A Stitch in Haste

So as we libertarians continue to lick our property rights wounds a year after the "public use" requirement of the Fifth Amendment was rendered a nullity in Kelo v. New London, could it be that a new sort of property rights fact pattern is bubbling up in a backwater block of Manhattan?

East Village activists fighting to save the old P.S. 64 on E. Ninth St. celebrated on Tuesday morning as the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it an individual city landmark, safeguarding it from the wrecking ball.

A few hours later, Gregg Singer, who purchased the building from the city in 1998 and is bent on developing a towering dormitory on the site, announced his plan for the building, for at least the next several years, to be home to the Christotora Treatment Center, a facility providing temporary housing for the homeless and ex-convicts fresh out of jail, supportive housing for people with H.I.V./AIDS and services for the mentally ill, substance abusers and “troubled youth.”

The peripheral issues grabbing the headlines in this case are twofold: whether the hippies "enlightened" residents of the East Village will even be fazed by a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, and whether a controversial "scare tactic" picture of a scabbed and bruised homeless woman (i.e., "your new neighbor") was photoshopped.

Whatever.

Here, in fact, is the really important part:

Calling the landmarking of the old P.S. 64 “stupid,” Singer said he plans to file a lawsuit in hopes of overturning the designation.
...
The landmarking of old P.S. 64 means that the standstill agreement preventing Singer from acting on his pre-existing permit to strip the building’s ornamental facade has been lifted. Speaking on Tuesday, Singer said he indeed now plans to commence with the stripping of the building’s terracotta window trim and copper cornice, starting on the 10th St. side. ... Singer said his strategy is to strip the building’s facade by using his pre-existing permit, then argue in court that the building never should have been landmarked in the first place.

How sublime -- granting "Landmark" status may in fact mean the destruction of the supposed landmark itself.

On Tuesday, Lisi de Bourbon, a spokesperson for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said there has never been a case where a court has overturned the L.P.C.’s designation of an individual landmarked building.

Keep in mind that the L.P.C. is an unelected patronage bureaucracy that has little oversight. It is a collection of self-important central planner wannabes who are, apparently, smarter than Gregg Singer -- and you. Any building over thirty years old is subject to landmark designation, based on the capricious whims of (a simple majority of) the commissioners. And since designating landmarks is sole purpose of the Commission, is it any surprise that it never in fact runs out of landmarks to designate? When all you have is a hammer...

The L.P.C. has for decades now stunted development and exacerbated the city's perpetual housing shortage by freezing 23,000 buildings, forever, in the name of the warm fuzzy feeling of "preservation." But "preservation" for its own sake, untethered to any rational basis, objective criterion (nor, above all, to any "demeaning" market forces), is not the description of sound urban planning, but of a wax museum. And this city deserves better.

If the government wants to preserve a landmark, then it should buy it (yes, by eminent domain if absolutely necessary). Seizing your property is, after all, better than the alternative of not seizing it but not letting you do anything productive with it either.

Gregg is right -- this is all stupid. Landmarks preservation in New York has become gratuitous, counterproductive and obstructionist. The original laissez faire "Penn Station demolition" pendulum (wrecking ball?) has swung so far in the opposite direction of "preserve anything and everything" as to be downright absurd.

The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, St. Patrick's Cathedral, perhaps. But a dilapidated, non-historical and currently unused former grade school in the East Village? Give me a break.

(Via Gothamist.)