Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 67

SYDNEY SCHANBERG A Tidy 10-Million Gift for a Developer "Finally if incentives are to be used to encourage development it is my strong belief that an eligible activity ought to be the provision of housing affordable to the 70 percent of New York City residents who earn less than $25000 per year You must forgive Motley her impudence in bringing up the real issue How can this city keep subsidizing housing for the rich when it builds no apartments for the working class and the poor? The community board in the area opposed the Eichner building as too large for the neighborhood service structure But the players of the big real estate game overrode the community once again They said Eichner had provided enough neighborhood amenities to qualify for the bonus Eichner's idea of neighborhood amenities at the start consisted of some street trees some benches and some street paving Since this was ridiculous even to his benefactors he said he would also create inside his building a new subway entrance to the southbound platform of the 86th Street IRT station The entrance however will be open only eight hours a day This was still so obvious an affront to common sense that in the final bargaining with the naysayers on the Board of Estimate primarily Dinkins he came up with a fond of $600000 to go for renovating rooms in single-room occupancy hotels for low-income people So the final tally goes like this: Eichner gets a building expansion worth $20 million He spends at most $9 million or $10 million to pay for constructing his bonus 60000 square net and for all the neighborhood amenities Profit: A wimum of $10 million on the gift alone above and beyond his normal profit on the building Who are we kidding? 6-5 Among those voting yes were Mayor Edward Koch and City Council Resident Andrew Stein Leading the opposition in a losing cause was David Dinkins the Manhattan borough president The yes voters will tell you all a coincidence and not an exchange or Christmas presents but Eichner has given some of them gifts of his own Last year after Eichner was awarded the same 20 percent space bonus on another of his luxury buildings the 72-story tower going up on West 56th Street behind the City Center theater he and a partner donated $10000 to the mayor's campaign fund His attorney Howard Hornstein gave even more $10000 to Koch and $12500 to Stein Prior to this Messrs Eichner and Hornstein had given only small amounts to members of the Board of Estimate not enough to do more than merely introduce themselves This campaign-gift information was compiled last year by Manhattan Assemb Franz Leichter who has been saying for some time that not nice to sell off pieces of the city like so many rugs in a bazaar Leichter also pointed out in his report that Hornstein was until two years ago a member of the very planning commission that designed the bazaar Sometimes hard to tell on which side One member of the present planning commission Susan Motley dissented in frank language from the decision to give Eichner his gift She said: "The Upper West Side has experienced a luxury residential development boom in the past five years Luxury residential does not require a 20 percent density bonus in order to produce high quality well designed buildings in this neighborhood THIS IS ONE of those who-are-we-kidding stories that have become so common in the Koch era of selling the city piece bj piece to real estate developers A lot of the developers are presumably nice guys and they are to be valued for their job-creating risk-taking entrepreneurial skills but they must be laughing up their monogrammed sleeves at the way the city keeps giving them goodies when it doesn't have to The latest saga is about a fellow named Ian Bruce Eichner and a high rise he is about to erect on Broadway between 86th and 87th Streets going to be a 21-story 355-apartment luxury condominium with a health club swimming pool and two squash courts plus a terrace garden and solarium on the roof The City Planning Commission decided that building was such a nice place that it granted him a bonus of 20 percent more floor apace than he would have been able to construct under the regular zoning rules This works out to a bonus of 60000 square feet which at the going rate sells for about $20 million when you market it as living space for the affluent The $20-million handout was approved under a zoning device known as the Housing Quality Program that says you can get the extra square footage if you provide the tenants with such special niceties as concierge service and give the neighboring community some amenities as well This program is so demonstrably flawed that its authors the planning commission are in the process of pipsing it out but apparently wanted to get in one more giveaway before it expired Last Friday the Board of Estimate as final arbiter approved the gift to Eichner by a vote of ART BUCHWALD Helms Our Man in the Wrong Places persuade the dictator general to get his country to straighten up and fly right and this was making Pinochet feel lousy When your troops are accused of kidnaping people always good to talk to a senator who understands your problems You can fault Helms for many things but not his foreign relations know-how In complaining to the Chilean press about our ambassador Helms said that Barnes had advised the State Department about the burnings "in a manner calculated to produce criticism of the Chilean That says it all If Helms succeeds in getting Barnes out there is only one U3 citizen worthy of filling the post and that is Helms himself Would Helms take it? the burning question asking in Santiago said "I assured President Pinochet that the major media in the United States have a tendency to be very unfair to anti -Communist What really boiled the senator was that the US ambassador to Chile Harry Barnes attended the funeral (which was tear-gassed by the government) This Helms decided was tantamount to going to a Communist rally Helms wants the ambassador sent home for "planting the American flag into the heart of a Communist Before you get upset at Helms look at it from his standpoint Chile is one of the few solid fascist governments got in South America You turn your back on a head of state just because he keeps tear-gassing the citizens The US State Department has been trying to MATTER HOW BAD a military dictator you are you can always find a friend in Sen Jesse Helms Gen Augusto Pinochet strongman is devoted to Helms and vice versa Even when it comes to setting people on fire the senator is in the corner Recently two teenagers Santiago were doused with a flammable substance and burned The boy died the girl is fighting for her life The crime was so heinous that the senator was one of the few people who could find anything good to say about the Pinochet government When Helms went to visit the good general in Santiago to pay his respects he told reporters that he was incensed not at what hail pened but at the way it had been reported He ELLEN GOODMAN 55 Haut Cuisine in Summer Reading ship angst you may have to leave the country The Old by Carlos Fuenles is in a sense about another marriage: Mexico and the United States His novel takes the did journalist Ambrose Bierce back to Mexico to die I learned mors about Israel from Amos "A Perfect than from a year of press reporta Perhaps the best look at father and son this year is Adam "Half the Way A founder of the best-of-the-left megerine "Mother Hochschild has written about growing up with his father heed af the international eonglom erate be calls The He manages to be honest and kind in short grown-up Finally ifyou turn the TV set offlong enough to want to read about it try Linda "And So It a romp through television journalism It does however fill every definition of lite summer reading: funny frothy delirious Bon appetit list Miller has explored a tender territory where maternal and erotic love conflict The emotional triangle engages a divorced mother her small ffhiM anil hT liwnr It eiilmmetwi in that familiar setting for modem tragedies a custody fight Margaret Atwood creates a futuristic world in "The In this theocracy the Republic of Gilead a fundamentalist fantasy turned real the role of women is to produce children The story of Offred (literally Of Fred) a woman who is no longer entitled even to her own name is a cautionary tale not only about the religious right but about current post-feminist drift This year produced a bumper crop of mismatched quirky souls Anne Accidental gives us another of her extraordinary collections of people: The main man writes travel guides for people who wish they were at home If by now you want a relief from modem-relation OVER THE YEARS for reasons that are not entirely dear publishers have marketed a literary cuisine called "summer Summer reading is in theory as differ-ent from winter reading as gazpacho is from beef stew It is made light rather lite This season the most popular ingredients are spies thieves and glamorous young women rising in the business world A composite recipe would find a gorgeous woman from an English dynasty that traces its origins back to a prehistoric blonde mammoth hunter and who turns secret agent to save the United States and China from war For those who prefer something more nourishing a Judith Krantz special I would like to oner as a public service my eclectic personal menu of what I enjoyed during the past four seasons The Good by Sue Miller is remarkably Tneking an appearance on the best-seller.