Published in Technology Review, May, 2007
Planning for a Climate-Changed World
As the global picture grows grimmer, states and cities are searching for the fine-scale predictions they need to prepare for emergencies--and to keep the faucets running.
By David Talbot
On December 11, 1992, a powerful northeaster coalesced off the eastern seaboard of the United States, and an eight-foot storm surge struck New York City. Seawater swamped the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to a depth of six feet, cascaded down PATH subway stairs in Hoboken, NJ, and forced LaGuardia Airport and many roads and subways lines to close. Had the storm been slightly stronger, a 10-foot surge could have devastated a far wider region, inundating low-lying areas like Coney Island and Manhattan's financial district and overwhelming the 14 sewage plants dotting the New York City coastline.
A flood of comparable height in New York City's environs should occur about once every 100 years, on average, in the estimation of one Columbia University study. But global warming and rising sea levels--as well as the possibility of more-intense precipitation, stronger storms, and altered storm trajectories--will make such disasters more frequent. And to protect the people who live and work where disaster threatens, the critical first step is to determine how quickly and by how much, exactly, the threat is increasing. That knowledge is essential to deciding how seriously to consider specific countermeasures; for New York, these could range from mandatory evacuation plans for seaside neighborhoods to multibillion-dollar storm-surge barriers spanning the Verrazano Narrows and other key channels.
But there are no clear answers, and part of the problem is that well-documented predictions about planetary change haven't generally been broken down in local terms. Though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded with 90 percent certainty that human activity is warming the planet--and spelled out the likelihood of consequences that include higher seas, droughts, and fiercer storms--the United States is committing scant resources to providing usable information to the people who respond to emergencies, plan for urban development, manage coastal areas, and make sure the crops keep growing and the reservoirs stay full. "The challenge is to increase our capability to accurately forecast climate at the regional level," says Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric scientist who directs the Center for Global Change Science at MIT. "That is what is needed in order to improve the information that government agencies get--[and] to then translate those regional forecasts into something useful at the city [or] state level." Equipping people to deal with climate change could mean simply giving state and local planners access to a wealth of existing information--such as calculations made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that could indicate how far inland storm surges would move if sea levels were higher. But it will also mean sharpening local and regional models, so that they can predict the effects of climate change in far greater geographic detail. And it will require new approaches to emergency planning, water-supply management, and more.
Global warming will affect different regions in different ways. In 2000, a national assessment by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) warned generally about potential climatic changes in what it called "mega-regions" of the nation. "What we were able to do at that point was very limited," recalls Michael MacCracken, an atmospheric physicist, now retired, who coördinated the assessment effort. And the study's climate scenarios were based only on global models: "We really wanted to have more models, and more regional results, but we had very little resources to get that done." Similar, very general statements about climate change across large regions appeared in the most recent IPCC assessment, the first time the IPCC has narrowed its focus even that much. The report pointed out, for example, that the southwestern United States will probably get even more parched than it is now. But what we need are projections on a far finer scale. With federal climate-science budgets cut to the bone in recent years, a few state and local governments are funding their own efforts in New York, California, and western states eyeing dwindling water supplies with alarm.
A Wet New York City
Rushing into her office near Columbia University, Cynthia Rosenzweig was chipper despite her evident exhaustion. An agronomist by training, she directs the Climate Impacts Group at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and advises New York City's government on how climate change will intensify heat waves, stress upstate watersheds, and increase the risk of a devastating storm surge. She had just returned from Delhi, India, where she cowrote a summary of the 2007 IPCC reports, the first of which was released in February. Brightly painted papier-mâché elephants she'd brought back from her trip were arranged on the coffee table in her sixth-floor office overlooking 112th Street (as it happens, some of the highest ground in Manhattan). She sat down and, on her computer screen, called up images from a GISS global climate model.
Honed by a broad range of climate scientists, the model represents atmospheric and oceanic systems. Like other global models, it simulates interrelated processes: for example, the warming of Earth's surface by solar radiation; the absorption of heat by the oceans; the reflection of solar energy by land surfaces, ice sheets, and particulates in the atmosphere; and the effects of the accumulation of excess carbon dioxide and other atmospheric gases that trap heat. Researchers test the accuracy of such models by seeding them with, for example, data on actual greenhouse-gas emissions over the past 30 years and then seeing whether they return results consistent with temperature and other measurements recorded over that period. The goal, of course, is a model that can predict how much temperatures will continue to rise given various future greenhouse-gas emission levels, and how other parts of the climate system are likely to respond.
But the limitations of global models quickly become clear when Rosenzweig zooms in on a map of the eastern United States showing climate predictions for the 2050s. On the screen, a line cuts from eastern Pennsylvania to western Massachusetts. The area north of the line is yellow, representing a 2 ºC increase over historical averages; the area south of the line is more orange, indicating a 2.25 ºC increase. The entire New York metropolitan area, Connecticut, and much of Massachusetts and New Jersey are lumped together under a single temperature estimate. The same goes for several other variables, such as precipitation and evaporation rate. The problem is that one "grid box" in the typical global climate model--think of it as a pixel in a photograph--is a square of 150 to 200 kilometers per side.
Weather and climate are, obviously, far more localized than that. Mountain ranges--even individual peaks and valleys--make their own weather. A single glacier might grow or dissolve because of temperature and rainfall changes in a very specific area. Differences in air temperature over water and land cause breezes that can dramatically influence climate and weather in coastal areas. Regional models that take such phenomena into account are familiar to any viewer of TV weather news. But where global models are calibrated against data spanning decades, regional models are used to project only a few days ahead. Thus, one goal of climate scientists is to find a way for the twain to meet, to give local precision to predictions about global warming and climate change.
Rosenzweig's group has calculated that today's one-in-100-years New York flood would, in the 2080s, be considered a one-in-40-years or perhaps a one-in-four-years event. The order-of-magnitude difference is simply the result of variations between models. To calculate a more useful range of probabilities, Rosenzweig is currently combining global models with regional ones. By "nesting" models of smaller regional areas in the global grid boxes, she hopes to increase the resolution of climate-change predictions to 10 to 15 kilometers. In six-hour time increments, a global model introduces a fresh batch of climate variables into the regional models, which then make local calculations.
The project is ongoing; so far, efforts to validate such nested regional models against actual temperature measurements have shown the predictions to be off by 1 ºC or more, an unacceptable margin of error. Still, Rosenzweig expects that regional models will become more precise with further work. And as they do, one of their uses will be to better predict storm surges by accounting for changes in local wind patterns. "The large majority of climate impact studies have been done with the GCMs," Rosenzweig says, referring to global climate models. "We are just now beginning to do more with the RCMs [regional climate models], and they are very much in research mode. Sea-level rise is the number one vulnerability, and we need better information for the agencies. It's critical for their planning."
To be sure, global sea-level projections are still a matter of debate: the IPCC pegged the 21st-century increase at between 18 and 38 centimeters under a scenario that assumed lower greenhouse-gas emissions and between 26 and 59 centimeters with higher emissions. This uncertainty makes perfect storm-surge predictions impossible. But the lack of information about local climate change remains a stumbling block that prevents New York City--and every other coastal area--from developing the detailed information it can act on. "You don't always protect against the worst case, because you would bankrupt the city," says Rohit Aggarwala, director of long-term planning and sustainability under New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg. "How urgent is it to invest in multibillion-dollar projects? Knowing that over the whole Atlantic seaboard there will be x sea-level change and x change in violent storms doesn't necessarily help New York City make different decisions than Miami or Halifax." On the other hand, he notes, if New York were to operate on incorrectly optimistic information and delay the most ambitious storm-surge barriers too long, the consequences could be disastrous.
New York City authorities have already gotten some specific warnings from Rosenzweig's group, which made a study of how the city's water-supply and sewage-treatment infrastructure could be affected by rising sea levels. For example, a pump station north of the city on the Hudson River--built to draw emergency fresh water during times of drought--will eventually require expensive new filtration systems as rising seas push salinated water to within range of the intake areas.
But while there's still uncertainty about the rate at which sea levels are rising, it has become increasingly clear that temperature increases alone could severely tax a large city's infrastructure. Late last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, MA, released a report titled "Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast." Produced in collaboration with climate scientists, the report predicts that by midcentury, northeastern cities could be experiencing an average of 30 to 60 days of temperatures above 90 ºF each year, up from 10 to 15 days historically. By the end of the century, these cities could see 14 to 28 days of temperatures over 100 ºF, if the higher-emission scenarios are realized.
Armed with such predictions, the city of New York and a prominent regional civic-planning group, the Regional Plan Association (RPA), are starting to think about how to respond. Jennifer Cox, a senior planner and director of geographical information systems at the RPA, is superimposing estimates of heat waves and storm surges onto city maps showing topography and socioeconomic characteristics. And GISS is collaborating with a consortium of universities whose members are now plugging temperature estimates into air-quality models, to see how bad ozone levels could get during the hotter summer days of the 2040s or 2060s. High ozone levels could produce severe health crises as heat waves overwhelm emergency facilities, water supplies, and the power grid.
But such studies are just the first academic pass at planning. The scenarios they envision are still relatively vague. And while suggested remedies abound, they reflect more imagination than engineering. Physical oceanographer Malcolm Bowman of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for one, would place a tidal-surge barrier at the Verrazano Narrows (between Brooklyn and Staten Island); another near the Throgs Neck Bridge, where the East River meets Long Island Sound; another between Perth Amboy, NJ, and Staten Island; and a fourth across Rockaway Inlet at the entrance to Jamaica Bay. The barriers--more ambitious versions of the storm-surge barrier at the mouth of the Thames River outside London--could theoretically prevent tens of billions of dollars in damage. With the models and computational power available now, however, it's hard to determine whether and when such ideas need to be acted on. "If you look at European experience," says Bowman, "it takes a major flood and a major loss of life to get the bureaucracy to do anything."
Other sections of story--
- The Dry West
- The Canaries
- Staggering Backwards
- Vanishing Yosemite Snowpack
David Talbot is Technology Review's chief correspondent.
Link to online story. Archived here.
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Published in the Star-Ledger, Saturday, July 21, 2007
Study: 2008 election paper trail unreliable
Electronic voting records can fail, NJIT says
By KEVIN COUGHLIN
Star-Ledger Staff
Computer scientists have identified 33 flaws in three printer models intended to ensure the accuracy of electronic voting machines used across New Jersey.
The problems, found by the New Jersey Institute of Technology and posted online yesterday by the state elections division, potentially could compromise voter privacy and election security, according to the experts' reports.
Vendors of the gear contend the problems are easily fixed and stem largely from NJIT misinterpretations of new state guidelines for the printers.
"They're all very workable. A lot of things were taken out of context," said Michelle Shafer, spokesperson for Sequoia Voting Systems.
By January, all electronic voting machines are required by state law to include printers so voters can verify that their ballots are recorded accurately, and so officials have a "paper trail" to recount.
At the state's request, NJIT has spent several weeks scrutinizing printers for the Sequoia AVC Advantage and Sequoia AVC Edge voting machines, along with a printer for the Vote-Trakker, a machine from Avante International Technology Inc. in Princeton. The printers were tested against criteria devised by the state, and simulated both a 14-hour election day and a 1,200-vote election.
The public can examine the printers during hearings next week, from Tuesday to Friday at the New Jersey National Guard Armory in Lawrenceville. If a state panel rejects the printers, New Jersey could face the costly task of replacing touch-screen voting machines statewide with devices that scan pen-and-ink ballots.
According to NJIT, all three printers run out of paper too fast and do not properly conceal printer cables. The printers fail to alert poll workers to malfunctions and the paper storage reel of the Edge is easily accessible. The Advantage lacks tamper-proof seals, and lost 56 simulated vote records because of a paper jam. NJIT noted such an event was unlikely under real election conditions, however.
In one scenario, the Advantage could compromise the privacy of visually impaired voters. And observers taller than six feet, standing "directly next to the left or right side of the curtain," might spy a voter's printed selections.
Sequoia countered that any system would be vulnerable to snoops allowed too close to voters. And the Oakland, Calif., company said it provided security seals to NJIT.
Avante President Kevin Chung said his company has addressed most of NJIT's concerns. "They did a reasonably thorough job," Chung said. "Nothing in there is totally out of line."
Kevin Coughlin may be reached at kcoughlin@starledger.com
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Published in the Los Angeles Times, Saturday, August 4, 2007
State decides to secure electronic voting machines
Secretary of State orders more precautions be taken against tampering,
and withdraws support of the InkaVote Plus machines used in Southern California.
By Jordan Rau and Hector Becerra
Times Staff Writers
SACRAMENTO — Expressing concern that several brands of electronic voting machines used in California were vulnerable to tampering, Secretary of State Debra Bowen late Friday ordered new security protections be added and limited the use of two types of machines that were to be used in next year's elections in several Southern California counties.
Bowen also withdrew state approval of the InkaVote Plus machines used in Los Angeles County, saying that the machines' maker, Election Systems and Software, had failed to submit its equipment to her office in time to analyze its vulnerability to hacking.
She said her office would examine the InkaVote machines and expressed optimism that they would win approval in time to be used in next year's elections, but did not say what would happen if the machines failed her tests.
"When NASA discovers a flow or a potential safety concern in the space shuttle, it doesn't continue launching the missions...," Bowen said. "It scrubs the missions until the problem is fixed."
Her announcement, made just nine minutes before a midnight deadline, was condemned by the head of the state's county registrar's association, Contra Costa Registrar Stephen Weir.
Weir said Bowen's actions -- along with an unusual audit in which she dispatched several computer experts to try to hack into the machines, which they did -- had undermined public confidence in the security of the new electronic machines. But her solutions, he said, would not do anything to restore the public peace of mind, especially for elections that will occur this year, such as a special Congressional election in Los Angeles in two weeks.
"I think the secretary has redefined the definition of midnight madness," Weir said. He said that while he was not sure what the impact of the new rules would be, they had enough potential for causing chaos and delays at the polls that he encouraged people to vote by mail. Her restrictions on the use of two types of machines to one per polling place would require the printing of far more paper ballots that planned, and that could prove difficult to achieve.
"Tens of millions of additional ballots, you don't just go to Kinkos," Weir said. "The timing is way too tight."
He also predicted that the changes could delay the counting of votes. "If people don't see results, they start going 'something's wrong,' " he said.
Bowen ordered that some machines made by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems be limited to one per polling place to limit the chances that they could be tampered with. The Sequoia machines are used in Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties.
Bowen said the presence of the machines, though limited, would be helpful for disabled voters, though any voter could use the machines. Weir, however, said she was creating a "separate but unequal" voting system.
The security requirements Bowen imposed include: reinstalling the software before the Feb. 5. election to ensure it has not already been tampered with; placing special seals at vulnerable parts of the machines to reveal tampering; securing each machines at the close of each day of early voting; assigning a specific election monitor to safeguard each machine; and conducting a complete manual count of all votes cast.
Sequoia issued a statement early Saturday morning expressing "disappointment" at Bowen's actions. "Electronic voting systems have never been successfully tampered with in an actual election," Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle M. Shafer said. "That same statement cannot be made about lever machines and paper-based voting systems throughout our nation's history."
Only some of the security requirements -- involving heightened security and auditing of results -- were placed on machines made by Hart InterCivic. Those are used in Orange Counties.
Alan Dechert, president of Open Voting Consortium, and group that is critical of the electronic voting machines, said many activists would be critical that Bowen did not completely decertify those machines. "She's not asking for changes to hardware or software," he said. "This is not really doing much for transparency."
Bowen's actions came on the heels of an audit she released last week. It found that machines manufactured by Diebold Hart and Sequoia-which are used by more than twenty Californian counties--could be compromised either through manipulating the software or physically breaking into the computer hardware.
Bowen's announcement was made under odd circumstances. A press conference originally planned to be held Friday afternoon was delayed hour after hour as Bowen and her aides worked feverishly in her Sacramento office to issue her orders at least six months before the Feb. 5 presidential primaries. The requirements do not apply to any elections that occur before then.
Bowen emerged at 11:51 a.m. to issue her opinions to a small group of print and television reporters who had been camped downstairs for the evening.
"This is the most frustrating thing. Why would she do something like this, make people wait this long for something that should have been taken care of ages ago?" said Assemblyman Anthony Adams (R-Hesperia) in a telephone interview from San Bernardino County.
Bowen's actions are sure to add to the debate around the country about the potential for electronic voting machines to be infiltrated by hackers trying to changes the results of races.
Increasingly, states are moving toward electronic voting machines, prompting lawmakers and other to argue over what can be done to prevent hacking. The U.S. Congress has been debating whether to require all electronic voting machines to produce paper records.
Bowen has long been outspoken in her concerns about electronic voting. Last year, she defeated incumbent Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a Republican who was appointed to the job by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005.
The campaign hinged largely on the candidates' differences over the trustworthiness of the voting machines.
During the March 2004 primary in California, touch-screen voting terminals by Diebold malfunctioned, and state election officials discovered that the machines contained uncertified software.
The state barred four counties from using Diebold but later approved their use in 11 counties after those jurisdictions agreed to new security requirements, including making paper ballots available as an alternative.
Bowen's audit has been harshly criticized by election officials across the state who said the testing was done in a manner inconsistent with real-life situations.
The University of California tried to infiltrate the three companies' machines physically and electronically without facing the safeguards that voting machine vendors or counties use. The testers were provided with encrypted source codes by the companies that government employees would not have.
"It was akin to testing the security of your money in a bank with unlocked doors, with no security guards or even bank tellers in sight and the bank's vault wide open," said Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack.
Other election officials said decertifying machines now would cause major problems. "Six months is not a lot of time to make any wholesale changes," San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler said before Bowen's announcement.
jordan.rau@latimes.com
hector.becerra@latimes.com
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Published in the New York Times, Saturday, August 4, 2007
California Restricts Voting Machines
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:55 a.m. ET
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- California's top elections official placed rigorous security conditions on voting equipment used in dozens of counties and limited the use of two of the most widely used machines statewide.
Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced the measures minutes before midnight Friday, making good on a promise to tell counties at least six months before California's Feb. 5 presidential primary if their voting equipment would be decertified.
The announcement leaves the most affected counties with little time to find alternate equipment in time for the primary. The decision follows an eight-week security review of voting systems used in all but a few of California's 58 counties.
University of California computer experts found that voting machines sold by three companies -- Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems -- were vulnerable to hackers and that voting results could be altered.
Bowen said she had decertified the machines, then recertified them on the condition they meet her new security standards. She also limited the Diebold and Sequoia machines to one per polling place. That will force some counties to find replacement equipment on a tight schedule.
Bowen ordered the review, which was released last week, to ensure California would not face the same doubts about the accuracy of its voting systems that hit Florida after the 2000 election and Ohio in 2004.
The additional requirements she imposed included banning all modem or wireless connections to the machines to prevent them from being linked to an outside computer or the Internet. She also required a full manual count of all votes cast on Diebold or Sequoia machines to ensure accuracy.
Bowen said the study revealed some vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to manipulate the systems ''with little chance of detection and with dire consequences.'' Her review also found that the machines posed problems for disabled voters.
Company officials have downplayed the results of Bowen's review, saying they reflected unrealistic, worst-case scenarios that would be counteracted by security measures taken by the companies and local election officials.
Officials with Sequoia said they were disappointed with Bowen's withdrawal of the company's certification but would make necessary improvements. They said their equipment is accurate and secure.
Hart InterCivic issued a news release defending its equipment and promising to comply with Bowen's requirements.
A message left with Diebold early Saturday was not immediately returned.
Machines made by a fourth company, Election Systems & Software, were not included in the review because it was late providing information the secretary of state's office needed, said Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for Bowen.
The secretary of state launched a separate review of that company's Inkavote Plus system, which is used only in Los Angeles County. On Friday, Bowen said she had decertified that equipment but would review and reconsider it.
A message left for an ES&S spokesman early Saturday morning was not immediately returned.
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Published in the New York Times, Sunday, July 29, 2007
[Eminent Domain]
Now You Own It, Soon You Don't?
By RUSS BUETTNER
IT'S not so much the modest bungalow's spacious second-floor addition or the expansive side yard that gets to Lori Ann Vendetti.
The thing that keeps her fighting is the misty ocean air that floats through her doorway when she lets her dog out in the morning. The salty aroma can transport her back to childhood weekends spent playing on the beach with her two brothers, long since dead and gone.
Neither Ms. Vendetti, 46, nor her parents across the street believe they can afford another place within a sniff of the ocean if the City of Long Branch, N.J., wins its 12-year effort to turn their homes over to a private developer who wants to build luxury condominiums.
''We always feel like things are stacked against us,'' said Ms. Vendetti, who has lived in her home for 12 years. ''But if they're going to take it from me, they're going to take it with a fight.''
During the last two years, homeowners and property-rights advocates across the country have echoed that sentiment, and state lawmakers have answered. A controversial United States Supreme Court decision in June 2005, which upheld the power of local governments to seize private property for the benefit of private businesses, inspired an uprising that led 40 states to pass laws that rein in, to varying degrees, that authority.
But legislatures in the three states in the New York metropolitan area, long seen by property-rights advocates as home to some of the worst abuses of eminent domain, have done little to change the status quo.
''New Jersey and New York are among the worst states in the country for eminent domain abuses -- New Jersey is really awful,'' said Dana Berliner, a senior lawyer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va., which represents residential and business owners facing condemnation. ''What's interesting is that New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are some of the few states that have not managed to pass any decent legislation.''
In Connecticut, where the United States Supreme Court case originated, Gov. M. Jodi Rell late last month quietly signed a law that includes a prohibition on taking property ''primarily'' to increase local tax revenues, leaving open that reasoning as a secondary cause.
New York, which already allowed the taking of property for private use, saw its lawmakers introduce 17 related bills in 2006. But the Legislature passed only those laws seeking to ban two specific projects.
Similarly, New Jersey legislators have been unable to pass any bill. The State Supreme Court recently stepped into the breach, arguing that cities and towns cannot condemn properties simply because another use could be more productive. That ruling, in Gallenthin Realty Development v. Borough of Paulsboro, has already had an impact on several projects, including a plan to build 2,000 condominiums in downtown Newark.
Other states have instituted more precise definitions of blight, set minimum compensation levels above market value for the owners of seized properties and restricted eminent domain to more traditional public projects like schools and roads. The legislative changes have been driven by an unusual alliance of conservative Republican property-rights advocates and liberals interested in the rights of lower-income people.
Not everyone believes such measures are needed. It remains to be seen if the new laws will protect property owners without chilling redevelopment projects. ''You had this huge uproar,'' said Larry Morandi, who has tracked the new laws at the National Conference of State Legislatures, ''and an incredibly fast legislative response. The effect of that legislation will be seen in how it is implemented, and that takes time.''
While supporters of the current laws say a reasoned analysis would show that eminent domain is most often employed as a last resort and without major conflict, what has driven the push for change and has led to so many lawsuits is anger at the potential loss of control over such a fundamental aspect of life.
The lead plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case, Susette Kelo, a nurse who lived in a pink Victorian cottage in New London, Conn., opposed the town's condemnation of her neighborhood to make way for a private development of offices, condominiums and a hotel. The 5-to-4 majority opinion held that promoting economic development met the ''public use'' clause of the Fifth Amendment that allows condemnations. In a dissenting opinion in the case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave voice to the fear that started a revolt: ''Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded.''
IN Norwalk, Conn., Nancy Esposito doesn't want to be uprooted or upgraded. Her family has owned and run Casey's Sheet Metal Service in Norwalk for 15 years. Five years ago, a developer showed up offering to buy their building as part of a plan to remake several blocks. Ms. Esposito has resisted, and watched as the developer bought most of the buildings and land around her.
''They keep saying they want to make this area a destination,'' Ms. Esposito said. ''I say that it is a destination. It's my destination.''
The developer, Stanley M. Seligson, a Norwalk native, envisions a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood spanning several blocks, with more than 500,000 square feet of stores, restaurants and theaters, 350 apartments and a large medical center. His project would be contiguous with other large developments.
Mr. Seligson said he has so far acquired 75 percent of the property and was determined to acquire the remaining properties without the town invoking eminent domain. Town officials see the neighborhood as part an old urban core that has not responded to less sweeping redevelopment incentives. Four contiguous redevelopment projects are in the works, all of which have involved or could involve taking property through eminent domain if negotiations between the developer and property owners fail, said Susan Sweitzer, a senior project manager for the Norwalk Redevelopment Agency.
''The impetus is on the private developer to make this a nonissue,'' she said.
Ms. Esposito said she believed the cards were already stacked against her.
''They keep saying they will use eminent domain as a last resort,'' she said. ''But when they have the ultimate power to take your property, it's a done deal. There is no such thing as private property anymore.''
Governor Rell responded to the United States Supreme Court ruling involving the Kelo case by asking local governments to observe a voluntary moratorium on condemnations for private development until the state legislature could act. This year, she introduced legislation.
''It is time to clarify our eminent domain laws and make it absolutely clear when and why governments can -- and cannot -- take private property for public purposes,'' Mrs. Rell said in a statement in March.
The law that Mrs. Rell signed requires municipal legislative bodies to approve eminent domain seizures by a two-thirds majority and build in other protective measures for property owners. But property-rights advocates say the law's ban on citing increased tax revenues as a primary reason for condemnation will do little to clarify concerns about when property can be taken.
The new law also didn't include a provision that had been proposed by the governor to reimburse property owners at 125 percent of fair market value. Still, a spokesman for the governor said Mrs. Rell was pleased.
''Did it achieve everything that she wanted in one fell stroke? No,'' said Rich Harris, the spokesman. ''But certainly this is a considerable step forward from where the state was.''
James S. Alesi, a state senator from the Rochester area, held a series of hearings across the state on eminent domain after the Kelo decision. He said he was repeatedly told that New York didn't need a handful of hastily drafted bills, but rather a commission to study the issue.
''I thought it was beneficial to learn one key thing: We don't really have to do a lot in New York State,'' he said. ''As compared to other areas around the country, New York's laws are pretty strong.''
The New York State Bar Association has been the most prominent supporter of that position. Patricia E. Salkin, chairwoman of the association's eminent domain task force, said state laws might need tweaking, including a passage to increase public involvement in redevelopment plans and to extend the 30-day period allowed for owners of condemned property to file appeals. But she said states that passed more sweeping laws risked losing vital projects.
''We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water,'' said Ms. Salkin, director of the Government Law Center of Albany Law School. ''We should make sure that it's a fair playing field for everybody.''
State Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat from Greenburgh in Westchester, said the choice was not black and white. ''The bottom line is we can fix the law so it protects average people and still maintain it as a tool,'' Mr. Brodsky said. ''The bar is entrenched on this one, and they're wrong.''
In 2004, Mr. Brodsky pushed through a bill that required that towns notify by mail property owners facing condemnation.
It followed a controversy in Port Chester, in which a local business owner hadn't seen the Westchester village's notice in a local newspaper that his property was facing condemnation to make way for a Stop & Shop supermarket.
The 30 days that the state law allows for appeals passed before the businessman, Bill Brody, had even heard about the plan. A federal judge this month ruled that Mr. Brody's due process rights had been violated.
''I think it's obvious that people are upset by what eminent domain is being used for,'' Mr. Brody said, ''and I think things are going to change.''
Not all redevelopment projects engender large controversy. On Long Island, the Village of Hempstead is moving forward with a $2 billion plan to replace 26 acres in the village's downtrodden center with a mix of 2,500 housing units, 600,000 square feet of retail space and a performing arts center. The city has agreed to sell 21 properties it owns to the developer and seize up to 58 privately owned properties if the developer cannot come to terms with the owners. Most of the concerns voiced so far, including at a packed meeting last week, have involved ensuring that the plan includes a significant amount of affordable housing and that current residents receive enough compensation to find new homes.
Mr. Brodsky introduced a bill last year calling for the appointment of an eminent domain ombudsman, compensating displaced homeowners at 150 percent of fair market value, and requiring that all condemnations for economic development be part of a comprehensive plan.
THE bill gained no traction in the State Assembly. ''This is an area where there's a lot of comfort with a bad law, and that's unfortunate,'' Mr. Brodsky said.
Mr. Alesi, the state senator from Rochester, maintains that state laws need only to be ''buffed up'' and that the laws may not offer enough protections. Courts are relied on to catch abuses, but average people don't have the resources for a legal fight with the government, he said. ''No one should have the American dream turned into their own personal nightmare because of the government,'' he said.
Last month, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the Town of Paulsboro had overreached in relying on a consultant's determination that an undeveloped 63-acre parcel could be condemned because it was ''not fully productive.''
''Under that approach, any property that is operated in less than optimal manner is arguably 'blighted,' '' wrote Chief Justice James R. Zazzali in the court's unanimous opinion. ''If such an all-encompassing definition were adopted, most property in the state would be eligible for redevelopment.''
Citing the Supreme Court ruling, an Essex County Superior Court judge ruled this month that Newark could not designate as blighted a 14-acre area on and around Mulberry Street so the land could be used to build condominiums. Several property owners had fought the city's efforts to take the land by eminent domain, arguing to the court that the area was still productive. A spokeswoman for Mayor Cory A. Booker said the city had not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling.
And an appellate panel last week rejected Lodi officials' efforts to replace two trailer parks with housing and shops. A newly elected Borough Council had dropped the plan earlier this month.
A bill that would more narrowly define blight passed the New Jersey State Assembly last year but has been tied up in a State Senate committee since.
The New Jersey League of Municipalities opposes limiting the power of municipalities in using eminent domain. Its opinion carries weight in a state with 566 municipalities, a strong tradition of home rule, and one in which many legislators are also mayors of their hometowns.
William G. Dressel, executive director of the league, said that with little undeveloped land left in the state, and with towns increasingly relying on property taxes to provide services, responsible town leaders must look for ways to redevelop unproductive land. ''We were quite frankly relieved that the court did not unravel the eminent domain statutes as it relates to the use of that tool for economic development purposes,'' he said. ''We feel very strongly that eminent domain is a viable economic development tool in New Jersey that is used sparingly.''
The state's public advocate, Ronald K. Chen, said a 1992 revision of the state statute created the ''not fully productive'' justification that ''opened up the floodgates'' for the improper use of eminent domain.
Mr. Chen's office recently issued a report that listed the plan in Long Branch, where Ms. Vendetti lives near the beach, under the heading ''Bogus Blight.'' It said the town based its conclusion on ''superficial'' exterior inspections that noted deteriorating paint or chipped masonry.
Nothing appears to be decrepit about the Vendettis' homes.
Carmen Vendetti, 80, had saved his money driving a truck to buy his family, in 1960, a modest respite from the harsher environs of their home in Newark. He and his wife, Josephine, moved there full time after he retired. Ms. Vendetti saved her money from a job with Amtrak and bought a house across the street from her parents in 1995. Two months later, she attended a town meeting where a developer's model of the neighborhood showed luxury buildings all along the oceanfront.
''They had a house on my lot,'' she said. ''I just laughed and thought, 'How are they going to do that?' No one ever used the words 'eminent domain.' ''
But Adam Schneider, the mayor of Long Branch for 17 years, said some in the area ignored the redevelopment plan, thinking it would fail, as had many before. Some homeowners have accepted offers of units made affordable to them in the new development, he said. He said that with just 20 percent of the construction completed, the beachfront has been transformed from a dangerous area of boarded-up storefronts to an upscale, year-round destination that includes packed restaurants and a popular park.
He said he thought the recent emotional backlash may dissuade officials in other areas from even trying such a sweeping turnaround using eminent domain.
''Politically it won't work anymore,'' he said. ''I think the time has come and gone.'' "
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Published in the Star-Ledger, Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Assemblyman seeks probe of Plainfield board's actions
BY ALEXI FRIEDMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
In a letter to the state Department of Education commissioner, Assemblyman Jerry Green has called for an investigation into "the operation and governance of the Plainfield Public School District."
The Aug. 2 letter to Commissioner Lucille Davy alleged "potential fiscal abuses occasioned by the appointment of an interim superintendent at the rate of $850 per day upon the sole recommendation of the board's legal counsel," Green wrote. The school board hired Peter Carter as interim superintendent June 8, after Paula Howard resigned from that position.
Green (D-Plainfield) wrote that he was also concerned about "an ethical breach" on the board's part because an attorney for the law firm representing Carter in his recent case against the New Jersey Association of School Administrators is a partner in the law firm Hunt, Hamlin & Ridley. That firm also represents the Plainfield Board of Education.
A spokesman for the state Department of Education, John Zlock, said the commissioner received and read Green's letter, then forwarded it to the agency's Office of Fiscal Accountability and Compliance, which will be reviewing it.
The assemblyman believes the school board forced Howard out, and said he thought the board should have kept her in place for another month, as stated in her contract, to ease the transition.
Howard rescinded her resignation shortly after she tendered it, but the board had by that time already hired Carter. No reason was given for Howard's departure, and the decision came just five months after the board extended her contract another three years, at $160,000 a year.
In an interview Monday, Green said he didn't have any ax to grind against the board of education and did not have any allegiance to Howard.
"We needed each other in order to move the district ahead," he said of his relationship with the former superintendent.
Carter's per diem salary equals an annual income of $220,000, Green said, though Carter was only brought on as a temporary superintendent until his replacement is hired.
A copy of Green's letter was sent to Lisa James-Beavers, executive director of the School Ethics Commission and David Johnson Jr., director of the state Office of Attorney Ethics. It was not sent to the Plainfield Board of Education nor to the interim superintendent.
Reached yesterday, school board president Patricia Barksdale said she could not comment on the letter because she hadn't seen it. Louis Rivera, the Plainfield board of education's director of community relations, referred all calls to Carter, who could not be reached for comment.
Alexi Friedman may be reached at (908) 302-1505 or afriedman@starledger.com.
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Published in the Star-Ledger, Sunday, July 29, 2007
[OpEd - Recidivism]
When neither crime nor punishment pays
BY CORY BOOKER
In barbershops and boardrooms, in newspaper headlines and presidential debates, Americans are questioning the billions of dol lars a month being spent on a failing war, and the current "surge" in Iraq.
But we, policy-makers at every level of government, should also be questioning the "domestic surge" at home in the so-called war on drugs and urban crime. There are more guns, more technology, more cameras scanning streets, and more money spent on jails, prisons and juvenile facilities every day. The cost to American taxpayers also rises every day.
The way we have chosen to deal with crime is leading our nation away from its highest ideals and producing results that stand in stinging contradiction to who we claim to be.
In the land of the free, we lock up a greater percentage of our population than any nation. The U.S. prison population has increased 91 percent in the past 15 years. More than 7 million Americans are under some form of state or federal cor rectional supervision, and this does not include the legions of Americans in county and city facilities.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our societal resources pour into prisons and police budgets -- the numbers are staggering. Billions of dollars are spent annually around our state, with budget growth at a pace far beyond that of our economy. Newark spends over a quarter of its budget on police, courts and jails.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our legal system is plundering conceptions of equality. In our America, one in three African- American men in their 20s is under some form of correctional supervi sion. New Jersey leads in racial disparities in incarceration; while 14 percent of New Jersey's population is black, more than 60 percent of its prison population is African-American.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our correctional system does not correct. We are the worst nation on the globe for recidivism. After spending billions incarcerat ing people, we release them only to see one in every two ex-offenders return in three years. We are forcing our proud law enforcement community to engage in a profound cyclical absurdity of arrest ing, re-arresting and re-re-arresting the same individuals time and time again.
Is this the America of which we dream?
Our nation is not expending all of these national resources on violent offenders. The majority of the Americans clogging our courts and prisons are nonviolent offenders primarily engaged in the use, sale or distribution of drugs. Violent or not, offenders should face punishment -- whether they throw litter on a Newark street or come to a Newark street to buy heroin. But when the punishment perpetuates the problem, when it destroys lives instead of correcting them, when it saps taxpayers of their precious resources, when it perpetuates the hideous legacy of racial injustice, when it aggravates cycles of poverty and undermines the very principles we seek to uphold, we must seek change.
Is this the America of which we dream ./. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?
We arrest teenagers for drug dealing and drug use at an alarming rate. But we make little, if any, investment in alternatives to exist ing detention programs, or in drug treatment, counseling, or intensive mentoring and education. Instead, we lock up these young people and release them back into our communities and the cycle begins anew, with re-arrest often within a matter of days or weeks.
New Jersey's largest juvenile facility is in Essex County and based in Newark. The former warden told me that three of four incarcerated youth have been at the Essex County facility before. Yet upon re lease, we put them right back into the environment that created the juvenile drug user or dealer. As a nation, we then wash our hands of any obligation and shake our heads when that 14-year-old youth offender becomes a 20-year-old offender and is once again clogging our jails.
When an adult is released and sincerely wants to stay out of prison, he faces a host of barriers to success that we do little to address. Ex-offenders are ineligible for numerous public assistance programs. They are stripped of their driving privileges, which might allow them to get to work; even if their driving privileges have not been revoked, they cannot obtain a commercial driver's license. They are entangled in a host of legal challenges, from parking tickets that turned into warrants for their arrest while they were in jail to child-support payments that have accrued to tens of thousands of dollars.
These Americans have a host of urgent needs, from housing to hunger and, of course, to children and families that desperately need their help. And as they try to meet these needs, they face a nearly insurmountable hurdle -- a community stigma that prevents many employers from hiring them.
I meet dozens of men every week with dramatic and painful stories of what they have been doing to survive, stay out of trouble and try to maintain financial stability. I see their sense of personal vic tory that they have resisted the easy, yet dangerous, call back to criminal activity that can afford quick but costly answers to their financial needs. However, I also see their frustration that, despite years of walking the right path, they still face a persistent punishment that costs them the right to return to society as a full and productive member and is depriving America of an enormous swath of its poten tial human talent. New Jersey's narrow expungement laws have men caught selling drugs in their 20s still paying the price in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
Enough. As mayor of our state's largest city I have decided to join with others to do whatever is necessary for a dramatic change in crime and prisoner re-entry policy at every level of government. In the coming weeks, we will announce a series of changes we will make here in Newark to reverse this travesty; however, as important as they are, they will not be enough to adequately alter the devastating course on which we find ourselves.
We live in a profoundly intercon nected world, with interwoven des tinies. This is not an urban problem or a suburban problem. It is not a black problem or a white problem. If we continue on the path we have chosen in the years and decades ahead, all of New Jersey will feel greater and greater pain and be forced to pay the ever- increasing price. American greatness has always required sacrifice, but we have been sacrificing and bleeding in the most senseless fashion, diminishing our nation's glory and strength. Now more than ever we must be united for broad- based reform. Now more than ever we must be the America of which we dream.
Cory Booker is mayor of Newark.
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Published in the Star-Ledger, Sunday, July 29, 2007
High-rise project: Hotel Suburban becomes Vista
BY KEVIN C. DILWORTH
Star-Ledger Staff
East Orange's former Hotel Suburban, the once ritzy lodging establishment that used to draw celebrities, politicians and socialites, is getting ready to undergo a $10 million face-lift.
The long-closed hotel-turned office tower became an eyesore that has marred the city's landscape ever since it closed in the mid-1980s.
It's a dream ready to come true, according to Arij Hasan, a developer-investor who successfully bid $1.4 million to purchase the building at an East Orange municipal property auction last summer.
Hasan expects to transform the high-rise into upscale residences and lofts next year, and the idea now bears the name: Vista Towers.
"We're looking to deliver this project by the summer of 2008," said Hasan, referring to creating 100 planned condo residences, mostly one- and two-bedroom units that might sell anywhere from $150,000 to $300,000 each. "We're selling a trend, in terms of a modern, urban lifestyle building. It's all about vision. It requires a lot of ingenuity."
There also will be nine elaborately decorated bi-level penthouses, ranging from 1,200 square feet to 1,800 square feet, created between the existing top 11th floor, and a soon-to-be-added 12th floor, Hasan said.
Four of the penthouses -- two in Vista Towers' front corners, facing the Manhattan skyline, and two in the rear, facing the South Mountain Reservation -- also will feature 5-by-12 balconies.
The construction of the one- and two-bedroom condominiums and barrier-free lofts there could begin as early as late next month. The East Orange Planning Board is expected to vote on whether to give a go-ahead to Hasan's proposal at its 7 p.m. Wednesday meeting in city hall.
"We're currently in the construction document phase of the project, getting ready to secure work permits," Hasan said of the building at 141 S. Harrison St.
The building has been environmentally cleaned up and all asbestos removed from the building, said Hasan, a Newark-based developer who heads both Insight Properties and the Blackstone Group LLC.
Mayor Robert Bowser, a city planning board member, said he likes what Hasan's plans show so far, including a goal to transform a two-story, 12,000-square-foot rear portion of the former hotel into a leased day care facility, with half the roof being turned into a playground area for up to 100 youngsters, and the other half, a sitting area for others.
Plus "there will be adequate parking for residents, visitors and employees," said Bowser, referring to Hasan's plans to create 133 on-site parking spaces alongside the high-rise, and in a rear portion of the site. The underground parking lot of the former hotel has been eliminated.
The building has a rich history in East Orange, beginning as a 250-room high-class lodging facility that became renowned as the Hotel Suburban.
It opened for business on Feb. 28, 1926, when business and social references initially were required to even stay there. The hotel finally went out of business in the late 1970s.
After undergoing a dramatic facade transformation in 1978, it reopened as the Suburban Essex Tower office building. It later became known as the Essex Towers office building.
Since going into foreclosure and getting boarded up in the late 1980s, it has stood in sharp and negative contrast to the otherwise aristocratic and upscale looking charm of the other residential buildings in that same neighborhood.
"We've kept in mind the historic nature of this building," said Hasan, explaining his plans to restore the high-rise and to ensure the new facade blends in with the street's other brick and limestone-facade residences on that once-fashionable thoroughfare. "Now we're bringing it into the 21st century.
Goldie Burbage, president of the Historical Society of East Orange, said her single hope is that Vista Towers mirrors the look of the immediate area.
The pending transformation plans "will definitely upgrade the area," Burbage said. "I just pray that everything will complement the architectural features of the existing buildings."
Hasan reiterated that it will, saying, "It's going to have a modern look, but yet it will pick up some of the historical architecture."
The Hotel Suburban featured a rear first-floor ballroom that could seat up to 500 people, and later, dining facilities known as the Crystal Room, the Mimosa Room and the Rose Room.
Beginning about Dec. 31, 1960, the ultra fancy Paris in the Sky supper club opened up on a then-newly created 11th floor.
That is where club owner Dick Kollmar, a popular radio personality, along with Dorothy Kilgallen, his newspaper columnist and "What's My Line" television program panelist wife -- offered patrons, including Hollywood and Broadway stars, some of the area's best food, entertainment and views of the Manhattan skyline.
Kevin C. Dilworth may be reached at kdilworth@starledger.com or (973) 392-4143.
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Published in the New York Times, Sunday, July 29, 2007
In New Jersey, the ‘Backyard’ Up on the Roof
By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
EVEN in a thoroughly urban setting — maybe especially there — people want a patch of the outdoors to call their own, according to Dean Geibel, a New Jersey developer whose company, Metro Homes, is based in thoroughly urban Hoboken.
“Everybody wants a place to have a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said. “They need a spot where they can see the sky, and breathe the air.
“Or maybe,” he added, with a less embracing fervor, “somebody wants to be able to smoke a cigar from time to time.”
Increasingly, New Jersey developers are going above, if not beyond, to satisfy that buyer demand. They’re looking to rooftops — above a building’s parking garage or its penthouses — to create shared, or even private, garden spots, in locales as diverse as the Hudson riverfront and the East Orange inner city.
A short list of rooftop projects now under construction includes the seventh-floor space with pool and “great lawn” at the 55-story Trump Plaza in Jersey City, a landscaped deck at One Hudson Park in Edgewater (where most units have balconies as well), elevated terraces at two different condo developments on the beach in Asbury Park — one a huge open garden and the other offering individual penthouse rooftop spaces — and five small condo structures in East Orange that will have overhead lawns and patios.
“Rooftops are hot in Jersey,” crowed Tom Bauer, a landscape architect with Melillo & Bauer in Manasquan. “Finally.”
Mr. Bauer was a pioneer in rooftop development in 1979, when he had black pines helicoptered to the top of the Caesars Boardwalk Regency Hotel Casino in Atlantic City to meet a local “green space” requirement.
More than a quarter century after that Atlantic City job — when high winds and inexperience literally blew an electrician off the rooftop and down two floors, resulting in a broken arm and leg — Mr. Bauer says he is constantly busy putting green icing atop the cake, as it were.
“It is the right thing to do, for so many reasons,” he said. He cited “aesthetic improvement,” meaning that people living and working up high get to look down on garden greenery as opposed to black tar and gravel, and “environmental improvement” — the natural cooling effect of “green” roofs and their efficient use of rainwater.
In Asbury Park, where several new beachfront complexes are under construction, Mr. Bauer’s firm recently hoisted loads of soil up to the roof of Paramount North Beach and then planted ornamental grasses and ground cover around the pool deck and private garden patios.
At the other end of the beach, town homes at the Wesley Grove development are being given individual rooftop terraces.
On the central beach, the two-tower Esperanza is rising. The project, being developed by Metro Homes, will have a lavish — and lush — plaza on the roof of the parking garage between its towers, similar to the planned configuration at Trump Plaza, where a second tower is in the works, Mr. Geibel said.
The Esperanza’s fourth-floor plaza will feature a pool, a children’s water park and jungle gym, a lawn large enough for soccer and pet walking, and a “tiki hut” offering food and beverages.
“People love to eat outside,” Mr. Geibel said, “and a lot of them have jobs where they don’t even get outside for lunch. I worked on Wall Street for 16 years and could never leave my desk.
“So we make that a provision in our buildings,” he said. “Outdoor eating is allowed, and even encouraged.”
Of course, that brings up the related subject of seagulls, or pigeons, depending on the local habitat. “You just have to make sure to clean up after people eat,” Mr. Geibel said. “It’s worth the effort to have that amenity.”
Besides, Mr. Bauer pointed out, one pleasure of urban rooftop gardens is that it is possible to experience “wildlife” in the city. Mr. Bauer said he had done some “beautiful bird-watching” from that vantage point, although he conceded he had never spotted a rabbit or deer on a rooftop.
Michael Barry, a principal of Applied Properties, which has installed rooftop gardens and two pools and a children’s playground atop various roofs in its Shipyard complex of condo and rental towers in Hoboken, spoke of such space as being “neighborhood parkland.”
“We put green anywhere we can physically put green,” Mr. Barry said. “It’s simply good urban planning.” Also, he said, it is a way to help keep tenants from leaving cities for suburbs once they have children.
“During the summer, the pool area is a great place for moms and young children to gather during the day," Mr. Barry said. In wintertime, some parents take their children up to the roof to build snowmen, he said.
Snow removal from rooftops can be very challenging, developers say. Mr. Barry spoke of having to scare up a fleet of snow blowers and send out a team of maintenance workers for several days after one big storm last year.
Mr. Bauer said the reason he can’t sell every developer on the idea of a roof garden is that it costs about 10 to 20 percent more to engineer a green rooftop that is structurally sound, completely waterproof and can handle a load of snow.
In East Orange, where the start-up developers Keith Miles and Marlon Haniff are putting up 12 units in 5 buildings on neighborhood lots, Mr. Miles said he has been dragging a hand mower up and down two flights of stairs to maintain the green oasis he created atop a two-family structure on Tremont Avenue. “I think I’m going to have to build a little shed up here to hold that thing — and the snow blower,” he said.
Mr. Miles and his partner, whose company, South Atlantic Assets Holdings, is among a small group of entrepreneurs aiming to lure middle-class home buyers back to old neighborhoods in Orange and East Orange, said providing green space was crucial to that cause — but extremely difficult on small urban lots.
“So we decided to put the backyard up top,” he said. The third-floor “backyard” at 555 Tremont Avenue, which has a velvety carpet of grass, a small paver-stone patio and a gas barbecue, is only 35 by 55 feet. On the other hand, the entire lot is only 50 by 125 feet.
“Size is not the important part,” Mr. Miles said emphatically, and then he started to sound like Mr. Geibel, the builder of the 862-unit Trump Plaza in Jersey City. “You just need a little place to drink your beverage in the morning or at night, and to take a breath outside, and get a feel for the day.”
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Published in the Star-Ledger, July 24, 2007
Question: What is green dry cleaning?
By VINNEE TONG
The Associated Press
(AP) — Q. What is green dry cleaning and how can I find a cleaner near me that does it?
A. Dry cleaners looking for a chemical-free method have learned something from the domestic goddesses who run for the club soda to prevent a stain from setting. Simply put, carbonated water is related to what many are calling the most environmentally friendly way to get your clothes dry cleaned.
Dry cleaning involves washing clothes in liquids other than water. As it's done at 90 percent of cleaners in the U.S., it uses a liquid form of perchloroethylene (PERC), a chemical believed to cause cancer. As it evaporates, PERC can contaminate nearby air and groundwater, and reportedly can be absorbed through the skin from soil or from dry-cleaned clothes. California is phasing out its use by 2011.
A far less common technology, CO2 cleaning, uses liquid carbon dioxide to clean clothes instead of PERC. A handful of entrepreneurs have found a way to profitably operate dry cleaners using CO2, but the higher cost for the machines has prevented any wider adoption of it. (A CO2 machine costs about $100,000, roughly twice as much as a PERC machine, which can cost $45,000 to $50,000.)
Supporters of CO2 cleaning see strong growth as soon as consumers are made more aware of its benefits.
"I think it really is ready to explode," said Howard Guy, President of Linde Cleaning U.S. LLC. The company has the rights to franchise and license the Hangers brand name, which is used by 15 of the roughly 45 CO2 cleaners operating in the U.S. today. Linde Cleaning is owned by the German conglomerate Linde AG, which also operates CO2 cleaners in Europe under the Fred Butler brand.
Josh Dorfman, author of "The Lazy Environmentalist" and host of his own radio show, said CO2 dry cleaning leaves clothes cleaner and without the smell that sometimes comes on chemically-cleaned clothes. The rising consumer demand for more environmentally friendly practices makes potential growth of CO2 cleaning a more viable near-term prospect, Dorfman said.
"People actually go out of their way once they realize there's an option," said David Kistner, co-founder of Green Apple Cleaners in New York. "We have grown tremendously in a very short period of time and it's all been organic and word of mouth."
Kistner started his business six years ago after reading about the potential health risks of PERC while his wife was pregnant with twins. The Lodi, N.J.-based business — which delivers clothes to doorman buildings and corporate clients in Manhattan — has a waiting list 500 long.
Independent green dry cleaners including those who license the Hangers name can be found in pockets around the country. Many are listed on the Web site http://www.findco2.com/.
Another method touted as more environmentally friendly than PERC is a silicone-based solvent called Green Earth. However, Green Earth also has come under scrutiny as a possible carcinogen, a claim that could harm its prospects among consumers concerned about their health.
Another common but less prevalent method, hydrocarbon, is the modern-day version of dry cleaning as it was discovered in the 1880's, when someone in France accidentally spilled turpentine on a stained tablecloth.
Hydrocarbon uses petroleum-based solvents and is sometimes marketed as being "organic." That segment holds about 7 percent of the U.S. dry cleaning market, Guy said.
_______________
On the Net:
CO2 dry cleaners in the U.S.: http://www.findco2.com/
Green Earth cleaners: http://www.greenearthcleaning.com/consumer/rostersearch.asp
The Lazy Environmentalist: http://www.lazyenvironmentalist.com/
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Published in the New York Times, Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Economic Scene
Keep Your Eyes on Adjustable-Rate Mortgages
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Two years ago, when the housing market was roaring along, I called a mortgage broker on the West Coast and asked for some help. I told him that I wanted to interview some recent home buyers who had taken out an adjustable-rate mortgage — one of the big drivers of the boom — and he was nice enough to pass along a short list of names.
One of the buyers was a business consultant in her 40s. She told me about her charming new house and the fact that she expected it to be a good investment, even if it had cost a bit more than she wanted to spend. Then I asked about her adjustable-rate mortgage.
“I don’t have an adjustable rate,” she said.
Confused, I called the broker again to see what was going on. A little while later, I got a sheepish e-mail message from him explaining that her loan did, in fact, have an adjustable rate. She just hadn’t realized it.
Now, I think this was an honest misunderstanding in which the broker believed that he had explained the terms of the loans more clearly than he had. And the mortgage ended up being a good one for the buyer anyway: she recently decided to move to a new area and sold the house before her rate jumped.
But the fact that this confusion could have occurred neatly captures the ridiculous state of the home buying business in 2005 and 2006. The fallout is going to last a long time. House prices will need years to work off their irrational values, more people are going to lose their homes and Wall Street can probably look forward to some more nasty surprises.
In fact, the mortgage meltdown has arrived at something of a turning point. So far, most of the loans gone bad were among the worst of the worst. Some were based on outright fraud, either by the lender or the borrower. In many cases, buyers were never going to be able to make their monthly payments and were instead banking on a rapid appreciation in home values.
But the pool of people falling behind on their house payments is starting to widen beyond this initial group, and adjustable-rate mortgages are the main reason. Starting in the spring of 2005, these mortgages began to get a lot more popular, largely because regular mortgages no longer allowed many buyers to afford the house they wanted.
They turned instead to a mortgage that had an artificially low interest rate for an initial period, before resetting to a higher rate. When the higher rate kicks in, the monthly mortgage bill typically jumps by hundreds of dollars. The initial period often lasted two years, and two plus 2005 equals right about now.
The peak month for the resetting of mortgages will come this October, according to Credit Suisse, when more than $50 billion in mortgages will switch to a new rate for the first time. The level will remain above $30 billion a month through September 2008. In all, the interest rates on about $1 trillion worth of mortgages, or 12 percent of the nation’s total, will reset for the first time this year or next. A couple of years ago, by comparison, only a marginal amount of mortgage debt — a few billion dollars — was resetting each month.
So all the carnage in the mortgage market thus far has come even before the bulk of mortgages have reset. “The worst is not over in the subprime mortgage market,” analysts at JPMorgan recently wrote to the firm’s clients. “The reason for our pessimism is that loans originated in late 2005 and all of 2006, the period that saw peak origination volumes and sharply decreased underwriting quality, are only now starting to reset in large numbers.”
It isn’t hard to figure out what will happen when buyers who were already stretching to afford a house are faced with suddenly higher payments. Many will manage. They will cut back on other spending, or they will refinance their mortgage and get a new one they can afford. Others, like the buyer I interviewed two years ago, probably planned all along on selling their homes after a few years. For them, the artificially low initial rate was a no-lose proposition.
But there are also likely to be a shocking number of people who lose their homes. From 1994 to 2005, some 3.2 million households were able to buy homes thanks to subprime mortgages or other such loans, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com. About 1.7 million of them will probably lose their homes to foreclosure when all is said and done. More than half of the homeownership gains from subprime mortgages will be erased.
The flood of those homes onto the market will further depress house prices. So will the newfound conservatism of mortgage lenders, which will make it harder for tomorrow’s buyers to get a mortgage. (Thank goodness.) The S.& P./Case-Shiller index of home prices covering 10 major cities has fallen about 3 percent since its peak last summer. Two or three years from now, JPMorgan predicts, the index will have fallen 15 to 20 percent. Adjusting for inflation, the decline will be worse.
The big unknown is whether the housing bust will cause a recession or a bear market. Most people who have looked closely at the mortgage market argue that the answer is no and that the damage will be contained. Subprime loans still make up a distinct minority of the mortgage market. Over all, only 3.4 percent of mortgage holders are currently behind on their payments. And as Victoria Averbukh, a former mortgage analyst at Deutsche Bank now teaching at Cornell, points out, “The housing market is still a limited portion of the U.S. economy.” Consumer spending has slowed recently, but is still fairly strong. Corporate balance sheets and the job market seem fine.
Rationally, the argument for optimism is pretty compelling: the economy’s strengths do look big enough to overcome its weaknesses. Yet even many of the optimists confess to an uncomfortable amount of uncertainty. There has never been a real estate bubble like the one of the last decade. So it’s impossible to know what the bust will bring, especially when there are still so many mortgages that are about to get a lot more expensive.
E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com
nb: Chart filed under 'meta'
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Published in the Star-Ledger, Sunday, August 5, 2007
In Newark, a question of blight or wrong
Some see a section beyond help, while others like it
BY KATIE WANG
Star-Ledger Staff
For Michael Saltzman, the abandoned dirt lot across the street from his Scott Street home in Newark is an eyesore, a symbol of wasted opportunity in the downtown area.
The neighborhood, says Saltzman, who uprooted from Manhattan and moved to Newark five years ago, is definitely ripe for redevelopment.
Three blocks over on Elm Street, Augusto Mariano says the neighborhood is a thriving one that he and other Portuguese residents helped rebuild in the 1980s when no one else was willing to move into Newark. As far as he is concerned, the area is fine as it is.
The two divergent views strike at the heart of a protracted four-year legal scuffle involving the city, a redeveloper and the Mulberry Street Association, a group of 22 property owners who fought to protect their land against eminent domain. The case hinged on this question: Are the 14 acres of land, which are covered with houses, small businesses, parking lots and a handful of desolate tracts, considered blighted?
The developers and city said yes and declared the area in need of redevelopment in 2004, clearing the way for a 2,000-unit condominium complex just blocks from the new Prudential Center and City Hall.
The Mulberry Street Association disagreed and sued, challenging the designation in order to protect its land.
A week ago, Superior Court Judge Marie P. Simonelli in Essex County sided with the property owners.
"There is no substantial evidence that the Mulberry Street area has reached a state of deterioration or stagnation that negatively affects surrounding areas," Simonelli wrote in her decision.
Alluding to views laid out earlier this year in the precedent-setting state Supreme Court decision Gallenthin Realty Development Inc. vs. Borough of Paulsboro, Simonelli said the city cannot seize property just because it does not feel the land is "fully productive."
Both the city and developer, Newark Redevelopment Corporation, have not decided whether they will appeal the decision, but the City Council last week passed a resolution "strongly urging" the administration not to appeal.
The tract in question is squeezed between the federal courthouse and McCarter Highway, which carries rivers of traffic in and out of Newark. It also sits near the train tracks, where PATH trains lurch through every few minutes. Visitors to the new Prudential Center, scheduled to open in October, will pass the neighborhood on the way to Route 78, making the property one of the most attractive and valuable parcels in the city.
Too valuable, said the city and developers, to be used for parking lots and small businesses -- an argument they made in court. In addition to those businesses, there are churches and homes in the area.
"(The project) would provide a new mix of retail and entertainment services not currently available in the downtown," said Bruce Wishnia, a principal of Newark Redevelopment Corporation, the company behind the condominium project.
Saltzman, the owner of a real estate services company, said he was disappointed by the judge's ruling. Saltzman's house sits on the rim of the disputed area. He bought a house, banking on the promise of a bustling downtown in the future.
Over the years, he has stared out at an empty lot filled with stray cats, homeless people and prostitutes, waiting for the redevelopment wave to arrive in Newark.
"If an area is filled with vacant lots and vacant parking lots and barely any retail in the area, then to me that's not a thriving neighborhood," said Saltzman. "It's not maximizing the value of the area."
At the same time, Saltzman said he empathizes with the residents who have lived there for years. The problem in this case, he said, might have been the way the city and developer proceeded with their project.
Latasia Elliott, 16, a neighbor who has lived on Scott Street for a year, also said the area could use some sprucing up. Still, she said it is better than her former home on Seventh Avenue in Newark.
"Besides the hookers and transvestites, everything is all right," she said.
But longtime residents such as Mariano, 56, have a radically different opinion. Mariano bought a three-bedroom, pale yellow house on Elm Street in 1987 for $7,000. When he moved in, the neighborhood was unsafe to wander around at night.
Years later, he said, it is "awesome" compared to what it used to be. His block is lined with narrow homes, occupied by Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish immigrants. At the end of his block, abutting Mulberry Street, is the club QXT, which he says does not cause any problems at night.
"It's clean, it's honest," he said.
Even so, if a developer gave him a fair offer for his house and to move, he would consider it. The judge's ruling, he said, pleased him, but it was far from vindication.
"There's still a lot of bad blood with us because of the way they treated us," said Mariano.
George Mytrowitz, the owner of Market Body Works and leader of the Mulberry Street Association, said he does not think his organization would have prevailed in court five years ago. The members of the association have spent $250,000 on legal bills and attended countless council meetings over the years.
Mytrowitz said the tide started turning in their favor at the federal level, with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling against private property owners in Kelo vs. City of New London. In that case, the court ruled in favor of eminent domain for economic development -- a decision that did not sit well in the court of public opinion. Kelo, said Mytrowitz, opened people's eyes to what he calls eminent domain abuse.
Separately in New Jersey, the state's highest court offered a different opinion on the issue in the Gallenthin case in Gloucester County. In that case, the court ruled municipalities cannot declare "underused properties" as blighted ones for the sake of redevelopment.
Contrary to what the developers and city say, Mytrowitz said the Mulberry area is still a viable one.
"Surface parking plays its part here," he said. "Those lots are completely full. There's nothing wrong with the neighborhood. It's safe. We're not afraid to walk around here."
Mytrowitz said he does not think the city has much grounds for an appeal.
And if they do, he said they will continue to fight.
"This thing has consumed the last 4 1/2 years of my life that I can't get back," he said. "I've been put through the wringer."
Katie Wang covers Newark City Hall. She can be reached at kwang@starledger.com or (973) 392-1504.
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