Housing, Power, and Broken Promises: The Fight Over NYCHA’s Chelsea Redevelopment
Last week, on two summer-like April evenings in Chelsea, a procession of residents—many of them elders, most of them lifelong New Yorkers—filed into community centers to testify against the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea demolition proposal. A plan they say will dismantle not only their homes but the social fabric that binds them. Of the more than one hundred speakers across the two hearings, only two offered tepid support. The rest spoke with a kind of anguished unanimity: No demolition. As the crowd passed the microphone, what emerged was not just opposition but something more charged: a chorus of grief, defiance, and the kind of civic intimacy that public hearings so rarely conjure. In this room, at least, the blueprints were not just lines on paper—they were battlegrounds.
When this whole saga started in early 2019, the proposal was, as these things often are, presented in the language of necessity. The Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses—two of the largest public housing developments in Manhattan—were in disrepair, their facades weathered by time, their plumbing and electrical systems decades past their prime. A plan was needed, the city said, and it would be bold: two buildings would be demolished and rebuilt, modernized for a new era. What was left unsaid, or at least buried, was that the very residents who had made homes there for generations would be the ones bearing the uncertainty, their futures tied to a redevelopment plan that seemed, from the outset, to be less about them and more about real estate.
The numbers, as presented, had a neat, almost mathematical simplicity: two sleek new towers rising where smaller ones once stood. It was, on paper, a pragmatic solution: a denser, more modern development, financed in part by the very forces that had long reshaped the city’s skyline, but promising this time to serve the public interest. To the residents of Fulton though, the equation did not feel so balanced. They had seen these numbers before, in neighborhoods where public-private partnerships had promised affordability, only to yield something far more lucrative for developers than for those who had once lived there. And so, the question lingered—was this a plan for them, or simply around them?
In March 2019, the announcement by NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, was met with immediate opposition. The specter of demolition, a word that in New York has rarely meant anything positive for low-income residents, loomed large. In the past, “revitalization” had often been a euphemism for displacement and gentrification. Across the city, public housing tenants had watched as promises of new affordable units failed to materialize. Towers once meant for working-class New Yorkers gave way to market-rate apartments and private-development deals that left fewer, not more, affordable homes in their wake. It was not paranoia that made the residents of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea wary; it was precedent.
Chelsea boasts the most expensive land in New York City—making it among the priciest in the country and the world. The New York City Department of Finance has projected a 5.7% increase in the city’s total property-market value for fiscal year 2025, bringing it to approximately $1.6 trillion. This growth is primarily driven by residential properties which have seen a 7.3% rise in value. The land on which the NYCHA buildings sit is simply the crown jewel.
By October of 2019, the city sought to temper the outcry with process. The Chelsea NYCHA Working Group was established, a coalition of residents, elected officials, Community Board 4 members, and affordable-housing advocates, assembled to weigh the options and come up with a solution. It was a grand exercise in deliberation, complete with public meetings, expert testimony, and the requisite charrettes that made the undertaking seem, at least superficially, collaborative.
During one year, the group gathered in a series of weekly meetings designed to elicit feedback, provide insight, and devise a plan that would be tenant-led. The apotheosis was a 101 pages report, illustrated with photojournalistic pictures of residents actively engaged in coloring large sheets of paper, putting stickers on boards, and animatedly talking to each other.
The projected needs would be met through a carefully arranged financial cocktail: $263 million in private mortgage debt, made possible by converting the developments to RAD/PACT, the controversial federalprogram that would shift NYCHA’s role from landlord to overseer, by long-term leasing the buildings to a private developer. Another $81 million would be raised through the construction of infill buildings, new mixed-income residential towers to be slotted into the vacant spaces between the existing ones. A smattering of smaller funding sources would fill in the gaps. The scheme even accounted for a $3 million contingency fund in case the capital needs were underestimated.
The RFP, when first unveiled in 2021, was heralded as a revolutionary departure from NYCHA’s troubled history of top-down decision making, a moment in which public housing residents would finally be partners, not bystanders, in shaping the future of their homes. The working group, formed after months of heated debate, had been clear: no demolition, no siphoning of funds to other NYCHA projects. And the RFP honored that. The press release was triumphal, almost utopian. “For the first time, NYCHA residents are situated as equal partners and decision-makers,” declared Jessica Katz, then-Executive Director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a longtime advocate for rethinking public housing governance. The language was precise, crafted to soothe decades of distrust: residents had helped design the RFP, had developed a scoring system that reflected their own priorities, and would sit alongside NYCHA in choosing the winning proposal. It was, in theory, a reordering of power—a seat at the table rather than an obligatory listening session before the inevitable rubber-stamping of a preordained plan. And yet, as with all things NYCHA, the reality of what followed would direly test the limits of that promise.
And off to bid the RFP went, leaving everyone jubilant that a great feat had been accomplished.
At the time, as bidders prepared their submissions, NYCHA was already signaling that the boundaries of the Chelsea Working Group’s carefully negotiated recommendations were more flexible than they appeared. While the Working Group had spent 18 months crafting a plan that explicitly ruled out demolition, NYCHA was quietly encouraging developers to “think creatively”—a phrase that, in the language of real estate, often translates to rethinking, reshaping, or outright disregarding prior commitments. In the third round of questions under a chapter conspicuously titled Alternative Design Scenario, the agency made its intentions plain: “NYCHA wants to remind Applicants that this RFP includes the option to submit an additional, alternative scenario that deviates from the recommendations of the Chelsea Working Group.” The directive continued, nudging bidders toward bolder proposals: “Applicants are encouraged to think creatively about design interventions that may not have been considered as part of the Working Group process.” In other words, the vision that residents had helped shape was not necessarily the one that would be built.
A small group of tenant representatives, whose names to this day have not been made public, reviewed and ranked the three RFP responses. They were required to sign a non-disclosure-agreement. On December 1st, 2021, it was announced that Related Properties and the minority-owned Essence Development had been selected. The partnership between Related and Essence was a factor in the choice. Essence is run by Jamar Adams, a former NFL player. Adams grew up in public housing. He used to be an executive of Related. He decided to set shop a mere six months before the RFP was issued and partnered with his former boss to enter the competition. Some have suggested that Essence was created at the impetus of Related solely to satisfy the DEI requirements that, until recently, were mandatory for public projects.
The press release issued by NYCHA was exultant. If we were to believe every word, the days ahead of us were glorious. Jerry Nadler, the congressman representing the area, emphatically declared: “As we fight to bring more money back from Washington to meet NYCHA’s repair needs, I want to applaud the residents of Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea for leading this process to bring in crucial support and advance a project to improve the lives of every resident.” Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea tenants were promised more federal funding and a public-private partnership that would preserve their rights and their homes, while paying for all necessary improvements.
On December 29, 2021, the NYCHA board—comprised entirely of mayoral appointees—swiftly approved an Authorization to Submit the Initial RAD Applications to HUD for PACT Conversion of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea. This authorization, if approved by HUD, would permit the conversion of public housing into private ownership and management. The decision, made in the quiet lull between the holidays, was never submitted to the approval of tenants. It carried sweeping implications for the future of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, yet moved forward with the efficiency of a bureaucratic formality rather than the weight of a transformational housing policy.
And then, no one heard a thing. 2022 was the year of deafening silence. Tenants continued to endure broken elevators, periods without heat, and safety concerns. They remained simultaneously hopeful and concerned. What would happen? When would it happen? Not much transpired other than the occasional message from the tenant association presidents: “the project is moving forward”.
Despite the silence, a lot was happening in the inner-circle of decision makers. Immediately after they were awarded the gig, Related and Essence deployed a hired community-outreach consultant named HOU (Housing Opportunities Unlimited) in both developments. A ground-floor apartment was converted to an HOU Fulton Houses office. Caitlin, the firm’s young staffer in charge of the project regularly engaged with residents. One tenant, an elderly woman, confided that Caitlin was marvelous: “She’s a little bit like my shrink, I tell her everything.” A bond and a trust were forming.
A NYCHA document alleges that back in October 2022, seemingly out of nowhere, tenant leaders—along with HOU—had approached NYCHA with a spontaneous and urgent request to tear down their own homes. The decision, according to this version of events, had bubbled up organically, a groundswell of enthusiasm for demolition.Tenants I spoke to have no recollection of this version of facts. The shift in strategy was not debated. It was not even announced. It was simply decided.
Many respondents now say that they did not understand that “new construction” meant demolition. They also did not understand what “rezoning” and “current zoning” meant. They thought it simply meant they would have brand new apartments, in their existing buildings. And they comprehensibly wanted that sooner rather than later. The criteria to answer the survey was loose. Anyone in the household aged 18 or over could respond. Some have suggested that non-residents could use the QR code to participate, something Essence and Related have strongly denied. The survey closed on May 20, 2023. It took NYCHA a month to announce the results. They were never directly presented to the tenants.Because PR is everything, NYCHA (Or maybe Related) had given an exclusive to the New York Times which published the story on June 20th, the day before the survey results were officially announced. And what a story it was. The jolting title read “To Improve Public Housing, New York City Moves to Tear It Down.” And so, tenants, along with neighbors, advocates, and the whole world, discovered the fate of the buildings not from NYCHA, but from the morning paper.
The world was meant to believe that the decision was tenants-driven. But in fact, on May 26, just six days after the vote closed, and almost a month before the results were made public, demolition appeared in NYCHA’s Draft Significant Amendment to the 2023 Fiscal Year, a five-year-capital-budget document that takes months to prepare. There, in plain sight, it said the developments were all slated for demolition. Renee Keitt, who became president of the Elliott-Chelsea Tenants Association in early 2025 on a no-demolition platform, has asked: “How could NYCHA know the outcome of the survey? Obviously, the outcome was a set-up, or else they would not have any way of knowing before May that the tenants allegedly wanted demolition.”
On June 21, 2023, NYCHA issued a hefty press release with quotes from every elected official representing the area. It announced that all 24 buildings were coming down after 57% of participating tenants had “voted” to recommend demolition of both developments. It was presented as a fait-accompli.
The press release actually did not use the word demolition once. By contrast, it used the word “new” 23 times, in a variety of combinations: new developments, new units, brand-new buildings, new era, new housing, new windows—as if erasure of the history of these developments was necessary at all cost. Allegedly, and bafflingly, tenants who had once passionately fought to save just two of their buildings from demolition now wanted all of them gone.
What the press release also failed to mention was that at only 29%, the participation rate was low, and that NYCHA bundled options 1A and option 1B to reach a majority. (It would take another six months for a breakdown of the survey results to be made public, after sustained advocacy by tenants who opposed the plan).
Then, on June 22, 2023, literally the day after the Fulton and Elliott Chelsea demolition announcement, the latest NYCHA Physical Needs Assessment landed. And with it, a revelation engineered to stun: the combined capital needs for Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea had ballooned to $927 million, up from the previous $366 million assessment. This staggering 153% increase was devoid of a clear or rational explanation, particularly given that NYCHA had recently completed substantial upgrades, including new roofing across all the Fulton buildings.
But the real trick was in the framing. The news was swiftly subsumed by an even greater shock: the entire NYCHA portfolio’s needs had doubled since 2017. The estimate had now soared to $78 billion from an already-daunting $40 billion—an incomprehensible sum meant to drown out any scrutiny of individual line items.
With the numbers now catastrophic enough to defy argument, NYCHA sounded the alarm: without an aggressive push for the controversial RAD PACT conversions to private management, they warned, financial ruin was imminent. But fear not—Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea had found their path forward.
By then, few had noticed that the Physical Needs Assessment for Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea was shy of a billion dollars, yet the project’s price tag slapped by Related in their PR materials had already reached $1.5 billion—a full 50% more than the stated capital needs, as if half a billion was pocket change. The discrepancy lingered, unexamined, buried under a plan that had already taken on a life of its own.
Tenants started to organize against demolition. Jackie Lara, Renee Keitt, and Celines Miranda led the charge. The dynamic trio attended community board meetings, testified at public hearings, and started building a coalition. The broader Chelsea neighborhood, a constituency that had been entirely left out of the process, concurrently awakened to the news and began to push back.
NYCHA, Related, and Essence pressed ahead with their campaign, working to convince, cajole, and, when necessary, strong-arm stakeholders into accepting the plan—not as a proposal, but as an inevitability. The survey was rebranded as a vote, and any challenge to its legitimacy was dismissed as NIMBY anti-democratic obstructionism. Elected officials, echoing the script, repeated the refrain: “The tenants have voted. They want demolition.” Soon, in the corridors of power, a new mantra emerged: “It’s a done deal.”
And so, the brilliant PR machine roared to life, a ferocious, unrelenting force. The news, carefully distilled, wouldn’t just inform—it would crush, erase, render opposition obsolete. After all, when the crisis is big enough, so is the excuse.
What was entirely lost at the time is that Related and Essence had bid on a $366 million project, and somehow, when the scope of work was entirely changed, the project was not put to bid again. And just like that, Related had landed a $1.5 billion no-bid contract, that would eventually ballon at $1.9 billion, and still growing. At the time, and to this day, no one with authority or the ability to elicit answers questioned the legality or the ethicality of the procurement process.
As the debate over the project intensified, elected officials struck a reassuring tone. The plan, they promised, would go through the city’s labyrinthine Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, known as ULURP, ensuring that the local council member would have ample opportunity to address concerns and reshape the proposal. It was a familiar ritual, the invocation of procedural safeguards to reassure the public conditioned to believe that if a project passed through enough layers of oversight, it would ensure a democratic process.
But this framing obscured a more consequential reality: the city was not, in fact, in the driver’s seat. The project, at least at its current stage, had nothing to do (yet) with zoning, nothing to do with land use, nothing to do with the city’s urban planning apparatus at all. It was, at its core, a housing issue—and more crucially, a federal one. The buildings, owned by NYCHA but funded and regulated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), fell under federal jurisdiction, meaning that while the city’s officials could gesture toward process, it was HUD that held the real authority. ULURP would come, perhaps, eventually—but it had not been triggered yet, and only would if the demolition was carried through.
The disposition and demolition of public housing fall under Section 18 of the Housing Act of 1937, the federal provision that governs how and when publicly owned housing can be transferred, demolished, or removed from inventory altogether. Among other things, it must follow a carefully codified review process, including environmental review pursuant to NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.
The complexity of the process caused confusion, exactly what Related was banking on. Even within the community board, where advocates prided themselves on policy fluency, members began discussing the new buildings as if demolition were a foregone conclusion. The strategy was simple and effective: keep opponents fixated on the future as envisioned by Related and Essence, while the real fight—the fate of the existing buildings—slipped quietly out of sight and out of control.
On January 8, 2024, HUD published a Notice of Intent to prepare an environmental impact statement for redevelopment of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. This signaled the first step of NEPA, setting off alarms that the train was in motion. But the scoping document, the very first document drafted to define the scope of the project, had a catch. Although the working group had adamantly ruled out demolition, and anti-demolition sentiment was boiling into full-on rage, the scoping document presented only scenarios based on full demolition.
The New York State Attorney General Letitia James submitted a ten-page statement, questioning the omission of a renovation alternative. The local community board made the similar comment.
The comment period closed on March 8th of 2024 and NYCHA promised the Final Scope of Work and Draft Environmental Impact Statement that spring. It would take them another year to release the document.
Tenants opposing demolition launched a petition drive across both campuses and have gathered 959 signatures so far—significantly more than the alleged support for demolition reported in the survey.
Throughout 2024, NYCHA, Related, and Essence dutifully showed up for a series of public meetings with Community Board 4, offering their usual mix of vague assurances and carefully controlled engagement. But behind the scenes, a different conversation was unfolding. Private meetings—closed-door sessions between NYCHA, the development team, elected officials, and the pro-demolition tenant leader of Fulton Houses—had been quietly taking place. It didn’t sit well with the community when this was revealed.
Members of the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, one of the few local political groups actually engaged in the issue, were less than thrilled to learn that decisions were being held without them. When they asked for a seat at the table and to have tenant activists included, they were met with thinly veiled irritation from the local council member, who seemed to find the request both outrageous and inconvenient. The message was clear: this was a discussion for a select group. For everyone else, there were public meetings.
At an October 30th, 2024, NYCHA board meeting attended by tenants and neighbors, the anti-demolition petitions were handed to NYCHA board chair, James Rubin, who in his day job is the chief investor for a venture-capital firm in renewable energy.
At the meeting, Jonathan Gouveia, NYCHA’s Vice President for Real Estate, gave a presentation about the Master Development Agreement that would tie NYCHA to Essence and Related. The presentation, for all its polish, was light on detail. Yet, it made a shocking revelation. Gouveia announced that NYCHA planned to close on the first building by July of 2025. The board was preparing to vote on a Master Development Agreement—a binding contract that would officially tie NYCHA to its private-sector partners, Related and Essence—yet the document itself remained unseen by the public. On the agenda, the cost for the item was listed as N/A, the source of funding as unknown, and a draft of the contract was not part of the documentation.
I sat in the audience, waiting for the moment when the details—the fine print, the actual stakes of the deal—would finally be revealed. That moment never came. Other community members in the room, equally unsettled, took to the microphone during the public comment session, urging the board to hold off on the vote until more information was disclosed. Surely, it wasn’t too much to ask that a deal affecting thousands of tenants and billions of dollars be subject to, at the very least, basic public scrutiny.
But deliberation was not on the agenda. Board members asked few questions. Chair Rubin noted that the board had many opportunities to discuss the issues with staffers beforehand, hence the scarcity of questions. Then, with the efficiency of people who had long since made up their minds, they cast their votes and the Master Development Agreement was unanimously approved.
Once the meeting was adjourned, I chased Jonathan Gouveia in the corridor outside the hearing room and asked to see a copy of the MDA. My exchange with him was unsettling. I proceeded to memorialize the exchange in a letter I addressed to NYCHA’s CEO, Lisa Bova-Hiatt, ensuring it was on record.
I wrote: “Following the meeting, I sought clarification from Mr. Gouveia regarding the specifics of the agreement with the PACT Partner (Essence/Related). Mr. Gouveia indicated that, although the Board had just voted on it, the agreement itself was not available. I specifically asked if the board members had had a chance to review the agreement and Mr. Gouveia responded that the vote had just happened and that NYCHA would now start to prepare the agreement. It appears that the NYCHA Board members may have voted on an agreement without having reviewed its contents.”
Ms. Bova-Hiatt promptly responded to my letter. She did not deny nor confirm that the board may have voted on a document that did not exist at the time. Instead, she said that if I wanted to see the MDA, I should request it pursuant to FOIL, the Freedom of Information Law, which I did. While NYCHA has not responded to my specific FOIL requests, the state senator representing the area forcefully asked NYCHA to make the MDA available. Without any fanfare, it was eventually posted on Community Board 4’s website.
The following month, at a Community Board meeting, it was revealed that the project’s estimated cost had now ballooned to a staggering $1.9 billion dollars. Because this full tear-down-and-rebuild project was never put to bid, there is no way to know if the number is accurate or arbitrary.
So was there cause for trouble, tumult, or trepidation in the Master Development Agreement? Did it justify chasing down a civil servant? The Master Development Agreement is a 191-page endurance test, a document so dense, so punishing in its legalese, that those who have read it describe the experience in terms usually reserved for neurological trauma. Some, half-jokingly, have accused it of inducing smooth brain syndrome.
Even for those trained in the art of bureaucratic forensics, the document is worse than what they would expect: a contract in which the most consequential provisions hide in plain sight, buried under a haze of obstructive, impenetrable phrasing. Poison pills, hidden in fine print, abound. Among the many alarming clauses is one that gives NYCHA the unilateral right to modify the apartment count, room count, and size of the so-called “replacement” units—at its sole discretion. The language is subtle, almost casual, but its implications are enormous. The promise of one-for-one unit replacement, a centerpiece of the project’s public messaging, exists only insofar as NYCHA decides to honor it.
But the real bombshell—the clause that cuts through the governmental fog with unsettling clarity—is this: under the terms of the agreement, Related could claim hardship at any point in the process and walk away for a $2.5 penalty. For example, Related could start to relocate tenants who live in the first few buildings slated for demolition, demolish those, and then, at its discretion, claim financial hardship. If they walk away, their penalty would be $2,5 million, a very small penalty for a company worth $60 billion.
The MDA bares the seed of a self-fulfilling prophecy of crisis baked directly into the deal. With tariffs set to drive up the cost of steel and aluminum under Trump’s administration, the math will likely no longer work—not for Related, anyway. And then, what?
On March 25, 2025, NYCHA released its long-awaited Draft Environmental Impact Statement—a dense, thousand-page tome detailing the proposed future of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. Among the document’s five scenarios is one that imagines no demolition. It is summarily dismissed. Why? Because it fails to meet the “purpose and need” of the project. That phrase recurs throughout the document with the force of doctrine. But what, exactly, is the project’s purpose? And whose need is being addressed? What began as a promise to upgrade public housing has quietly shapeshifted into a plan where market-rate luxury housing is the centerpiece, with a number of units that outweighs all other typologies
With the release of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, Chelsea stirred uneasily into a clearer view of what was to come. Towers rising up to 39 stories—some topping 400 feet—would muscle their way down 9th and 10th Avenues, casting long, unapologetic shadows over a public ballfield and the elementary school playground nearby. The construction noise, projected to exceed legal limits and deemed “unmitigable,” would become a feature of daily life, particularly for students at PS33 and other local schools. The disruption would not be fleeting—sixteen years at minimum, with a possible stretch into a generational thirty-one. Buried in the appendices, an ominous finding: the soil beneath was laced with lead, mercury, and other industrial relics, all registering above acceptable toxicity thresholds. And finally, a truth as old as New York itself: segregation, methodical and architectural, ran through the plan’s DNA. Public housing tenants would be relegated to massive, uniform blocks; luxury renters, meanwhile, would be assigned a different address entirely.
While the plan was always touted as fiscally desirable, if this redevelopment model becomes the blueprint for NYC public housing, it would require roughly $5 billion a year in federal subsidies just to sustain the Section 8 private deals (NYCHA operates 177,569 apartments, HUD average voucher payment standard is 2,696/month)[1]. That level of commitment assumes a benevolence from Congress that history suggests is unreliable. What if those funds stop come through? No one has yet answered this question.
NYCHA was invited by various constituencies to provide insights into the DEIS but they declined, instead giving a 10 minute presentation at the public hearings, that failed to even show one rendering of the proposal.
The project started in 2019 at $366 million, and now has reached a stratospheric $1.9 billion no-bid price tag. Was the whole deal designed to play out this way? The financial model is fragile, the costs may be underestimated, even at the latest $1.9 billion. The timeline won’t be endlessly elastic—and once the buildings come down, there is no turning back.
It is an old trick, one that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown laid out with blunt efficiency: “If you want to build a big project, start by digging a hole.” Once demolition begins, the crisis becomes self-sustaining. There will likely be displaced tenants, half-finished construction sites, unforeseen cost overruns, and then, inevitably, the claim that more public money is needed to avoid catastrophe. The PR machine is primed to shame elected officials into curing tenant distress (whether it is developer-induced or circumstances-induced) with more public money when the bill comes due and extract every dollar they can. A policy expert recently told me “This project may become bona fide looting of the US Treasury.” At that point, the city, state and federal government will have no choice but to provide it—because the hole will already be there, and someone will have to fill it.
In 2019, the project scope called for limited demolition of two buildings. That put the community in an uproar. In 2021, the Working Group responded with a red line: no demolition. Today, 24 buildings are set to come down—and we are all meant to believe that it is the best thing that could happen to this community.
Anxious tenants are pressing the same question: “But is it a done deal?” The developer and their team and allies will tell you that it is. Others, including tenant advocates and housing experts, insisted the opposite: nothing had been finalized, and the outcome is very much in play.
Which you accept as true depends largely on how you interpret the balance of power between federal, state, and city government—particularly when that power is steered, if not outright dictated, by a real estate giant managing $60 billion in assets. The technical reality is simple: it is not a done deal. The project must still go through the NEPA process, including numerous steps such as a final Environmental Impact Statement, and a Record of Decision known as ROD in environmental lingo. Even then, the funding and financing agreements would have to be finalized. The Master Development Agreement clearly states that no step can be taken, unless all permits have been secured. And even then, lawsuits can—and likely will—follow, delaying, altering or even halting the project. So, no matter how often the claim is repeated, it is not a done deal.
At recent meetings, elected officials offered anti-demolition advocates a cheerful solution: if members of the community don’t like the plan, they should simply come up with their own. A nice thought, in the way that telling a cancer patient to develop their own genomic therapy is a nice thought. Master-planning a multi-billion-dollar redevelopment requires specialization in housing finance, environmental law, municipal finance and federal regulation—the kind of expertise residents neither possess nor can afford to hire. But that, of course, is the strategy: to frame power as a matter of effort, as if the imbalance were simply a lack of initiative.
And that is the inescapable flaw of public-private partnerships: the public always loses. As great as Ms. Bova-Hiatt, Mr. Rubin, and Mr. Gouveia may be at their job, they will never be savvy enough for Related Companies. Because of an imbalance of power so structural, so embedded in the process, that it barely registers as unfair. One side enters the negotiation with teams of lobbyists, lawyers, financiers, and planners who have spent decades learning how to make the numbers work in their favor. At best, the other side enters with nothing but the hope that this time will be different, equipped with a slide deck, and just enough plausible deniability to feign surprise if the deal goes sideways.