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We stopped by the offices of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership at 15 Metrotech Center last week. It turns out to be the perfect perch for keeping an eye on the Flatbush Extension building boom. Pictured here, clockwise from top right: 1) 180 Myrtle, supermarket kingpin and aspiring politican John Catsimatidis’ 500-unit mixed-use development; 2) 156 Myrtle, BFC’s 37-story condo project currently in high gear; 3) 157 Myrtle, the half-block of low-rise properties awaiting the wrecking ball courtesy of rentals-only developer AvalonBay. Kinda puts it all in perspective, huh. GMAP


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. It seems unlikely that societies will seek to use less energy per capita. Nor does it seem likely that people will “flee the cities.: However, if I am wrong, Scranton and Rochester await you.

  2. Hi Polemicist,

    All your bandying about of figures is getting me all warm and fuzzy, but all that aside, I do agree with you on many points.

    Listen, one point: did you know that apparently maritime shipping, which uses less fuel per mile traversed than air transport of course, is using some huge percentage of transportation fuel these days. It’s gotten rather insane. And…a lot of what we get here is trucked, not railed or shipped, to NYC. A trucker friend or ours drives from FL to the wholesale market, drops the produce off, goes to NJ and picks up a major brand of packaged tea, drives it to Indiana…trucks are moving tons of goods. Though, coal and heavy goods are traveling via rail, granted.

    I’m glad you have deduced the figures on elevator maintenance/usage. But to take the focus away from them, do you at least agree with me that these hi-rises should be built much more well-insulated, glazed, etc., etc. Somehow they’re able to build eco-efficient towers and lower-rise office complexes in Europe that are incredibly low impact. “My whole thing” is that we’re witnessing this building boom in NYC with towers going up in such ways that they will turn out to be overall energy hogs (granted, maybe not the elevators…) and also, when we see the level of workmanship, it appears they will need high levels and costly maintenance down the not-so-long road (e.g. cement decking taking right to the outside of the building envelope exposed to look like a decorative stringer course…very common unfortunately).

    I don’t quite agree with the “impoverishing billions” banter since most of the world already lives with so much less than us with so many already impoverished it boggles the mind (and often impoverished because they’ve left/been pushed off the land and end up in dense cities). North Americans use much more energy per capita than anyone else in the “developed” world. Counting “down” from the “developed” world we start to see people living okay but who use VASTLY less energy than us. Of course, many of these people live in regions with low heating needs if any.

    I still cannot agree with you on the impacts of coal and nuclear…haven’t convinced me there. But yes, agreed, liquid and gaseous fossil fuels are polluting…and running out. How do you see the whole energy thing playing out?

    I’m also not entirely sure that what you’re defending (by defending these hi-rises…or are you actually not defending them? I can’t tell anymore…) really supports your good arguments of equity, etc. in the urban environment. In fact, unless these towers have to slash their rents/sale prices, they won’t be affordable to that wide an audience. Yes, it appears people want to move back into cities. It’s not necessarily happening in relationship to energy costs right now. There are many factors leading to the phenomenon in NYC (immigration, boomlet kids and yuppies, the kinds of jobs and businesses in NYC and all the money that circulates through this town which trickling down created a market for certain services, tourism, even wealthy non-citizens wanting pieds-à-terre though this may be over publicized…I’m not sure.).

    All in all, my argument that the City’s footprint is enormous is going unheeded here. As I wrote earlier, we simply do not live in a bubble. Someone above wrote he thought the whole country would need to be inhabited with no possibility of natural open spaces if the country’s estimated 300M people lived in smaller settlements…this is not true. Population densities show that if we were more spread out we would still be able to live in what would to be countryside and natural land. Many countries in Europe have much higher population densities than the US and they manage to have a lot of small towns and farming communities that thrive. Granted, they lack some of the massive forests we sort of are hanging onto here but still…

    Listen, no matter what we do, each one of us has a huge footprint living our basic daily lifestyle in the US, be it urban, suburban, or rural. If we can reduce our usage of resources and energy and become more efficient, we may discover huge gains over what were doing now.

    One little PS, there are examples historically that in times of trouble and resource scarcity (fuel, food, water), many people flee cities. What happens over the next decades will be interesting. Personally, I’m hoping to move to a more countrified setting, have a big home garden, chickens and a beehive. Oh…by the way, if anyone other than Mr. Polemicist is reading this, I hope you all know we actually can keep live chickens in NYC…and there’s that beekeeper who comes to greenmarkets selling his honey who will come put a hive on your roof. I lost his website address.

    Baci de Brooklyn
    FG/GL