The Early Stages of the Future

Far from being in the early stages, as his people like to claim, the team drafting Mayor Bloomberg's Strategic Plan had commissioned a study by Alex Garvin (Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff's Olympics designer) on housing, which was completed in May. The list of projected housing platforms is far longer than we reported yesterday, including not just the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Sunnyside Yards but also the Prospect Expressway, the 36th Street Yards, and the Bay Ridge Line.

"This report," the introduction states, "presents opportunities to build between 160,000 and 325,000 housing units, with virtually no residential displacement...."

By way of explanation, from the housing chapter: "In some sections of the city, the cost of land now exceeds the cost of buildign a platform."

There is a lot more of it to dig through, also about the "public realm," which an urbanist like Garvin surely put a lot of thought into. Aaron Naparstek has it all on StreetsBlog.