Dear Editor:
I believe the Yiddish term is “chutzpah.” The word means unmitigated effrontery or impudence, or put more simply, gall. For example, if you owe me $100, and you propose to resolve that debt by offering me $50 and asking me to give you something more, then you’ve got some chutzpah.
Or let’s say you’re a developer, and perhaps you promised the city to build two 20,400 sq/ft community centers, and perhaps a swimming pool, in exchange for being designated the sole developer for 18 city blocks in the city’s northwest. Maybe this obligation arose in 1998 and you have failed to live up to it, other than periodically sending out mailers with images of community centers, and pools, and hosting public events in election seasons with smiling politicians whom you support.
Then, in 2011, you propose that you will create and donate a less-than-one-acre, smaller-than-regulation playing field, at 11th and Monroe Streets, rather than the community center with a pool, if the city gives you, among other things, the right to develop yet another city block with hundreds of condos, on a property where residential use is prohibited under zoning laws. Oh, and the field will be immediately adjacent to the PSE&G electrical transformers and apparently won’t have lights for night games.
This is Ursa Development Group’s proposal to the city, as you may have about read in this paper on Feb 27. And the city block of residential buildings which Ursa wants thrown into the deal is the very same for which it sought and failed to obtain multiple zoning variances from the Zoning Board last year.
Ursa is poised for either answer from the city. It may capitalize on the city’s misfortune – namely the city’s current dearth of needed playing fields, caused by prior administrations’ neglect and exacerbated by the shipworms under Sinatra Park – by getting the city to accept this bad offer. Or, if the city says no, Ursa, your offer of a field and hundreds more condos rather than a community center and pool without added density is not a good deal for the city, then Ursa will have created a political weapon for its developer-friendly allies in the upcoming May elections. Glossy campaign literature will no doubt fly off the presses, trumpeting that the Zimmer Administration (and, by extension, any of its allies) are opposed to open space for our children. Don’t get me wrong, we need all the playing fields we can get. But at what cost?
Ursa would note the 48 affordable housing units in the offer. It won’t note that it has yet to deliver on the legally obligated affordable housing units in the many other city blocks it has already developed in the northwest. But then again, making promises and keeping them are two different things … just more chutzpah.
Jim Doyle