The overarching tone of Governor Hochul’s Penn Station plan is one of old-fashioned paternalism, writes JDavidsonNYC
Do we really need all that? Art: governor.ny.gov In the years after World War II, American planners did as much damage to American cities as Allied bombers had done to German cities. There was less bloodshed, but a lot of urban centers emerged looking almost as two-dimensional as Cologne’s.
Look at Chelsea, Times Square, Hudson Yards, Hell’s Kitchen, the state admonishes: All are paying their way, making room for greater densities and new towers. Around Penn Station, though, decades of procrastination and fussing with zoning have stimulated no fresh construction and coughed up no significant revenue. There’s a certain amount of muffled glee buried in the section on current conditions because blight is the necessary precondition to renewal.
This is one of the central head-scratchers of the entire project, an unalloyed faith in the continued dominance of Class A office space as an economic engine. Under Hochul’s proposal, developers would have to build 540 new apartments, 162 of them affordable, and would be allowed to build up to 1,800 . That’s fine as far as it goes, but the bulk of the square footage is reserved for a kind of space the city is drowning in now: offices.