New York City is not going to “ban” glass and steel skyscrapers, but you wouldn’t know it from sound bites from the mayor this week. On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly made it sound as if he’s poised to do just that, prompting multiple headlines and a New York Post cover along those lines, as well as a lighthearted-but-denunciatory Fox & Friends segment.
“We are going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers, which are incredibly inefficient,” the mayor said Monday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a setting he’s used previously to address a national political audience.
“[W]e are going to introduce legislation to ban the glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming,” de Blasio said later at a press conference, using similarly bold language. “They have no place in our city or on our Earth anymore.”
He went on to say the buildings at Hudson Yards “are examples of the wrong way to do things” and referred to his proposal as “the ban on the traditional glass and steel buildings.”
And later that evening, on NY1’s Inside City Hall, the mayor once again referred to his idée fixe of the day: “Glass and steel buildings, the ones that were built for decades, were just huge emitters of greenhouse gases,” de Blasio said. “They were built, as you know, [as] monuments to wealth but they were horrible for the environment. And what we are saying is we are going to ban those.”
The mayor’s hopping onto the “Green New Deal” bandwagon—and using dramatic language in doing so, while providing few details to back it up—is the latest instance of de Blasio thrusting himself into the national conversation as he mulls a presidential bid.
But will there actually be no more shiny glass skyscrapers in New York City if de Blasio gets his way? Not exactly.
At one point during that press conference, Mark Chambers, director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, chimed in to clarify that there would be no prohibition on buildings made from glass. “I want to call out that it doesn’t mean that buildings can’t use glass anymore,” he said. And the mayor himself followed the “ban” language with a less bold proclamation.
“If a company wants to build a big skyscraper,” he said, “they can use a lot of glass if they do all the other things needed to reduce the emissions.” In other words, skyscrapers made out of glass and steel will not be banned; instead, they will be required to meet certain energy-efficiency standards.
There is some rationale behind de Blasio’s new focus on cracking down specifically on carbon emissions from buildings made predominantly from glass. Modern high-rise buildings often have more than 50 percent glass facades, and windows conduct roughly five times more heat than traditional walls, according to the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability. That in turn can lead to a greater need for air conditioning when it’s hot, and heat loss during the winter.
But what provisions de Blasio has in mind have yet to be spelled out. The mayor’s goal is to draft and sign a bill specifying the energy performance requirements these buildings will have meet to meet by the end of 2019 (though there is currently no Council legislative language or a specific member who would spearhead a bill on the matter), complementing a new more stringent energy code that will take effect in October.
Carl Hum, the general counsel of the Real Estate Board of New York, told Curbed he looks forward to reviewing de Blasio’s proposal, but that nobody has “seen any policy yet.”
“I’m not too sure where the data and research comes from in terms of saying that glass and steel is less efficient than, say, concrete,” he said on Tuesday, adding concrete has its own sets of “limitations,” including its ability to retain heat. He noted it is doubtful an old concrete building with a dirty boiler run by heating oil would be less energy efficient than a new glass and steel building with state-of-the-art heating and insulation.
“It all depends on what’s inside,” Hum noted. “That’s going to determine if it’s ‘efficient’ or not.”
De Blasio’s proposal is not to be confused with the larger package of bills passed by the City Council last week, one of which mandates building retrofits with the aim of reducing their carbon footprint by 40 percent by 2030.
The Council learned of de Blasio’s proposal before the mayor appeared on MSNBC. According to a spokesperson, the Council supports the idea to make glass and steel buildings more energy efficient, agreeing with de Blasio that many such structures are not meeting the city’s sustainability goals. But no bill has yet been introduced in the body—the mayor can, if he wants, offer legislation, which would then be subject to hearings and other public input.
One Council member, speaking on background, didn’t see why de Blasio announced his policy so soon after the body voted on one that’s very similar, targeting buildings over 25,000 square feet.
“Feels odd, especially with regard to the fact that we just did a bill related to buildings,” said the Council member. “I would almost say that it’s not fair to have a massive conversation about building emissions and then to throw something in after it passed.”
De Blasio’s comments come on the heels of recent attempts to put himself in the national spotlight ahead of what he says will “soon” be a decision on if he will launch a presidential campaign, for which there thus far appears to be little appetite. According to a recent poll, 76 percent of New York City registered voters say he shouldn’t run for president.
His public weighing of a campaign—and his struggle for relevancy among the recently climate policy-enthused left—has prompted questions over how much he is acting in his capacity as mayor, as opposed to a prospective national political player.
Additionally, de Blasio has a history of tweaking existing policies in a way that is bound to garner national attention, such as his unveiling in the Washington Post of a supposedly “universal health care” program for the city, which amounted to something less ambitious.
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