The passing of "wise man" Richard Ravitch: much respect, tho West Side Stadium criticism unmentioned (& he was precluded from Atlantic Yards comment)

The kudos, well deserved, have poured in for Richard Ravitch, who died two weeks ago. Richard Ravitch, Rescuer of the Subways and New York’s Finances, Dies at 89, the New York Times reported 6/26/23, noting:

Mr. Ravitch never won elective office. But he left an outsize mark on government at every level as one of the backstage wise men recruited to stave off the financial collapse of New York’s Urban Development Corporation [now Empire State Development] in 1975 and, a few months later, of New York City’s own overdrawn municipal accounts.

By rallying public support for inventive means of raising revenue, he was also instrumental in rejuvenating the city’s mass transit system in the 1980s as the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

He later served as New York’s lieutenant governor, enlisted by David A. Paterson in 2009 to lend gravitas to his teetering administration.

Write Sam Roberts, "Mr. Ravitch was shrewd, guileless and so unambiguously blunt that he was sometimes dismissed as a doomsayer."

What was missing: West Side Stadium (+ AY)

That's why it was intriguing to me that none of the coverage referenced Ravitch's public--and lonely--opposition to Mayor Mike Bloomberg's West Side Stadium plan. As the Village Voice's Tom Robbins wrote 2/8/05, in Stadium Fear Factor:

It is a rare instance in which a blue-ribbon member of the development fraternity, never known for outspoken courage, has broken ranks to denounce one of City Hall’s most sacred cows. While most builders have remained mum on the subject, Ravitch has been speaking out forcefully against the stadium, arguing that the proposed deal shortchanges both the MTA, which owns the site, and taxpayers.

Ravitch ran a family-owned development company, HRH Construction, notable for building moderate-income Waterside Plaza and Manhattan Plaza in Manhattan.

Ravitch told Robbins that, while some in the real-estate community agreed with him, they wouldn't say so publicly, because they didn't want to clash with Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, who could influence their owther projects.

It should be noted that Ravitch never spoke up about Atlantic Yards, though some of the same arguments were made. He never entered the fray, neutralized in part by his investment banker son’s role brokering the team sale.

A tweet from Robbins:

We differed years back over Manhattan Plaza's Section 8 deal, but he was the only guy to say NO to Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Commodore Hotel/Grand Hyatt scheme, and that rare housing mogul who truly loved his city.
He was my favorite member of the Permanent Government.

— Tom Robbins (@tommy_robb) June 26, 2023

And a follow-up:

Another Ravitch move dramatically out of step with his developer brethren: He fought - successfully -for shifting hundreds of millions of federal funds allocated for Westway into the ailing MTA and mass transit.

— Tom Robbins (@tommy_robb) July 10, 2023

Other coverage

From New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante, Richard Ravitch and the Matzo Summit That Saved New York (or, in print, "With a Savior Gone, a Chasm Widens"):

Crucial to this outcome was a mutual respect among those on both sides of the negotiation — men defined by similar backgrounds, ideology and a profound sense of civic commitment. If it is almost impossible to envision the same sort of collaboration between labor and business interests today, it is because that commonality has vanished in a world defined by toxic stratification.

From Gothamist,  Richard Ravitch, savior of NYC subway, dies at 89

:Ravitch led a state-appointed commission that in 2008 issued recommendations to reform New York’s public authorities, which for decades operated with little public oversight.

The recommendations resulted in the state Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009, which gave board members of public authorities like the MTA more independence from elected officials. Instead of serving at the will of governors, mayors and legislative leaders who appointed them, the law required public authority board members to be “fiduciaries” and only act in the interest of the agencies they served.

That may not have worked as well as hoped.

From THE CITY, Richard Ravitch, 1933-2023, Friend to NYC and THE CITY:

But Dick (no one ever called him Richard) should be remembered for one more aspect of his life that seems especially important today: He was a steadfast friend of journalists.

Dick was one of the driving forces behind the creation of THE CITY and the initial chair of the board. Jere Hester, THE CITY’s first editor-in-chief, remembers visiting Dick’s Fifth Avenue apartment in early 2019 with a printout of a PowerPoint outlining plans for the newsroom.

Dick flipped through the pages quickly until he got to the one listing the journalists who had been hired. “He wanted to know everything about every one of them,” Hester recalled. “He wanted to know everybody’s life story and took genuine delight in every detail I could muster.”

I don't know if he really needed to be a "friend" to journalists, just an honest broker, and a supporter of more robust journalism, which the city sorely needs. More from Greg David:

After his stint as New York’s lieutenant governor in 2009 and 2010, Dick became appalled by the superficiality of coverage and overall lack of interest among media outlets on the issue of state and city finances and wanted to do something about it. Some people told him journalists weren’t interested in such training.

Sarah Bartlett, then dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, said that if a training program were free, with all expenses paid, the reporters would come. She was right.

Over the last nine years, as director of the Ravitch Fiscal Reporting Program, I’ve welcomed some 900 journalists who have come to New York on Dick’s dime for weeklong deep dives into fiscal policy (budgets, bonds, pensions and tax incentives), local economic coverage (jobs), the Puerto Rican debt crisis, housing and transit.

From Politico, New York officials remember Richard Ravitch, the state’s top crisis solver for half a century:

“He was never elected to anything, yet he had arguably the most impactful and consequential role in state and city government over the past 50 years,” Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said in an interview with POLITICO, pointing to Ravitch’s time saving New York City from the financial crisis in the 1970s, running the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and spending 18 months as lieutenant governor.

From the Albany Times-Union, editor Casey Seiler, Dick Ravitch, New York’s unconventional lieutenant governor:

Michael Oreskes — who delivered a funny, moving eulogy at Ravitch’s funeral — talked with me about Ravitch’s refusal to see politics as a zero-sum game. It’s a tendency seen most unpleasantly in the career of Andrew Cuomo, who viewed everyone else’s share of power as a portion that was being taken from him.

“To Dick, power was an asset to be shared, not hoarded,” Oreskes said. (Ravitch and the Cuomos had never gotten along very well, he added.)

From that Oreskes eulogy:

He was a most unusual combination of personal loyalty and intellectual independence. He once complimented my [New York Times] colleague Sam Roberts for having—quote—“a healthy disrespect for everyone.” At least, Sam took that as a compliment.

From William Glasball in NJ Spotlight, Richard Ravitch’s legacy as a watchdog for sustainable state and local finance:

We will continue his work at the Volcker Alliance, through advocacy of sustainable budgeting and via the recently launched Richard Ravitch Public Finance Initiative, which seeks to catalyze federal action to improve state and local budget practices that present looming risks to the federal system and economy.

From Nicole Gelinas in City Journal, He Loved New York:

In between his calls, I tried to ask Ravitch some questions about the MTA, but he kept asking me questions. Where did I come from? Where did I go to school? Why did I care about the subways? Why did I want to work for the Manhattan Institute? He’d barely begin answering one of my questions before the phone rang again, and he was off giving advice to some candidate about fundraising or asking when someone’s flight was landing.

At the end of my requested hour, I gathered my things, figuring that he wouldn’t want to squander any more time past our scheduled meeting, and I didn’t want to interrupt him on the phone to say goodbye, and thank you. He called after me, looking annoyed. “Where are you going? Where is she going?” he asked his secretary. “I figured our time was up,” I said.

“We’re not done talking,” he said. So I sat back down, and we continued in the same manner for another two hours. He answered all my questions, and then some—but he also listened. Though he had decades more knowledge and practical experience than I did, he asked for my ideas about how to save the MTA’s finances and seriously considered them, debating pros and cons.

From E.J. McMahon in the New York Post, Farewell Dick Ravitch, city savior who sounded alarms NY should heed:

Before and after leaving his last state office, Ravitch pushed back, privately and publicly, against the notion that New York’s steep income tax rates on high earners would threaten the city’s future.

After all, he would frequently say, taxes had never deterred him from investing here.

But as it did for so many others, the pandemic changed Ravitch’s perspective.

In the spring of 2021, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s final budget jacked up New York’s top tax rates to their highest level in decades, the old fiscal-workout warhorse was growing alarmed that the burden had reached a tipping point.