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“The city is still tinkering with designs that started to seem old more than a decade ago. We’re moving too slowly (while our cars still go too fast).”
Jeanmarie Evelly
Queens, Manhattan skyline
A new “NYC Climate Dashboard” onlineNew York City is not doing enough for its climate goals. What’s worse, the goals aren’t enough for the challenges we face.
Scientists are increasingly agreeing that the world has just a decade left to go before the end of this decade. Avert climate catastrophe. Our biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses in New York City are our buildings, and our driving. As an architect and urban designer, I know we’re missing some easy but significant changes we can make.
We’re staring into the abyss, but building and driving like it’s 1999. We must do better for future generations.
We’re building energy-wasting towers
New York City and New York State collaborate with the wealthiest developers.Tax credits, upzonings, public-private partnerships, and tax credits can be used to promote and subvention these activities.Construction of glass supertalls is a triple threat to the environment. The towers are made of high-tech glass, which uses chemicals to reduce heat gain from the sun. The glass walls are made from a lot of energy.
Second, even though the glass is high-tech, properly insulated masonry walls can save far more energy than any other glass walls. No glass wall can be raised to the level of insulation of the best solid wall with “punched” windows.
You can make the situation worse by raising the glass wall higher in the air. This can be seen in the Energy Star ratings New York City provides buildings.
The Energy Star scale ranges from 1 to 100 with 100 being the most prestigious. A famous new luxury tower in Tribeca frequently called “the Jenga building” scored a 3. My 116 year-old apartment building scored 85. Many people I spoke to believed that every building should get at least a 30, similar to the SAT scores.
Leadership in is a better-known rating system. Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) started the certification program in 1993. LEED measures more that energy use. The point system is based on 10 categories. A building that has a failing score on the Energy Star System can be certified LEED-certified if it has enough points from various elements, such as superior indoor air quality or bicycle racks.
LEED does not penalize third problem with glass towers still in New York: no one knows how much time the chemicals in high-tech glass will last. This is because their design, composition and design are constantly being updated. We won’t know how long the new composites work until they start failing. However, they will eventually fail so much that the curtain wall and all its embodied energy will have to be removed.
“The greenest building is an old building,” is an increasingly common phrase. They use less energy (check out their city ratings), and they contain embodied energies we throw away. New York City has to reevaluate its priorities when it comes building. This is not a reason to build these glass towers.
Stop building glass towers and supertalls
If we look at all the facts, stopping glass towers and supertalls from being built is low-hanging fruit. It might seem radical, but look at what Mayor Bill de Blasio said three years ago: “We are going to introduce legislation to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming,” our former mayor Declared on Earth Day 2019.. “They have no place in our city or our Earth.”
Unfortunately, that was the last public statement that an elected official made. One can’t help but wonder if de Blasio got a call from his Big Real Estate donors. Big Real Estate around the world likes the glass walls, because they’re simple to design (the architect usually picks them out of a catalog), cheap to manufacture, and come in a semi-fabricated form that’s easy to install.
Supertalls in New York are either “Class A” office towers—office buildings with very large floors too big to be naturally lit or ventilated—or super-luxury apartment buildings. Only the most exclusive apartments can afford the high-end construction costs of very tall towers. Supertalls also drive up land prices making it prohibitively expensive to build luxury housing.
The supertalls are unnecessary. Post-Covid, New York’s office buildings will have a 20% vacancy rate in 2022. The future is unknown. Chase, a large corporation, plans to reduce their office space at least 30%.
Although supertall residential buildings in Manhattan were once highly profitable, they were overbuilt and created a glut on the market which resulted in unsold units even after steep discounts. The two most profitable buildings in New York’s history are two super-luxury apartment towers that are neither high nor covered in glass.
Both buildings are clad with limestone, not glass. Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), the architects of both buildings, has ceased to design glass apartments in New York. Because their designs for 15 CPW, 220 Central Park South, were so successful, they can do this. RAMSA currently owns 15 apartment buildings in New York.
We drive too much
The average New York City household doesn’t own a car. In Manhattan, more than three-quarters of households don’t own a car. Yet we have a New York City Department of Transportation that’s primarily a Department of Traffic. Like all other DOTs in the country, NYC DOT does more than to reduce traffic. Prioritize moving cars into, through, and out of the city.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed in 2007 a congestion zone for Manhattan, with tolls to reduce car use and increase revenue for mass transportation. The NYS Legislature rejected the proposal. Fifteen years later, it’s hard to say precisely who’s still holding it up. Gov. Kathy Hochul could work with others to push it through. However, she and the MTA recently stated that they should examine the situation. Additional 16 months. We don’t need studies, we need major changes to the status quo.
Eight years ago Mayor de Blasio committed to the city the Vision Zero program,With a promise to reduce traffic deaths in New York City by zero by 2024. Although the date was changed to 2030, it is clear that the streets we are building now will not lead to zero deaths. In 2022, traffic and traffic deaths in New York City are the worst they’ve been since Vision Zero began.
When it took road space at Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street from cars, the NYC DOT was one of the most radical in America. It also brought in tables and chairs. Since then, the revolution has been slowly evolving.
These improvements are evident. CitiBike and many protected bike lanes are available. Post-Covid, there are Open Streets and Open Restaurants. There are also parklets. Mayor Eric Adams has pledged nearly $1 billion to improve bike lanes and sidewalks. The city is still working on designs that look dated more than a decade back. We’re moving too slowly (while our cars still go too fast).
Chuck Marohn, an engineer who’s the founder of the popular nationwide movement known as “Strong Towns,”He proposes in his book “Confessions of a Recovering Traffic Engineer”That we take the design and construction of streets away traffic engineers.
“The underlying values of the transportation system are not the American public’s values,” Marohn wrote in his book. “They are not even human values. They are values unique to a profession that has been empowered with reshaping an entire continent around a new, experimental idea of how to build a human habitat.” His state Board of Engineering Licensure is You can sue him.
New York’s first “people-first” street (one short block of Broadway between 24th and 25th streets) is a non-place where drivers are more comfortable than people walking or cycling. Similar holds true for another block, University Place south of 14th Street. 5,000 traffic engineers dominate the NYC DOT. Despite appearances, they are not skilled at designing streets for urban living. New York City’s best street designs have been created by urban designers or architects for Business Improvement Districts.
Streets for living
“The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” the great Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman once said. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”
He’s talking about the traffic lights, traffic signs, crosswalks, turn arrows, white and yellow elastomeric paint, red lanes, “Fresh Kermit” (green) lanes, and all the other detritus of traffic engineers that makes drivers comfortable going faster.
Many of these problems are being addressed in European cities. In reducing traffic and making streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, most cities in the Netherlands or Denmark are decades ahead. However, every major European city responded to Covid’s pandemic. Making streets more livable. American cities produce five to six-times as much carbon gas than European cities, and this gap is growing.
London has Low Traffic Areasand a commitment towards becoming the Most walkable cities Europe. Paris is moving towards “the 15-minute City,”All your daily needs can be met within a 15 minute walk or bike ride. Brussels and Milan are both within easy reach. changing just as quickly. Helsinki and Oslo are both available. Reduce pedestrian deaths to zero Worth noting: most European “streets for people” are not designed by traffic engineers.
A New York non profit called OpenPlansThat funds groups such as StreetsblogAnd StreetopiaUWS Has proposed a New York City Office of Public Space ManagementThat would be in collaboration with the NYC DOT to manage the public space, which makes up 70% of the city’s streets.
Why stop there European streets are safer and better for city life because they don’t put traffic engineers in charge. Because they have huge budgets, DOTs in America are powerful. But the Biden administration is sending billions to states and cities for infrastructure project funding. New York’s Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer is strong in transportation issues. He has stated that he would like New York to look more like Amsterdam. And our senator secured what was called “an effing lot of money” for street work.
People who do the urban design work I do frequently hear, “We’re not Amsterdam.” Well, New York was once called “Nieuw Amsterdam,” and the streets in Lower Manhattan were laid out in the 17th century by Dutch people. I was part the planning team for Financial District Neighborhood Association. “Amsterdamize” many of the streets below City Hall.
It is time to make changes. No other American city is more dependent on cars than Manhattan. We can reduce the number of cars in our streets and make Manhattan a city where people come first. It’s easy to create Slow Streets in the Financial District and Greenwich Village. When people realized what was possible, Brooklyn and The Bronx neighborhoods would soon be calling for their very own. Slow Street plans.
Why stop there? All the old cities that have good public transportation are great places to transform from a life based upon driving. Many people live in walkable neighborhoods, such as New Orleans, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Portland. Many American cities and towns have at least one or more walkable neighborhoods.
Time to change
Norman Mailer ran for mayor in 1969. He was a candidate for Mayor in 1969. Communities to control the developmentParticularly with housing being rebuilt rather than razed.
Part of Mailer’s platform called for the end of private cars in Manhattan. The platform would have provided free transit and free bicycle-sharing to connect to garages outside Manhattan. Mailer claimed that it would reduce the island’s pollution by sixty percent.
Half a century on, the world has reached the tipping point to reverse climate change. We are now causing irreparable harm to the earth’s life forms. We must reduce our dependence on automobiles for the good of the planet and the people living there, but we keep going with the status quo. We should be a model for the future, as we have the best mass transit system and the most walkable neighborhoods in North America.
New York City is home to some of America’s most successful policies and programs. We are punishing future generations by not making changes to the way we use our streets, and how we build. The good news is that New York City will be better for everyone if we make the necessary changes now.
John Massengale, an architect and urban planner in New York City, is John Massengale
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this opinion piece was previously published by CommonEdge.
