Annual Report 2007

Visionary Leaders

Perhaps never before have so many city-shaping projects been undertaken simultaneously and been so widespread. Much of the focus in recent years has been on the unprecedented boom in housing construction, which has reached deeply into established neighborhoods as well as into formerly neglected areas.

It would be easy to sit back now and enjoy what we've done. To let our successors worry about the future. But we must not become complacent. Michael R. Bloomberg Mayor of the City of New York

“It seems wherever you walk in our city these days, whether it's Kingsbridge Heights or Lower Manhattan, Queens West or East New York, Fort Greene or here in Flushing, there's new housing being built,” Mayor Bloomberg recently said. “Over the last two years, more permits for housing construction have been issued than at any time since the early 1970s, and we will need all of those new units, and more, because the Department of City Planning projects that by 2010, New York will grow by another 200,000 people. And by 2030, our population will reach more than 9 million– the equivalent of adding the populations of Boston and Miami to the five boroughs.”

But that is only part of the story. After a slump following the recession at the start of this decade, a new generation of skyscrapers is rising at a rate not dreamed of just a few years ago. At the same time, dynamic commercial districts are being nurtured in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

Not to be outdone, New York’s leading institutions, such as Columbia University,
Lincoln Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art, are forging ahead with major
modernization and expansion projects.