Stuckey: There are things that I think all three of those projects did for the city, that is that they were transformative, economic development projects. The benefit of some of the projects that you mentioned, I did them while I was in the public sector and then I continued some of them on the private sector as well. When I came into the public sector, it was at the time when Ed Koch was mayor, and New York City was almost bankrupt. We had to be very aggressive with our economic program. Interestingly enough, by the time that Ed Koch left, we had people saying that we were overdeveloping the city. So in the course of 12 years, we obviously made a significant turnaround.

But what I think every one of projects did, quite honestly, was create a transformation in the areas where they were located. The South Street Seaport was transformative in a sense that it began to create one of the first major projects to create a Downtown environment between the Prudential building that Reznick Group did with us, which was a one-million-square-foot building, with the seaport. It began to make Downtown a very strong office market and tourism market. Typically people went down to the Statue of Liberty and then got on the subway to go back Uptown. Now this gave them a different reason to stay.

Similarly, I think the Times Square project was transformative because that was a project that didn’t start for real estate reasons; it started because we had very serious sociological and crime reasons. We decided that we were going to deal with that problem by essentially taking the real estate back again by having different owners and less places for people to hide. We knew that wasn’t going to stop the crime, but it made the crime much more manageable. The other thing it did is it allows us to transform it into a family-destination place and restore it to its historic roots. It has been a major contributor to the tourism boom that we’ve seen in New York City.

Similarly, MetroTech was a way of us keeping business in New York City. During the 1980s, New York City was experiencing tremendous problems, particularly in keeping office, computer facilities and call centers in New York competing with New Jersey, Florida, Texas and international locations. We developed a number of important tax abatements, the energy cost reduction program and other programs that gave companies corporate real estate tax abatements. Each job that they created they would get $500 per job each year for 12 years. That was because we didn’t want them to be developing buildings that only had computers in them; we wanted buildings that were going to create jobs.

I think those were all very transformative, but I think the problems of each project rely more in the particular design and issues about financing. The criticism of MetroTech, and I don’t think it’s valid, was that there is a lot of government tenants. But I don’t think it’s valid because that was a strategy of ours. I think private tenants wouldn’t go to MetroTech at the time because they were afraid of what they perceived as being high-crime. Part of what we had to do is lead the area with government agencies to create a business-like environment. And obviously Times Square started as one type of project and evolved over time into a different project, and I think the evolution of that led it to be more retail-oriented. But I also think personally I would have tried to put a lot more thinking at the time on ways to move people around better.

GlobeSt.com: Keeping with the redevelopment discussion, you’re also an expert on post-catastrophe reconstruction both here in New York and around the world. How do you evaluate human-made disasters like the World Trade Center from natural disasters like in Haiti? What principals do you follow in both situations?

Stuckey: We, in fact, look at the World Trade Center as being a disaster and Haiti as being a catastrophe. It’s important to make the distinction for the following reason: in both cases, people die and it is a catastrophe for whoever is affected by it, but in a disaster, it doesn’t incapacitate the areas, in this case New York City’s ability to function. Even though many people died, even though there is massive construction at the trade center site, 95% of the city was functioning as if nothing happened. The city had the ability itself, along with by county, to start saving lives and trying to get people out and all the things you need to do after a disaster. In a catastrophic situation like Haiti, the nature of the event has such a magnitude where the area that impacted doesn’t have the capabilities of helping itself. It is totally dependant on outside help to get its feet back on the ground. If you remember how devastated it looked at Ground Zero after September 11, you could walk away and go home. If you go to Haiti, you just walk from one site that looks like Ground Zero to the next. I say that because that begins to define how you look at challenges. Being able to deal and help with the healing process in an area, as traumatic as it was at the trade center, it is very different than how you go about taking a place like Haiti, where 316,000 people died, where one-third of the government was killed in the earthquake, where 18 of the 19 government ministries were destroyed, virtually every hospital and virtually every school. They are starting from scratch with everything. The way you approach those two situations is obviously very different.

GlobeSt.com: The expansion of NYU in Greenwich Village has caused much agita among preservationists in the neighborhood. At the university level, how do you respond to community concerns while attempting to expand NYU as a local and global brand?

Stuckey: This is a problem confronting many universities. It is an interesting problem for the following reasons: many times, everything that is developed around these universities has developed the cost of the university. They became the anchor of the community. My answer is, universities, historically over time, realize that they should control land around themselves for expansion. But in many cases, they could have never contemplated the level of expansion that they have today. So what happens now is that the very neighborhoods that grow up around the school, now all of a sudden, the school has to grow. And like a living organism, it either grows or it dies. But I also believe there are very legitimate questions that have been raised by people concerning the NYU plan, and I believe the university has done a remarkably good job at trying to answer those questions and work with the local community, make modifications where appropriate and particularly spend a lot of time thinking about how what they are doing hits the ground.

Ultimately, the historic buildings have their own laws that protect them, so that sort of takes care of itself. They may talk about how it changes the character of a neighborhood, but again, we have to make a decision. This isn’t an NYU question; this is a city one. Are we going to stop all development? Everything changes the character of a neighborhood, and we have a million more people getting here by the time 2030 comes and very little land that’s still available for development. So are we going to allow the neighborhood to change, or are we going to become San Francisco-like? Specific to NYU, they are doing a good job at trying to work with the community. They’ve had tons of meetings before the public approval process even started, which to me is doing it the right way. It’s inclusive.

GlobeSt.com: On the residential side, you are currently developing a $50 million, 132-unit affordable housing project in Flushing. And with other large-scale projects being planned in Willets Point, what do you believe the future is for development?

Stuckey: The city knows that I’m an academic now and that I have no interest in developing anymore, but I am the president of the design commission for Mayor Bloomberg, so the city will oftentimes ask me ideas about Willets Point or the RFPs that they do. I think through their RFPs, from the eyes of a development organization, I recognize that government doesn’t always see things the way a developer does, and a developer doesn’t always see things the way the city does. I think, and I tell my students this all the time, that there are a couple of areas where I think there will be tremendous growth. One of them is affordable housing for sure; the second area I would look at is the creation of an infrastructure business predicated on public-private partnerships; and third area I would look at doing is an area is post-catastrophic building. But first and foremost, affordable housing.

GlobeSt.com: From a public policy standpoint, what can the city do to encourage industrial development and job growth in all five boroughs? Are EB-5 transactions emerging as a viable solution?

Stuckey: I think it is a tool for sure. We are in the process of examining a new conversation in our development area about community development. I think when you get to some of the areas that were once manufacturing in nature, you need to start thinking about how you involve the city in the redevelopment of those cities in different ways. I’m very concerned about city planning on a vast amount of manufacturing lands in the South Bronx and other places being converted to residential. I think it is a mistake from a policy point of view because, one, there is very little public transportation, and two, it is taking away any chance of us ever recovering any new types of industrial technology and industrial development. Historically, a lot of the reasons why manufacturing left the US and New York is because of the cost of labor and they went to places like Indonesia, Bangladesh and China and what have you. But the truth of the matter is that most modern manufacturers, the pay disparity isn’t as large anymore because most of what happens is done by machinery. So there is an opportunity and a need for cities to start recapturing manufacturing and recognizing that the labor laws wouldn’t be what they were before. Secondly, I believe there are other types of industries like urban farming, which could be occurring on space where you have brownfields that could be remediated. All these different things can create jobs for people who are semi-skilled or unskilled, and that could be a way to get them in the workforce. And that to me is only one of what could be many technology-based strategies.

GlobeSt.com: We all know you’re a Brooklyn boy at heart. When looking back on your home turf, what is the biggest challenge the borough currently faces?

Stuckey: I look at Brooklyn and the strength of it is its diversity. Sunset Park, where I grew up, was a place where first generation immigrants would come. It was always the strength of Brooklyn because it really allowed people from different perspectives and different ethnicities, cultures and religious backgrounds to come together and find ways of surviving in the so-called melting pot. There’s one new group that’s coming in now, which I think is a potential danger: the gentrification group. I say that half-heartedly, because it is the one group that is not giving back. It concerns me deeply because these are people that have been here through the hard and the good times in Brooklyn, and they are kind of being ignored and pushed aside. They are slowly stripping away what I think is the soul of the real Brooklyn. They are very much about what is in it for themselves, and very little into contributing something greater than themselves.