Here is an example of what I am talking about:
Scott Veerkamp / Predatory Lending (Franklin Township School Board Member.)

Please review this information from U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley regarding deceptive lending practices:
“Steering payments were made to brokers who enticed unsuspecting homeowners into deceptive and expensive mortgages. These secret bonus payments, often called Yield Spread Premiums, turned home mortgages into a SCAM.”

The Center for Responsible Lending says YSP “steals equity from struggling families.”
1. Scott collected nearly $10,000 on two separate mortgages using YSP and junk fees. 2. This is an average of $5,000 per loan. 3. The median value of the properties was $135,000. 4. Clearly, this type of lending represents a major ripoff for consumers.

http://merkley.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/?id=A09C6A80-537A-4EB1-83C5-31925F046B6F

As, you correctly said 125th is becoming a CBD for black New York. I would tend to put immigration as the number one driver for a lot of the dense nodes.

“As for secondary downtowns: the trend, at least in the early part of the 20th century, was for making them less important, not more. Downtown Brooklyn declined in importance after Brooklyn became part of New York; while early subway and elevated lines were meant to serve both Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, nowadays the focus is just on Manhattan. Similarly, Jersey City and Newark were bustling secondary downtowns but declined in the postwar era.”

This statement really would make people who don’t know the region today think almost dense mixed use groupings are in Manhattan and might have been accurate if you wrote it in 1980. In fact the trend is towards thriving higher density business and shopping districts all over Brooklyn and Queens.

I wouldn’t describe the Jersey City waterfront as “spillover” from Lower Manhattan. In fact, a high percentage of finance industry offices are now in either, Midtown or Jersey City. It looks like a number of people are living in Manhattan and taking ferries to work in Jersey.

It’s really how important to understand how this is happening in spite of every city policy working against this for the last 50 years.(And Jersey was much worse) When people break the law on the scale they did to live in places like Williamsburg, it indicates some pretty huge demand. When the most distinctive landmark in a neighborhood is massive housing projects like it is in Williamsburg, you know what the city thinks of your neighborhood and it’s future.

The part about Atlantic Yards that’s controversial isn’t the building. It’s the corruption. The city’s exercising eminent domain on multiple intact blocks in order to raze them and hand them over to a politically connected developer; simultaneously, the MTA is selling said developer air rights over the railyard for half the assessed value, and moreover is letting the developer pay it in interest-free installments. The land was valued at more than $200 million; Ratner got it for $100 million even though there was a competing bid for $150 million, and now Ratner is only going to pay $20 million now and the rest later.

The same is true for many of the rezonings in New York. Jane Jacobs’ last published piece was a letter to Bloomberg in opposition to the Greenpoint rezoning, which she said had no community input and went counter to the neighborhood’s own plan for upzoning, which would preserve industrial land.

The recent growth of some secondary downtowns is really an extension of CBD growth. For example, take Jersey City. The traditional downtown, surrounding Journal Square, is still depressed. The recent growth is on the waterfront, right across from Lower Manhattan, and is dominated by overflow from Manhattan finance. I believe the same is true for Downtown Brooklyn.

125th Street is a completely different case, coming from the fact that it’s less a secondary downtown than the primary downtown of black New York.

All over the Rust Belt, the growing city regions are typically the centers of very large CBDs: hence New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago are revitalizing, but Baltimore and Providence are not, and within the cities that are revitalizing growth is starting at the old core. It’s like 19th century urbanization is happening all over again, but this time with hipsters, or the creative class, or however you choose to call them. It’s starting from downtown, and now spilling over to nearby urban neighborhoods; in New York, where this trend is the most mature, a few people are even discovering the urban neighborhoods further out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly5gJR-ouIE

Here’s a video tour of Main Street in Flushing Queens. The end of the number 7 line and NYC’s largest asian hub. Agood example of the kind of organicly driven growth fueled by immigrants. Dense retail, and lots of new office growth here and my guees is the area is still way underbuilt.

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5600661/14700198

According to the video, major high rise office, residential and retail development began along the The Jersey City Water front twenty years ago with the costruction of Excahnge Place.

You need to get out more.

Take a trip to the places I mentioned and tell me what you see. Also study your history of NY transit, road and most importantly zoning policy.

I was a life long NY resident until 6 years ago and go back pretty often.

What you will see with even a little study is all of these “downtown” centers and other trying to build themselves up– often in spite of active zoning and other restraints.

Up until very recently in Bloomberg’s term, almost all of Waterfront Brooklyn and Queens was zoned strictly for industrial uses. In fact , all of Long Island City was zoned that way, give or take a few streets here and there of old residential mixed in and a tiny square of a few blocks at Court House Square where the Citibank built a huge office tower. Every thing else was pretty much grandfathered in.

Already, even with the zoning there were lots of people trying to stretch and break the zoning codes like artists who were renting studios and putting illegal lofts in Long Island City and all along waterfront Brooklyn.

In case you don’t know it Williamsburg in Brooklyn is world artist and hipster headquarters. All along that waterfront, people have been breaking the law to convert factories into needed studio and living space as well as a host of “creative class” uses like film and video, recording studios etc.. Take the L to Bedford and walk around sometime. The same thing was happening in Greenpoint and in Dumbo, Red hook, and along the Gowanas Canal.

Finally, when the zoning laws were changed a torrent of residential high rises went into construction.

The same kind of thing is going on in Downtown Brooklyn. Metro Tech built by Forest City kicked was built in the 1980’s and included major offices for Chase Manhattan. Much more recently, with zoning changes, huge residential, hotel and other construction was kicked off stretching all the way from Atlantic Ave in the South to the edge of Brooklyn Heights.

I imagine you have heard of Bruce Ratner’s massive Atlantic Yards project proposed for the area just on the North Western edge of downtown Brooklyn which calls for several million square feet of office space, 60,000 residential apartments, a new Nets stadium and large amounts of retail.

Maybe all these people and developers are crazy but I’m hardly the first one to be thinking this way. Also, whatever the bad timing and near term results of some the new construction, the earlier things that slipped through the cracks like DUMBO have been very financially successful. Shortages of available residential, retail and office space (legal and illegal) in places like Williamsburg were driving rents to incredible levels.

As you said, Jersey City, in particular has already shown the potential of multi centered development by putting a big new city right across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. That was what finally got enough people to wake up and open up the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts.

I was in NYC in November and was very impressed by the new developments in Northern Long Island City and along the Astoria waterfront. Astoria’s business district is busier than I have ever seen it and there are lots of new hotels in the area.

In fact what you are seeing in Manhattan is the reverse trend in lower Manhattan in particular. Older buildings not well suited for modern class A office space are becoming high end residential and the area is filling up and becoming a 24 hour neighborhood. You can also see more residential stuff happening in and at the edge of the Midtown office district.

Further up in Harlem, there is retail and office development near 125th st. to mix with all the residential.

Now, then we come to a huge problem which is that very little affordable residential stuff is being built, not because of lack of demand but because of rent control.

Even so, one sees tremendous levels of density along almost all the major subway routes most of which is driven by legal and illegal immigrant communities.

As for secondary downtowns: the trend, at least in the early part of the 20th century, was for making them less important, not more. Downtown Brooklyn declined in importance after Brooklyn became part of New York; while early subway and elevated lines were meant to serve both Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, nowadays the focus is just on Manhattan. Similarly, Jersey City and Newark were bustling secondary downtowns but declined in the postwar era.

That’s not to say they can’t be served by transit well. They can, but it requires some effort to make commuter rail work better, possibly extend the subway, and upzone.

Alon, in Columbus they built more freeways inside its ring road to/from downtown than Indy did. Columbus has two segments north of downtown, two east, one south and one west; Indy has one east, one west, one south, and one northwest. Indy built one-way arterial pairs through its urban core in addition to its two alpha streets, Meridian (old US31, Indiana’s central N-S spine) and Washington (National Road/US40). Those arterials keep most people inside the outer loop off the freeways.

I am not convinced of the value of re-converting one-way pairs. I think stealing ROW width for bike lanes and streetcars is much more possible; the main east-west pair (Michigan/New York) is separated by 1000 feet or less, about a 3-minute walk. Creating such a wide transit corridor would lead to both densification and intensification of use between the arterials while preserving their usefulness as a relatively convenient in-town commuting route.

A nearly identical situation exists with the Chestnut/Walnut pair in Philadelphia; it parallels the Market St. subway/elevated line, and it is the most-dense part of Center City and West Philadelphia. Philly didn’t have to reconvert that pair to get dense development. (Plus, it’s way easier and safer for Penn and Drexel students to jaywalk on a one-way.)