Mary Campbell Gallagher

"The Eminent Domain Casino," op-ed by Mary Campbell Gallagher. In Metro New York, July 9, 2007, p. 10.

THE EMINENT DOMAIN CASINO

Hear the rattling of the dice and watch the giant croupier tossing
Brooklyn houses onto the craps table. Hear the bulldozers rumbling
through Prospect Heights to the Eminent Domain Casino! Watch Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and developer Bruce Ratner, high rollers, scooping up
Jerry Campbell's house and his lovingly-tended garden! Watch them rolling
Freddy's Bar. Atlantic Yards is big-time real estate gambling, and the
stakes are high. "Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!"

Success? Where there used to be a lowrise Brooklyn neighborhood, guys in
a skybox will watch a basketball game. Sixty stories above the spot where
Huda Mufleh-Odeh raised her three children, people on a terrace will sip
drinks as the sun sets behind Manhattan.

Will tax revenues from Atlantic Yards break the bank? Risks are high.
The economy changes. Ratner won't build part of a real city, with many
lots, multiple owners. Atlantic Yards will be one gigantic, twenty-three
acre, all-or-nothing gamble, looming over Brooklyn.

In 1981, the City of Detroit clear-cut a multi-ethnic neighborhood called
Poletown so General Motors could build an assembly plant and create 6150
jobs. Poletowners staged chained themselves into the Immaculate
Conception Church for a 29-day sit-in. On July 14, 1981, church bells
ringing, police pulled the doors apart with a tow-truck and dragged the
last protesters away.

The government and GM uprooted 4200 people. They bulldozed 600
businesses, 1400 residential properties, six churches and a hospital.

It was all a mistake. The GM plant employed half the promised workers,
and economic development never happened.

In New York City, to choose just one example, the government gambled by
using eminent domain to wipe out the business district called Radio Row,
plus the Little Syria neighborhood, the Washington Market, and scores of
historic buildings, to build the World Trade Center. The twin towers were
icons, but for decades they were over-sized economic losers, supported by
rents from government offices.

Eminent domain for Atlantic Yards is gambling, but who pays? If the
neighborhood is ruined, if the old buildings are bulldozed but the project
is not completed, if the project is completed but it's economically a
disaster, will any politician ever pay at the polls?

Not Mayor Bloomberg. He plays by his own rules. He popped Atlantic Yards
out of the City Charter process requiring a vote in the City Council, and
he handed it to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).

Not the ESDC. They are a state public benefits corporation. Theirs is a
shell game, and nobody gets to watch.

Not the City Council. The Mayor kept them from playing.

And developer Bruce Ratner? He walks away richer than ever.

If we allow the government to use eminent domain for Atlantic Yards, it
will gamble away the character of Brooklyn and speculate with citizens'
property, and no one will ever pay the price.

Except for the big losers, the poor jerks like us, the people who
bargained for a Brooklyn neighborhood and found they were living on the
Bloomberg-Ratner craps table, instead.

-- The End --

http://ny.metro.us/metro/blog/my_view/entry/My_View_The_Eminent_Domain_Casino_/9282.html

"Atlantic Yards: What Would Tiny Tim Say?" op-ed by Mary Campbell Gallagher. In Metro New York, September 25, 2006, p. 10.

ATLANTIC YARDS: WHAT WOULD TINY TIM SAY?
By Mary Campbell Gallagher

Picture Michael Bloomberg, chief executive officer of the New York City Realty Corporation — a Fortune 500 colossus of property development — back in 2002, as he tosses in his sleep in his massive East Side bedroom. Will developer Bruce Ratner get to build the hot new product in Prospect Heights that he calls Atlantic Yards?

Ratner’s 18,000-seat-arena-plus-offices-plus-condos development would be the biggest in the history of Brooklyn and the densest census tract anywhere. Atlantic Yards’ 16 skyscrapers — the tallest up to 620 feet high — would also, the mayor and Ratner know, loom over Brooklyn. It would cover not just the former MTA railyards but a full 22 acres, and the state would have to use eminent domain to take businesses and homes.

So Ratner is promising something for everyone: jobs, tax revenues, apartments, brand-name architecture, basketball, you name it. The mayor, meanwhile, knows that all developments provide jobs and tax revenues. Starchitect Frank Gehry’s designs are a titanium train-wreck. Ratner’s Community Benefits Agreement looks like pay-offs for minority supporters. The traffic will choke Brooklyn. And the financials for Atlantic Yards are less transparent than Enron’s.

In the mayor’s darkest nightmare, Atlantic Yards struggles through the City Charter’s land-use procedures, the product launch from hell. Angry New Yorkers at community board meetings attack Ratner’s zoning violations, his government subsidies, eminent domain and the fact that no alternative ways to develop the site have been considered. In the City Council, Letitia James, the councilmember from Prospect Heights, shouts, “Atlantic Yards does not look like Brooklyn!” and member Charles Barron cries, “Land grab!” The mayor’s microphone has been cut off. City Council votes no.

‘Michael!” A flash of light, the smell of sulfur and the ghost of Robert Moses, New York’s notorious builder of highways and housing projects, steps through the window. “The state’s ‘public authorities’ ruse worked for me,” Moses chuckles. “Get the project away from the city’s procedures and let the state handle it.” Presto. The mayor assigns Atlantic Yards to the Empire State Development Corporation, a state public authority with the power of the Politburo and the secrecy of the CIA. No financial accountability. No City Council hearings.

The Public Authorities Control Board — Gov. George Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno — will vote yes. And then opponents will bring some lawsuits — at the least, a pro forma attack on the environmental ruling and a challenge to eminent domain.

But one other thing is also certain. If New Yorkers complain loudly enough to their elected representatives, they can still stop Atlantic Yards, develop the railyards a better way and preserve Brooklyn.

Surrounded by flashing yellow flames, Robert Moses crosses his fingers. Will the “public authorities” dodge fail Bloomberg on Atlantic Yards as it did on the West Side Stadium?

Or will CEO Michael Bloomberg of New York City Realty and developer Bruce Ratner get to sell a traditional lowrise neighborhood, Prospect Heights, as one heckuva great new product?

###

"Superstores Come With Too High a Price," op-ed by Mary Campbell Gallagher. In Newsday, January 6, 2005, p. 37.

Big-box retailer Wal-Mart promises that it will create jobs in Rego Park. Big-box retailer Ikea promises that it will create jobs in Red Hook. At this festive party where new jobs come in big boxes, opponents of Wal-Mart such as Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn-Queens) and Assemb. Brian McLaughlin (D-Flushing), the head of the Central Labor Council, are killjoys.

Today the Economic Development Committee of the City Council is supposed to hear testimony on whether these big-box retailers actually create jobs or kill them - as critics claim.

In careful studies all over the country economists have found that Wal-Mart does not create jobs at all. In fact, Wal-Mart destroys jobs. Weiner and McLaughlin are right. In Iowa, economists Thomas Muller and Elizabeth Humstone examined seven counties where Wal-Mart built stores. In that study, sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, non-retail jobs grew faster than expected given statewide trends, but in five of the seven counties, the retail share of all jobs actually declined following Wal-Mart's arrival. As Muller recently told me, "The expected increase in retail employment just did not occur."

Most of the sales in a new Wal-Mart store must come from existing stores that sell the same goods. Economist Kenneth E. Stone of Iowa State University found in his own studies in Iowa that small stores not only in the target community but in nearby communities suffered. If we assume that the total retail pie in the area remains static, then it follows that Wal-Mart's sales must come out of the pockets of existing businesses.

Muller reports finding that when Wal-Mart built a store, in addition to downtown areas in the communities where Wal-Mart opened, downtown areas in nearby smaller communities were also affected. Stone said, "A town of 10,000 might support 50 or 60 small merchants, but when a large corporate retailer moves in, the host community as well as several smaller towns in the vicinity, often lost their Main Street merchants altogether."

As Stone and others have observed, in order for Wal-Mart to come into a market area without just taking most of its sales from existing stores, it would have to benefit from dramatic new economic or population growth, or from offering products never before offered in the area, or from an expanded sales territory. None of which we are expecting in Queens or Brooklyn.

Proponents of these superstores may imply that new big-box stores in New York City will suck their sales straight out of competing big boxes in the distant suburbs. They may suggest that city retailers are miraculously resistant to big-box stores. Yet even one store with $150 million a year in sales, like the proposed Ikea-Red Hook, must reach into local retailers' pockets. Besides, it is part of the business plan of big-box stores, that they keep adding new facilities until their stores are so close together that they choke the competition. In the zero-sum retail game, once big boxes start to multiply, jobs must disappear.

Politicians are happy when big boxes hire a lot of new employees right before opening. That increase in jobs is short-term. Economist Emek Basker of the University of Missouri conducted an exhaustive study of effects on retail jobs of 2,382 Wal-Mart stores in 1,777 counties. He found that while retail employment jumps by 100 jobs in the year Wal-Mart enters a county, the increase does not last. It falls to 50 jobs within five years, while retail employment in neighboring counties falls by approximately 30 jobs, and employment in retail distribution falls by 25 jobs.

No skunk at the development picnic, Mayor Michael Bloomberg applauds all the big boxes, the stadiums, the condos. We must believe, however, that Mayor Bloomberg cares about local retailers and their employees and about the overall strength of the economy, too - not merely about developers or phantasmagorial short-term job-gains in poor neighborhoods. If so, then the mayor should break up the developers' big-box party now.

As Assemb. Brian McLaughlin says, Wal-Mart's low prices come with too high a price tag. More than 200 communities across the country have already said "no" to Wal-Mart. New Rochelle and Gowanus recently said "no" to Ikea. The City Council and Mayor Bloomberg should say "no," too.
______
Mary Campbell Gallagher is an urban expert based in Manhattan.
______

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

"Why Red Hook Ikea Project Should be Rejected," Guest Opinion by Mary Campbell Gallagher. In The Brooklyn Papers, October 2, 2004, p. 6.
Dream that you are flying over New York harbor three years from now, in September of 2007. Ahead are the sparkling towers of lower Manhattan.

To your left, the Statue of Liberty raises her flaming torch 395 feet above the water, a symbol of America. But what is this? On the Brooklyn waterfront to your right there has arisen a vast new structure as big as five football fields, bearing the blue and yellow colors of the Swedish flag. Thousands of cars head towards the 1,500 cars already parked there.

Unfortunately, that giant blue box with yellow lettering is a symbol, too, just like Lady Liberty. It is not a symbol of America’s hope and greatness, however, but of New York City’s desperation. For on September 8, 2004, the City Planning Commission voted to sell out our peerless New York City waterfront to a Scandinavian company named Ikea.

Yes, it is a nightmare. But wake up! We are still in 2004. New Yorkers can still tell the City Council to save the Brooklyn waterfront from being obliterated by suburban sprawl.

Ikea’s only argument for its gigantic tax-subsidized store is this: There may possibly be jobs for the residents of Red Hook Houses, a public housing project.

Ikea’s reps have divided the community: the residents of Red Hook Houses, who are largely African-American, from their neighbors who have refurbished dilapidated structures.

Ikea says it will create "500 or 600 jobs." The activist Red Hook Civic Association, which has saved Red Hook from previous urban disasters including garbage transfer stations, says that Ikea will force 50,000 cars a week down through the narrow cobblestone streets of Red Hook to the waterfront.


Questions that the City Planning
Commission has failed to ask Ikea.

QUESTION. Exactly how many unemployed people live in the Red Hook Houses?

ANSWER. According to the Department of City Planning web site: 569.*

QUESTION. How many jobs in large retail stores are there in Red Hook right now?

ANSWER. According to John McGettrick, co-chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association, there already are or soon will be more than a thousand retail jobs within walking distance of Red Hook Houses. Employee turnover in retail is 40 to 60 per cent a year, so retail jobs are abundant.

QUESTION. If New York City permits Ikea’s tax-subsidized store on the waterfront, how many jobs will Ikea promise to Red Hook’s residents?

ANSWER. None. Not even one.

QUESTION. What does Ikea promise?

ANSWER. Ikea promises only that it will consider applications from Brooklyn’s 1-1-2-3-1 zip code two weeks earlier than other applications.

QUESTION. Ikea says it will offer "close to 600" jobs in Red Hook. In the New Haven, Conn., store it just opened, however, Ikea has only 350 employees in a 311,000-square-feet store. Why would Ikea need 600 employees in a store in Brooklyn with 346,000 square feet? Lots of greeters?

ANSWER. Silence. There is no answer to this question.

QUESTION. Does Ikea offer employee benefits?

ANSWER. Ikea offers employee benefits, including health benefits and tuition reimbursement. The majority of Ikea’s employees will work fewer than 20 hours per week, and they will get no benefits for six months. Considering the high turn-over in retail, Ikea may never pay even one worker from Red Hook Houses any benefits at all.

QUESTION. Won’t Ikea destroy other jobs in Red Hook?

ANSWER. Building the Ikea store will destroy 80 to 100 jobs on the Erie Basin. Hundreds of other jobs in Red Hook will be imperiled by the streets’ being clogged with traffic.

QUESTION. Isn’t it an open secret that big box stores like Ikea do not create retail jobs, they destroy jobs?

ANSWER. Yes. In fact, there is a slight bump up in retail employment after a big box store opens, but within a year, the total number of employees drops, to a figure lower than would have been anticipated given statewide economic growth. A big box store puts local stores out of business, and then it needs fewer employees to sell the same amount of goods.

QUESTION. So does New York City need a big box store located near Red Hook Houses?

ANSWER. No.


Questions for Ikea foes.

QUESTION. How would Ikea affect the Brooklyn waterfront?

ANSWER. Ikea will degrade the Brooklyn waterfront with suburban sprawl, with more parking lots, traffic, pollution, and big box stores, and less of the lively variety we expect on city streets.

QUESTION. What is the best use for the Red Hook waterfront?

ANSWER. In 1996, the City Planning Commission approved Red Hook’s community-originated plan, called a 197-a plan. As Antonia Bryson, attorney for one Red Hook coalition, emphasizes, the plan seeks to improve the pedestrian environment, capitalize on Red Hook’s historic resources, and support maritime activity. The Baltimore firm of Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse has proposed a beautiful mixed-use project for Red Hook that is consistent with the 197-a plan. It emphasizes maritime, commercial and residential uses. It is an urban, not suburban, plan, it will result in city growth in surrounding blocks and more jobs than Ikea.

* * *

In order to provide a few jobs for Red Hook Houses should New York allow a tax-subsidized big box store to blight the New York City waterfront? New Rochelle recently rejected Ikea, as did Somerville, Massachusetts, and [even nearby] Gowanus, Brooklyn.

The City Council will [act by October 11]. Tell the City Council that for Ikea to degrade the New York City waterfront is a nightmarish mistake.

-- The End –

"New York, New York," Essay-Review by Mary Campbell Gallagher of A New Deal for New York, by Mike Wallace. In The Nation, 6 January 2003, pp. 25-32.

The economy of New York City still reels from the attack on September 11, to which has been added the economic effect of global recession and Wall Street's sharp decline. Official estimates of what the World Trade Center attack alone may have cost the city economy run as high as $100 billion. For many New Yorkers, however, the attack on the World Trade Center was a new wound at exactly the spot where an old wound, going back nearly half a century, had not yet healed. They felt again their grief for the bustling, gritty harbor culture of the old Lower West Side that planning for the World Trade Center, completed in 1974, had bulldozed under. They mourned the century-old redbrick Washington Market, Radio Row with its hundreds of small businesses, and the throbbing West Side docks, which were moved to New Jersey. They missed the hundreds of ships that crowded the harbor and the swarms of blue-collar workers and shopkeepers that had animated the streets of lower Manhattan, along with the bankers and traders of Wall Street. They wondered how New York City could recapture all the jobs it had lost, going back fifty years. . . .

"This Park is Central," Commonweal,
22 April 1994, p. 30.

Following the path of a woozy mastodon of old, I cross Central Park from upper east to upper west each morning, and from upper west to upper east each afternoon.

The park is its own country, bigger than Monaco, the undulating green valley amidst the mountains of Manhattan. Crossing in the morning, past the Trefoil Arch, along the Terrace, past Bethesda Fountain, along the drive, I pass every day a serious Frenchman hustling intently from west to east. He has a young boy on each hand, one fluttering like a jib, both chattering to Papa as they go, their buckled black book bags flapping on their backs, their free hands rapidly gesticulating, as Papa leads them along. . . .

"Two Dreams of Greenwich Village,"
Literal Latte, November-December 1997, pp. 19-21.

I was just seventeen when I moved to Washington Square on the bright Labor Day Week-end of 1955. The big yellow cab flew along the nearly empty streets, down from the Barbizon Hotel for Women and through the driveways of Grand Central Station. I was in the back with one arm around my new suitcase full of plaid Bermuda shorts and button-down shirts, my music, and my pencils and sketchbooks from the old School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This land is your land, This land is my land . . . .

"Linguists Could Provide Insights into Abscam Tapes." Legal Times, 31 August 1981, p. 12.

As a lawyer who is also trained as a linguist, I am concerned about the evidence that went to the jury in the Abscam caes. Those cases in which the defendants were convicted are now before the trial judge again, on post-trial motion, or are on appeal. They will certainly come in due course before the Supreme Court. I have the greatest respect for the attorneys who represented the defendants in the Abscam cases. I respectfully suggest, however, that linguistic analysis of the taped conversations in those cases might raise new issues of due process. Indeed, it might raise new issues of scienter and mens rea, and of simple innocence or guilt.

"Bill on Parental Consent for Abortions Poses Quandary." The New York Observer, 30 April 1990, p. 12.

"My father is from a pre-Revolutionary family," says the young graduate student, an athletic-looking woman with long, dark brown hair. "Both of my parents are extremely liberal. I was 17, and I didn't want to tell them that I wanted an abortion. . . ."

Scoring High on Bar Exam Essays. New York: Arco, 1991; Sulzburger & Graham, 1996. Audio Companion to Scoring High. Arlington, Virginia: The National Jurist, 1996

About this book:

Essay writing can account for fifty per cent or more of a candidate's bar exam score, yet even the best bar review courses often don't teach students how to write lawyer-like essays. Now candidates will find the step-by-step instruction they need in this unique reference. It is packed with expert essay-writing systems and confidence-building practice. It features systems for hitting all the issues, focusing on the law, and scoring high with less writing. It contains 80 actual state bar exam essay questions, with answers written in the Model Paragraph and Key Outlining format.

"Testing 1-2-3: An Insider’s Insight on How to Do Well on Bar Exam Essays." Student Lawyer, March 1992, pp. 12-14.

This summer some 40,000 bar candidates will gather in the heat, many to take the computer-scored Multistate Bar Examination, almost all to write six or more hours of essay examinations, and so leap the last substantial hurdle between themselves and the coveted title attorney at law! As summer turns into fall, alas, several thousand of those examinees will receive a thick envelope containing the notice "You did not pass," and application forms for the next sitting for the bar. Often burdened by debt, embarrassed in front of their family and friends, usually having to work up until the last moent at a job they are afraid of losing if they fail the bar again, these repeaters, as they are known, are a brave and hard-working band. But wouldn't it be wonderful if they had received the thin envelope of congratulations, instead?

"Lessons from the Sputnik-Era Curiculum Reform Movement: The Institutions We Need for Educational Reform." In What’s at Stake in the K-12 Standards Wars: A Primer For Educational Policy Makers, ed. Sandra Stotsky, pp. 281-312. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2000.

In scattered universities at the middle of this century, in the gloom of the Cold War, a few of America's leading scientists, mathematicians, scholars and educators began what was to become a brilliant national movement to reform American science and mathematics education. The curriculum projects they founded prospered and multiplied, ultimately receiving millions of dollars in federal and foundation support, producing scores of textbooks, films, and teaching aids, spreading across the curriculum to English and other subjects, and in time reaching hundreds of thousands of students, in the majority of America's schools. And then, having blazed into glory, just as abruptly, Curriculum Reform fell from sight. Of the dozens of high school science and mathematics textbooks that the projects published in the 1950s and 1960s, to my knowledge only three remain in print, in updated editions. Two are biology textbooks from the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) and one is the physics textbook from the Physical Sciences Study Committee (PSSC), which also has supplementary materials still in print. Of the dozens of groups of scientists, writers and teachers that were developing high school curricula then, only one, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), remains in operation. Indeed, many of today's teachers have never even heard of Curriculum Reform. It lives now principally in the memories of the surviving Curriculum Reformers, and I am one. . . .

Review of Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). The Weekly Standard, November 22, 1999, at 39-40.

From Mary Campbell Gallagher's review:

"For all his promises of shocking revelations about the selection of our meritocracy, Lemann challenges almost nothing in the American university system. He criticizes the SAT, but he loves the greasy pole of success. He scorns the kind of old-fashioned authority exercised by Henry Chauncey, but he admires the research universities Chauncey nurtured. It seems not to occur to Lemann, however, that our German-style universities--with their huge menus of elective courses, their armies of teaching assistants, and their reliance on a multiple-choice test for entrance--are short-changing undergraduates. The index to The Big Test contains no entry for "liberal arts. . . ."

Brown, Thomas R., Mary Gallagher, and Rosemary Turner, Teaching Secondary English: Alternative Approaches. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1975.

Textbook that gives secondary school teachers of English three ways to teach language, literature and writing. Dr. Gallagher wrote the sections on linguistic theory, close textual analysis of literature and classical rhetoric.