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199 chapter eight The Logic of Investment Though the Bloomberg administration spent a good deal of time, money, and energy on selling the Hudson Yards plan as an example of good planning, its primary justification for the plan was its economic impact. The Bloomberg administration incorporated the Hudson Yards plan into the luxury city strategy , constructing the plan and presenting its economic benefits in a way that reflected the administration’s corporate and technocratic approach to governance . Specifically, the administration sought to construct and portray the Hudson Yards plan as a profitable investment. These efforts to sell the Hudson Yards plan as a profitable investment involved two separate tasks. The first was the administration’s campaign to design and generate support for the rezoning portion of the plan (I refer to this as “the rezoning”). The second was the effort to finance the nyscc, a.k.a. the stadium, and then sell it as an economic boon for the city (I refer to this portion of the plan, which also included the Javits Center expansion, as “the convention corridor”). These two tasks played out over slightly different time frames: the former started in early 2003 and ended in late 2004, while the latter occurred between early 2004 and mid-2005. They also ultimately had disparate outcomes, as they involved different governmental and political dynamics. Despite these differences , both were animated by an antipolitical and corporate logic of investment. But even as this logic of investment drove the administration’s construction and marketing of the Hudson Yards plan, it manifested a number of contradictions that reduced this logic’s political efficacy and ability to guide policy-making. The chapter addresses these issues in several sections. The first describes the relationship between the administration’s luxury city approach to development, in which the Hudson Yards plan played a key role, and the logic of investment. Here, the emphasis is on how the logic of investment operated as a logic, a set of suppositions underlying governmental practice, while subsequent discussion describes how this logic fared in the context of actual governmental and political practice. The second section describes the difficult process of developing the details of the financing plans for the rezoning and the convention 200 • chapter eight corridor, as well as the contradictions in the Bloomberg Way in general and the logic of investment in particular that emerged during that process. In the third section, I examine three lines of debate these financing plans generated, each illustrating a different aspect of the antipolitical logic of investment and each describing new forms and sites of conflict generated by this logic. The fourth section details the successful efforts of allies of the administration to use more traditional and explicitly political means to gain support for the Hudson Yards plan. In the conclusion of the chapter, I discuss the political ramifications of deploying the logic of investment. the luxury city, the hudson yards, and the logic of investment In chapter 4, I argued that the Hudson Yards plan served as both microcosm and capstone of the administration’s luxury city urban and economic development strategy. Here, I want to focus on the goals that the plan and strategy were supposed to achieve and on the concrete mechanisms that would permit their realization. The administration and its allies claimed that the city’s quantitative growth was absolutely crucial to its future economic and social health. Such growth could best be assured by the city government employing a logic of investment , whereby it would select and pursue investments (particular development projects) in “the product” (the city as an urban environment) that would ultimately lead to increased “profit” (incremental tax revenue). Thus, in early 2004 cpc Chair Amanda Burden described the basic premise of the Hudson Yards plan by saying, “New York City must grow” (2004). The Hudson Yards plan was vital to this aim, as it would allow the city to capture its rightful share of economic growth on regional, national, and global levels. These claims had significant continuities with the past, echoing decades of argument that expanding the midtown Manhattan cbd to the Hudson River would generate massive amounts of postindustrial employment. These older arguments reflected the interests of the city’s real estate elite and comprised, in Fitch’s words, “a real estate strategy . . . disguised as a jobs strategy” (1993, 49). For real estate elites, the primary justification for the Hudson Yards plan was that it would expand the city’s supply of office space...

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