Question

Mega real estate projects like Hudson Yards destroy neighborhood real estate markets and the quality of life by increasing residential and commercial rents.

TRUE OR FALSE?

Answer 1

True: This, of course, is the point: Hudson Yards is billed as a “new neighborhood,” “a city within a city,”3 and is set apart from the surrounding neighborhood in size, scope, and sheer glittering magnificence. Its high-rises will be among the tallest in the city, thus redefining Manhattan’s iconic skyline.4 “It’s creating a mixed-use environment that’s vibrant 24 hours a day, that is diverse in lots of different ways, and has something to offer everybody.” Cross, “I think the dream is to create a new urban environment, the likes of which we haven’t seen before, that’s responsive to the 21st century.”5 Clearly, Hudson Yards represents one vision of the ideal city, a concept that has been pursued by urbanists and architects since the first metropolis and that has driven the development of urban architecture and shaped the image of the city both in concept and concrete. The introduction of Hudson Yards to Manhattan’s landscape is a faint echo of the more democratic impulses of the modernist architects, who believed they could wipe away urban struggle with structural perfection. However, as the disastrous failure of America’s post-war urban renewal shows, these types of tabula rasa architectural ideations are still susceptible to the complex historical, sociopolitical, and economic forces that converge within the urban grid.