Stadium Plan Threatens Chelsea, Clinton
By John Fisher

Two years ago, voters were treated to the strange spectacle of City Council Speaker Peter Vallone becoming a populist - calling for a public referendum on Mayor Giuliani’s plan for a new Yankee Stadium on the West Side rail yards at Tenth Avenue and 33rd Street. The vote was derailed by Rudy’s charter-revision scheme and Vallone has been strangely silent ever since, especially now as the plan is back, much larger and much more serious. The Mayor, developers, dotcommers and financiers are calling for a complete makeover of Manhattan’s West Side. A private committee, NYC2012 (which includes many developers), is calling for an 80,000-person stadium that would also be home to the New York Jets football team after it leaves the New Jersey Meadowlands in 2008.

But the stadium is just the frosting that masks larger plans. They also want to build a new Madison Square Garden a few blocks to the west, extend the #7 subway line (for a cool $700 million) westward to an expanded Javits Center, and build several high-rise hotels and other office buildings. An entire block of active businesses would be bulldozed in the process. And while there’s not enough money for city housing inspectors, much of this would involve direct or indirect public funding, rezonings, and tax abatements.

No wonder developers are salivating and no wonder Vallone, who gets much of his campaign contributions from this crowd, isn’t touting a public referendum. While most West Side politicians are already against the stadium, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields is, not surprisingly, being noncommittal by offering an alternative only if ‘Plan A’ falls apart. And Senator Charles Schumer is right in there with Rudy - he created a "gang of 35" business leaders (with no community voice) to map out the makeover.

Underlying all these proposals is the desire to convert the West Side between Chelsea and Clinton into part of the city’s central business district, replete with massive office towers. Every few decades the real-estate industry decides it wants to expand Midtown to the river. With the sustained real-estate boom, they see this goal now within striking distance, whether or not there’s a neighborhood in the way.

Even though the area may look underdeveloped to some, it brings to the city tremendous worth and vital services - among them manufacturing, printing, transportation, film production, package distribution, and various service industries. This area contains a significant portion of the garment center, one of the city’s most important industries, and is also a growing residential area.

But the impact will be more than just traffic gridlock on the West Side around the stadium. The Olympics must be recognized for what it is - a franchise worth billions of dollars that allows global corporations to massage their egos by being official sponsors to a captive audience and an opportunity for politicians and developers to remake significant portions of a cityscape under the guise of the "Olympic spirit."

Four years ago in Atlanta, up to 15,000 tenants, homeowners and small businesses were displaced to make way for the Olympics. Rent-gouging is now occurring in Sydney, Australia, and the beginnings of similar impacts are now being seen in Salt Lake City, where the 2002 Winter Olympics will be held.

In Atlanta, newspapers ran editorials about the "Techwood Problem" - Techwood being one of the country’s first public housing projects - which just happened to be in the way of Olympic and corporate makeover plans. Even though it’s 12 years away, the New York Times and Daily News have already run editorials about the "opportunities" on the far West Side. Even before Techwood residents were forced out, the police stopped patrolling the project and evictions increased. Atlanta’s homeless were swept up and offered one-way tickets out of town, and city officials boasted about the first Olympic venue to be completed - a new jail.

Many tenants were evicted by landlords hoping to rent housing to tourists during the Olympic months. The New York Times rented an apartment complex, leaving nine tenants looking for new apartments. Some tenants faced rent hikes from $475 to $3,000 a month.

And in Sydney, where the 2000 Summer Games are just getting underway, Beth Jewel of RentWatchers (a coalition created just to document how the Olympics affects tenants), reports, "although the Sydney Olympic stadium was not built on existing housing, the Olympic Games did lead to the eviction of thousands of tenants through accelerated gentrification, development and unaffordable rent hikes. Up to 20 suburbs were affected in the Olympic ‘inner ring,’ which spans from Bondi Beach on the coast to Homebush in the West. The legacy of these games will be a permanent loss of affordable accommodation and an oversupply of badly built expensive apartments. As a minority benefit financially from the Games, the homeless, low-income tenants, and the whole social diversity of the city suffer an enormous loss."

This is the part of the coming Olympic legacy that the New York Organizing Committee doesn’t want to talk about. The games may represent international diversity and sportsmanship, but the benefits accrue to corporations, developers, and those who make better livings than most tenants do. Whether it’s the impact on traffic, rents or any number of other reasons, the stadium, subway and new "Far West Central Business District"” all bode for new ills in our city.