Matthew Haag

That is at the heart of a plan for a landmark overhaul of New York City’s corrections system, which will culminate with the closing of Rikers Island, the jail complex with nearly 10,000 beds that has become notorious for chronic abuse, neglect and mismanagement.

The City Council approved the proposal Thursday, a decision that seemed nearly impossible just a few years ago and that supporters say immediately places New York City at the forefront of a national movement to reverse decades of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected black and Hispanic people.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, embraced the jails plan, throwing their political weight behind the momentous reforms despite steady opposition from neighborhoods whose residents worry that the towering jails will harm their quality of life.

“What we are doing today will reshape the city for generations to come and impact the lives of every New Yorker,” Johnson said Thursday. “For decades, our city was unfair to those who became involved in the justice system, and the overwhelmingly majority who were caught up were black and brown men.”

But now, the hard part begins. To meet its deadline of 2026, the city will have to build four new jails scattered in neighborhoods across the city, shut down a 400-acre jail network on an island in the East River, and relocate thousands of prisoners and corrections officers.

The transition and new construction also carries a hefty price tag: more than $8 billion.

The city may also find itself having to fend off the legal challenges that are often mounted when neighborhoods oppose major developments.

In a sign perhaps of the challenges and opposition ahead, Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents parts of Brooklyn, said the legislation did not go far enough to address the reasons people end up in jail.

“This vote only enriches developers in the short term, while leaving the fate of Rikers in the hands of a future mayor and a future Council,” said Menchaca, who voted against the proposal. “I do not trust this mayor, do you?”

To make the plan a reality, city officials must place their trust in future elected leaders to share the same vision and see it through on the same aggressive timeline. It also depends on further declines in the city’s crime rate, which by some measures is already the lowest since the 1950s.

Today, the city’s jails hold about 7,000 people every day — about a third of the population when it reached its peak during the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s. The new jails, however, would not have room even for the number of prisoners today.

The city announced this week that the new facilities will be smaller than first anticipated with a combined daily capacity of about 3,300 prisoners. The jails will be about the same size — each with 886 beds — and will require reducing the jail population by more than half by 2026.

The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, which represents more than 10,000 correction officers in the city, has criticized the projected number of prisoners as unrealistically optimistic.

The City Council’s minority leader, Steven Matteo, said Thursday he had concerns over what it would take for the city to reach the goal of 3,300 prisoners.

“It will require putting more potentially dangerous offenders back on the street, jeopardizing public safety,” said Matteo, a Republican from Staten Island who voted “no.”

When the new jails open, officials said, they will be safer, smaller and more humane and will make New York’s corrections system a model for the rest of the country. Prisoners will be provided job training, mental health counseling and education services.

“I have been to Rikers. I have been to the Kew Gardens jail,” said Karen Koslowitz, a councilwoman who represents the area of Queens that would get a new jail. “They weren’t cells. They were cages.”

Before the vote Thursday, Johnson said that years of declining crime rates show that the prisoner population would continue to drop and that the new jails would meet future needs.

“We feel confident this is the right size,” he said.

Smaller jails are possible, city leaders say, because of changes by New York state and the city to reduce the number of people sent to jail.

In recent years, New York state repealed the Rockefeller Laws, the 1970s antidrug legislation that established mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. New laws go into effect in January that will outlaw cash bail for most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, and will require prosecutors to give evidence to the defense far earlier.

New York City has banned solitary confinement for people under 22 years old, expanded diversion programs that keep people out of jail and did away with arrests for most people found with small amounts of marijuana.

As part of the jail plan, the city also announced $265 million in new spending on efforts intended to keep people out of jail and to support those who have been released.

It would include an expansion of the supervised release program, which allows defendants to wait for trial outside jail; conflict-resolution lessons in schools; and transitional employment opportunities for inmates upon release.

This article originally appeared in

NYC Votes to Close Rikers. Now Comes the Hard Part.

NEW YORK — One 886-bed jail will tower over shops and restaurants in downtown Brooklyn. Another will be next to a subway yard in Queens. In the Bronx, a jail will replace a Police Department tow pound. And another jail will rise in the shadow of City Hall in Manhattan.

Mayfield, then 46, had been arrested often enough to have seen the inside of many jails, including those at Rikers Island, the sprawling complex near La Guardia Airport.

But he had never laid eyes on the Vernon C. Bain Center, a hulking, 625-foot long royal blue barge in the East River topped with a nearly windowless five-story jail resembling Lego pieces stacked together.

“The heat was unbearable, and it was dark and cramped and sweaty,” Mayfield said of his experience at the jail. “We were in a cargo hold of a slave ship — a modern day slave ship owned by the City of New York.”

More than 10 years later — and 27 years after it first docked along the shores of Hunts Point — the Bain Center, a largely unknown and overlooked workhorse of the New York City jail system, houses up to 800 inmates every day.

It opened in 1992 as a supposedly temporary and emergency fix for a soaring inmate population fueled by the crack epidemic.

But the number of inmates has plummeted at Bain, thought to be the country’s only floating jail.

Now, the facility has been pushed out of the shadows as New York City pursues an ambitious plan to shut down Rikers and build a new criminal justice system with more humane jails and fewer inmates.

The city has pledged to close the Bain Center as part of the plan, which has won the support of criminal justice advocates, as well as Mayor Bill de Blasio and many members of the City Council.

The council must vote on the plan and, if approved, Rikers and Bain would close by 2026.

But the soft timeline for closing the barge has sparked outrage among elected officials and criminal justice advocates, who have demanded to know why the floating jail is even still around.

They have made the future of the facility central to the broader jail debate, insisting that it should be vacated and removed immediately before any other part of the plan moves forward.

“Sink the boat, get rid of it and sit with the community about how we can best utilize that open space there,” said Rafael Salamanca Jr., a councilman from the Bronx whose district includes the jail.

So far, city officials have not revealed the order in which the jails would be shut down or whether the closing of the Bain Center could be expedited. The barge, which has 317 workers, costs nearly $24 million a year to operate.

“We also want to see the barge closed,” Dana Kaplan, a deputy director at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, told council members at a recent hearing. “We do not want a continued vestige of what was not supposed to be a permanent solution and what is not representative of what we think is the right justice system.”

On Jan. 22, 1992, the Vernon C. Bain barge, named for a Rikers Island warden who died in a car accident, sailed into New York Harbor joining a fleet of four other floating jails. In the late 1980s, Mayor Edward I. Koch had envisioned these jails as the future of the city’s corrections system.

The city ordered the Bain from a shipbuilder in Louisiana at a time when the inmate population at Rikers was near capacity — 22,000 inmates every day — and was expected to grow. The shortage of facilities was so dire that the Department of Correction warned that temporary jail dormitories might have to be built.

Koch said the floating jails were needed if the city was to get serious about cracking down on crime.

“We have to have jails in which to put them, and we dock a jail barge alongside a neighborhood, there are opponents,” Koch said in a speech in 1989. “I say to these groups, ‘Would you rather have these people walking around in your neighborhood, or be in jail on a barge in your neighborhood?’ ”

The Bain Center was pulled by tugboats — it does not have motors — to Hunts Point, after the city had considered but dismissed other locations, including the Brooklyn Army Terminal and near Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but area residents rose up in protest.

But by the time the Bain Center arrived, the city’s jail population was declining and the city soon announced it would remove and likely sell two of the floating jails, one off Greenwich Village and the other near the Lower East Side, to a company that said it was going to turn them into scrap.

In the years since it opened, the Bain Center has stayed relatively the same. Inside, the walls and ceilings are still colored an off-white gray. The barge sways with the waves. Inmates can exercise on the top floor inside a caged-enclosed recreational area that has views of Rikers Island. From their cells, inmates can look out through tiny portholes.

“Rikers, in all its gory details, still had benefits over the barge,” said Mayfield, who spent 10 months between 2008 and 2009, at the Bain Center because he could not afford bail regarding his drug-possession charge. “One of those benefits was mobility and being able to move around and being able to go outside.”

Mayfield, who at age 57 is taking undergraduate classes at Columbia University on a scholarship, said he would never forget sweltering summer days inside the barge jail, breathing in steamy, acrid air.

“Closing Rikers is one thing. Closing the boat should have happened decades ago,” he said.

Critics say the Rikers Island complex, a collection of nine jails, has become emblematic of the country’s embrace of mass incarceration and of a criminal justice system that is biased against African Americans and Hispanics. It has also been the site of brutal attacks by officers on inmates and unsafe, squalid conditions that officers themselves have long complained has exposed them to attacks.

The Bain Center, which is much smaller than the Rikers complex, had the third-lowest rate for use-of-force by corrections officers in the city’s jails, according to the latest report by a federal monitor overseeing changes at New York jails. Yet, the rate has ticked upward, prompting the monitor to caution that the conditions at the barge “create reason to be watchful.”

In the early 1990s, the Hunts Point neighborhood around the barge was overrun by rampant prostitution, other crime, homelessness and junkyards. At night, the main attraction was strip clubs. Children in the area had some of the country’s highest asthma rates. The closest bus stop in Hunts Point, a roughly 900-acre peninsula in the South Bronx, was a 20-minute walk from the jail.

“Hunts Point was a place to put things that no one else wanted,” said John Robert, a former president of the local community board.

A little more than three years after it opened, the Department of Correction shut down the Bain Center, saying that the city’s lower jail population, about 17,900 at that time, did not warrant the cost. The city, after moving inmates and officers to the jails at Rikers, expected to save $2 million a month by closing the Bain Center.

But the closing was relatively short-lived. Mayor Rudy Giuliani reopened the Bain Center in the late 1990s as a juvenile detention facility and then as a jail for adult inmates.

The city’s inmate populations has dropped even more since it reopened, down now to just more than 7,000 inmates every day.

“That’s the nature of a lot of temporary things that become permanent in the city,” said Paul Lipson, a former chief of staff for Rep. José E. Serrano, a Democrat who represents the area. “Once a city agency grabs a parcel of land, it’s very hard for them to relinquish it.”

Now, the barge is part of a changing Hunts Point.

The strip clubs have been shut down; violent crime, including homicides and rapes, has plunged by 280% from 1990 to 2018, according to the Police Department.

Down the street from the jail, Amazon opened a warehouse over the summer, where trucks line up throughout the day to pick up packages to be delivered.

The city’s Economic Development Corp., which owns much of the prime waterfront real estate in Hunts Point, has big plans for the area. It recently asked companies to submit ideas for a redesigned Hunts Point Produce Market, one of the neighborhood’s economic engines.

Roughly 16,000 trucks travel through the area, shuttling goods like produce, meats and beer from warehouses to restaurants and shops throughout New York City. The city, hoping to significantly reduce congestion, has announced plans to develop a marine terminal at Hunts Point.

City officials envision that the marine terminal could anchor a major shift in how goods like produce and lumber enter the New York market, moving them off roads and onto waterways.

Whatever the future holds for Hunts Point, it does not include a city jail taking up precious and valuable waterfront property, Salamanca said.

“We should give this land back and create jobs,” he said. “Some could be green space for the community so we can enjoy the view of the East River.”

A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago

NEW YORK — On a mid-September day in 2008, Marvin Mayfield, a lifelong resident of the Bronx, discovered a part of the borough he had never seen. The revelation came while he was being taken off a Department of Correction bus, placed in a single-file line with 10 other men and led over a gangplank.

When officers arrived, they found a woman lying on the street — critically injured but still alive — outside a two-story colonial-style home. Police entered the house and discovered a male victim.

The man, David Kimowitz, 40, who managed comedians and owned a popular comedy club in New York City, was pronounced dead in his home, authorities said Sunday. The woman, Karen L. Bermudez-Rodriguez, 26, an au pair for Kimowitz’s two young children, later died at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Police announced Sunday that they had arrested Bermudez-Rodriguez’s boyfriend, Joseph D. Porter, 27, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in connection with the deaths. He was charged with two counts of murder, possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and criminal restraint. He is being held at the Essex County Correctional Facility.

Kimowitz’s two young daughters and his wife, Laura, were not home at the time of the attack, authorities said.

The killings stunned residents of the leafy suburban town about 20 miles west of New York City. Until Saturday, there had been only 15 homicides in Maplewood, a town of about 25,000 people, over the past three decades, according to state and federal authorities.

Neighbors said Sunday that they could hear Bermudez-Rodriguez screaming from inside their homes before she collapsed on the street.

“It’s a shocking feeling,” Kathy Cantwell, who lives next door to the Kimowitz family, said. “You wish you could have interceded or you could have saved David.”

Several neighbors said that in the days before the attack, they noticed a man they did not recognize sitting in a dark-colored sedan near the family’s house. While they had alerted one another about the man, they did not call police. Authorities have not said whether that man was Porter.

On Sunday, a large portion of Walton Road, a tree-lined street with rows of clapboard homes, remained an active crime scene. Yellow police tape surrounded the Kimowitzes’ home, and officers were seen looking through shrubs outside nearby homes.

Neighbors of the Kimowitz family, who had bought the house on a corner lot in 2017, said that the family’s daughters were often seen playing outside with Bermudez-Rodriguez.

On Sunday, friends placed flowers outside the house, at the intersection of Walton Road and Jefferson Avenue.

Andrew De la Torre, who lived near the Kimowitzes, said that the family had employed several au pairs, who rotated every few months, since they moved into the house.

“They have a little balcony that they would be playing out there with their kids,” De la Torre said Sunday. “They’d have family friends over. Really nice people.”

Kimowitz was well-known in the New York comedy scene, as both a manager of comedians and one of four founders of the Stand Restaurant and Comedy Club, a comedy venue near Gramercy Park in Manhattan.

While the biggest club in town, the Comedy Cellar, attracted comedy elite like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle, the Stand maintained a steady rotation of high-profile performers including Tracy Morgan, Janeane Garofalo and Dave Attell. “There’s a stigma about comedy clubs,” Kimowitz told The New York Times in an interview in 2012. “They’re tourist traps, watered-down drinks. We’re trying to evolve the comedy club.”

The Stand closed its Gramercy Park location last year and reopened a few weeks ago in a fancier and larger space near Union Square. The founders added an upscale restaurant in an attempt to differentiate itself from other clubs. The club also has a green room — a rarity in most clubs — and two rooms with low ceilings for intimate performances.

The Stand also hosts a popular weekly comedy podcast, “The Legion of Skanks,” which features comedians managed by Kimowitz.

In 2012, Kimowitz and the same group that had opened the Stand started the Standing Room comedy club in Long Island City, Queens. While they had hoped to attract top comedians to perform there, the Standing Room could not replicate the success of the Manhattan venue and closed last summer.

Comedians who knew Kimowitz said that they were stunned by the news of his death.

“A great guy and friend has passed this weekend,” Rich Vos, a comedian, said on Twitter. “He seemed so happy, a wife, 2 kids, his new club opened.”

A LinkedIn page for Kimowitz said that he had received a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University in New York in 2002 and had joined several comedy ventures, including a company called Cringe Humor, which had started the Stand. He was also a partner of CH Entertainment, a talent agency with clients that included Vos. The group previously represented comedian Pete Davidson.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/nyregion/maplewood-murder-david-laura-kimowitz.html" id="9b636a41-0967-3688-a3d4-798dc2f4d7f9">The New York Times</a>.

Owner of Comedy Club and Nanny Are Killed at Maplewood, NJ, Home

The 911 call came just after sunrise Saturday: A woman was being attacked outside a house in Maplewood, New Jersey.

The au pair’s boyfriend was arrested Sunday and charged with two counts of murder.

Police in Maplewood, New Jersey, responded to a 911 call around sunrise Saturday about a woman being assaulted. After arriving at the scene, officers found the woman, Karen L. Bermudez-Rodriguez, 26, lying in the street critically injured.

They later found the homeowner, David Kimowitz, 40, dead inside the house, the Essex County prosecutor’s office said.

Bermudez-Rodriguez, an au pair for the Kimowitz family’s children, was pronounced dead at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. The family’s two young daughters and Kimowitz’s wife, Laura, were not at home at the time of the attack, authorities said.

On Sunday, Joseph D. Porter, 27, Bermudez-Rodriguez’s boyfriend, was charged in connection with the deaths and was booked into the Essex County Correctional Facility.

The killings were a stunning event in a suburb known as a safe place to raise children. Over the last three decades, there had been only 15 homicides in Maplewood, a town of about 25,000 people approximately 20 miles west of New York City, before Saturday, according to state and federal authorities.

Neighbors of the Kimowitz family, who had bought the two-story colonial-style house on a corner lot in 2017, said that their family’s daughters were often seen playing outside with Bermudez-Rodriguez.

Owner of Comedy Club and Nanny Are Killed at NJ Home

The owner of a high-profile comedy club in New York City and his family’s au pair were killed at his suburban New Jersey home Saturday, authorities said Sunday.

The four companies all had close ties to George Norcross, a powerful Democratic leader in the southern part of the state.

A state official revealed that three of the companies had indicated that they were considering moving to Philadelphia in order to qualify for tax breaks to stay in New Jersey, but in fact did not have viable offers to go there.

The fourth business identified a potential relocation site in Philadelphia four days before the state approved its $40 million tax credit in 2014, the official said.

The revelations about those companies, which all sought to move to the city of Camden with sizable tax credits, under a 2013 law known as the Economic Opportunity Act, were made public during a daylong hearing by a panel of investigators appointed by Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat.

The task force is examining whether $11 billion in economic development programs have delivered significant economic benefits or have been a boon to politically connected firms and companies.

An investigation by The New York Times found that lawmakers allowed a real estate lawyer, Kevin D. Sheehan, whose influential law firm has close ties to Democratic politicians and state legislators, to edit drafts of the 2013 law that unlocked sizable tax breaks for his firm’s clients.

The testimony on Thursday by current and former officials at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which oversees the tax credit programs, raised serious concerns about the law, the lack of oversight in reviewing applications and the way some tax credits were awarded.

A former president of the authority, Tim Lizura, also acknowledged that many last-minute changes to the law were made by Sheehan. The Times found that those alterations were done without any public disclosure.

Companies had been awarded $4.9 billion under the 2013 legislation by moving to New Jersey or remaining in the state and creating and retaining jobs.

The hearing was the second held in recent months by the task force, which in April referred evidence to federal prosecutors for possible criminal charges. It is not immediately known whether the evidence might lead to charges or what might result from Thursday’s testimony.

But a member of the task force said companies could be held criminally liable.

“There is real criminal exposure for companies that lie to the EDA,” said Pablo Quiñones, a special counsel on the task force.

For several hours, another special counsel, Jim Walden, displayed some of the specific edits of the bill on a large screen. Some changes, he noted, were intended to allow specific companies, such as Subaru of America, to claim hundreds of millions of dollars in additional tax breaks.

Several companies had business ties with Sheehan’s firm, Parker McCay, Walden said.

Sheehan did not register with the state as a lobbyist for the Economic Opportunity Act, and his firm told The Times that its work on the legislation did not amount to lobbying.

“Parker McCay was asked by policymakers, including those in the Legislature, to review this legislation and offer input and suggestions on ways it could be strengthened to help Camden and other localities in South Jersey, which have historically lost out to North Jersey in receiving economic benefits from the state,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Beside his work on the bill, Sheehan also helped the four businesses who were considering a move to Philadelphia — Cooper Health System; Conner Strong &amp; Buckelew; the Michaels Organization; and NFI — assemble their tax credit applications, Walden said.

Cooper Health was awarded nearly $40 million in tax credits to relocate to Camden. It submitted an application on Nov. 7, 2014, and stated that none of its employees were at risk of losing their jobs and wrote “TBD” in response to a question about whether it was considering leaving the state, according to a copy of its application shown during the hearing.

The next month, a Cooper Health executive told the state that it had located a property in Philadelphia. Four days later, the Economic Development Authority approved its tax credit submission.

A Cooper Health spokesman said on Thursday that the company was truthful in its application and had hired more employees than it had proposed. A representative for Conner Strong &amp; Buckelew said that suggestions made during the hearing were inaccurate and that the company was seriously considering a move out of state to consolidate its offices.

The building that Cooper Health eventually moved into had been owned by the Economic Development Authority, according to records obtained by The Times. The agency sold the site in late December 2014 to a nonprofit organization, which sold it that same day to a real estate investment group, documents show.

Intersecting nearly every piece of the testimony on Thursday, even though their names were rarely mentioned, were the Norcross brothers.

Parker McCay’s chief executive is Philip Norcross, whose brother is George Norcross, an insurance executive at Conner Strong and the chairman of the board of trustees of Cooper Health System.

A third brother, Donald Norcross, is a former Democratic state senator who represented Camden and had been a sponsor of the 2013 law; he is now a United States representative.

Conner Strong, the Michaels Organization and NFI submitted tax credit applications on the same day in October 2016. They collectively sought $245 million to relocate together to a new 18-story tower on the Camden waterfront. Without the tax credit, they were considering moves to office towers in Philadelphia, the companies claimed.

But by the time they applied for the credits, the offers to lease space in Philadelphia had expired, according to David Lawyer, an official with the Economic Development Authority who had reviewed the applications for the task force.

The companies later submitted new leases, but those offers should also have raised red flags, Lawyer said.

The companies had proposed new lease configurations in Philadelphia, with far different office layouts that had employees scattered on different floors, he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/nyregion/nj-tax-breaks-george-norcross.html" id="5218a997-0014-3edd-a5ca-b9153e76db72">The New York Times</a>.

Nearly $300 Million in Tax Breaks Awarded to 4 Companies With Close Democratic Ties

NEWARK, N.J. — The backlash over New Jersey’s lucrative corporate tax incentives grew on Thursday when it was disclosed that four politically connected companies received nearly $300 million in tax breaks based on questionable claims that they would otherwise move out of state.

But 432 Park also has an increasingly common feature in these new towers: swaths of unoccupied space. About a quarter of its 88 floors will have no homes because they are filled with structural and mechanical equipment.

The building and nearby towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city’s labyrinthine zoning laws. Floors reserved for structural and mechanical equipment, no matter how much, do not count against a building’s maximum size under the laws, so developers explicitly use them to make buildings far higher than would otherwise be permitted.

The towers benefiting the most from the zoning quirk have all sprouted during the past half-decade: enormous glass and steel buildings with lavish condominiums that sell for millions of dollars. Many line the blocks around Central Park, some of the most expensive and coveted real estate in the city, and have become second homes for Chinese billionaires, European tycoons and out-of-state hedge fund investors.

But the proliferation of these buildings is provoking a backlash amid a broader debate about affordable housing, megaprojects for the ultrarich and the city’s identity. Now, officials are seeking to rein in developers by proposing rules that would apply unusually large mechanical spaces toward a building’s height limit.

The motivation to build tall is obvious: panoramic views for residents and hefty profits for developers. A 95th floor condominium at 432 Park Ave. sold in December for $30.7 million, or about $7,592 a square foot. That same month, a unit about halfway down the building sold for $4,216 a square foot.

“It’s pretty outrageous, but it’s also pretty clever,” said George M. Janes, a planning consultant who has tracked and filed challenges against buildings in New York with vast unoccupied spaces. “What is the primary purpose of these spaces? The primary purpose is to build very tall buildings.”

The effort by the city to curb building heights has ignited a showdown with the powerful real estate industry, which has criticized the proposed rules as overly restrictive and misguided.

Harry B. Macklowe, who developed 432 Park Ave., said he agrees with the effort to establish firm rules around mechanical spaces, but he rejected claims that his building was using them to rise higher. Every mechanical floor, he said, has equipment necessary for the building to function.

“It offends me,” Macklowe said, “because we created a very nice building that fits into the skyline perfectly.”

Many of these towers stay vacant most of the year, so their owners are not subject to local and state income taxes because they are not city residents. As a result, the state and city have already begun a separate crackdown on them.

State lawmakers proposed a pied-à-terre tax, an annual recurring tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million, but it was derailed under intense lobbying from real estate groups. Instead, lawmakers embraced a one-time fee on the sale of multimillion-dollar homes.

New York City’s complicated building regulations are meant to produce predictable developments. Height requirements are imposed in most of the city, though parts of Manhattan are exempt. Every block is also effectively assigned a maximum square footage, which can be spread across smaller buildings on a block or condensed in larger developments.

Savvy, well-heeled and patient developers have worked that system to their benefit. A developer seeking to build a supertall tower might start with one lot on a block and then buy unused square footage from its neighbors.

With advancements in engineering and construction, that developer can take the accumulated square footage and concentrate it in a skinny mega-tower. Floors of mechanical space, exempt from the square footage calculations, make the tower even taller.

“There is no question that they have become this lightning rod because they are not just luxury housing but uber-luxury housing,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, a nonprofit group that seeks to preserve the city’s architecture and urban design. She said they were unaffordable not only for the 99 percent but also for most of the 1 percent.

The city’s proposal aimed at supertall buildings — which needs to be approved by the City Council — would not eliminate enormous mechanical spaces but would penalize projects that have them.

Oversized mechanical floors — those greater than 30 feet tall, or about three times the size of a typical apartment’s ceiling height — would be counted toward the building’s maximum size. The rules would largely apply to developments around Central Park and in parts of lower Manhattan.

Two other cities with skyscrapers, Chicago and Miami, have similar zoning codes but regulate mechanical floors differently.

In Chicago, big empty spaces — those greater than 5,000 square feet — are not counted toward the tower’s overall size, though officials said they knew of no complaints about developers exploiting the rule. In Miami, mechanical spaces are subtracted from the maximum size unless the area is an atrium or an open-air feature.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the proposed rules would “stop luxury developers from gaming the system.”

“Artificially tall mechanical spaces that serve no purpose but to boost views of top-floor apartments violate the spirit of our zoning regulations,” de Blasio said in a statement.

But the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s influential lobbying arm, said the rules were too restrictive and at odds with engineering trends, such as the future need for large spaces for batteries to support renewable energy.

At a recent public hearing, engineers and architects said the proposal would drive up the cost of construction.

Bart A. Sullivan, an engineer in New York who has worked on high-rises around the world, said supertall skyscrapers need large unoccupied floors for complex mechanical and structural equipment, including elevator motors, heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

Developers, he said, could work within the proposed restrictions but would have to spend more on structural features.

“Most anything is possible if you throw enough money at it, but these projects have to make sense from an economic point of view,” Sullivan said. “They are tying the hands of the design professionals.”

There are legitimate reasons for large areas in buildings for mechanical and structural features, he said. At 432 Park Ave., clusters of unoccupied sections throughout the tower allow wind to flow through and stabilize the building.

That tower’s structural engineer, Silvian Marcus, said that without the large, open-air mechanical floors, 432 Park Ave. would noticeably sway and be unacceptable to residents.

“When they come home, they want to feel like they are at home and not like they are on a boat, airplane or motorcycle,” he said.

Marcus used a similar engineering technique at Central Park Tower, which at 1,550 feet tall will be among the most slender residential skyscrapers in the world. More than a fifth of its height will remain unoccupied.

The developer of the building, Gary Barnett, said he believed the city’s proposal was reasonable, but he said that critics had mischaracterized the mechanical spaces in Central Park Tower.

“There is one void and everything else is truly necessary mechanical space, amenity space and high-ceiling retail space for the first Nordstrom in New York City,” Barnett said.

Some supporters of the new legislation argue that the rules do not go far enough to curb supertall buildings. They would largely apply to neighborhoods around Central Park and would not touch other areas with high-rises, including Midtown and Hudson Yards.

City planners first noticed the trend of using mechanical spaces in new buildings several years ago.

But a turning point emerged over the past year and a half when Rafael Viñoly Architects, which designed 432 Park Ave., unveiled plans for another building, a futuristic, barbell-shaped 32-story residential tower on the Upper East Side. It would top out at 510 feet tall, thanks to a 150-foot-tall midsection devoid of residences.

Neighborhood associations, along with Janes, the planning consultant, filed a complaint with the city’s Department of Buildings, noting that “the project includes a huge void, which is larger than necessary for any mechanical use.”

But without changes in building rules the tower would be likely to avoid legal challenges: The developers described the super large midsection as an open area with structural features.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/tallest-buildings-manhattan-loophole.html" id="c58cfa1b-d011-36ac-aa53-ccaeb4bef946">The New York Times</a>.

How Luxury Developers Use a Loophole to Build Soaring Towers for the Ultrarich in NY

NEW YORK — Some of the tallest residential buildings in the world soar above Central Park, including 432 Park Ave., which rises 1,400 feet and features an array of penthouses and apartments for the ultrarich.

All thanks to the help of taxpayers.

New York was riveted by a debate over whether Amazon should receive $3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives in return for setting up a headquarters in Queens and creating 25,000 jobs. But with far less public attention, the city government has for more than a decade been funneling even more aid to Hudson Yards, a 28-acre complex of office buildings and luxury residential towers.

In all, the tax breaks and other government assistance for Hudson Yards have reached nearly $6 billion, according to public records and a recent analysis by the New School.

The city spent about $2.4 billion to extend the No. 7 subway line to Hudson Yards and set aside $1.2 billion for about 4 acres of parks and open spaces called Hudson Park and Boulevard. The City Council stepped up to pay $359 million in interest payments on bonds when revenue from the development, which was supposed to cover the tab, fell short of projections.

As a result, Hudson Yards is perhaps an even more resonant symbol of the role of government in giving tax breaks and other incentives to spur development. In this case, two of the world’s largest real estate developers, Related Cos. and Oxford Properties Group, which together built Hudson Yards, have significantly benefited.

Supporters of the Hudson Yards project say the government incentives will pay vast dividends by creating an entirely new business district, generating thousands of new jobs and retaining many thousands more.

But the project’s detractors voice the kind of criticism that reverberated during the Amazon deal: Wealthy businesses should pay their own way and not demand government incentives to undertake projects.

Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, a supporter of the Hudson Yards project, is now expressing some misgivings about the property tax breaks. De Blasio had been a backer of the Amazon deal, but since the company pulled out, he has abruptly shifted tone.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html" id="31ce0cff-7d66-3ed9-a7a2-fbfb31851fd4">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — At Hudson Yards, the expansive real estate development that is about to open in Manhattan, seven floors of retail are occupied by Fendi, Dior, Neiman Marcus and other high-end shops. Major corporations will have their headquarters there.

Deal for Amazon Pales Against Aid to Hudson Yards

New York was riveted for weeks by a debate over whether Amazon should receive $3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives in return for setting up a headquarters in Queens and creating 25,000 jobs. But with far less public attention, the city government has for more than a decade been funneling even more aid to Hudson Yards, a 28-acre complex of gleaming office buildings and luxury residential towers that is one of the nation’s biggest real estate projects in recent years.

Supporters of the Hudson Yards project say the government incentives will pay vast dividends by creating an entirely new business district, generating thousands of new jobs and retaining many thousands more. They point out that the No. 7 subway extension, the parks and other improvements that the city financed will help make the Far West Side an overall better neighborhood.

But the project’s detractors voice the kind of criticism that reverberated during the Amazon deal: Wealthy businesses, no matter their promises of jobs, should pay their own way and not demand government incentives to undertake projects. (Stung by the backlash over the incentives that it would receive, Amazon last month abandoned its plans for its campus in Long Island City.)

The opponents are focused in particular on a lengthy and lucrative property tax break for developers within the broader Hudson Yards area. So far, the cost of that tax break has surpassed $1 billion, according to the recent analysis by the New School.

Future properties in Hudson Yards can also take advantage of the tax break, which can be as much as a 40 percent discount and last about 20 years. The opponents said such incentives inevitably end up widening income inequality in a city like New York.

“We are still giving tax breaks to a development that enriches billionaire developers and high-rise commercial and residential development that is not benefiting ordinary people in New York,” said James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

There are other incentives as well.

BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, which ended 2018 with $5.98 trillion under management, can obtain $25 million in state tax credits if it adds 700 jobs at Hudson Yards. L’Oreal USA is in line for $5.5 million for the same discretionary tax credit, while WarnerMedia can get $14 million.

Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, a supporter of the Hudson Yards project, is now expressing some misgivings about the property tax breaks. De Blasio had been a backer of the Amazon deal, but since the company pulled out, he has abruptly shifted tone, just as he has been seeking to solidify his credentials with progressives.

De Blasio said in a statement that the subway and park spending had broad benefits, but added: “We’ve moved away from providing discretionary incentives like the prior administration. I believe state and local economic development programs need to be re-evaluated and updated.”

Hudson Yards sprouted during a moment of post-Sept. 11 pride and economic uncertainty, with the mayor at the time, Michael Bloomberg, vowing to reclaim a neighborhood that included a stubby collection of brick warehouses, factories and tenements built when the Hudson River docks were busy. In the middle was an unsightly rail yard.

On Friday, when Hudson Yards officially opens, a city within a city will rise as the centerpiece of an area bounded by Eighth and 12th avenues from 30th to 42nd streets. The main site, developed by Related Cos. and Oxford Properties, was built over the rail yard, and it is by some estimates the largest real estate project in New York since Rockefeller Center in the 1930s.

The $25 billion neighborhood has 13 buildings, including a school and parks, that will bring more than 55,000 employees to new offices there. There will also be a major dining complex with restaurants run by celebrity chefs like Thomas Keller and David Chang.

“Without a doubt, we now have millions of square feet of office space and housing we did not have,” said Alexander Garvin, a former commissioner on the New York City Planning Commission, who became involved with Hudson Yards in the mid-1990s. “We have that many more jobs, that many more places for people to live, and that much more property taxes that come into the city.”

(The Related Cos. chairman, Stephen M. Ross, 78, a billionaire who is one of the world’s richest people, is moving into a penthouse in the 72-story tower, which is known as 35 Hudson Yards.)

L. Jay Cross, president of Related Hudson Yards, which oversees the development of the site, said in an interview that the redevelopment would not have gotten off the ground without the subway extension and tax breaks that allowed for new office space to be offered at rates comparable to Midtown’s.

NEW YORK — At Hudson Yards, the expansive real estate development that is about to open in Manhattan, seven floors of retail are occupied by Fendi, Dior, Neiman Marcus and other high-end shops. Major corporations, including WarnerMedia and L’Oreal USA, will have their headquarters there. In the luxury residential buildings, one-bedroom apartments will rent for at least $5,200 a month — or you can buy a two-floor penthouse condo for $32 million.

Matthew Haag

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