NYC Cuts New Deal To Redevelop Willets Point With Mets Owners

New York City has cut a new deal to redevelop Willets Point with the Mets ownership group. Willets Point has long been eyed for redevelopment. It's a neighborhood that is largely off the grid - it lacks sewer hookups and is a warren of junkyards and repair shops in the shadow of the gleaming new CitiField. Since construction got underway to build the stadium a few years back, Mayor Bloomberg had looked to get the redevelopment going.

Those efforts had stalled until now.

A new deal between the Bloomberg administration and a group of developers, including the owners of the Mets, will call for the remediation and redevelopment of a 20-acre area of the blighted neighborhood next to Citi Field, adding retail and ultimately new housing in a time frame that extends past an initial proposed 10-year plan, a person familiar with the agreement told The Associated Press.

The person requested anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the matter ahead of an announcement.

Under the agreement, the developers, Related Companies and Sterling Equities, would clean up the area and construct a mall on the west side of the ballpark. A 200-room hotel and “two retail strips” are part of the plan for the opposite end of the stadium, the New York Times reported.

Then, no later than 2025, they would start construction on a mixed-use component that would include housing and measure anywhere from 1.3 million square feet up to 4.5 million square feet. The founders of Sterling Equities are Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, the owners of the Mets.

The redevelopment of the area, currently populated by auto-repair shops and junkyards and lacking infrastructure as basic as sewers, has long been a goal of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s. In 2007, he announced a 10-year initiative that would bring homes and commercial space to the area.

The new agreement extends past that period, but the person speaking to the AP said that by the original end point of 2017, much would have been done including the vital first step of cleaning the area up and construction of some of the retail spaces.

Sterling Equities is run by Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, both of whom are embroiled in the ongoing fallout of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors. The Wilpons have been claiming that they were as much victims of the scam as everyone else, but the trustee has targeted funds owned by the Wilpons for reimbursing other victims.

The Mets have had a serious cash crunch for the better part of the past couple of years, and it's limited their ability to field competitive teams. They've also sold off minority ownership shares to investors to help raise funds for operations on and off the field.

So, how is it that the City thinks that Sterling Equities is in a financial position to make any of this happen?

One has to wonder whether they're actually going to be putting up any money of their own and are instead hoping for others to pay the way for them to move ahead on a deal that would benefit them financially in the long run.

Related Companies has deep pockets, and their real estate ventures includes getting another one of Bloomberg's pet redevelopment projects underway - the Hudson Yards. They've got the ability to get this done and they have the experience to build out combined retail and commercial space.

It would be really interesting and insightful to figure out the real working relationship here - and how it is structured.

A Misguided Plan For Penn Station and Madison Square Garden

The NY Times' Michael Kimmelmann has proposed that instead of building the Moynihan Station that would only accommodate Amtrak and leave nearly 500,000 people to deal with the horrible commute through the subterranean Penn Station beneath Madison Square Garden, that the City, MTA, and the Dolans (who own the Garden) should relocate Penn Station and the Garden to the far West Side's Hudson Yards.

A more ridiculous proposal I could not think of. We're talking about moving a major transit hub out of the Midtown hub because the station is ugly and outdated at a time when New Yorkers and New Jerseyeans are complaining about the out-of-control costs for the PATH transit hub at the World Trade Center that would service a fraction of the daily users claimed for Penn Station.

On a more practical level, the move makes no sense since there are no subways other than the soon to be completed 7 Line extension that would reach the site being proposed by Kimmelmann.

The whole point of the Penn Station hub at its current location is that it provides access to a whole host of subway lines, including the 1,2,3,A,C,E, which service more than 140,000 every day (2010 figures). The proposed location would have no connections and leave commuters no options to get to their ultimate destination.

I understand the lure of building a new station/terminal along with a new Garden at the Hudson Yards, but it's a development project that makes little sense on paper or on financial grounds.

UPDATE:
A few further thoughts. The proposed project does nothing to increase the number of tracks or platforms to maximize commuter flow, nor does it do anything about the bottlenecks on either the Hudson River or East River - it doesn't address the need for new tunnels (Gateway on Hudson Side) and apparently 4 tracks are sufficient on the East River. Capacity would be roughly the same.

Meanwhile, the MTA budget on the Fulton Street project that doesn't add capacity is more than twice what was estimated, and the South Street Ferry was likewise overbudget.

Existing infrastructure needs to be overhauled to be sure, and increased capacity needs to be built - the 2d Avenue line for instance for its entire stretch (to Hanover Square), not merely the phase underway from 96th to 63rd Street. All that costs money, and right now, prettifying Penn Station is a low profile compared to what the MTA must do.