 My name is Vishan Chakrabarty. I'm a professor of practice at Columbia University. I'm also an architect and urban planner. We have a fantastic panel, as well as some student presentations today. And so really the genesis of this is every spring I teach kind of a design workshop and it has a different theme or question around New York. This question seemed to be quite provocative. New York is dead. We're not trying to approach this with a binary yes or no answer tonight, I assure you. But we did feel like this is a question that's sort of in the zeitgeist somehow. It's in the air. And it's in the air in part because there are a treasure trove of articles and blog posts that are sort of bemoaning the death of New York in one way or another culturally. But there was one article that came out last year, in Harper's that caught my attention, caught many of our attention, maybe many of you have read it, by Kevin Baker called The Death of a Once Great City. And if you haven't read it, I really encourage you to read it because it makes a case that is far more nuanced than many of the things that we read along these lines. So it talks about things like chain stores or empty store fronts or a lot of development or gentrification. But it also talks about all of these things in a way I really appreciate, which is a non-nostalgic way. For those of us who remember New York after 9-11 or New York in the late 1970s, our crises were not always crises of gentrification and crowded subways. We had other problems and I do a lot of work in places like Detroit and Newark and East New York and frankly they would kill to have some of our problems. And so what I really appreciated about Kevin's article is that it tackled this question with nuance. So tonight's, the way we're gonna run this is I'm gonna introduce everyone who's participating and then Kevin is gonna give sort of a synopsis of his article for those of you who haven't read it. Then what our students did through the course of the semester and our students come from a variety of different disciplines, they use the article as a prompt and created design responses, urban planning responses. And so two of the students are gonna summarize all of those responses. I think there were six projects that they're gonna talk about. And then we're gonna have a panel discussion with people who in one way or another are involved with culture today in New York City and to talk about this question of the culture of the city. So with that, I'm gonna first do some introductions. Kevin Baker who is a graduate of Columbia College from 1980 when Columbia was a very different place is a novelist, historian and journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five novels including his four historical novels about New York, The Big Crowd and his City of Fire trilogy, Dreamland, Paradise Alley and Strivers Row. Kevin is also the author or co-author of four non-fiction books and the graphic novel Luna Park. He has written for many major periodicals and is currently a columnist and contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. He was a 2017 Guggenheim fellow for a history of America between the World Wars to be entitled The Invention of Paradise and at present he is completing a history of New York City baseball and working on a documentary script for Florentine films. So I am going to introduce the other panelists right before we start the panel discussion so we can break things up a little bit and also introduce the students after Kevin has spoken. So Kevin if you wanna join us please. Thanks for coming out tonight. New York is dead. Well that's been said a few times in the past and reports of its demise have always proved to be premature. How can New York be dead if here we are sitting in a cool new museum on the bowery, the bowery of all places on this fine Mondi Thursday? Isn't New York better than it ever was? You know Dr. Chakrabarty mentioned how my nuanced approach on New York and having lived here since 1976, one of the things I did right off of this article was make a list of the things that I didn't like from the old New York. And they included in no particular order crime, dirt, garbage left on the street for days, cockroaches, the Bronx burning down, homelessness, the discarded hypodermic needles on my building stoop in the morning, the discarded crack vials and packs of burned out matches on my building stoop in the morning, the way cockroaches scatter everywhere when you turn on the light, entire neighborhoods of Brooklyn looking like bombed out Dresden, subway cars covered in graffiti, subway cars on which only one door or no door opened when the train came, subway cars ventilated in summer rush hours only by a single fan that swung slowly around and around, just stirring up the hot air. Deindustrialization, the shabbiness of the old time square, those really big cockroaches that we called water bugs and that crunched like, well, kind of like crack vials under your feet. New York today is, in the aggregate, a wealthier, healthier, cleaner, safer, less corrupt, more tolerant, and better run city than it has ever been. But people don't live in the aggregate. For all of its shiny new skin and its shiny new numbers, what's most amazing is how little of its social dysfunction New York has managed to shed over the past four decades. The Bronx remains the poorest urban county in the country with almost 40% of the South Bronx still living below the poverty line. Drug overdoses kill three people a day in the city overall. Homelessness in the city is at or near a historic high and the worst per capita in the country with an average of 61,000 people requiring shelter every night. Most of the new homeless are not derelicts or the mentally ill, three quarters of them are families with children and at least one third of the adults in these families hold jobs. Most New Yorkers now work harder than ever for less and less. The poverty rate was still nearly 20% in 2015 as opposed to 15% in 1975 when the city was supposedly bankrupt. Those making less than the near poverty rate today which is for families of four means earning $47,634 a year or less, these people make up nearly half of New York's population. And not coincidentally, a similar situation exists in nearly every other city in America considered an urban success story. In trying to improve our cities we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. We signed on to political scams and mindless development strategies so grandiose that they have become even more destructive than the problems they were supposed to solve. This urban crisis of affluence only exemplifies our wider continuing crisis how here in America we no longer believe that we have any ability to control the systems we live under. Our city's public amenities have been systematically diminished, degraded, appropriated. Conservancies run our parks and the boards of business improvement districts control our streets. New York subway now has the worst on time performance of any major transit system in the world and it is the only major system in the world with fewer miles of track than it had during World War II. Our once incredible array of affordable or free public diversions and amenities will now cost you dearly. Just one example, a ticket for the Bronx Zoo in a borough with median income is under $35,000 is now nearly $37 for anyone over 12 while the rental of a single seat stroller is $10 and a wheelchair requires a $20 deposit lest you attempt to speed off with it apparently. All over New York vital public spaces now routinely suffer the worst acts of architectural vandalism since the original Pennsylvania station was ripped down over 50 years ago. You can see it everywhere. Astor Place now obliterated by Fumiko's Maki's Death Star building. The forest of interchangeable glass towers that is rapidly obscuring the Chrysler building grand central from Missal. The leveling of the West Village by NYU. The appalling enclave towers that have been built almost right up against St. John the Divines. You know, we weep over the burning of Notre Dame and we should but in a few years Notre Dame will be fully restored and enjoyed again by Parisians where it may be centuries if ever before we New Yorkers will be able to see all of St. John's again. Instead our skyline is dominated by the likes of Raphael Vanoli's 432 Park Avenue a structure openly modeled after a designer waste basket designed by a literal Nazi. The void in our public design and public art reflects the sensory deprivation of our neighborhoods where the complex and buried city has also been wiped out. Where once the iconography of New York honored ideas, enterprises, achievers and heroes whatever we may think of them now and we should debate what we think of them now today's new public spacers and structures speak a secret language of the cool and the knowing and inside joke that is lost on the rest of us. This is a city now in which children literally shiver in the shadows cast over Central Park by the super tall buildings along Billionaire's Row. More and more the condos in them belong to some of the worst people in the world oligarchs and kleptocrats hiding under the monikers of mystery buyers, land bankers who aren't even home from Fifth Avenue to Park, 49th Street to 70th almost one apartment and three now sits empty for at least 10 months a year. You know when I first wrote this article I was criticized for the ultimate heresy of being anti-capitalist by some hack in the New York Post. I mean this is pre-capitalist. This is how feudalism used to work. The king's preserve which the people aren't allowed into even if the king isn't there. To our shame we subsidized this sort of development for both individuals and businesses. At Hudson Yards that windy desolation we gave some of the richest corporations in existence $6 billion so that they could move 90% of the employees there a few blocks from where they were already working in Midtown. We tried to throw another $3 billion at Amazon to move into Long Island City but unfortunately for its sponsors there was a sudden outbreak of democracy. All of this is rationalized by the promise of the good things we will supposedly get the big new buildings, the fabulous jobs of the future. These are false promises and false idols. What we should ask ourselves is what is being replaced? This is a city now where we are being pushed inside away from each other. A city where everything rare or unique, everything of practical value, everything that pushes us together and makes this a great city. Jane Jacobs exuberant diversity and intricate ballet of the streets is being lost. The incidental city in all its glory. The cornice cinema, the independent bookstores dive bars and fine restaurants, fish stores and butcher shops and laundries all have been relentlessly driven out of my neighborhood just as they have been in hundreds of communities all over New York. What is replacing them are sometimes chain stores. In our new faceless monoculture we are inundated with pharmacies, bank branches, nail and beauty salons, Dunkin' Donuts, 7-Eleven, Starbucks or nothing at all. In a quick survey of my neighborhood last fall up and down Broadway from 93rd Street to 103rd, I found roughly one third of the shop frontage simply empty. Much of it had been that way for months and even years. This was mind you, nine years into an economic expansion in the richest city in the country. What I miss most of all though are my friends and neighbors, old and new, who are steadily being forced out of this New York. Instead, my neighborhood like so many others is now made up more and more of millionaires living above these empty store fronts. Those who are not lucky enough or a student enough to grab the money must lead an increasingly hard scrabble existence if they want to survive. And any idea of community is steadily eroded. We're becoming a city of transience, of pop-up stores and temporary workers, of tourists and Airbnbs in empty city. The things that are lost will never be found again and the new things we have received in their place are literally empty and spiritually devoid of meaning. Thank you. Sorry to be such a downer. Kevin, thank you. I especially wanna thank you for making me Dr. Chuck Ravardi, who is my father and probably the son he wanted. That's okay. Um, so, you know, so what would typically happen with something like this with that kind of provocation is we then have a panel discussion and everyone would argue. But, and I agree with Kevin on some things and disagree with others, but that's not really the main issue. You know, one of the things that I find the most interesting about this line of thought, especially, I've been teaching at Columbia for about a decade now, is, you know, if you look at our population, our growth rates are actually faster than what people anticipated. We're about 8.6 million people as a city today. And a lot of that is driven by young people. And what I find actually over the course of time teaching is that most international students that we teach usually come to us at one point or another and say they want to stay in New York for a couple of years or the rest of their lives. So, one of my questions is, if the city has become this desolate place, why do all of these young interesting people want to continue to be here? And so, we thought the best way to have insight both into that question and also this question of, if you agree with Kevin, hook, line, and sinker, part of the question becomes for us as folks who teach in a school that is largely a professional school, schools that are teaching people to become architects or urban designers or real estate developers or a whole bunch of other things. But if you agree with Kevin, what's the instrumentality of what they're supposed to do? What are they supposed to do when they go out in the world if they agree with this kind of line of thought? So, to try to help us address and understand that, two students, Zana Mengesha and Amanpreet Singh Dugal are going to present a summary of six projects that the students did over the course of the semester in response to Kevin's article. So, with that, I'm going to invite Zana and Amanpreet to come up and show you our stuff. Of course, came up with six responses to this question that range from policy all the way down to design and housing reform. For the first project, it's called Living in Parallel. It's a proposal that looks at injecting diversity in segregated neighborhoods. New York City is experiencing a drastic increase in population that comprises of an increasingly diverse demographic. However, the diversity of different racial, ethnic, and economic groups are segregated. The proposal imagines ways to increase the mixing of these groups by injecting diversity in the places that lack it and preserving the existing diverse neighborhoods. The pilot project for this is proposed at the currently dormant subway line in Queens called the Queensway Bridges. The northern part of this subway line presently lacks diversity while the southern part is more diverse. So for the northern part, revitalizing the subway line will lead to an increase in land values in the adjacent properties. And through the mechanism of value capture, the project seeks to generate revenue to fund the injection of an inclusionary housing and an inclusionary commercial program. By creating a level above the subway tracks for laying down this program, we can avoid encountering high real estate prices of the ground level and preserve the existing neighborhood culture. For the southern part, revenue from value capture of the adjacent properties are used to create a public park at the ground level and places for an inclusionary commercial program. This program relies on larger big box retail stores at the ground level to subsidize the inclusion of smaller businesses at the level above. Being developed around a subway stop, these smaller businesses can use the heightened pedestrian activity at this upper level to support their businesses. These injections are imagined as small scale insertions in the neighborhoods to preserve their unique experiences and create a more pedestrian friendly environment. The public spaces created at the interfaces of the subway line and neighborhoods will promote a healthy interaction among different ethnic and economic groups. Here are some of the views of what these elevated spaces might look like. Our second proposal is called Workshop. It's a project that creates a network of making and repair spaces in currently vacant Manhattan storefronts. Rising rents that have created a dead streetscape of vacant storefronts is a problem, but no one can be blamed on, but the blame cannot fall on the ultra wealthy alone. Shown is a low estimate of vacancies as mapped by a project called vacant New York. We have a crisis of cultural malaise on our hands. The expectation of a frictionless lifestyle is an inextricable cause of the dead streets. Increased social stratification and a huge amount of consumer waste. This project does not propose new buildings, but creates a network of making and repair spaces in order to respond to the critique that New York has in fact become boring. Instead of perpetuating the fringe nature of maker culture, this proposal brings it to the mainstream by putting the program in storefronts distributed throughout the city. Letting that enliven the streets by putting production in former spaces of consumption. New Yorkers can buy new goods, get a pair of shoes we sold, buy a gift or household item, socialize with neighbors, learn how to repair a watch, trade in a TV, fix a cracked iPhone, take a suing class, or find out about local events. Spaces become a more democratic, more New York specific type of convenient. For our third proposal, they don't build them like they used to. An analysis of economic and social realities of building housing today, as opposed to the good old days. Many New Yorkers see the arrival of large, flat, boxy, high rises as a result of society's changes in aesthetics or developers out just to make a quick buck. The reality is that many factors have influenced multi-family projects. Not just in New York, but the world over. Why are both buildings, why are old buildings beloved? Why are new buildings simply tolerated? Can we combine the best of both? By comparing the construction budgets from 1932 to those of 2019, we can see a large jump in costs attributed to mechanical and electrical services. HVAC, security, building systems and technology command more of the budget. Less money for interiors and exteriors. Additionally, the percentage of budgets spent on labor and materials has inverted. Labor must be conducted locally while materials can be sourced globally from cheaper markets. As workers' rights, safety requirements, job complexities and bonding insurance requirements have increased, rightly so has compensation. You can see from the picture to the left that the iron worker building Colombia's Morningside campus was not harnessed in and had almost no worksite safety precautions. Also as global markets expand and prices for local products increase, international options become more attractive to help keep budgets in line. As markets and materials become more global, designs become more homogenous and create generic buildings that no longer reflect their context. So what can we do to avoid this? We must take tomorrow's construction technology and use it to create more community-conscious buildings built for permanence and future generations. We do not need to recreate the aesthetics of yesteryear, but by studying what is so beloved about historical architecture, we can craft our buildings and policies accordingly to make buildings in communities that will be as loved tomorrow. Incentivizing use of local, durable materials that lend to the context of New York City creates a sense of place, community, and creates long-lasting buildings that are innately sustainable. Exploring technologies such as mass timber construction and automated fabrication along with smart, logistics-based sourcing and delivery. Reducing parking minimums, especially in transit-rich areas, autonomous vehicles will make parking structures obsolete. What kind of future do you want for New York? Our next proposal is demographic conflicts, a proposal that turns the sidewalk into a framework for community services. This project does not see any demographic be they tourists, low-income immigrants, or billionaires as a problem in New York, but argues that the system is and should be inclusive of all demographics. The theater district, north of Times Square and south of Central Park has been deeply affected by the global tourism industry with generic-go shops and fast-food restaurants most prevalent. Services for locals, especially low-income immigrants who support the tourism industry, is significantly lacking. The program's in plan at the bottom, a healthcare counter consultation and temporary exam room. In the middle, a group of immigrants learning English using public seating space. And in the upper portion, immigrant services and career consultation with counter and roundtable discussion. Note the difference in the two diagrams are the directions of the arrows. The diagram on the right shows a muddying of too much production consumption. The left shows a genuine microcosm of diverse behaviors in the city. This is what makes New York, New York. Urban playground, bridging New York City's racial barrier. Today, New York City's racial barrier remains prominent along community district border lines. In fact, children from different ethnic groups still live within their racial bubbles while adults might engage in cultural exchange across these border lines. The idea that urban streets were meant for cars and not for people is rooted in people's minds. Children, the city's most important population, do not have a culture of playing in the street with neighborhood friends. Creating child directed playgrounds in strategic locations along today's most noticeable African American white border line between the upper east side and east Harlem would burst a racial bubble and bridge a racial barrier through children and thus their parents. Bike culture in New York City is a project to develop a more diverse and safer biker culture. There are 120 miles of protected bike lanes in New York City. However, they are not physically or lawfully protected from cars. People often use bike lanes for unloading, ubers and taxis pull into the lanes to pick up passengers and force bikers into traffic. Only 2.5 of commuting New Yorkers use bikes compared to 7.2 in Portland and 25% in the Netherlands. Among the bikers, only 20% are female which is the lowest in North American cities. These next two slides show proposals to develop a more diverse and safer biker culture. There are two ways to perceive biking, either as a sport or as a way to get around like walking on the sideway or hopping on the subway. This first site is in Chinatown Moth Street where the slow bike lane is integrated with the street market. The second is in St. Mark's Lower East Side where the slow bike lane is combined with the parklet and waiting areas for restaurants. These interventions create different street and social conditions, accommodating a huge variety of New Yorkers. These are just a few of the ways that we've imagined the continued life of New York City. And I just really want to, could all the students stand up please? I just want to thank them all. It's not so easy to come down to the new museum and present your work. And I should point out, by the way, this is not design studio work. This is a design workshop that happens Friday morning separate from their design studios. So this is quite an undertaking. I also want to thank Evan Saranen who co-taught the class with me and put a lot of time in with the students to get those presentations where they are. So I am now, yes, thank you Evan. So I'm going to now introduce our panel. Jose Esparza-Choncui is the Executive Director and Chief Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Most recently he was the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago which he joined in 2016 at the MCA. He organized a major collection to celebrate the museum's 50th anniversary and curated solo shows of Tania Perez-Cordova and Jonathan, sorry, Jonathan's De Andre as well as a major commission with Federico Herrero. Jose will continue to oversee a collection show of recent acquisitions and a large scale retrospective on the life and work of Lina Bovardi co-organized with the Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo and Museo Mex in Mexico City. Risa Shoup is the Executive Director of Spaceworks, a New York City based non-profit cultural community development organization dedicated to expanding the supply of subsidized rehearsal, studio and community space for New Yorkers. They do this in collaboration with artists, partners and neighborhood residents. Spaceworks is committed to preserving, protecting and restoring cultural legacies in collaboration with partners and neighbors. Risa has worked for the past 14 years in NYC focusing on the production of subsidized space for arts and culture that elevates and strengthens local communities. They serve on the board of naturally occurring cultural districts in New York and the Invisible Dog Arts Center and on the Planning Committee for the American Museum of LGBTQ plus history and culture. They were a consultant for Create NYC, New York City's first ever cultural plan. And finally, my dear colleague, Galea Solonoff who is a graduate of GSAP from 94 is an associate professor of practice at Columbia GSAP and a principal of SAS Solonoff Architecture Studio in Chelsea and a registered architect. She has worked with over 40 international artists creating installations in homes, museums, airports and the public way. As architect of Dia Beacon, Solonoff collaborated with artist Robert Irwin, Richard Sarah and Michael Heiser among others to interpret their sketches into permanently built artworks. For the Jewish Museum and the Institute for the Study of Ancient History, Solonoff has engaged in ongoing assignments to design temporary exhibits ranging from Shigal to Modigliani, Islamic manuscripts to Burley Marks in ancient history. Her expertise extends to art-centered restaurants such as Kapo Masa for Larry Gagosian and 980 Madison which features works by Picasso and Russon daughters at the Jewish Museum with a mural by Myra Kalman. At GSAP she engages in discussions of art, architecture and how to further their public democratic mission in the cultural and political sphere. So I could ask Kevin and all of the panelists to come up please. So you can tell the panel was kind of handcrafted of people who are really engaged in culture in the city and culture in the here and now not in I think an older version of it. So I decided to go open-ended. So we're gonna talk for a while and then take some audience questions. So just initial responses from what they saw in the students. I quite liked it. I thought it was great to see all these young people with these terrific ideas for changing. So if all of those projects happen would you write an article called The Life of the City? Sure, sure. How Columbia is changing the city it's in. I thought they made some great points. I mean I'm one of these people gets probably carried away about old architecture but it's important to remember how that rested upon the bones of so many working people. The old rule of thumb was a death for every floor which is probably an exaggeration but as you saw from that picture this was not a safe way to work and that's why things were so cheap. You could get these terrific artisans who would come in from places like Italy and make more money maybe than they had in Rome or wherever but we're really being exploited and working in very dangerous conditions and so that costs more and that's a problem that's a good problem that we address. It still happens it's just no longer Italians. No, no, I mean I know and this is one of the horrible things that goes on too in my block it's zoned by this big corporation relatively benign toward the tenants but it brings in, it gets tax breaks and ups all our rents by doing improvements to the buildings and the way they do improvements is they bring in these teams of obviously undocumented workers from Asia and from Latin America who are literally not allowed to speak to us they're out repointing the brick in February and we're trying to give them a glass of water and they're not allowed to speak to us so they'll be fired so this horrendous exploitation still goes on but at least for unionized workers it's better. If you can get in the union. Yes. But not to belabor that what I would say about the student work is impressed at the depth of research across a wide variety of sectors whether it's labor statistics as we're talking about or transportation or this really beautiful notion of the opportunity of a vacant storefront and the other thing I wanna say Vishan just before the students be in a spoke you asked or you mentioned that students always tell you that they wanna stay here and why do they wanna stay here if the city is dead and I think the student work exemplified why people these students included want to stay here because it's still a magical place and it's still a place that is filled with opportunities particularly in light of all of the inequities that Kevin goes through in his article that we are all aware of that we see every day even if we try to shut our eyes to it these are all problems that perhaps we are excited to solve and hopefully to solve equitably. I would say I would follow Risa's point that what the students do is to understand first that there are problems and the reason why they probably want to stay here is because we know the problem of New York we all are concerned right we all the reason why we come to discuss New York is dead as a proposition is because there are reasons for concern and so what I think the students are giving us is the sense that with data one can do specific recommendations there are no pine the sky dreams there is specific you can do X, Y, and Z to moral type of recommendation that's what I really appreciate about the connection between data and design in the case of the studio and also that when you have big problems solutions are in a small increments it's not a wholesale let's clean up everything and bike lanes, more housing here maybe a different combination when you do when you prepare a budget for a large building so maybe that thing and it's also easier to replicate small things you know we all like I feel like a really common trope in the discussion of closed store friends there is bookshops right and several months ago I had the opportunity to visit a community bookstore in Washington Heights that's not part of the community league of the Heights but is allied with them and this is you know cloth community league of the Heights services Washington Heights with a variety of commercial enterprises and service provision and again there's this community book shop that's next to a couple of their store friends and together they combine they create community hubs places where people in that community particularly the Dominican and other Latinx folks that have made that neighborhood so vibrant feel comfortable gathering and sharing with one another including receiving the services from the providers that are located there if you can do that there in a collection of small store friends in a way that makes sense for that community then there's hope that you can replicate that somewhere else in a way that makes sense for Brownsville or Prospect Heights or you know whatever neighborhood you would like to focus on but I think this point about small recommendations is a great one and also because it's easy to replicate the small it's a great observation I think actually quite a variety of scales so the first project which takes on the Queensway was sort of the anti-highline right they were trying to design a kind of zoning and an idea that would give you a very very different results than what the highline did and someone who's very involved in the highline in the early years has come under a lot of criticism now for a lot of actions that would actually have been very hard to have foreseen but my point is just you know so some of these projects were operating at a very large scale a bike lane across Manhattan even the empty storefront project wasn't about one storefront it was about a network and actually the design of an organization or an institution which I found very interesting and then you had this other scale of like could you build these kind of makeshift pop-up playgrounds that were sat on racial lines you know in different neighborhoods and so so just a question for all of you is like and I think it's an interesting thing for the students to contemplate is this about you know kind of acupuncture like a kind of urban acupuncture at the scale of the small which you guys were just discussing because it is replicable and it's achievable right like it doesn't require large scale you know institutional action necessarily or are the problems that Kevin laid out so large right that you you know that it's hard to just rely on kind of urban acupuncture I mean John's analysis of kind of why we don't build buildings the way buildings used to get built you know these are really large scale systemic issues and they have to do with building code and they have to do with sort of taking on not just the development industry but government I mean there's a huge number of things having to do with code that drive a lot of these things and I'm again in the interest of avoiding binaries I'm not saying it's one or the other but I'm just interested if you could talk about scale of action well to me you know New York is not there but it's a high functioning and so and you know our drug it's money and subsidies and so our fixes are hats on yards and full ton station and the the Oculus and this idea that there's you know when I came to New York in the 80s I'm working architecture I know what cocaine rush feels like and bright lights big city and so this is what we get you know there's always an excuse there's always a deadline there's always somebody's birthday there's always a model that you have to take across the country there's always a reason why you can do another line work more hours and this is what we're getting into it's like we are fixing this acupuncture will not make it it's like we need sometimes does not look great that health it's a process it's an engagement it's work and so I think that you know jumping into the main discussion I think that when right now in the community of architect of architects at Columbia there's a lot of discussion about the last project you know hats on yards everyone is focusing whether they like it they don't like it it's not really about whether you like a particular project or not but it's about what is it saying about us as a city homelessness for kids you know what is the excuse to have more than 10,000 kids I think that's an excellent point and I think hudson yards is a great example of how not to develop in the city you know the city was moving toward the west side anyway the rocks that long ago rotted the whole port of New York and moved to Elizabeth and Newark a long time ago early sixties you know so something had to be done there with the city old people and old developers was to rebuild the infrastructure there and to provide you know subway stops which they did a little of and schools and you know have the area well policed and then see what was there the city cannot and should not be massively subsidizing some of the wealthiest corporations in the world to go there and that's exactly what it did I mean we need much more of a you know if you build it they will come model and this goes on all over I mean it's willing to bring people in the subway to Yankee stadium it's another that throw a billion plus dollars at how starburner who instantly announced that he can't sign expensive free agents because of his debt service you know he he's taken more than his debt service out of the taxpayers of New York many times over you know this goes on and this was unfortunately the idea with Amazon it's this sort of almost Stockholm syndrome mentality New York still has left over from the nineteen seventies where it's like unless we throw money at everyone they won't want to come here people want to come here you know young people rich people you know developers everybody wants to come here we need to build us the city should be in the business of building a society around that not just subsidizing development well also people are here right and I think you know the reason I'm thinking about the small in relationship to the student work and also your article Kevin is because I think these challenges that we're talking about inclusive of code requirements and other bureaucratic hurdles those things can be overwhelming you try to consider them on the largest scale but again if you think of them on a smart the scale of your own neighborhood I think they become manageable when working together with your neighbors and others to solve them and I feel like it's not it's my focus or my interest in the small is not about pinpointing pinpointing inoculation in different places but again it's the ability to collectivize replicate and then suddenly you do see the seismic shift that I think we all are talking about is necessary in order to strengthen the health of this city again especially for the those of us who are here and have those who have been here for a very long time many times also the small and maybe to go back to the student work and these kind of like betterment like acupuncture projects that are kind of like small scale and in specific neighborhoods I mean those usually if they're successful those usually also lead to big corporate investment so this the small and these kind of like I mean I work at a small institution that we kind of like do we all do as individuals and as small organizations we do what we can but usually if you're successful you become a big institution or you get big investment and if there's big investment there's displacement so it's I mean it really is a much larger systemic problem as some I mean not to be a pessimist but really we began with that tone I mean it's kind of sad also because I only recently moved to New York and you're telling me that it's dead clap your hands but you can get good drugs and a rent-stabilized apartment so you know I have to I have to kind of pause on forgive me if you're not an architect or don't care about architecture one-wit but I have to sort of pause on the architectural question here for a second because a lot has been said tonight already about I mean Kevin you had a litany of architects and architecture that you hate and you know and you know it is interesting this I actually was at a community board meeting for a master plan we're doing in Queens and someone stood up and said you know we don't want any stark attacks working in our neighborhood this is an interesting interesting change right so this is I mean that's a horrible word but at the same time you know at the other night I was at a dinner with Del Magold and we were talking about the studio museum and Harlem and David Ajay is doing that project and I think that project is actually an important project and I just worry that somehow we are you know we're just lumping everything together here right somehow and what I mean and going back to the analysis of the lack of architectural quality in the city you know a lot of us are old enough to remember a city in terms of architecture where you know form followed finance right and it really wasn't until I mean we could pinpoint maybe some I keep looking at Kathleen because she knows exactly what I'm talking about we could pinpoint a couple of different moments in post 9-11 right the World Trade Center say but I would also say right but I would also say that you know and there's probably gonna be an audible hiss when I say his name you know there's a lot of condos on the west side where you know a developer for one of the first real times thought design would add value and design would add leverage and that was not for those of you who are newer to the city condos were barely a thing in the city before 2000 right they were just like that's not what developers built and so I'm not trying to whether it's Vignoles building or other people buildings in terms of scale or whatever that Heatherwick thing is but I do not want to see a regression right back to this world where we stopped believing in design quality either I mean which was not that long ago so I just how how do we make a how do we have a more nuanced conversation about this I think we need to separate form from process you know I'm talking about the process I actually love Rafael Vignoles building on 57th Street I think Thomas Heatherwick it's a very crafty very ingenious maker of things and I have good words to say about most of the people that are designing big buildings in New York City at the moment what I'm talking about is the process that enable to use taxpayers money to subsidize construction of large projects that are not for public use I have no problem if somebody wants to build a beautiful building I'm all for it if somebody wants a tax break for building a beautiful building we can discuss if somebody wants a mortgage from me it wants our money I mean we all just paid taxes a few days ago that needs to be considered so I'm trying to one thing if we do a community investment if we say the best return for our tax dollars is to invest it with Oxford and to invest it with related I'm all for it but I want the return if I give $6 billion can I connect? if I give $6 billion to do a Hudson Yards and that brings me back $10 billion in revenue over time great can I just look I'm not going to defend any project in particular but I think it's important to understand the theory of the case because frankly the press on all of this has been wildly irresponsible the New York Times article that claimed Hudson Yards had a $6 billion subsidy was grossly mistaken and it was lumping all sorts of things into that number and this is being purposefully misrepresented right now and it has to do with the insanity of the White House that is trickling down into a kind of pendulum swing in the other direction where everyone feels completely fine about throwing around misrepresentations of tax you could hate Amazon for all sorts of reasons for all the people who said that $3 billion should have gone to schools and subways produce the $3 billion because they're not coming let's be clear about this I'm not a big fan of Amazon because so much is being made about the subsidy point that $3 billion doesn't exist it was only going to exist if Amazon generated about $30 billion in new tax revenue Hudson Yards you said you wanted to see the returns there is a white paper being produced right now that's going to talk about how much Hudson Yards is going to add to the city's coffers because the bottom line here is this I don't know that we need to overly belabor this topic but after 9-11 the city's budget was $43 billion the budget we just passed was $82 that's an enormous increase in discretionary revenue that we use so when Risa goes and chases Cultural Affairs funding or we build a new park I'm working on 100% affordable housing project in East New York we're going to use a massive amount of city dollars that money comes from these projects and it's just being purposefully misconstrued in the press right now you can hate these projects for all sorts of reasons but I think there's already an irrational person in the White House who's willing to just totally put the facts aside to make polemical and ideological points we should not do the same I have to really disagree and you wrote very eloquently about Amazon defending it for the times and I think there's a legitimate debate to be had about it but one of the things I hate about this whole process is we don't have the debate this is done as much as possible without democratic votes without democratic debates by this tyrannical governor we have and others the Hudson Yards which took an enormous amount of money out of the public coffers and the MTA was again done without making a single politician have to vote for it both of those statements run through it went through Euler the city council voted on it the city council did not vote on Hudson Yards the city council did not in 2005 there was not a vote on it I was there I don't know what you're talking about in 2005 there's a recorded vote Gifford Miller voted for the project and on Amazon I think what is important to understand is that every single politician who came out against it Jimmy Van Bremmer Mike Geanaris all signed documents that said that they were going to be proponents of Amazon before they came so there's a lot of political chicanery that goes on around all of this stuff again you can hate all this stuff for all sorts of reasons but we have to be fact based so we have a long term relationship these have been going on so we first got shelter and then we decided how we're going to do the next thing and how we're going to so prosperity and cities have been connected for a long time I'm all for a prosperous city I'm all for large companies and I'm all for diversity of income but there are urgencies and there is budgets and somehow I think we are all here today because there's not enough discussion about what are the relationships between money and buildings it's not clear to many of the students it's not very clear to me and yes there has been votes about different things but for example if you are worried about Hudson Yards again not as a building but as a political process an entire half that is being built right now so I think the reason why I'm here today is because I feel like if we're going to say something let's say it now if there is not enough oversight let's start the process now it's not enough I mean we are architects we can read plans we can tell the rest of the population what is going to happen and we can have a spreadsheet and look at the different costs you know if you say the money is not there most of the money that we talk about it's nowhere the money is a construction that depends on trust and depends on the city and it's constantly being updated and so the idea that there is connection between the large apparatus of making capital visible to real estate it's part of this construction that keeps building and I think yes I think you have a point that some of this is legitimate infrastructure building I think like for instance out of the 6 billion in Hudson Yards maybe about 3.6 billion with the figure built for subway for streets and all I think that's a legitimate thing to do to improve what was a rotting district Amazon is not getting the full 3 billion was not supposed to get the full 3 billion up front I think they were supposed to get the 1.8 billion up front and it also distorts the process you talk about these distortions and disinformation claims like Amazon is going to produce 25,000 well-paying jobs or 40,000 well-paying jobs in 25 years neither Amazon Cuomo as he decided to call himself about this or Bill de Blasio or Jeff Bezos or God in His Heaven knows if Amazon is going to produce jobs by the year 2044 this is just high in the sky this is just imagining and saying oh these are the jobs of the future and they're great and they'll pay a lot of money so we need to bring them in who knows what will happen with Amazon the 25 years from now and frankly even if it is successful I really have qualms about making the city so dependent upon one corporation well that's it we have a lot of corporations we don't have a lot of people in the city already but the jobs were tied to the tax breaks you only got the tax breaks as the jobs arrived but let's shift from this for a second because I think the way to shift is to say okay so folks have a lot of issues with Hudson Yards folks have a lot of issues with Amazon what is the future growth approach and no growth approach but the larger question is what's the health approach and because the thing is and Risa made a kind of strong case for the folks who are here right but I'm still I was born in Calcutta and so I speak Bengali and so you know who else speaks Bengali a lot of Bangladeshies and a lot of Bangladeshies are cab drivers and waiters and waitresses in the city and so I talk to them in Bengali which is fun and I hear a lot about their stories how long they've been here and not a one of them says you know gee I wish I was in a union right most of them are coming here because they want a job that's better than the opportunities they had back home which is still I am still corny enough to believe in that statue in the harbor and there is this thing about newcomers the city is about newcomers still right and we've got a president who's saying the country's full right and are we going to sit here and say the city's full and so if we're not going to say that but Hudson Yards and Amazon and all these things are not the answer what is a healthy way to deal with this I will say that I think it's threaded throughout everything that we've been all the topics that we've been addressing is sharing information or making information available to people and for sure we want accurate information but just thinking about the conversation that you guys are having about who voted when and where and how on Hudson Yards there's also issues around access to those meetings and when they are held in light of the schedules of folks who drive cabs or work a regular 9-5 or work 5-9 I think one way we can improve the health of our city is by better sharing of information and greater opportunities for public comment on public developments which I think also Galia ties into your point about like yes do the building do the development but show me the return and give and give more people the opportunity to see what that return on those developments is going to be so you know first of all we all have a skin in the game right we all you know it's like I'm a critic but I'm also a doer here and so it's not that I'm criticising from from above it's like I'm in the mix and so what is it that we have to do I think we do have problems the first sign of health is to recognize that you have to work on a plan to get better and that not every day and not everything will be perfect and so I think that taking stocks I can think of two problems that are really important for our health as a city one is children homelessness I see no reason to having a deacons like you know you talk about in your article about how New York is becoming these deacons like London London in the 1900s and so there's no reason to tolerate that and the other thing is the sideways when you talk to restauranters and I do work with restaurants and one of the things that make restaurants in New York great is that you can have people working until late hours that get home taking care of it's something that needs to happen and it requires ingenuity because it's a 24-7 city and I think keeping working with density that is something that you have pioneer in New York City and thinking about how to integrate diversity not just ethnic diversity but diversity of income I think one of the things that we talk a lot about different skin colors different gender but we really talk about different class and different income and so I think integrating that more into the fabric of the city is something that is an urban approach and an architectural approach I was also invited to this panel and maybe it's because I work in a small organization that somehow is still around that was founded in 1982 and it's kind of connected to other cultural organizations that maybe even the Studio Museum in Harlem from 1968 to the New Museum from I believe it's 1977 so they're all kind of like from that era 70s, early 80s organizations many of them are now major museums such as this one or what the Studio Museum will eventually become and we somehow are perpetually precarious I mean I think about this a lot as well a reason very likely is because there's no real market around architecture as an exhibition whereas there is a market around art so the supporters of art and organizations are much wealthier and generous so you can support Storefront as well but and maybe it's good that Storefront hasn't become a major museum I don't know I mean it really I've been asking myself this question a lot like is would it be better for us to become a three-story building with a great exhibition like with a great exhibition in spaces and have weathered proof rooms where we can actually get loans and make new commissions and it could be great but it's also kind of like the spirit of Storefront is really everybody always only speaks about Storefront as this kind of that's what they like about it the scrappiness of it yeah I mean Marcia Tucker when she started this museum in the 1970s she had this rule that every 10 years the museum was going to sell everything and with that money buy all new art and so that hasn't happened right the institution has become I don't know that's the new museum collection now it doesn't have a collection and so the idea of the mission I think it's a really key idea and in some cases sometimes museums grow for no particularly good reason other I don't know I think you have a very good point I mean one of the things I was appalled at in doing this article was how much nonprofits Cooper Union NYU and wrecking the West Village with this new complex and these and these various museums how responsible they have been for this kind of crazy expansion you know it's both the next one is now the Museum of Natural History which is going to wreck that beautiful park there and build who knows what you sound very much against anything new you know I mean no I'm very concerned because you know people should understand West End Avenue was a massive real estate development project the Chrysler building most of the buildings that are beloved in New York City and are over-built the Empire State Building so I worry about this it feels like you want to put the city in a museum but one of the things and I think that is a fear we get trapped in Amber and we become Venice a lot to see from the people running some of these great institutions which are largely untaxed and own a large amount of land in New York is some kind of sense of there are things that should be preserved and just kept as they are we just brought Domino through landmarks and there's a pretty significant set of landmarks laws in this city I mean you know this is not it's not kid stuff but I mean I actually I don't think it's about preserving I think it's about taking care of the people that are hurting I don't think it's about preserving I totally agree because you know you said Venice I actually my bigger fear is Paris because most of the Paris we visit is only about 17% of Paris and we're talking about poor people living on a periphery this is what will happen to us and is happening to us right now I mean there's a great book called The Great Inversion which talks about suburbanization of poverty in the United States and a lot of that's happening oh yeah you're talking about homeless and we're working on a supportive homeless project in our office right now the fact is the reason we don't have these projects going up is because communities will fight them tooth and nail you know this is not there is the funding the mayor's office tries to do it right try to site homeless housing try to do it in the West Village see how far you get with a group of progressives like people are using Jane Jacobs tactics right and using sort of like that idea of organization to fight these things the same way they were fighting affordable housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park this is happening all over the city right and that's why these things are so difficult to build in many cases it's because the people so I don't want you're saying that the reason why we don't have homeless housing is because nobody wants them I think that the reason why we don't have homeless housing is because we do not give ownership of the issue to the people that are suffering the problem we try to create a situation like we try to create affordable housing as a byproduct of luxury housing rather than what it needs to be if there is a group of people I'm working on a project in the Bronx it's a community center it's organized by the Mary Mitchell community all the people they don't own the house their houses they rent but they bought a piece of land from the city and they're building a community center for themselves and they are not owners they are building a field and a community center for themselves in land they bought instead of buying their houses so what to concentrate is that in the short term like a cocaine fix you know but what is it going to a long drag instead what is it going to make healthy in the long run so we have some questions Columbia when I was there was actually forming fake corporations to buy a land they were solving their problem with the community and I think they've gotten somewhat better about that and I don't particularly mind the fact that you know Tucky says tuck it away has been moved out of his you know storage space where the new biomedical place is going up and these are just really disappointing buildings and I think you know when was the last time Columbia built a great building you know I mean 1898 oh come on oh that's you just don't like new architecture come on this thing the business school was a good building okay someone else someone else cock until you have to take that back so Galea you said before with regard to supportive and affordable housing like who's being centered in that so I think when we think about how large institutions become you know mega scale landowners there's some inevitability to that and if nothing else it's already the case right so I appreciate this add-on to the question of well what can be done and I think the question for me the idea is well then how does this institution which you know needs tuition and other revenue streams in order to survive and again it's a foregone conclusion that it's there it's happening we can't necessarily stop it but how can the institution consider centering the people who are not already part of it the people who live next to it who run the coffee shop that you know bring that where the students go I don't mean to be too romantic about this at all but just how the first question for me is okay so how do those institutions start to think about their neighbors and if you and if they start to think about their neighbors and provide opportunities for those neighbors whether they're workers or residents or what have you to speak to what they want and be centered in these conversations I think that there are many ways that either through programming service delivery or the opening up of open spaces as well as built spaces can be used to effectively bring the broader community both that of the institution and that of the neighborhood or in the case of lots of educational facilities multiple neighborhoods together but this first question is how do you re-center or de-center the institution and re-center the neighborhood itself so the way I see it is that since the Chicago School of Economics and Toucher and all that we have been we have been very successful at making more money out of money but also allowing money to concentrate in fewer hands so I think we can continue doing what we're doing but changing the model where where do the benefits go to so the same system but with a more beneficial outcome and a more quick little example would be something like up until a few years ago co-ops were limited to getting 20% of their revenue from the shops on the street that was the only that was the amount they could get from that that was ripped away I think Charlie Rangel pushed it through and got that changed and now they can get any amount of money back so I know in my neighborhood they're no longer paying maintenance fees but they put all the mom and pop shops in their buildings out of business that sort of runaway capitalism could be contained at least and change somewhat by relatively easy pieces of legislation another one would be to stop using this 421A tactic where we say we'll give you this huge tax break for your enormous development so if you put a few affordable apartments in there that will then go into the market in like 30 years or something I mean the amount of that is incredible I think it was 1.4 billion last year take some of that money and actually build public housing so I just want to go left of my colleagues for a second look because I don't think it's the system as it is today actually I mentioned thatcher and the Chicago school and Reagan and Milton Friedman I mean the thing is in Reagan's 1986 tax reform public housing the federal government in the United States cannot build public housing it is illegal and it has been illegal since 1986 and so we have the tale of sort of four presidencies FDR, LBJ Reagan and Trump and so you see this creation of a federal system and the destruction of a federal system over the course of those four presidents and I think that it is I mean this talk of a Green New Deal which interestingly and I think it's going to be fascinating to see how it plays out arguably is a pro-growth strategy has to resuscitate our belief in the public and that means that you know if I'm a government official and I'm trying to build not a 60-40 but 100% public housing building and it goes 5% over budget that you don't all eat me alive because I actually think the place where the neoliberals won the biggest victory is not over people who are already right wing but over people who are progressively leaning but who now equally believe government's incompetent because then what's left who's left not everything is going to be DIY you can't build an enormous public housing project or a subway system or a public park through just a series of small community actions there needs to be larger players who we have faith in that are competent and that means believing in ourselves as a public I hope the vessel ends up where the figures on the old Penn Station ended up in a dump in New Jersey this is just what I'll say about the zoning for Hudson Yards required a major public space where the vessel sits and I actually think the vessel is a zoning violation that the Vlaziu administration refused to enforce because the Vlaziu administration tends to think of design as an elitist enterprise and so my big issue with it is I don't want to comment on the architecture but I want to comment on the fact that it is supposed to be fully public space and instead that pauses incredibly tight and it's sort of crowbarred in there the vessel with so much urban Vaseline and I just think that's fundamentally a problem it's supposed to be public space in an unequivocal way not 700 people on tickets and an occasional rent out to a fashion show I mean an unequivocal public way I agree with you it's interesting I was bringing a client through different privately owned public spaces and Greenacre Park and Paley Park were both built by the public sector and Domino and they're all extraordinary public spaces now again should we have a different framework where we're not accounting on the private sector to build our public land of course but the thing is not everything has to be this way and I just think that again there's nuance in that kind of okay well thank you to everyone for coming thank you to the panelists Kevin especially thank you for being so anti-architectural in your views I want to especially thank the students I want to thank the new museum for hosting us to Lila who has been my partner in crime on this from the dean's office at Columbia and the dean herself who is a big supporter of this idea of combining a panel discussion of student work and taking on an interesting question so we're going to close tonight not with any further words but actually a little video to hopefully take you on your way as you think about whether New York City is dead