As outlined on the Reclaim Land page, this project will create 2,560 acres of new land. Based on Barr’s calculations for his New Manahatta project working out to around $19.3 million per acre, the cost of this development will be about $50 billion. However, Barr’s figure included all infrastructure, of which this development will contain considerably less as we will only be creating housing on a thin strip rather than covering the entire area with housing and additional subways. The cost of fill on Barr’s project was $7 billion, my project is a little less than half as big, generating a fill cost of around $10 billion for the fill. Factoring about a quarter of the infrastructure, my final finance bill will be $17 billion.
Firstly, New York City’s current Blueprint for Change, which is created to address infrastructure issues with New York’s existing public housing has earmarked $25 billion to address those issues, with roughly ten percent allocated for Staten Island, so that $2.5 billion will be used to build the new structures rather than fixing the old ones. This leaves $14.5 billion to be funded.
Currently, property developers have available to them a tax break known as 421-a. This is a tax break on property taxes when building multi-family homes. Currently, this is costing around $2 billion in unclaimed property taxes a year. By allowing this tax to expire, there will be additional funds each year that can be used for infrastructure. If our project takes fifty percent of the yearly taxes coming from these payments, that would give our project a continuous stream of income. If we take fifty percent a year over the next fifteen years, that will provide the remainder of the funding for the entire project.
However, the project will make money from the sale of new properties, plus there are several federal funding programs that could be utilized for funding. It is very hard to determine the amount of money that could come from infrastructure grants from either the federal or state coffers, so the project will remain based on the fifteen-year timeline using property taxes and Blueprint for Change, with the assumption that this timeline could be shortened as grants are awarded for this climate resilience project.
To fund the light rail initiative, we will follow the lead of Robert Moses and sell bonds in the project that will be paid back by the fees collected in ridership.
Beyond obtaining the money to build the project, it is important that the public become aware of the work that is intended to take place, the important reasons for the necessity of the work, how it will be funded and how the entire community, as well as them individually, will benefit once it is completed. Move on to the Media page to see this outreach plan.
