The Taking of Willets Point

by Sandy Ikeda
Sun, 6 Jan 2008 at 2:47 PM

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A recent article in The Sun prompted me to take a drive one morning through Willets Point, the area at the geographic center of New York City and literally at the doorstep of the Mets' new stadium in northern Queens. The place is not for the faint of heart. It was right after a heavy downpour, and I was glad to be in an SUV while navigating through pond-sized potholes, across rivers of oily brown water, and around a carnival of mostly shabby-looking auto-repair and parts shops, warehouses, and junkyards.

I would wager that most middle-income-and-above New Yorkers have never been there, but if you own a car but not much money, Willets Point is the place to go. Mayor Bloomberg, however, thinks it's a blight on the city and wants to get rid of it.

My last post mentioned Dharavi, purported to be the largest slum in Asia with a population of upwards of 1 million. Willets Point is the business equivalent of a slum: a place where poor businesses congregate for mutual support and networking. Like Dharavi, Willets Point is home to many longtime establishments, many doing very well, that serve the low-income community but with little infrastructure to speak of, thus the flooding and poor drainage.

You can read about the Mayor's intentions here. He claims that his proposal, part of his mega-vision "PlanNYC 2030,"

would create 5,500 units of mixed-income housing, 500,000 square feet of office space, a 700-room hotel, a two-acre park, and a new bridge into Flushing over Flushing Creek. Over all, the mayor said, the project would create 20,000 construction jobs and 6,100 permanent jobs, and would generate at least $1.5 billion in revenue for the city.

Bloomberg threatens to use eminent domain if owners are unwilling to sell. (In a catch-22, he plans to justify the use of eminent domain to redevelop Willets Point precisely because of the toxic filth that is the result of the government's failure to provide adequate infrastructure in the first place. An article in the Village Voice mentions this issue.) The Sun article reported that 250 of the businesses located there, which is just about all of them, are quite understandably unwilling to leave. Many are second- and third-generation family-owned establishments; altogether, they employ around 1,500 workers. We have seen this before many times, especially recently in the case of the proposed private development of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and unfortunately we will see it again.

Many would question whether this city, particularly Queens, really needs another government-subsidized, so-called "mixed-use" project. This in an area made grimy by more than a century of misuse and neglect, encouraged by local governments, beginning with the 40 Thieves of Tammany Hall. Here's a good article from the Gotham Gazette by Tom Angotti that describes the city government's continuing shenanigans in the "Iron Triangle." Angotti rightly points out that "city officials have an opportunity to help strengthen this network instead of destroying it."

Elsewhere in the U.S., local residents and businesses have been fighting the constitutionality of the rising trend of using eminent domain to take private property for private use. I am speaking of Kelo v. City of New London, in which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this practice by ruling in 2005 that the benefits generated by large private developers, who were the beneficiaries of a taking, qualified as a legitimate "public use"; and the case of Bailey's Brake Service in which the City of Mesa, Ariz., (which happens to be my hometown) attempted, unsuccessfully so far, to transfer private land in the city center from an auto repair shop in order to clear the way for a large hardware store. I doubt the Founding Fathers had these things in mind when they wrote the takings clause into the Constitution.

Bloomberg's plan will thus likely use political power to drive out businesses that have been serving low-income New Yorkers for years in favor of big, private developers and those who will be able to afford the new housing (80% of which will be market-rate), offices, and accommodations that are to be built.

It almost makes me nostalgic for the bad old days of Robert Moses, who used eminent domain no less brutally but mainly to build parks, highways, and bridges. Private construction companies did profit handsomely from his projects, of course, but it seems to me that obvious ties between big-money developers and political power were much less tolerated, and therefore less blatant, than is evidently the case today.

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