Jay Weiser, associate professor of law & real estate at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business, writes in with a look at preservation gone amuck in New York:

New York's preservation crazies are at it again. The New York Times reports that The Society of American Baseball Researchers discovered a wall in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn that may have once been an 1899 carriage shed for the ballpark of the predecessor of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who departed the facility in 1912. Does that sound too attenuated to follow, let alone care about? Not for our intrepid preservationists. Their squawks led Con Ed, which has owned the site since 1922, to back off plans to renovate its truck depot and storage facility. And they want the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to start considering the site. "Simply having a file open at the commission," reports the Times, "could be enough to gain an injunction on future Con Ed construction projects." So New York has among the highest electricity costs in the country, but the preservationists are tying Con Ed in knots over a meaningless wall. It's the death of a thousand cuts—and ratepayers, not the preservationists, get to bear the increased costs.

This is less egregious than the City Council's recent re-landmarking of two model tenement buildings in the City and Suburban Homes Company's First Avenue Estate on 64th & 65th Sts. in Manhattan. The First Avenue Estate was a model tenement, with more light and air than the typical working-class tenements of the era. In landmarking the buildings in 1990, the Landmarks Commission called the First Avenue Estate an ''important achievement in the social housing movement'' and said the project set an important precedent for the birth of federal housing policy in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the old Board of Estimate stripped the two buildings of the designation later that year. Council member Jessica S. Lappin praised the re-landmarking as "a great opportunity to right a wrong and save an important piece of our history.'' Yet 13 other buildings in the First Avenue Estate are already landmarked, as is the nearby, similar, York Avenue Estate. Alfred T. White's Riverside apartments (Brooklyn Heights) and Tower and Home Buildings (Cobble Hill), which are also early model tenements, are also landmarked. How many landmarked model tenements does the city need?

There's a cost: owner Stahl Real Estate could build a tower on the site of the two buildings, adding housing that would help alleviate New York's shortage. Lappin doesn't care: "[B]uilding a tower in what is a model full-block tenement, it irreparably harms the meaning of the full-block tenement,'' she told the Times, adding, ''If you throw up a huge tower, that's going to impact the air and impact the light and impact the reasons why they were built.'' Of course, the Upper East Side has plenty of high-rise apartments, so residents should be used to them by now. But thanks to the City Council, Lappin gets to imbue the city with "meaning," even if it leaves New Yorkers who want affordable housing out of luck.