Steve Cuozzo
REALTY CHECK
Joining the melee over East Midtown rezoning, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will propose today that City Hall issue bonds to pay for future transit and infrastructure improvements in the Grand Central district.
Schumer makes the pitch in a letter to Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Steel. The bonds would provide revenue to fund the upgrades — which rezoning critics say are needed to prevent unmanageable congestion — before new buildings go up in the area and add thousands of new workers to the sidewalks and rail stations.
They'd be issued against the District Improvement Fund, a proposed city-controlled pot into which landlords would pay in exchange for being able to construct larger new buildings than current zoning permits.
Associated Press
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"The No. 1 point critics of rezoning have made is that the transportation improvements come too late," said Schumer, a strong proponent of the measure pushed by Mayor Bloomberg and Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden.
"But we could get going on the transit infrastructure immediately, and not wait until the buildings go up," Schumer told us yesterday.
Since up-zoning, if approved, wouldn't kick in until 2017, the city would have a head start on new public amenities before new construction.
Schumer recognizes the obsolescence of the office stock along and astride Park Avenue, where buildings are on average 60 years old. "Our office buildings are our factories, our economic engines, and they need to be state of the art," he says.
The rezoning proposal has begun the public review process leading to a City Council vote in October. It affects a 78-block zone roughly between East 39th and 57th streets, between Third and Fifth avenues.
Under the scheme, the city wouldn't collect DIF payments until a deal was struck with a developer wishing to buy air rights to build towers larger than existing zoning rules permit.
That, Schumer writes to Steel, means "[infrastructure] upgrades would not get funded until new buildings were already rising.
"Instead the reverse must occur," Schumer says — "invest in infrastructure improvements now" to prepare for the new towers and the employees who would work there.
He also hints that pre-financing the amenities could lead to benefits from Washington: "I am open to . . . using this new source of revenue to leverage more federal resources."
While the rezoning proposal's fine print is complicated, basically a developer would pay the city $250 for each additional square foot to be built at a particular address above the currently permitted floor-to-area ratio (FAR) of 15.
The maximum permissible size of new structures would vary throughout East Midtown, but could rise to 30 FAR in the blocks nearest to Grand Central Terminal. The much greater floor space on the same "footprint" could result in towers as tall as the Chrysler Building.
The DIF would pay for "critical transit and pedestrian improvements . . . such as additional, relocated or reconstructed stair, ramp and escalator connections within the Grand Central subway station as well as a full range of at-grade public realm improvements," according to the Dept. of City Planning (DPC).
Landlords and many preservationists are on board with the idea that new, larger projects are necessary to keep the city from losing its global edge to London or other financial capitals. Under current zoning rules written in 1961, most existing East Midtown buildings couldn't be replaced by new ones even of the same size.
But they disagree on timing, the volume of new construction and how many older buildings should be protected from demolition.
All sides in the struggle are digging in. Real Estate Board of New York president Steven Spinola says the lobbying organization wants to allow larger structures on sites with footprints smaller than 25,000 square feet — a size that is required by the current proposal.
Meanwhile, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is considering eight East Midtown properties for designation, a list first reported by The Post's Lois Weiss last month.
The eight — including the Graybar Building, 270 Park Avenue and three Lexington Avenue hotels — are understood to be merely the first wave of perhaps 30-plus the LPC will evaluate over time. Rezoning advocates say the initiative has the city working at cross-purposes — the DCP battling to encourage large new development, while LPC allegedly inhibits it by making too many sites off-limits.
LPC spokesperson Lisi de Bourbon said the agency has "reached out to the owners of all eight buildings" and is meeting with them to discuss the situation.
scuozzo@nypost.com
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