ALBANY — I wasted a lot of this newspaper’s ink writing about the redevelopment of the Harriman State Office Campus, the modernist desert between Washington and Western avenues.
A plan to remake the campus was launched 20 years ago by George Pataki. The Republican governor called for spending $300 million to raze Harriman’s buildings and move 7,000 state workers downtown. Subsequent, less-ambitious plans called for keeping some government employees on the campus while still turning acreage over to private development — apartments, stores and offices, all on Albany’s tax rolls and connected to its street grid.
As a newly minted Times Union business reporter, I dutifully detailed many of the twists and turns, including the responses submitted to the state’s request for proposals, what various developers hoped to accomplish, and blah, blah, blah, blah. It was all a tremendous waste of time and energy, because Andrew Cuomo scrapped the idea of Harriman redevelopment soon after becoming governor in 2011.
Cuomo never offered an explanation. He didn’t seem to have any particular ambition for Harriman and its 330 acres, at least from design and urban planning perspectives. The Democrat seemed fine with the status quo.
And so, the Harriman of today is much like the Harriman of 50 years ago. The boring campus is a place apart from its city, home to bland office buildings surrounded by parking lots and little used green space. Surrounding it all are absurdly wide ring roads used mostly to whisk commuters onto highways and away from Albany.
In other words, it’s an almost Soviet-style wasteland stuck in the 1960s, pretty much the antithesis of the human-scaled ways we should want to build cities. It’s a place for driving, not walking. For working, not living or enjoying. When state employees leave at the end of the workday, there’s little choice but to get in their cars and zoom away.
I’m bringing this up because, as reported by the Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein, we’ve just been told that construction of the new Wadsworth Center, a public health lab planned for the Harriman campus, will cost taxpayers $1.7 billion, which is just a wee bit more than the original price tag of $750 million.
$1.7 billion. That is, of course, a staggering amount of money. In fact, the Wadsworth Center is projected to cost more than the $1.6 billion stadium planned for the Buffalo Bills, at least until the inevitable cost overruns also make that project way more costly than predicted.
Hey, are we sure we don’t want to build a football stadium with the Wadsworth money? Maybe we could lure a sad sack NFL football franchise to town, the Jacksonville Jaguars perhaps. Well, give it some thought.
In the meantime, consider whether the state is leveraging its Wadsworth spending for the maximum economic benefit.
On one hand, the lab is a big win for Albany, in that it will combine five facilities into one modern campus within city limits. Initially, there was talk of building Wadsworth in Rensselaer County or even on Long Island.
But putting Wadsworth on the Harriman campus, as it now exists, will severely limit economic spin-off possibilities. Instead of walking to shops, restaurants and apartments, the lab’s workers will head for the highway. The location on state-owned land also limits the likelihood of a tech and research hub that could generate tax revenue for the city.
The scenario is similar to the mistake being made in Western New York, where a Bills stadium backed by $650 million from state taxpayers is planned for an isolated site surrounded by parking lots. While a downtown Buffalo stadium might have generated spin-off development for a needy city, a suburban stadium will enrich only the team and its billionaire owners.
If we’re going to spend these massive sums of money, shouldn’t we ensure we’re also encouraging private development? If the state is serious about a healthier environment, shouldn’t we move away from development patterns that force people to drive? Shouldn’t the state leverage Wadsworth for a more vibrant Albany?
And why put a forward-looking lab on an outdated campus?
“I will stand in front of a bulldozer if we don’t also rebuild Harriman,” said Assemblywoman Pat Fahy, a longtime advocate for building the lab in Albany. “It cannot be another standalone office building from the 1960s where you have to get on a ring road to buy a postage stamp.”
Fahy, a Democrat, is calling for Wadsworth to be constructed in conjunction with improvements that would revive aspects of Pataki’s plan. The idea, essentially, is to reconnect the campus to the city and the nearby University at Albany. It’s about thinking comprehensively and for the future.
New York should give it a try.
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