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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, New York City's former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Dan Doctoroff. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who he worked for, compared him to Robert Moses for the number of big things he got built in the city. If you don't believe me, here's a clip of Bloomberg that we used on this show in 2007.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg: He leaves an extraordinary record of accomplishment, and unlike Robert Moses, he did it by working with communities, not bulldozing them.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Mike Bloomberg in 2007. The New York Times continued the comparison with Robert Moses last fall by saying both master builders, both at once respected and resented for their relentlessness and their impatience. They didn't make that one up either. Here's Doctoroff himself, another clip we used here as Doctoroff was leaving office in 2007.

Dan Doctoroff: I'll take a little bit of criticism for maybe not being as good a listener as I could have been at the very beginning, but I think we've really learned.

Brian Lehrer: Dan Doctoroff is credited with being the force behind the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, leading the creation of cultural institutions, including The Shed in Manhattan, the King's Theater in Brooklyn, the new Whitney Museum, Steiner and Silvercup Studios, also Citi Field, and the new Yankee Stadium, the Barclays Center, and more, and nearly 20 parks from Brooklyn Bridge Park to McCombs Dam Park in the Bronx to the High Line in Manhattan and more. He claims credit for rezoning 40% of the city with Mayor Bloomberg. We know Mayor Adams is doing another citywide rezoning for more affordable housing, and we'll get his take on that. He is seen as the force behind Mayor Bloomberg's climate change sustainability initiative known as PlaNYC 2030. Yes, they were doing climate planning 20 years ago when other cities were only starting to talk about it. We will see how close he thinks they are to his goals now that 2030 is getting pretty close.

Dan Doctoroff did have his famous failures too, notably getting a West Side Stadium built for the New York Jets, that didn't happen, and bringing the 2012 Olympics to New York, that didn't happen either. He was important enough, even if not a household name, that when he left office in 2007, we did a segment on this show called The Legacy of Dan Doctoroff. Dan Doctoroff is also open about being in declining health with the neurodegenerative condition ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He's helping to raise money for research into the disease with a group he founded called Target ALS, and you will hear that it does affect his voice.

Now there's a new book about Dan Doctoroff's legacy that includes something around 100 essays. It's called The Urbanist: Dan Doctoroff and the Rise of New York. Dan Doctoroff joins us now for a kind of oral history interview to talk about his own legacy as he sees it, and options for keeping New York great in the future. Dan, thank you for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dan Doctoroff: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Where did you grow up, and how did you become interested in urban planning?

Dan Doctoroff: [chuckles] I grew up in a suburb of Detroit called Birmingham, Michigan. I didn't really have an interest in urbanism until I went to the World Cup semifinal game at the Meadowlands in 1994. I realized that every team could have hometown fans in New York, and so standing there, I thought, "New York should host the Olympics." For the next year and a half, I developed a plan. I understood that the Olympics could be a catalyst for great change in cities and brought together a team, and we developed a plan. Ultimately, Mike Bloomberg joined the Olympic bid. When he was elected to be mayor, he asked me to join his administration.

Brian Lehrer: The 2012 Olympic bid failed, as I said earlier. I wonder if it's gratifying to you that now the New York area is going to get the next World Cup, which was your inspiration for the Olympic bid, and as you say, we have fans of every country [laughs] living in the New York area. I wonder if that at least is gratifying to you.

Dan Doctoroff: It is. The finals are going to be at the Meadowlands. Out of our Olympic plan, we redid Hudson Yards, the High Line, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Coney Island, Washington, the South Bronx, Harlem, and many more areas that we all put venues in and developed plans around them. The idea was that we could transform New York after 9/11, and we did.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious. Was Robert Moses, as an earlier generation's master builder of infrastructure for the New York City area, and we played that clip of Mayor Bloomberg comparing you to him. Was he an inspiration to you in any way or did those comparisons only come later and from others?

Dan Doctoroff: I think they came from others. I read The Power Broker in college, but I never thought I would become a Robert Moses equivalent. I just did what I thought was necessary to bring New York into the 21st century.

Brian Lehrer: You came into office in 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks, so rebuilding in lower Manhattan was obviously a priority. I guess the one question I'll ask you about that today is, why do you think lower Manhattan became the desirable residential area that it became, in addition to reviving the office space? I might have thought people would be too spooked by the ghosts of those killed there, to put it one way, and a fear of being targeted again for it to come back and flourish the way it did with respect to people wanting to live there.

Dan Doctoroff: Well, in December of 2002, we made a plan for the revitalization of lower Manhattan and include retail, and include parks, and included obviously the World Trade Center site, infrastructure, and the ability to get there more easily. I think what we did was inspire confidence that lower Manhattan will be a 24/7, 365-day-a-year destination, building off of the incredible assets that it had, but our plan, and people believed we could do it, inspire confidence among the private sector and others to actually take part in the rejuvenation of an area. That's what we tried to do all over the city.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, my guest is former New York City Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Dan Doctoroff. There's a new book about his legacy from when he served under Mayor Bloomberg from 2002 to 2007 as the master builder, if you will, of his generation. It's called The Urbanist: Dan Doctoroff and the Rise of New York. I will say again, for those of you just tuning in, that Dan is open about the fact that he is suffering now from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and that is affecting his voice, so in case you're wondering.

Skipping ahead to near the end of your tenure- and drivers will not be happy about this to this day, skipping ahead to near the end of your tenure, 2007, you and Mayor Bloomberg introduced PlaNYC 2030, definitely a leading-edge climate sustainability program for any American city at that time.

I listened back yesterday to your appearance on this show as part of the rollout. What struck me was how we're still debating at least two of the same big issues. This will make our listeners both laugh and cry, Dan, because in 2007, you and Mayor Bloomberg proposed something that you knew would be controversial, called congestion pricing. Here's a few seconds of you in 2007, making that case on this show.

Dan Doctoroff: One of the great things about this plan, the thing that sometimes gets lost in the discussion of congestion pricing, is that one of the major reasons for it is to be able to generate the money to be able to pay for a dramatic enhancement of our mass transit system. That includes big mass transit projects that'll help hundreds of thousands of commuters like the Second Avenue subway or East Side access.

Brian Lehrer: Dan, I don't know if you're laughing there where I can't see you, hearing that clip of you in '07 because we're having the same debate to this day. It's supposed to start in June, but may yet be derailed by lawsuits, and we have an endless number of callers for it and against it. Did you think in 2007 that we would still be debating congestion pricing and not have implemented it yet in 2024?

Dan Doctoroff: I knew it would come back, but if it didn't pass in 2007, 2008, we would've had $15 billion for subway and transit improvements already. I will say both my two biggest defeats, the stadium and congestion pricing, were defeated by Sheldon Silver, who ultimately went to jail for corruption.

Brian Lehrer: Sheldon Silver, who was the New York State Assembly speaker representing Lower Manhattan at that time.

Dan Doctoroff: Right. I believe in congestion pricing because it does generate revenue for the MTA. It clears the streets and gives us an opportunity to redo the streets in midtown Manhattan, which is really critical in a post-COVID era. It also is mobility equity because people can get from the outlining areas of the city into Midtown Manhattan much faster, which gives them greater opportunity. It's an equity issue as well.

Brian Lehrer: Here's one more from that 2007 interview that made me think, oh my goodness, do we ever actually make progress on some of the biggest issues facing the city? You propose more density in housing construction around train stations, both for environmental reasons and to enable many more apartments to be built to ease the chronic housing shortage. Sound familiar? Here you are on that talk to me back then.

Dan Doctoroff: We've rezoned the waterfront in Greenpoint, in Williamsburg, the Hudson Yards on the west side of Manhattan where we significantly, in a negotiation, by the way, with the local community, significantly increased the density. Part of it was to extend the subway over to the area, which made taking that kind of density feasible.

Brian Lehrer: Dan, as I'm sure you know, that is practically contentious topic number one right now in the emerging New York State budget for this year after a density construction plan failed in the legislature last year. How are we still stuck on this topic?

Dan Doctoroff: Well, I'm a believer in growth. We believe in a philosophy called the virtuous cycle of the successful city. What you need is growth. Increased density is a part of that. Growth in the number of residents, growth in the number of jobs, and growth in the number of visitors. Why that is so important is the incremental revenue from those additional people enables you to reinvest, hopefully wisely, in quality of life, and housing, and healthcare, in the environment, in lowering crime, et cetera, et cetera.

When you do that, people keep coming, but you have to be very smart in terms of how you prepare for that growth. That was what PlaNYC was all about. In 2006, we saw that the city was going to grow by a million residents, and we had to prepare for that in a truly sustainable way. That's what our plan was, is to grow, but prepare for growth so that the city could handle it.

I'll give you one example. At the time, 70% of the people lived within a 10-minute walk of a park. In PlaNYC, we had all sorts of proposals to build new parks, to renovate school yards. Today, 99% of people live within 10 minutes of a park.

Brian Lehrer: That's a big success. If you're just joining us, my guest for another few minutes is the former New York City Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Dan Doctoroff, who served in the Bloomberg administration from 2002 to 2007. He had a reputation as a master builder of his generation. If you didn't hear the intro of the show, you missed a clip of Mayor Bloomberg comparing him to Robert Moses, but without some of the baggage. We're talking about his legacy as described in a book about his legacy called The Urbanist: Dan Doctoroff and the Rise of New York.

As you hear, his voice is somewhat compromised, and that is because he's suffering now from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. We're going to talk about that a little bit before we end.

Dan, the book notes, and you referred to it in our conversation here, that you and Mayor Bloomberg rezoned 40% of the city back then. If that was a success in terms of affordable housing, why is Mayor Adams proposing another citywide rezoning now to accomplish that goal, and affordability seems, if anything, worse?

Dan Doctoroff: We need to grow, and in a report that I co-chaired with Richard Buery, who's the head of Robin Hood, for the governor and the mayor. We proposed that we need to generate 500,000 new units of housing across all income levels over the next 10 years. We've got to grow, but we also have to prepare for that growth in terms of equity, sustainability, and a lot of other elements as well.

Brian Lehrer: Dan, about your health condition, is there anything you want the public to know about ALS or what your foundation's goals are for the research to make it more survivable?

Dan Doctoroff: My father and uncle died of ALS; my father in 2002, and my uncle in 2010. I believed, and it's now validated, that it is inherited in my family. I felt I had to do something. I started Targeted ALS in 2013. There have been very little progress in ALS research over the 140 years since it was discovered. We reached out to scientists all over the world and developed a set of hypotheses about what could move ALS research along.

We came up with three major things that we could do. The first one was multidisciplinary cross-sectoral consortia. That has been remarkably successful. We've already generated 60% of the consortium we funded have resulted in drug discovery programs on the part of biotech pharma, seven clinical trials, and five new biotech companies.

The second thing we did, we wanted to lower the barriers to entry for new researchers coming into the field. We supplied, for free, a series of tool and resources that anyone in the world can access.

The third thing is we get industry involved in everything we do because industry is responsible for clinical trials. We've made it, really catalyzed the industry, and working with all other ALS organizations, the field has moved forward dramatically. For the first time ever in rare genetic cases, we have seen symptoms reverse. We're seeing hundreds of new companies getting involved. Lots of new researchers flooding into the field. We're making progress on biomarkers and lots of drug discovery program.

The stage is set. I think everyone believes that we're in a new era for ALS research, and I am very convinced that within 10 years, that we will start saving lives. Then a short distance after that, everyone will live with ALS. I've raised about $350 million for ALS research, and I'm going to continue to do it until I can't do it anymore.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure the world appreciates your efforts on that, and I know many, many New Yorkers appreciate your efforts on many, many things that have benefited the city. The new book is called The Urbanist: Dan Doctoroff and the Rise of New York. Listeners, if you want to see him in person, he'll be in conversation next Thursday, April 25th at 7:00 PM, in conversation with Danny Meyer at the 92nd Street Y. You're going to talk to a restaurateur about your legacy, huh?

Dan Doctoroff: Yes. He's a good friend.

Brian Lehrer: Dan, thank you for joining us today. Be well.

Dan Doctoroff: Thank you so much, Brian.

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