Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Rockefeller Center and Big Development Projects
I just saw a CNBC documentary on The Rockefellers. It was well done (not sure when it was originally made). One segment that I found very interesting from a land use perspective was the story of the development of Rockefeller Center in NYC-- you know, famous for the Christmas tree, the skating rink, Radio City, and the place where Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey hang out at 30 Rock (coincidentally, I thought that the middle-aged Nelson Rockefeller had an uncanny resemblance to Alec Baldwin).
The gist of the narrative is that John Rockefeller Jr. bought the land--several blocks of midtown Manhattan--from Columbia intending to redevelop it as a new home for the Metropolitan Opera. Then the Great Depression hit. Unable get traditional investors and real estate financing, Junior took the bold move of deciding to go ahead and build. He commissioned an ambitious plan for developing several blocks with buildings, theaters, the plaza, and the 70-story skyscraper. Rockefeller paid for most of it himself up front, and put thousands to work.
You can read more about it in Daniel Okrent's book Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center.
One thing it made me think about is the feasibility of large-scale redevelopment projects. The story seemed to be that Rockefeller Center was a big risk, but paid great rewards (both financially to its owners, and culturally to the city). But the current political mood seems to disfavor large-scale redevelopment. The high-profile failures of places like Poletown and even New London seem to caution ambitious planners away from undertaking too-ambitious plans for fear they might fail, and this is leading to some of the criticism of planned projects like Atlantic Yards.
One way to look at it is that the history of real estate development (as well as business generally) is probably replete with more failures than successes, so perhaps it isn't fair to judge all future projects by anecdotal examples of recent failures. There's also context: while one of the academics in the CNBC documentary described Rockefeller Center as "the biggest development project since the great pyramids," it was still just a few blocks of New York City, so as large as it was it probably wouldn't have singlehandedly sunk the fortunes of Gotham had it failed--where as a place like New London has much more at stake in a major economic development project. There's also the issue government involvement. While I don't know the full story of Rockefeller Center (I'll have to read Okrent's book!), it seems as though it was principally planned, organized, and paid for by private actors. The modern trend toward more government involvement may be necessary to execute a massive project given the regulatory issues and the need for eminent domain for land assembly. The question is whether governmental involvement comes with a price-- complicating the project politically, legally, and financially, and putting the public fisc at risk if the project tanks.
I know there are a million variables that influence why some projects succeed and others fail, and I don't have a scientific theory on the matter. It would be interesting, though, to compare modern and historical large-scale development projects and to account for historical failures as well as the successes that we can remember so much more easily.
Matt Festa
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/land_use/2010/12/rockefeller-center-and-big-development-projects.html