Myrtle and Flatbush Building Boom, From Above
We stopped by the offices of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership at 15 Metrotech Center last week. It turns out to be the perfect perch for keeping an eye on the Flatbush Extension building boom. Pictured here, clockwise from top right: 1) 180 Myrtle, supermarket kingpin and aspiring politican John Catsimatidis’ 500-unit mixed-use development; 2) 156…
We stopped by the offices of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership at 15 Metrotech Center last week. It turns out to be the perfect perch for keeping an eye on the Flatbush Extension building boom. Pictured here, clockwise from top right: 1) 180 Myrtle, supermarket kingpin and aspiring politican John Catsimatidis’ 500-unit mixed-use development; 2) 156 Myrtle, BFC’s 37-story condo project currently in high gear; 3) 157 Myrtle, the half-block of low-rise properties awaiting the wrecking ball courtesy of rentals-only developer AvalonBay. Kinda puts it all in perspective, huh. GMAP
Eyes…glazing…over.
It seems unlikely that societies will seek to use less energy per capita. Nor does it seem likely that people will “flee the cities.: However, if I am wrong, Scranton and Rochester await you.
Hi Polemicist,
All your bandying about of figures is getting me all warm and fuzzy, but all that aside, I do agree with you on many points.
Listen, one point: did you know that apparently maritime shipping, which uses less fuel per mile traversed than air transport of course, is using some huge percentage of transportation fuel these days. It’s gotten rather insane. And…a lot of what we get here is trucked, not railed or shipped, to NYC. A trucker friend or ours drives from FL to the wholesale market, drops the produce off, goes to NJ and picks up a major brand of packaged tea, drives it to Indiana…trucks are moving tons of goods. Though, coal and heavy goods are traveling via rail, granted.
I’m glad you have deduced the figures on elevator maintenance/usage. But to take the focus away from them, do you at least agree with me that these hi-rises should be built much more well-insulated, glazed, etc., etc. Somehow they’re able to build eco-efficient towers and lower-rise office complexes in Europe that are incredibly low impact. “My whole thing” is that we’re witnessing this building boom in NYC with towers going up in such ways that they will turn out to be overall energy hogs (granted, maybe not the elevators…) and also, when we see the level of workmanship, it appears they will need high levels and costly maintenance down the not-so-long road (e.g. cement decking taking right to the outside of the building envelope exposed to look like a decorative stringer course…very common unfortunately).
I don’t quite agree with the “impoverishing billions†banter since most of the world already lives with so much less than us with so many already impoverished it boggles the mind (and often impoverished because they’ve left/been pushed off the land and end up in dense cities). North Americans use much more energy per capita than anyone else in the “developed†world. Counting “down†from the “developed†world we start to see people living okay but who use VASTLY less energy than us. Of course, many of these people live in regions with low heating needs if any.
I still cannot agree with you on the impacts of coal and nuclear…haven’t convinced me there. But yes, agreed, liquid and gaseous fossil fuels are polluting…and running out. How do you see the whole energy thing playing out?
I’m also not entirely sure that what you’re defending (by defending these hi-rises…or are you actually not defending them? I can’t tell anymore…) really supports your good arguments of equity, etc. in the urban environment. In fact, unless these towers have to slash their rents/sale prices, they won’t be affordable to that wide an audience. Yes, it appears people want to move back into cities. It’s not necessarily happening in relationship to energy costs right now. There are many factors leading to the phenomenon in NYC (immigration, boomlet kids and yuppies, the kinds of jobs and businesses in NYC and all the money that circulates through this town which trickling down created a market for certain services, tourism, even wealthy non-citizens wanting pieds-à -terre though this may be over publicized…I’m not sure.).
All in all, my argument that the City’s footprint is enormous is going unheeded here. As I wrote earlier, we simply do not live in a bubble. Someone above wrote he thought the whole country would need to be inhabited with no possibility of natural open spaces if the country’s estimated 300M people lived in smaller settlements…this is not true. Population densities show that if we were more spread out we would still be able to live in what would to be countryside and natural land. Many countries in Europe have much higher population densities than the US and they manage to have a lot of small towns and farming communities that thrive. Granted, they lack some of the massive forests we sort of are hanging onto here but still…
Listen, no matter what we do, each one of us has a huge footprint living our basic daily lifestyle in the US, be it urban, suburban, or rural. If we can reduce our usage of resources and energy and become more efficient, we may discover huge gains over what were doing now.
One little PS, there are examples historically that in times of trouble and resource scarcity (fuel, food, water), many people flee cities. What happens over the next decades will be interesting. Personally, I’m hoping to move to a more countrified setting, have a big home garden, chickens and a beehive. Oh…by the way, if anyone other than Mr. Polemicist is reading this, I hope you all know we actually can keep live chickens in NYC…and there’s that beekeeper who comes to greenmarkets selling his honey who will come put a hive on your roof. I lost his website address.
Baci de Brooklyn
FG/GL
I’m basing my analysis on comparisons between buildings with elevators and buildings without, and looking at the difference. All buildings surveyed have meters for tenant units. Utility costs for a landlord are for common areas, primarily lighting, and elevators. There is not a great deal of difference on a per unit basis between buildings with elevators and those with out when it comes to common area costs. The difference is in the elevators, and that difference is minor.
If you knew anything about real estate you’d know there isn’t a single building in this city where elevators are metered separately. The cost of construction is irrelevant to your discussion – you are talking about the cost of operation. Right now, construction costs for taller buildings are not much higher than smaller buildings up to about 40-50 stories. Beyond that, it does become more expensive. That has nothing to do with this discussion however, where the properties in question are not that massive.
As for the actual costs, future costs are also irrelevant. What matters it the comparative cost of an elevator versus an automobile. The reality is in NYC operating an elevator for a year is about the same cost as 2-3 weeks of gasoline for the average American. There is absolutely NO cost comparison – and this is NYC where electricity is the most expensive in the nation.
I can’t even believe you’d mention the elevator not working. How can that possibly be relevant to this discussion? Obviously, tall buildings have multiple elevators and they can be fixed. What does that have to do with per capita energy efficiency? Maintenance costs for elevators are not an issue, and maintenance costs for new buildings are quite low – inclusive of elevator maintenance. I regularly project $1-$2 per square foot for new buildings (10-year projection).
I agree with your points regarding the environmental costs of energy, however I’m not willing at this point to impoverish billions of people. Right now, coal and nuclear power are the most cost effective, least damaging options available. They are far more desirable than oil and gas. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s not a perfect world.
In regards to transportation costs, centralized distribution and high density dramatically decreases those costs. Rail and water shipping is far more efficient than truck freight. We’ll always have local trucks, but there isn’t a way around that unless we start using horses.
The truth of the matter is cities will repopulate as energy costs skyrocket, which is all the more reason we have to have a sensible development strategy here. I do not want to face a world where the middle class are stuck 50-100 miles from NYC and have to spend 1/3 of their income on gas just to get to work. We can make this work for everyone until new solutions are found, but spreading FUD regarding high-density development helps no one except the rich who already own property in this city. The future is difficult enough as it is without inaccurate information being spread around.
BUILD FBX TO THE SKY!! BK puts the down in downtown. son.
Guest, your utopian vision of small towns clustered among green space is very appealing but is completely irrelevant in a country of 300M and a world of 6 Billion. Much less in one where we have economic and personal freedoms (how do you expect to force people to stay in their little hamlet in North Dakota when the one on the Puget Sound is so much nicer?)
Sorry to tell you but we live in a world of free trade, and specialization (thank god) and therefore little self-sufficient hamlets are not feasible or desirable (not to mention that our population is so large that the “open space” between the towns wouldnt be large enough to sustain natural habitats).
Polemicist,
You’re operating under today’s assumptions. You seem to think that only the current electrical charge for operating an elevator is important. First of all, are you looking at real numbers, say…individually metered elevators? How much does it cost to construct? How much does it cost to maintain, service, repair? What happens as electricity costs skyrocket? What happens when it’s not working? Lots of people put into distress.
And…coal plants are virtually emissions free…as are nuclear plants? WAH?! What have you been reading??? Listen, the energy needed to mine the raw materials for both types of plants is enormous and environmentally devastating. Also, they both have inherent problems operating. Coal plants extract about 30% of the energy from the coal burned. Better than some processes, but not great. Nucular…well that’s a whole other story.
Basically…it’s a mess. Electricity from these sources and fossil fuels is simply not clean. And yes, internal combustion engines are horrible…we agree. BTW…just because we live in a city does not mean we’re not surrounded by them…a lot of miles are being put on vehicles right here in hometown Brooklyn. Plus, count the endless miles driven to get goods and food to each of us here and voila, huge footprint and lots of internal combustion engines spewing out muck all over the place.
Let’s not have any illusions.
Okay, okay…Rehag and Putznamdenizen…I do agree with you to some extent…but Guest 2:25 I do not agree with.
I think we need to reposition the discussion. Yes, higher density appears to be more efficient when compared to “sprawl”. I hadn’t mentioned “sprawl” and was calling more for reasonably-scaled URBAN develop…but that aside, keep in mind hi-rise living, because it is a higher use energy housing solution compared to lower-height urban development, will be less sustainable in long run.
I think we’re getting carried away thinking that density is a good think. I am certainly not advocating for single family homes or, G-d forbid, sprawl.
Let’s consider a cities imaginary footprint. When you calculate in all the energy used, resources, food farmed elsewhere and trucked in, water systems and energy delivery infrastructure—all those things that bring goods and services into the city–you start to see the footprint grows to the point of being massive. It’s just a simple formula based on what each person needs to survive based on our averaged (wasteful) lifestyle needs. Putting up huge towers without thought to true “green” possibilities is a bad formula for density. It works out to be cheap for the builder with the cost defrayed and placed on future owners. To most US buyers this is currently usually a non-considered, almost hidden cost factor when shopping for a dwelling. But in Germany, the life-use energy needs of housing are calculated on new construction so buyers have a clear idea upfront.
What I AM for, actually, is low density, small town development. 2:25, you bring up issues that are great and part of the discussion: habitat preservation, pedestrian friendly. This can happen in an urban landscape that is not all hi-rise towers. It’s been going on in Brooklyn for two about centuries.
Now, Rehab, you really jump to conclusions and seemingly put words in my mouth. As I mentioned, I didn’t frame this as Urban vs. Sprawl. I am not anti-urban. But, I must take issue, not with your disgust with sprawl, but rather with your apparent lack of awareness that our lives here in the city necessitate all those roads, and everything else, outside the physical boundaries of NYC. Big cities, any cities, do not exist in bubbles but impact the immediate region, the wider region and now, the entire planet. See, the problem with sprawl is not the actual “sprawl†but how it is organized. The houses should be clustered and the open space well though-out as green space, garden space and native/natural space. Anyone who has a clerical job that can be performed at home, should do this. Maybe, in the future…once things fall apart…there will be less service/white collar work and people will be doing other things at home, producing things they, their neighbors use. No matter if in towns, cities or in suburbia, houses should take advantage of wind-PV electricity, solar HW and heat, rainwater, gray water uses, homegrown food, etc., etc.
Agreed. Sprawl in the US can be horrible. As fuel prices rise, some of these things may work themselves out…people will drive less. But, I am arguing, not even speaking about sprawl, that the kind of urban development we are seeing rising on Flatbush is also energy intensive, organized so there is little incentive for builders to care about future energy use, and going to prove bad for the environment.
Thus spoke FG AKA GL
Thank you for all coming. See you next year!
1:29
I work in real estate. I am intimiately familiar with the costs of construction and operating these buildings, as well as the huge demand. Your wrong about 1) the demand 2) the cost to operate elevators, which is at most $200 per unit per year even in a 50-story building and 3) the efficiency of electricty versus internal combustion engines.
I don’t really know how else to phrase it for you. I have a stack of operating expenses for many buildings on my desk at this very moment. Why don’t you tell us A) what you believe the cost per unit is for an elevator in a residential building and B) where you get your data.
As for the market demand, I don’t have time to school you in market research. As well, regarding the inefficiency of internal combustion engines, take a high school physics class. Modern coal power plans are virtually emission free, as are nuclear power plants. We can have an electrical distribution network in this country that is non-polluting, and even now cars and trucks produce the vast majority of airborne pollution.
Oh, and 2:00 – yeah, housing projects really helped the poor. That’s why they built them. Thanks for clarifying that for me.