The Works

Bill de Blasio Taps Anthony Shorris for First Deputy Mayor

Shorris has a long history in government, but his appointment might not be too welcome by some of the city’s more politically-connected real estate developers and advocates of public-private partnerships.

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New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio named his first three hires on Wednesday. The headline pick was his first deputy mayor, Anthony Shorris, most recently a top executive at NYU’s Langone Medical Center but with a long history in local government. On the housing side of the urbanist equation, Shorris was a key architect of Ed Koch’s 100,000-unit, 10-year housing plan — an initiative imitated by mayors ever since. (Bloomberg’s target was 165,000; de Blasio intends to make his 200,000.)

On the infrastructure side, Shorris also has plenty of experience. Most recently he was executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at a time when the agency was struggling with the multibillion-dollar World Trade Center redevelopment in Lower Manhattan. That project has come to symbolize government ineptitude and poor planning: The site will contain the world’s most expensive office building (One World Trade Center, at nearly $4 billion) and train station (the PATH subway station, at around the same cost), and most likely the world’s most expensive parking garage (the “vehicle security center,” which in 2010 was pegged at $667 million) and certainly the world’s most expensive underground passageway ($225 million for the “West Concourse,” far from the only pedestrian passageway at the site).

If Shorris had gotten his way, some of those projects would have been hundreds of millions of dollars cheaper — and maybe more than a billion less, in the case of the PATH station. Before his boss, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, resigned in a prostitution scandal, Shorris was working on plans to cut back significantly on the underground elements of the PATH station design, including the $225 million underground hallway across West Street to Brookfield Place (né the World Finance Center). While the signature above-ground structure would have remained intact, the cavernous, column-less open spaces below ground would have been reined in.

“The underground portions of the project would be new and serviceable, but more quotidian in design,” Shorris wrote to Spitzer in a March 2008 internal memo.

Spitzer ultimately resigned, and Shorris with him, before the changes could be carried out. The next governor, David Paterson, was more interested in having the 9/11 memorial completed by the 10th anniversary of the attacks, and the cost-cutting moves went out the window. (Despite his short tenure as head of the Port Authority, Shorris did have a lot of fans. Jameson Doig, author of a book on the history of the bistate agency, told Next City, “Of those [Port Authority executive directors] who’ve served in the last 40 years, he and [successor] Chris Ward would be at the top of my list.”)

It wasn’t the only time Shorris expressed concern over the cost of infrastructure projects — a major problem in the U.S. and especially in New York City, where subway tunneling projects cost anywhere from 50 to 500 percent more than they do in other large cities — and the way they were handled. After his time at the Port Authority, he wrote a piece for The Nation in which he warned of “stimulus profiteers,” or private contractors taking advantage of massive government infrastructure spending to drive up prices:

Unless we ensure the program reflects the realities of the marketplace for construction services, we risk being unable to implement the programs we need, or worse, handing billions of taxpayer dollars over to stimulus profiteers…

The bill requires that half the transportation projects be underway within a few months, so any sudden surge in demand for building of that size is going to run up against some serious limitations in the supply of construction services, at least over the short run. While commercial office building and home construction has certainly virtually collapsed, different kinds of builders handle these kinds of projects. When rising demand meets limited supply, the result can be higher prices, higher profits and potentially the very same kind of speculative bubble that served us so poorly in the high-tech and real estate sectors.

We’ve seen it before. In the New York region, a public and private sector construction boom in the years just before the crash drove building prices up by as much as 50 percent over three years. The same phenomenon was seen in markets as far away as Malaysia and China, and as close to home as Atlanta and Seattle before the global economy went into a nosedive.

During his stint at the Port Authority, Shorris also warned about the dangers of letting the private sector control public works projects. It came off as a shot across the bow of the recent trend, especially in the New York area, of public-private infrastructure partnerships, or at least the balance of power in them.

“We have ceded a lot of [public works development] to the private sector,” Shorris said in 2007. “Right now, we expect developers, real estate developers, who will build our train stations and run our ferries… we’ve had a kind of almost a religious obsession with having the marketplace solve all problems, including public works.”

“Increasingly we’ve deferred much of the [infrastructure] decision-making to the private sector,” Atlantic Yards Report blogger Norman Oder quoted Shorris as saying after he left the Port Authority, continuing sarcastically,“and we know by definition the public sector is incompetent and corrupt, unable to make decisions wisely; the only people who can make decisions wisely are clearly bankers.” He cited Moynihan Station, an Amtrak project to repurpose the Farley Post Office building behind Penn Station, as an example of a plan structured around “what’s good for [developer] Related’s investors.” (Former Amtrak president David Gunn, who killed the plan only for current Amtrak leadership to revive it, has also criticized the project, saying earlier this year, “It was controlled by a bunch of rich developers.”)

The developers behind the would-be station redevelopment — the Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust — can’t be too pleased by today’s announcement. (Nor lobbyists, for that matter. Shorris was well known for shutting them out at the Port Authority and forbidding them from entering his office.)

While the current first deputy mayor, Patricia Harris, has kept somewhat of a low profile, de Blasio made it clear that Shorris will serve as his second-in-command. “I came to the very strong belief early on that we want a first deputy mayor, not a deputy mayor for operations, not a group of folks where chain of command may be unclear, but a first deputy mayor,” the mayor-elect told reporters at today’s announcement. “There is going to be a lot that happens in this city where decisions have to be made very quickly and when it’s an important decision, a strategic decision, the buck stops right here.”

The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Stephen J. Smith is a reporter based in New York. He has written about transportation, infrastructure and real estate for a variety of publications including New York Yimby, where he is currently an editor, Next City, City Lab and the New York Observer.

Tags: new york cityinfrastructurepublic transportationtransit agenciesthe worksbill de blasio

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