By Laura Latzko
The Financial District is expected to be the most populous area in Community Board 1, overtaking Battery Park City, Tribeca and the Seaport.
A report done for Board 1 by the Manhattan borough president shows that the fastest growing area in Lower Manhattan is the Financial District, and by 2013 it is expected to have more than double the people it had in 2000.
This means that by 2013, there could be around 27,829 people living in the Financial District.
Pat Moore, a member of C.B. 1’s Financial District Committee who has been living in the neighborhood for 31 years, is afraid that the growth in population will cause her neighborhood to be overcrowded and unaffordable.
“We’re going to feel it makes it noisy and busy,” Moore said. “We liked it when it was quiet and no one lived down there.”
Ro Sheffe, chairperson of the Financial District Committee, said that although incentives after 9/11 to developers may have had something to do with this growth, it is largely unprecedented.
“No one can nail down why this happened at this place at this time,” Sheffe said. “It’s a great mystery.”
Basha Estroff, the borough president’s community planning fellow who completed the report, projects that the Financial District will make up 44 percent of Lower Manhattan’s population by 2013. In 2000, 24 percent of the people who lived in the C.B. 1 area were in the Financial District.
Estroff used a formula where she took the number of expected units for developments completed by 2013 and multiplied it by the average occupancy per household for Board 1, which includes the areas south of Canal St. and the Brooklyn Bridge. Based on the formula, there will be 63,561 people in the area by 2013.
“If you put that into context, if you were to pluck Community Board 1 out of Manhattan and pluck it down somewhere a few hundred miles north of here in the middle of New York State, it would be the 10th largest city in New York State,” Sheffe said at a recent Financial District Committee meeting.
The expected population of the Financial District and Board 1 does not include those who will be living in certain buildings, which were not included in the study because their unit numbers have not been determined. These developments, which the Financial District committee estimates could add up to more than 5,000 units, would cause the number of people living in the Board 1 area to be closer to 70,000.
Liz Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, said that the numbers in the report are consistent with her group’s population statistics. The Alliance has been tracking the Downtown population.
“We’re all on the same page,” Berger said. “I think they’re right to be looking at this issue.”
While the population of the Financial District and other parts of Board 1 is growing, and the number of condos and apartments in these areas also rises, infrastructure is not keeping pace.
C.B.1 ‘s Sheffe said everything is first on the list of priorities, including schools, community centers, parks, libraries and stores.
As rent in the Financial District has risen, many of the businesses that once resided in the Financial District have been forced to leave.
“I live just about geographic dead center of the Financial District, and the three delis that we had in 2000 are all gone,” Sheffe said. “One is now a highend cosmetic store, one is high-end condos, one is Gucci Couture. Nine o’clock at night, if I want a carton of milk, I have to walk nine blocks. In 2000, I could walk down the street.”
Michael Levine, director of land use and planning for Board 1, said that some amenities, such as retail outlets, are difficult for the city to control, but the community board can use the report to lobby for more funding for libraries, parks, community centers and schools.
“That’s the purpose of this report — to raise a red flag to the growth we have had in the Financial District,” Levine said.
The lack of available space in the Financial District makes solutions hard, he added.
“We’re heavily built on, and that’s a problem,” Levine said. “We will have to be very imaginative.”
One of the solutions to bringing amenities to the Financial District and other parts of Board 1 has been to involve developers with school and park projects.
Swig Equities donated $1.3 million to the Imagination Playground, which will be built on Burling Slip.
The new playground will be an interactive environment of sand and water, wheelbarrows, and blocks and other building materials.
Kent Swig, president of Swig Equities, said it is “vitally important to provide the FiDi neighborhood with resources for all of its residents, both the residential and commercial.”
Some members of the Financial District have other concerns about the effects of all of the development. Moore, who is the chairperson of C.B.1’s Quality of Life Committee, said that there are certain problems, caused by construction, that need to be dealt with now.
“Because we are growing in leaps and bounds, we have a huge quality of life issue in this area that nobody wants to address,” Moore said. “We have huge amounts of noise, huge amounts of construction, huge amounts of street closures. We get all of the inconveniences but none of the benefits.”
