Sagalyn, Lynne B. 1947-
SAGALYN, Lynne B. 1947-
PERSONAL: Born October 16, 1947, in Flushing, NY; daughter of Preston (a manufacturing executive) and Helen (a homemaker; maiden name, Geller) Beyer; married James Sagalyn, June 12, 1969 (divorced, 1985); married Gary Arthur Hack (a professor and university dean), January 1, 2002; children: (first marriage) Emily. Education: Cornell University, B.S. (with distinction), 1969; Rutgers University, M.C.R.P., 1971; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D., 1980.
ADDRESSES: Offıce—Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, 708 Uris Hall, New York, NY 10027. E-mail—[email protected].
CAREER: Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, research associate at Center for Urban Policy Research, 1971-72; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, instructor, 1980, assistant professor, 1980-86, associate professor of planning and real estate development, 1987-91; Columbia University, New York, NY, visiting associate professor, 1990, visiting professor of business, 1991-92, professor and Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Shore Director of the MBA Real Estate Program and the Paul Mistein Center for Real Estate, Columbia Graduate School of Business, 1992—; research associate, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1988-89, faculty associate, 1994—; Homer Hoyt Institute for Advanced Studies in Real Estate and land Economics, faculty, 1993—; consultant. Scholar in residence, Taubman Center for State and Local Government, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1991; consultant to Kirkland Group, Massachusetts Industrial Finance Agency, and New York City Public Development Corp. Member of Northampton Planning Board, 1983; vice president of board of directors, Cambridge Young Women's Christian Association, beginning 1988. Director of the United Dominion Realty Trust, of the Retail Initiative, and of the New York School Chancellor's Commission on the Capital Plan.
MEMBER: Urban Land Institute (member of national policy council, 1988-90), American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, American Society of Real Estate Counselors, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, Bunting Institute, Citizens Housing and Planning Association (member of board of directors, 1983-89), New England Women in Real Estate (charter member).
AWARDS, HONORS: Ballard Award, 1989, for "Measuring Financial Returns when the City Acts As an Investor: Boston and Faneuil Hall Marketplace"; Best Article Award, Journal of the American Planning Association, 1991, for "Explaining the Improbable: Local Redevelopment in the Wake of Federal Cutbacks"; grants from City Club of New York and J. M. Kaplan Fund.
WRITINGS:
(With G. Sternlieb and R. W. Burchell) The Affluent Suburb: Princeton, Transaction Books (New Brunswick, NJ), 1971.
(Editor, with G. Sternlieb) Housing: An Annual Anthology, 1970-1971, AMS Press (New York, NY), 1972.
Zoning and Housing Costs: The Impact of Land-Use Controls on Housing Price, Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ), 1973.
(With Bernard J. Frieden) Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.
Cases in Real Estate Finance and Investment Strategy, Urban Land Institute (Washington, DC), 1999.
Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2001.
Contributor to professional journals. Member of editorial board, Journal of the American Planning Association, 1988—.
SIDELIGHTS: A professor and director of the real estate program at New York's Columbia University, Lynne B. Sagalyn is a specialist in real estate finance and development. With books such as Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon and Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, and in a number of award-winning articles, Sagalyn has presented cogent studies about public-private development and redevelopment finance and public policy.
Collaborating with Bernard J. Frieden, Sagalyn produced with Downtown, Inc. an "interesting but flawed book," according to Joe R. Feagin in Contemporary Sociology. The book explores the means by which many redevelopment projects in American cities were carried out after the 1970s. Written mostly from the point of view of developers, corporate executives, and government officials, the book examines the processes in Boston, San Diego, Seattle, St. Paul, and Pasadena, five studies of "development success stories," as Feagin noted. Suburban and urban failures were also tracked in the work. Funding for such projects was largely subsidized by taxes, yet Feagin argued that such "tax abatements for large-scale redevelopment have often come at the expense of services for central city residents." However, such considerations were outside of the scope of Sagalyn's study. Feagin therefore concluded, "A deeper analysis is clearly required." Writing in the American Review of Public Administration, however, DeLysa Burnier noted that Sagalyn's book attempts to "revise the popular view that downtown-rebuilding efforts have been dismal failures." Burnier went on to comment that the authors "succeeded in their mission." For the same critic, Downtown, Inc. "is a well-written and valuable guide to the changes in redevelopment policy that have occurred since the 1970s."
With Times Square Roulette, Sagalyn traces the story of the redevelopment of New York's Times Square in the 1990s, creating the "definitive study of its turbulent implementation and a rich resource for planners and redevelopment officials," as David Gordon observed in the Journal of the American Planning Association. According to Gordon, Sagalyn "explodes five myths" about the project, among which are that Disney led the way and that then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani deserves the credit. Sagalyn goes on to show in her study that Governor Mario Cuomo and Mayor Edward Koch deserve much of the credit for this daring project, so long in the planning. Alexander J. Reichl, reviewing the same book in Architecture, called it "the real deal." Reichl further noted, "Sagalyn masterfully recounts the two decades of deal-making behind the latest 'rescripting' of Times Square." Similarly, a reviewer for the Economist commented that Sagalyn "gives us a scholarly yet gripping enough account of the boldest urban redevelopment programmes in midtown Manhattan since the Rockefeller Centre was built in the 1930s." A contributor for Publishers Weekly also had praise for the book, noting that the "jumble of symbolisms, politics, policies and business plans characterizing twentieth-century 42nd Street has never before been subject to such a thorough and perspicacious scrutiny." Dubbed a "massive chronicle" by Planning's Harold Henderson, Times Square Roulette was also the subject of a lengthy article in the New York Review of Books. James Traub, author of that review, commented that Sagalyn "has much to say both about the character of the peculiar place and about the processes that created it." Traub concluded that Sagalyn is "upbeat both about the process and the place it produced."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
American Review of Public Administration, June, 1990, DeLysa Burnier, review of Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, pp. 130-132.
Architecture, December, 2001, Alexander J. Reichl, review of Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, p. 46.
Contemporary Sociology, November, 1990, Joe R. Feagin, review of Downtown, Inc., pp. 960-861.
Economist, December 1, 2001, review of Times Square Roulette.
Journal of the American Planning Association, spring, 2003, David Gordon, review of Times Square Roulette, pp. 198-199.
New York Review of Books, February 14, 2002, James Traub, review of Times Square Roulette, pp. 29-31.
Planning, April, 2002, Harold Henderson, review of Times Square Roulette, pp. 39-40.
Publishers Weekly, October 8, 2001, "New York In Black and White," p. 60.
ONLINE
Columbia University Web site,http://www.columbia.edu/ (February 12, 2004).
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press Web site,http://mitpress.mit.edu/ (February 12, 2004).*