, if you see a building with an X in the box, that's basically put there by the fire department to alert firemen not to go inside, that there are no floors in the building. They can only fight the fire from outside the building. So that's something you should know if you do field work, if you see that. Also, it tells you to keep some distance away from the building because there may be some debris that may fall off the facade. But this is the before and this is the after. Again, these two buildings would have been demolished, but they were saved and they were fixed up and it turned out quite well. Now, Frederick Douglas Boulevard from 112th Street up to 155th Street was in very, very bad shape. And what you see in this image typifies what you saw on Motor Frederick Douglas Boulevard, more sponsored vacant land. This vacant lot was used as a playground and you can see a backstop area over here for baseball and you see some benches in here. In 2000, 2001, the Urban Technical Assistance Project, which is affiliated with Columbia University and then Manhattan Borough President, C. Virginia Fields came together and created a plan to redevelop Frederick Douglas Boulevard from 110th to 124th Street. Part of that plan was to increase the zoning density to allow for more units. Going from an R72 district, which is a medium density district with a FAR 3.44, to an R88 district, which will bring the density up to 6.02 of FAR. So it's doubling the residential density. UTAP and the Borough President's Office approached us. We supported what they were trying to do when we actually enhanced it and tweaked it a little bit. And the result is a zoning framework, a zoning sort of plan in place that encourages slightly higher density, but within a contextual building envelope. Here's the after. This is the Harry Tubman Gardens. And what's cool about this that in the past, when you had a large vacant lot, like what we saw, the building form would be towering the park. The building would be set back from the street, surrounded by open space. Here, we have a contextual building where the street wall lines up at the street line. Okay, this building rises to about seven stories or so, one, two, three, four, yeah, about seven, eight stories. And also what's important with these new construction buildings along Frederick Douglass Boulevard was the provision of ground floor retail, where before many of the new housing that was built did not have any retail. We're starting to see, particularly on the commercial rezoned avenues, space for ground floor retail and the types of building services that would support a growing community. Now, the cool thing about this is that when you build new residential units of a certain number, you have a critical mass of residents being brought into the neighborhood, which in turn will support the retail. And that's exactly what happened on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The other thing I've noticed that you see an improvement in the street condition. You see benches, you see street trees. These trees are much taller and they're more mature when this photo was taken. But the takeaway is that under the zoning regulations, not only did it require a street wall building and using a contextual building envelope, but it also mandated street trees and benches and streetcape improvements to ensure that the public realm, the pedestrian realm would be inviting in a place where people could spend time. They won't want to stay in. This is the before and after. This is on 118th and 19th at Frederick Douglass Boulevard. And this is the after. This is a cell hop, contextual building, street wall building, rises to about maybe eight stories or so, steps down as it heads to the mid block. And this is the back of the building. We have a yard. Parking is underneath, so the yard deck provides the roof for the parking. And you can see the backs of these buildings as well. Infill development on the smaller sides, we've begun to see also, lots that were 20 feet wide, maybe even 18 feet wide. We started to see some development on. Some of them were pretty funky. This one is in Central Harlem, I believe. And again, it's a street wall building. All those are different kind of a street wall. And this is what it looks like looking up from the sidewalk. We're starting to see buildings built to lead standards. This is at the Fifth Avenue and 115th Street. And you can see the ground floor retail spaces there as well. Revitalization of commercial corridors are very, very important. And as I said in my previous remarks, we started to see the introduction of ground floor retail in all of these buildings. And these buildings, these new constructed buildings were financed through various tax abatement, tax incentive programs. This is in East Harlem, I believe that about 101st Street, I believe. Contextual building, street wall building with ground floor retail space. Bringing in regional retail, providing a greater variety, was very, very important to the community also to serve and complement the new residential development in Harlem. This is Harlem, USA at 120th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. And even larger is East River Plaza, which was built on a former factory which was taken down. And here we have a number of stores in there and with parking as well. Again, providing the goods and services that community wanted to have been asking for for decades and also to complement the new residential development if they could place there. Here's some before and after. We talked a little bit about urban renewal site clearance. These sites were cleared as part of urban renewal. And here is the after. Again, the same sites. You can see new buildings, roughly eight stories or so along Madison Avenue. This is an East Harlem, you can see townhouses, roughly three story townhouses on many blocks here, here, here and here, as well as a tall mixed use building here. And this is Marcus Garvey Park. Now with that, obviously, gentrification becomes a big deal. We started to see more upscale types of businesses coming into the community. This was Jimmy's, I believe, which was located 130th and Adam Powell, which was a very popular spot, offered more upscale dining than was previously offered in Harlem. And Harlem began to and continued to gentrify with the bigger as people started to be able to purchase buildings for far less than they could unless they know the ports of Manhattan and buildings that were aesthetically looking pretty good, as a matter of fact. They required a lot of money in terms of rehab, but people were willing to put in the money to bring them to a good state of repair. Unfortunately, we had some property flipping activity. This is Massey Knackle, which was one of the big realtors flipping property at that time. And notice the prices that these buildings were selling for in 2006, they were selling well over $1 million, which was totally unheard of prior to this point. But we saw properties escalating, I won't even say appreciating, escalating in value. And it was primarily because a property was being flipped. Now, this is an image of the George Washington Bridge. And the George Washington Bridge is located in Washington Heights or Hudson Heights, depending on if you're up around there. But I actually saw this in a brochure selling Harlem. There's still some people who believe that Manhattan, north of 110th Street, all of it is Harlem. So I saw this in a brochure. And with that, we started to see certain areas Harlem being redefined. So North Harlem became NOAAA. South Harlem was renamed SOA. Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, which renamed SPA or Upper Yorkville, or the Upper Upper East Side. 12th Avenue below the Riverside Drive Viaduct, the area over by Dinosaur Barbecue over where the Manhattan built campus is being built, was called Viaduct Valley or Biva. So I'm like, you know, you can't, you really can't be serious about this. In 2008, the market crashed. And with that, all the new construction that we saw, construction activity, those that were not completed by this time came to a halt. It was difficulty getting permits, it was difficulty to get financing. And although construction activity had stopped for a point, it gave the community some time to pause and breathe. Because as we've seen in the earlier slides, there was a lot of renovation, a lot of new construction. And people felt that those long-time residents felt that the Harlem that was being created was one which they could not afford to stand. So with the market crash, it basically put the, they put development activity on pause. And that pause lasted for about six years or so. So, and also property, you know, transaction is stalled as well. This was taken out of Cranes in December of that same year, you know, 2008. So there's basically all type of construction or redevelopment activity came to a halt in Harlem, including residential. But we started to see things turn around. So in 2008, this is on 125th Street. This is right next to the Apollo Theater, they can watch. And the after, a red lobster. Again, providing more retail on the street, strengthening the retail presence, and also acting as a complimentary use to the Apollo Theater, where people could have a place to go to before the show or after the show. Or if you didn't want to go to a show, you had a place to go to in and of itself. There's another before and after. This is on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 125th Street in the northwest corner. And this is the after, again, generating jobs, providing expanding retail opportunities to serve of people moving into the housing that's being renovated and built in Harlem. This was a result of the 125th Street District Resoning. This is a national black theater located Fifth Avenue in 125th Street. It is the oldest black-owned performance theater in the country. And they're seeking to demolish their campus, which is here and here, and build a state-of-the-art building, including a black box theater and a more modern larger theater. Here, you can see, this would be a 22-story building with about 250 mixed income units and with the theater in the base with some ground floor retail here. This building is just about completed. It's topped off and the inside is being finished. This is on 125th. This is a combination hotel and mixed income housing development. The hotel is facing 125th Street, 150 rooms, 150 keys. And on the back, on 126th Street, we have a mixed income housing, about maybe 200 units or so, a mixed income housing for both low- and moderate- and middle-income families. They maintain the facade of the Old Victoria Theater, so that serves as an entrance to the hotel that's being built there. The hotel is important because hotels bring conference room space and meeting room space, which was something that Harlem lacked for many, many years. New residential development on Fifth Avenue and 110th Street with a museum space in the base. And we're seeing that development proposals are getting more ambitious. We saw the East River Plaza project. There was a proposal for an overbuild to build about, I think, about 1,000 units of mixed income housing on top of the existing retail center. The buildings are quite tall. It was met with the vigorous opposition from the community and from the community board and from the elected officials. But I put this slide in here because we're seeing the same type of ambitious housing development as we've seen south of here, in West Chelsea, Hudson Yards, as well as on the other side of the river in Loyola City. And last... Sorry, just to interrupt, I'm so sorry to interrupt, but it is approaching too, and I think some people are gonna drop off for classes. But I think I'm happy to stay, I think a bunch of us are happy to stay on. So just continue, but just say you know, some people answer. Okay. All right, I will move quickly. So this is the last thing I think I'm gonna show you. One of the things that we run into as planners, we talked about the conflict between, or the challenge of providing affordable housing for all. Another thing is when you have a legacy site that's being contemplated for redevelopment, how do you treat it? So this is the African Barrow Ground, Harlem African Barrow Ground Project. It's located where the bus depot, the MTA bus depot was at 126th Street and Second Avenue. And when DOT was working on the east, or the Harlem River bridges, reconstructing them, they were using this area here as a staging site and when they were doing some digging, they found some human remains. So they did some significant archeological work and they found that there is a footprint of the remnant of a former colonial era cemetery. This footprint is about 18,000 square feet, but the cemetery was much larger. And because of that care had to be taken in terms of what to do, how to redevelop the site. Plans had already been made to redevelop it for mixed income housing, but now the thinking had to be given towards how to treat the former African Barrow Ground, which is one of the oldest Barrow Grounds in the city. So they did an archeological sort of study. They dug three trenches within the bus depot footprint and they did not find any intact bodies. What they found was disarticulated remains. And the thinking is that as development took place over the decades in this area, the bodies were disturbed, they were damaged. And when you had left were just the pieces of disarticulated parts of the bodies that were buried there. So the plan is, well, first of all, the souls were removed there being, I believe they're being studied somewhere, at the top of my head, I don't remember where, but they will be reinterred once the project is built The plan calls for mixed income housing, about 800 units, I believe or so, between 800 and 1000 I'll say. The built program includes ground floor retail with a community facility space, possibly a museum, to compliment the Barrio Ground here. And the footprint of the Barrio Ground would remain undisturbed in terms of it not being built over. So it'll be open to the sky. And similar to what was done with the Colonial Barrio Ground down in Lower Manhattan by the federal building where that Barrio Ground is open to the sky and not built upon. But there is a museum that explains what happens there, the history of that site located on Broadway within the federal building that fronts on Broadway. And one last thing is that we found out through Storm Sandy, Super Storm Sandy, that New York City can be affected by the same coastal storms that affect Florida and the Carolinas and the Gulf Coast. And it was a wake up call to think about not only rebuilding those areas that were heavily damaged, but also how to build better. So in terms of housing, and this is just an image of the rock ways after Storm Sandy, you can see the entire boardwalk was taken out as well as the beach. The power of the ocean is actually remarkable and it's beyond words. However, for those who choose to live in areas that are close to the ocean, with the advent of sea level rise coupled with climate change, we had to build better. We have to think about building better, particularly residential development. This image shows the flooding. This is Espinada Gardens in Harlem, the subway station, which is 148th Street and Lenox Avenue was completely flooded. It was under, I believe, about four feet of water or so and was offline for a very long period of time. This shows the storm surge. When people think about the storm surge, they think about areas like the rock ways in Staten Island and Brooklyn, like Mill Basin being affected, but the storm surge also came as far north as Harlem. And you can see in the pink, the areas where you saw the water coming in off the river. This is the 100 year, the projected 100 year, sort of flooding. And you can see that a lot of East Harlem is threatened and as well as part of, this is East Harlem right here, as well as the northern part of Central Harlem, not so much in West Harlem, because most of it is on a bluff on elevation and at higher elevation than East Harlem and Central Harlem. So in terms of building a residential development, we have to think about sustainability and resiliency, storm resiliency, in addition to affordability, so that these structures will remain, can withstand these storms that we expect to see and sea level rise that we expect to see in the future. So a few closing thoughts. One is that, as with any community, the people are as strong as asset. So the community should have a collaborative role in what their future should be. Residents should have, Harlem residents should have an equity stake in their neighborhood and expanded rental and commercial development opportunities and ownership opportunities are very, very important. Community development should be that balance and you guys know this between preservation of culturally significant and architecturally significant buildings and new development. In addition to providing affordable housing for low and moderate and middle income families, we have to think about the more vulnerable residents of people with HIV AIDS, formerly incarcerated individuals. This becomes very, very important with the proposed closing down of Rikers Island. You know, these inmates will need a place to live after they complete their census. War veterans returning from Afghanistan, you know, war veterans military personnel mustering out in the military will need a place to live as well as the mentally ill and those that are victims of domestic violence. All of these individuals require affordable housing and we have to be creative in terms of providing opportunities expanding opportunities for these populations as well. Green design is very, very important. We saw one building that had it but there are many, many buildings that are being built to lead standards. And in fact, all buildings that are built with public money are required to adhere to some lead standards. But also equally significant is that for low income housing that they should be built to better design standards. They do not have to be a big brown box and that's some attention to detail and attention to the aesthetics should be given in a manner almost similar to what you do with market rate housing. There's no reason why a person in low income making low income or no income should live in a building that's sterile or not pleasing to the eye nor should they be walking through a poor door in a building where they're in a unit where it's mostly market, you know they should be able to walk in through the main entrance just like anybody else. And, you know, improvements to the public realm streets gave improvements public space, open space with community gardens, playgrounds, places where people can gather and enjoy. You know, the natural environment, you know, is very, very important. And Harlem is blessed in that we have coastline, we have espionage along Harlem River as well as the Hudson River. So we have opportunities to see that as well as enjoy Harlem Mirror in Central Park. So open space is incredibly important. So looking at the community holistically and not just focusing on residential development, looking at all development in a complementary way is something that's very, very important. So that basically concludes what I have to say. I want to thank you all for bearing with me. I think I ran a little bit over, but I look forward to your questions and comments. Thank you. Hi, first of all, incredible information. And I'm relatively new to New York, but this is simply phenomenal and awesome information. I did have a few questions. The first one is for all of the different rehab projects that were completed in around Harlem, is there like a master sort of Excel spreadsheet that has like all the different projects and like when they were completed and like how many units were part of each project? Or just if we maybe want to do some research on those? Well, I don't know if there's a master one. You can contact the Manhattan Planning Office. My colleagues there, they might have something. You can start with them. And they might be able to go through the files and provide something for you. Another place to go to would be HPD. HPD may have some information. And actually that might be a very good place to start, actually, HPD and see what they have. I'm sure they track this stuff or they might have some institutional knowledge of it. So I would recommend HPD, but I also recommend reaching out to the Harlem Planner in the Manhattan Planning Office at DCP. Awesome. For the Harlem African Burial Ground, did that enter like a section 106 process at all or was there any sort of further? I didn't know if like, was any of that project, did it contain any sort of federal funding at all or was it all private funding? That is a, it's a city project. There is a community-based task force that is involved. And I do know that they do receive some funding. What I can do through Joe, I can find, I can get that information for you and I'll forward it to Joe and then Joe can forward it to you. Okay, thank you. And then for like, so I'm really, so I'm from New Orleans and I'm all too familiar with hurricanes and flooding and FEMA maps, base flood elevation maps, that sort of thing. And so to see that map projecting the 21, the sea level rises in the year 2100 is sort of shocking. Considering New Orleans, a large portion of the city is below sea level. It just sort of indicates that there are other areas in the country that are also at risk. But I was curious if the city is creating or has the idea or at least perhaps is in like preliminary discussions about not so much limiting development in those areas that are projected to be underwater in I guess, what, 80, 80 years. Or maybe perhaps encouraging the development of some additional or like revised building codes to sort of mediate against that rising water in those areas. You are so totally spot on. We actually have that. What happened was when storm Sandy hit, two things happened. One, properties were destroyed. And we found in going through each of the five boroughs that there are some areas that should have never been developed from the onset. So in those instances, in those areas, and many of them are in Staten Island along what they call the South Shore. It's actually the East Shore, but they call it the South Shore. Places like Midland Beach, South Beach, Oakwood Beach. And the condition there is similar to New Orleans where as you proceed from the beach, the land dips below sea level. So it's like a soup bowl. And then it rises up again as it gets up to, as it heads further inland. Many of those properties were purchased by the state and the city of New York and the homeowners were compensated. And there was legislation passed to ensure that nothing will be built in those areas. So there'll be natural areas. These are areas that have a historic, a long history of flooding. So they were dealing with flooding long before storm Sandy. And there are other areas in the city where building will not be allowed because of what happened. The second thing is the city passed a series of regulations where the buildings will be more resilient to storm surge. So for example, like in New Orleans, for example, many of the buildings have been elevated. So the first floor is literally one story above grade. For new construction in New York City, the buildings have to be elevated to a certain height. The first floor, the ground floor cannot be an occupiable floor. So you can have maybe like a garage or something where the water can flow through but you cannot have an occupiable floor in the ground floor. For commercial places, commercial districts like Lower Manhattan, storm doors, storm shutters, flood shutters and flood gates are in place so that they will hold back the water in case we have the same degree of flooding that we had with storm Sandy. So the short answer to your question is that there has been new regulations and new statutes both in zoning and in the building code to make it obligatory of owners that want to stay in these particular areas to strengthen their buildings and floodproof their property. And then there are other areas where the property owners will not be allowed to rebuild at all because the risk is just too great. If you live in a flood plain, you have to have some degree of flood proofing on your property. There's a cost to that obviously because it's not cheap. Flood insurance is not cheap but it's something that has to be done. And sort of an aside, I'm in upstate New York here and I am not far from Phoenicia, New York. And Phoenicia is many miles inland from anybody of water but it's surrounded by creeks and mountains, the Catskill Mountains. And Phoenicia, when storm, when tropical storm Irene came to the metropolitan area, it bypassed the city but it slammed upstate New York and Massachusetts and Connecticut. So the towns up here, which as I said, many miles inland from an ocean or a river or the Hudson River are also incorporating to various degrees how to make their properties more resilient from rising floodwaters and stuff like that. So it's something that many communities are looking at not just the coastal cities. Thank you for that very thorough response. I appreciate that. And I'm really happy to hear that New York has taken very pragmatic approaches to flood water and rising sea level mitigation efforts. Louisiana, post Katrina, the state formed something called the Louisiana Recovery Authority. And it unfortunately was not as successful as what the state has done. I mean, it did allow people to actually rebuild in very low lying areas, which is really unfortunate. But I'm really happy to hear that there are states that are being very smart. Well, we were, you know, it was like a wake up call of the most extreme, in the most extreme way. And it's just like, it's like the same thing with earthquakes here. When people think of earthquakes, they think of California, they don't think of, you know, the New York metropolitan area being subject to earthquakes or the cities on a seismic fault. But there is a seismic fault running under 120th fishery over by the Manhattanville campus. And one of the things that Columbia had to do was they had to ensure that the buildings that are going up as part of the Manhattanville campus, you know, adhere to seismic standards, you know, because the earth does move from time to time. And to make things, if things weren't complicated as in a part, very much complicated, all of the Manhattanville project is built in a bathtub similar to the World Trade Center. You know, so they had to build a bathtub first and then construct it on top of that hole within it. You know, so they had to, and also because they're close to the river, they have to meet the resiliency and sustainability stuff regarding flooding and things of that nature. Yeah. So yeah, these are the times that we live in. In terms of housing, it drives up the cost of housing, you know, making a house, making affordable housing resilient, there's a cost to that, you know, but it's something that we have to embrace and figure out how to make it work. Yeah, exactly. I'll just say one other thing, sorry. Actually, I think sorry, but I do think we're gonna have to go fairly soon. So I'm just gonna pass it over to Joe briefly. Well, I was just gonna interject to say the same thing that I think sensitive to using up more time since we've gone over quite a bit, but if it's okay, Edwin and Eric, if it's okay to maybe just have one other quick question in some way. Sure. Jenna. Hi Edwin. Hi Edwin, thanks so much for your presentation. I was wondering whether you could speak a bit more to what you think might have allowed the Frederick Douglas Boulevard rezoning to kind of successfully make its way through U-Lerp. I feel like in the past couple of years, we've seen other rezonings like the rezoning of Inwood and then more recently with Industry City get stalled or canceled and I was kind of curious if you thought there was like some specific ingredients that made that rezoning possible. Oh, well thank you for your question. Several things made that rezoning possible. The first thing was that it was a proposal that was brought to the department from the community or from an organization that was held in high regard by the community. And in case of Frederick Douglas, it was UTAP, the Urban Technical Assistance Project, which was affiliated with Columbia at that time. It still is, I guess. You know, they did the- It actually is interesting. Sidebar, sorry, kind of disbanded. Nobody knows about it at GSAP, but apparently it was kind of like a housing lab but before our time and actually did a lot of stuff. We need to learn about it. Yeah, they did a lot of stuff. They worked with communities on community-based plans and they worked on a Frederick Douglas Boulevard plan. And they went to the Manhattan Borough President siege of Virginia Field and she was a council member that represented Harlem, Central Harlem, you know, and she said she would support the plan if you go to city planning. And the plan basically was up zoning, a slight up zoning to a contextual zoning district from an R7-2 to an RNA. And on the mid-blocks, you know, R7A between Lennox and Seventh and between Seventh and Eighth, I believe, maybe slightly lower, maybe R7A and R6A around 123rd Street, we have Brownstone, low rise Brownstones, you know, so it was a very nuanced rezoning proposal respecting the differences in building scale and density between the mid-block and the avenues. You know, we embraced it, you know, because it came to us from outside, it wasn't like the city was coming out to the community, it was something that came from the community to us. And UTAP had done the work, they had advisory committees and advisory groups working with the community boards to get that consensus that they needed. They also put out a document as well for a Frederick Douglas Boulevard plan. You know, it should be in the university's, you know, archives about that because it's a considerable amount of scholarship put into that. The third thing is that it was all vacant land. I mean, it was vacant land, vacant building, so there was no issue of displacement because there was nothing to displace. You know, there was no, you know, didn't require demolition, it didn't require relocation or anything. We're basically building on sites that had been vacant for 20 or 25 years. You know, so it was very easy to sell that. You know, as opposed to a plan that would require some relocation, you know, or displacement and this plan did not have that. People wanted to see something happen on Frederick Douglas Boulevard. They saw construction activity happening south of 110th Street and other parts of the borough and it felt it was time before development to occur there. And also we had a mayor that was pro-development. We had Mayor Giuliani, who was a two-term mayor and he was seceded by Mayor Bloomberg. Both mayors, you know, were pro-development and both mayors had, you know, strong connections with the real estate community in the city to be able to facilitate those connections to get things done, you know, and, you know, so as a result, the plan was fully embraced and met the plan. In terms of URB, it was approved unanimously by community board nine, community board 10, the Manhattan Borough Board, the Manhattan Borough President, the city planning commission and the city council. And it's very rare that you have unanimous approval of a plan, a rezoning plan by everybody. Usually you have one person dissenting or something like that, but it was unanimous across the board, you know, so it was, we were very, very happy that we were able to achieve that outcome. And now you can walk on Frederick Douglass Boulevard safely. The only thing that I wish we had, we did not have the wherewithal to do it, was to maybe increase the amount of affordable housing rather than having it 20% affordable, maybe have it maybe at 30% affordable or something like that. 50-50 would not fly in that environment at that time. You know, you had to provide, you had to be skewed towards market rate as opposed to having half and half to get something built. But in hindsight, it was we were, had to come up with a more clever way to maybe up the percentage of affordable units. But I'm very happy to see that strip of land that Boulevard redeveloped to what it is now. It was just awful before. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, Edwin. I think we could probably keep talking for hours and hours, there's so many questions. Bernadette wrote in the chat that if you have any burning questions, participants, and you want to put it in the chat, we'll log them and maybe follow up with them. Edwin, future date, but I think we just do want to be sensitive to everyone's time and cut this now. But thank you, Edwin, so much for what was truly like a master class, I think, of Heartland history. That's so important. Should be required viewing for anyone entering GSEP. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. So I really appreciate it. I think we all do and yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, and I guess if there's any follow up questions, Joe, you'll follow them to me and I'll answer them and get the questions back to you. I do have one. Are you really offering that? Because that would be amazing, but we have a lot. No, I mean, really, I mean, really, planners like to talk, as you can tell. So if there's any follow up questions, shoot them to Joe and he'll shoot them to me. I do want to follow up with one of your colleagues who had a question about the African Barrow ground and how it was financed and stuff like that. So that I should be able to find out fairly easily, but if there's any other questions, please, you know, follow them to Joe and he'll follow them to me. Yeah, I can compile a list. Yeah, that's very generous. That'll be cool, yeah. Okay, well, thanks very much and thanks to everyone who attended and as Bert and I mentioned at the beginning, we have these every Friday, so feel free to turn in next Friday at one. So thank you. Love to have you there too, Edwin. Thank you so much. If you want to join them. Thank you. Well, you know what? If there is, if you want me to chat again, by all means reach out to me. And this has been cool, this has been great. And, you know, and thank you again. Take care, everyone, and stay safe. Bye. Bye, thank you.