Dan Doctoroff: A complex legacy

Volume 2, Number 10 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | December 14 - 20, 2007

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Editorial

The early departure of Daniel Doctoroff, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development, from the Bloomberg administration came as a surprise to many, given his indefatigable streak over the course of his six-year tenure.

Doctoroff’s energy, vision and determination turned around the stalled rebuilding efforts after the 9/11 attacks. With eyes zeroed in on the Hudson Yards, Bloomberg and Doctoroff ceded too much power to Gov. Pataki in their first term, but Doctoroff, with the mayor’s confidence, took the lead in the second term and got things going. The WTC site still looks like a hole in the ground—all of the construction activity is seven stories below ground—but Doctoroff and his aides showed that developer Larry Silverstein could not rebuild the site himself, sparking the new agreement allowing construction and reining in astronomical memorial costs to manageable levels.

Doctoroff brought the rest of the city back to life with a dizzying array of projects, including not only high-profile developments like the new Yankees Stadium, Atlantic Yards, Moynihan Station and Hudson Yards, but a total of 79 contextual rezonings throughout the city that will change our neighborhoods well into the future.

Along the way, Doctoroff failed to forge a consensus vision for the West Side and left unsettled Pier 40, the Spring St. sanitation garage, Gansevoort Peninsula and Pier 76. He also alienated community groups and local elected officials by circumventing them and clumsily lobbying Albany to realize his plans: Witness the West Side Stadium debacle and Atlantic Yards. But according to many, it was also these battles, as well as his NYC 2012 Olympics bid, that made him a believer in the public process known as ULURP and the importance of community input, changing the way he approached development projects later on during his tenure.

The Hudson Yards project is a case in point, since it was the Jets Stadium defeat that set up the West Chelsea and Hudson Yards rezonings that made way for development over the rail yards. That project is part of a much larger vision shared by Doctoroff and Bloomberg to develop brownfields and transform industrial backwaters like Hudson Yards into viable neighborhoods and engines for economic development.

This environmental focus led to the far-reaching PlaNYC2030 plan, a bold vision intended to help New York compete globally with other world-class metropolises for employers, residents and visitors, and maintain a firm tax base on which to continue building. That global competition set the stage for the city to rethink how it uses land and infrastructure, and treats the environment, as we move headlong into the next century. We wish he and Bloomberg had started fighting for congestion pricing earlier, but we still have a chance to implement the traffic plan, which will pay for the tens of billions of needed transportation improvements and reduce pollution at the same time.

Doctoroff and Bloomberg deserve praise for a commendable and ambitious program to build 165,000 new affordable housing units throughout the city over the next 10 years. But it is an uphill battle. It depends on a hot housing market and leverages the private sector almost exclusively, and is running into problems: Funding for the state’s 80/20 program cannot keep up with developer demand, while old affordable housing stock under the Mitchell-Lama program and others continues to dwindle unnecessarily, leaving a questionable net gain.

As Daniel Doctoroff moves on to take the helm of Bloomberg, L.P., and the mayor moves to implement many of his deputy’s plans during his last two years in office, one thing is for sure: Doctoroff will leave a complex legacy in New York City that will last well into the 21st century.