Capital of the world? Why London is cleaning NY’s clock
I hate to break the news to Mayor Adams and other New Yorkers who call our city the “capital of the world” — but London is cleaning our clock when it comes to transformative improvements to what urban planners call the “built environment.”
That London’s clobbering the Big Apple was achingly clear on my visit there last month.
I particularly marveled at the swift progress of Canada Water, a new, something-for-everyone, 53-acre south London neighborhood coming into focus on the river Thames.
Named for a waterfront area where Canadian timber was once unloaded, it will bring 3,000 new homes, 2 million square feet of offices, retail, theaters, community spaces, and a 3.5-acre park to an underused parcel of land within 10 to 15 years.
Phase I alone, to be completed next year, will have 265 new homes, 320,000 square feet of offices, 20,000 square feet of stores, a leisure center, a university building, and revitalization of the district’s historic dock and boardwalk.
A New Yorker can only be amazed at the relatively smooth and rancor-free sail that Canada Water enjoyed through a rational approval process that mocks the Big Apple’s tortuous land-use ordeals.
Canada Water, developed by a joint venture of British Land and the pension fund known as Australian Super, received basic approvals for the entire master plan from the London Borough of Southwark in May 2019.
Despite squabbles over such details as whether a new bridge would disturb wildlife in a pond, opposition was largely limited and muted.
Nothing by a single New York developer compares in size.
Related Companies’ Hudson Yards, a mere 28 acres, remains only half built.
The hold-up is mainly due to a shaky economic climate.
Pacific Park in Brooklyn still isn’t finished after 18 years of revolving-door developers, bitter lawsuits, and even a name change (from Atlantic Yards) to make people forget its tormented past.
Every delay for whatever reason speaks to the futility that plagues our grandest visions.
London’s monumental Battersea Power Station throbs with employees of Apple, which set up headquarters there, as well as shoppers and restaurant-goers.
Here at home, the similar-size Kingsbridge Armory in The Bronx lies as empty as it’s been since 1969.
London’s new Elizabeth Line, a 73-mile long above- and below-ground cross-city train route, opened last year after 13 years of work.
Our “Second Avenue Subway” remains a three-stop spur after 100 years of false starts.
The MTA’s East Side Access project at Grand Central Terminal came 20 years late at a cost of over $11 billion; its main effect so far is that LIRR trains now suffer twice as many delays as before.
Given New Yorkers’ unflinching stance against actual progress — not to be confused with lunatic “progressive” agendas — it’s a miracle we build anything large at all.
But why does London whip us so frequently?
Too many New Yorkers who call themselves progressive but are in fact reactionary would rather the city never change at all.
Requests for a zoning change to add a few stories onto an old building trigger howls over “gentrification,” environmental nitpicking, and bureaucratic heel-dragging.
To say nothing of outright sabotage — such as by City Council members who have torpedoed worthy projects in Harlem and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park out of sheer spite.
Having the UN makes it sound plausible to call New York the “capital of the world.”
But it’s more helpful to be the capital of a place that can actually put money and muscle behind transformative, large-scale development.
Thanks to London’s status as the capital of the United Kingdom, its elected officials and commissioners share a common goal to make the great capital even greater.
Gotham isn’t the capital of the United States nor even of New York State.
Lawmakers in Washington, DC, and Albany sneer at our pleas for help.
Our builders must fend mostly for themselves with Kafka-esque bureaucracies, calcified zoning rules, criminally high construction costs — and “activist” opposition on every corner.
Ordinary Londoners, who are now as diverse as New Yorkers, don’t have the knee-jerk hostility to change that can seem genetic here.
Blame it partly on “master builder” Robert Moses, who launched great public works but demolished sound neighborhoods in the process — and instilled an enduring distrust of change.
But look at Canada Water and be amazed at what can be done in a city that’s open to actual progress — and lament that we can’t build anything like it.
