Rudin/St. Vincent's Shell Game

http://noticingnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/12/tough-luck-heads-developer-wins-tails.html

An excerpt below from Noticing New York (as usual a shell game and with Bloomberg and Amanda the People’s Burden aiding and abetting......)  Sam and May Rudin who made the 1.5 billion fortune would never, ever have approved this deal!  Their grandkids bad xeroxes and they kid themselves the community won’t feel bad will that there are luxury condos where once was a hospital.



• The Rudin/St. Vincent’s real estate deal was a very complicated shell game designed to cash in using the hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. That was a bad thing and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted other 501(c)(3)s to follow suit notwithstanding that there were some who favored this as a way to subsidize the hospital at the expense of the integrity of the zoning code and landmark preservation law. • The shell game failed when St. Vincent’s failed. One lesson that can be taken away from that failure is that with all the complicated rigamarole and professional energy being put into that subterfuge the eye had been taken off the ball- - In basic terms, the hospital for whom all this bending of the rules was being done was not being properly managed. • The moral is to stick to basics, to keep your eye on doing right what needs to be done. In this case, it’s a question of proper and consistent enforcement and administration of the zoning code. You can’t get pulled off course by shenanigans.