Deputy
Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff announced his resignation today
from the Bloomberg Administration (he'll be moving on to the Bloomberg corporation).
NY Times coverage here,
New York mag coverage here,
NY1 coverage here.
His last big policy push during his tenure was the PlaNYC 2030 proposal for
sustainable development. The mayor's PlaNYC proposal says, “As our search
for land becomes more pressing in the coming decades, we must be prepared to
work with communities to explore the potential of these sites.”
Clearly Atlantic Yards violated that principle...egregiously.
Deputy Mayor Doctoroff, to his credit, realized that, albeit too late. From
the Atlantic
Yards Report on
April 27, 2007, coverage of a Doctoroff interview on WNYC:
Doctoroff's discomfort: Atlantic Yards is an "extreme
case"
...He [Doctoroff] then distinctly speeded up, racing through the next sentence.
But I think that’s [Atlantic Yards] an extreme case,
probably. We’ve rezoned the waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg,
the Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan, where we, significantly, in
a negotiation, by the way, with the local community, significantly increased
the density, and part of it was to extend the subway over to the area which
made taking that kind of density feasible. So we don’t do anything,
any more, really, without consulting the community. I think we’ve gotten
a lot better at that over the course of the past five years.
(Emphases added)
Though that is a gross overstatement (we don't do anything, any more, without
consulting the community? just see the struggle against Columbia University's
expansion, and the growing controversy over Willets Point), we hope that Doctoroff's
replacement will take that to heart, and make some concerted effort to start over
with Atlantic Yards and consult, for real, with the community.
