Savor This, Because It Will Probably Never Ever Happen Again In Your Lifetime

A subway project will be completed years before it is actually necessary:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Related Companies, the real estate concern, appear to be weeks away from a final agreement on the long-delayed $15 billion redevelopment of the railyards on the Far West Side of Manhattan.

Under a deal unveiled Monday, Related would commit to the project with a $21.7 million down payment. But the company would not have to close on the project — and therefore start paying the 99-year lease — until after the city’s real estate market improves.

Here are some more details about what benchmarks constitute an “improving” real estate market (“Assuming Related signs its contract with the M.T.A., it will not have to close on the deal and thus be on the hook to start paying rent worth about $1 billion until the three triggers are hit. That kicks the can down the road some on the question of whether or not Related will indeed go ahead with the deal, which seems quite risky right now.”).

Remember, Bloomberg put everyone in debt for the $2 billion subway extension — something to think about if (when?) services are cut in the coming FY2011 budget. The argument for the bonds went that by developing the railyards, the City would recoup the costs of the extension through higher property taxes. Revenue-raising tax base-based developments may have worked in the 19th century (think Central Park), but today’s regional economy seems more like a zero-sum game (unless you really think New York City will have 1 million new residents by 2030 — perhaps the 2010 census will shed some light about where they are in that bold prediction).

Back to the 7 extension though — would it have been so bad to try out Bus Rapid Transit in a part of the city that doesn’t even have the infrastructure to support an expensive subway project? Or is the dirty secret about BRT that everyone knows in their heart of hearts that it’s kind of lame? Think about what a $2 billion bond could have done for other transportation projects — even current transportation projects — even current transportation projects in Manhattan (East Harlem seems like a good candidate for some wealth creation — and people actually live there already!).

People Say We Are Friends But We’re Really Auguring

The Observer discovers another great thing about lesbians:

They have a natural property: auguring increases in property values.

The Ballet Of Candy Wrapper-Dropping Teenagers, Beer-Swilling Longshoremen And Punch Bowl-Pooping Sociology Professors

Not so long ago observers hailed the mayor’s foresight in updating the Jane Jacobs school of thought by both preserving a neighborhood’s character and allowing for smart redevelopment. Jane Jacobs herself seemed to disagree, but whatever — it became a useful campaign talking point. Contrarian voices questioned. Then they finally pooped in the punch bowl:

[Brooklyn College sociology professor Sharon] Zukin — whose own book, “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,” was published in December — peered through the window at rows of glass candleholders. “Tchotchkes!” she said. “Oh, the sheer ignominy.”

Ms. Jacobs’s continuing influence on the city is clear. As Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, wrote a few years back, “Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.”

But if Ms. Jacobs is much hailed as an urban prophet, Ms. Zukin is a heretic on her canonization. She views Ms. Jacobs as a passionate and prescient writer, but also one who failed to reckon with steroidal gentrification and the pervasive hunger of the upper middle class for ever more homogenous neighborhoods.

The pattern in places like Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Ms. Zukin said, is dreary and inexorable: Middle-class “pioneers” buy brownstones and row houses. City officials rezone to allow luxury towers, which swell the value of the brownstones. And banks and real estate companies unleash a river of capital, flushing out the people who gave the neighborhoods character.

Ms. Jacobs viewed cities as self-regulating organisms, and placed her faith in local residents. But Ms. Zukin argues that without more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning, neighborhoods will keep getting more stratified.

“Jacobs’s values — the small blocks, the cobblestone streets, the sense of local identity in old neighborhoods — became the gentrifiers’ ideal,” Ms. Zukin said. “But Jacobs’s social goals, the preservation of classes, have been lost.”

Observers also love — love! — irony, and any story about Jane Jacobs now carries with it requisite colorful there-goes-the-neighborhood details:

Ms. Jacobs, who died in 2006, waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks. Her victory in that fight was complete, if freighted with unanticipated consequences. The cobblestone remains, but the high bourgeoisie has taken over; not many tailors can afford to live there anymore. Ms. Jacobs’s old home recently sold for more than $3 million, and the ground floor harbors a boutique glass store.

. . .

Ms. Zukin recently acted as tour guide on a stroll through Ms. Jacobs’s urban village, where Irish and Italian grandmothers once watched from windows as children played on the streets, and milkmen delivered bottles as chain-smoking playwrights typed in grotty flats. It began just north of Christopher and Bleecker Streets in the West Village, once a working-class haven, then the black-leather heart of Queerdom, and now something like the back lot in a Paramount Studios version of New York.

There’s the Magnolia Bakery, where perpetual lines snake out the door not so much because of its excellent cupcakes as because of its appearance on “Sex and the City.” There’s Marc Jacobs, where the lines are no less endless. A Ralph Lauren, a Madden, and a children’s store with the most adorable petite $250 pants. Ms. Zukin sighed.

“It’s another Madison Avenue, or the Short Hills mall,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Really, did we need that?”

What If Gossip Girl Were More Like Law & Order?

Then they’d quickly integrate really cool story lines like this into the show:

An Upper East Side all-girls prep school is accusing two elderly women in rent-controlled apartments of stalling its plan to expand to the building next door.

The Nightingale-Bamford School on East 92nd Street said it has done everything by the book since it purchased the adjacent space in 2007 for $9 million, and should be allowed to take over the four-story building.

But two women who have lived at 28 E. 92nd St. for nearly 40 years aren’t so enamored of the eviction and expansion effort.

. . .

“They are harassing two elderly women and trying to drive them out of their homes,” said lawyer David Rozenholc. “I really believe they’re heartless. They knew these elderly people lived there when they bought the building. I think it’s terrible.”

Fresh Off Its Victorious Effort To Stop The Closing Of Guantanamo Bay, REBNY Now Aims To Save The Flagging Municipal Bond Market

The problem is that it’s a lot easier to get the Obama Administration to twist in the wind than it is to get a thousand-ton tunnel boring machine to poke a couple more holes in the bedrock:

Fresh off a victorious effort to persuade the federal government to move the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial from New York City, the Real Estate Board of New York, the powerful lobbying arm of the industry, has turned its attention to the missing link in the No. 7 line. This week it started a Web site (BuildTheStation.com), a petition drive and a lobbying campaign to press the Obama administration to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the station.

“We think it should have two stops,” said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board. “There is substantial growth already taking place near 10th and 41st. For them to quietly let the station evaporate, without anyone telling anybody, is a mistake.”

(Innocent question: Since when did REBNY get the government to switch the KSM trial location?)