Steve Cuozzo

Steve Cuozzo

Opinion

Carl Weisbrod a great pick for city planning

The naming of Carl Weisbrod as chairman of the City Planning Commission is promising news all around. Stepping into Amanda Burden’s shoes is no small challenge — but Weisbrod is more than up to the task.

Although Weisbrod was on Mayor de Blasio’s transition team, his ascension to the top of the powerful agency, charged with directing all city “strategic planning,” is a reassuring surprise. De Blasio’s “progressive” agenda has scared the daylights out of the real-estate community even as it feigns cautious optimism.

Weisbrod’s appointment (which includes running the Planning Department that carries out the commission’s policies), suggests, like the choice of Bill Bratton as police commissioner, that the mayor has a larger foot in at least some parts of the real world than his rhetoric suggests.

Weisbrod is anything but the kind of development-averse, ivory-tower technocrat de Blasio might have chosen. A real-estate man through and through, he’s also a pragmatist with a holistic approach to land-use matters and the city’s often disparate needs. He understands — and his track record proves — that major new development and “community” and transit improvements needn’t stand in opposition, but can each decisively benefit the other.

Weisbrod headed Trinity Church’s real-estate division for five years, a time that saw the church’s vast commercial holdings in and near Hudson Square downtown flourish as never before — drawing major office tenants, especially in creative industries, to old printing-industry buildings skilfully retrofitted for the 21st Century.

But neither does Weisbrod subscribe to the knee-jerk, “all development is good” school. Far from it: In his illustrious career in public and private business, he has always viewed large-scale new construction as essential — but never in isolation.

More than any ideologue, he knows how to get things done. He was instrumental in turning Times Square from a disgrace to a crown jewel of the city during his time as president of the Times Square Business Improvement District in the ’90s. Weisbrod played a key role in bringing giant office towers to the area — but also to saving old theaters and taming and beautifying the once terrifying 42nd Street subway station.

Later, as head of the Downtown Alliance, he helped rescue the Wall Street area from oblivion by encouraging then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to provide tax credits for conversion of useless old office buildings to apartments. He created the popular Stone Street alfresco dining mall which brought outdoor life to the Wall Street area.

His leadership after 9/11 contributed to kick-starting World Trade Center redevelopment after years of delay — and also to creating public spaces and transit improvements in the troubled district.

As head of the CPC, Weisbrod will face daunting challenges. Paramount among them is East Midtown rezoning, which former Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed to push through.

Persuading the City Council to accept any measure to allow larger new buildings in the 73-block district that doesn’t call for more “infrastructure” improvements than the city can afford — and which are so complex and extensive as to stifle even modest development — won’t be easy.

But if anyone can do it, it’s Weisbrod. He has yet to fail. And with New York City’s role as the global capital under strain, we can’t afford for him to break the streak.