'Big Voice' Joining Dix Debate Belongs to the Real-Estate Development Industry

The News & Observer did readers a disservice today in a story titled "Big voice will join Dix land debate". The story reports on a legislative task force's decision to hire the Urban Land Institute to study the future of the 315-acre Dix Hill property, which has sparked tension between Friends of Dorothea Dix Park and others who want to preserve the property as a public park versus land developers who see profits in its beautiful downtown vistas. Unfortunately, the paper fails to tell us who exactly ULI is.

The group is "prestigious," the N&O reports. It was called on to offer advice on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks, the paper says.

But what the N&O does not tell us is that the ULI is a nonprofit think-tank that's an arm of the for-profit real-estate industry. The organization was founded in 1936 when Cincinnati real-estate mogul Walter Schmidt and other developers petitioned the National Association of Real Estate Boards -- now the National Association of Realtors -- to establish a research institute within the organization.

Four years later, ULI became an independent organization -- but one that has always represented big real estate. For example, ULI's current president is Richard M. Rosan, former senior vice president of Park Tower Realty Corp. and Silverstein Properties of New York and former president and CEO of the Real Estate Board of New York. ULI's sustaining members include AIG Global Real Estate Investment Corp., Bank of America, Citigroup Property Investors, Goldman Sachs & Co., JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch & Co. and other titans of real-estate capital.

The N&O also neglected to inform its readers of how controversial some of ULI's initiatives have been. For example, its recommendations on post-Katrina New Orleans -- formulated by a panel chaired by former Raleigh mayor and real-estate developer Smedes York -- were condemned by many because they called for the abandonment of wide swathes of the city without the input of affected residents.

This is how urban theorist Mike Davis described the ULI's role in New Orleans in an article for The Nation:

In a nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told [the city's Bring New Orleans Back commission]: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin -- truly a cat on a hot tin roof -- danced anxiously back and forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by [New Orleans real-estate developer and former ULI President Joseph] Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?"

In ULI's latest annual report, Chairman Marilyn Jordan Taylor acknowledged that the group's plan for New Orleans was not well-received. "Our work required making some tough calls," she wrote. "We said it would be irresponsible to immediately rebuild every section of the city based on its pre-Katrina layout. This was controversial, and reactions were mixed. But we did not come to New Orleans to tell people what they wanted to hear. We came to care, to tell the truth, and to offer realistic solutions to help residents rebuild in a way to make the city stronger and more equitable."

How exactly one finds equity in excluding citizens from making decisions about their homes and communities Taylor does not explain.

Could there be a useful role for a group like ULI in the ongoing effort to decide the future of the Dix property? Of course. After all, who better to turn to for property development expertise than property developers? But at the same time, it's important that we the people of Raleigh know who ULI is and the interests it represents so we can put its recommendations into the proper context. It's a shame we didn't get that information from our daily newspaper.