Hudson Yards is being built by two firms, Related and Oxford Property Group; while Related is a standard developer, Oxford is the real estate arm of the Ontario municipal workers’ pension fund. The developers say the project costs $15bn, but that doesn’t seem to take into account the $5.6bn in public expenditures already spent or committed to the project. It is financed through a Tax Increment Finance-like scheme that relies on public bonding, it was enabled by a Bloomberg-era rezoning, and it has been in city planners’ sights since at least the 1960s. The entire complex is being built atop public infrastructure – the rail yards – and the elaborate platforms that enable its construction are owned by the Metropolitan Transit Agency.

It’s certainly not a public development, though. There are no public buildings, and there is definitely no public housing. The main “public space” – a gigantic circular staircase to nowhere the developers like to call “The Social Climber” – sits on private property.

Hudson Yards is the city’s massive monument to private accumulation, and the ultimate example of real estate-driven urban planning. No one looked across the Manhattan landscape and said, “You know what this place needs? Eighteen million sq ft of high-rent office space luxury housing.” Instead, its planners looked at this stretch of active infrastructure and thought: “Someone could be making a lot more money here.”

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[Then] there are the jobs, perhaps the most maddening aspect of this project. Without a doubt, the complex construction of Hudson Yards has employed thousands of workers. If you go there now, most of the people you see are building trades workers. The first phase of the project was built by union workers, with all the associated wages, benefits and safety protections. For the next phase, however, the developers tried to go “open shop”, or hire a combination of union and non-union contractors to break the solidarity between locals.

For decades, that would have been unthinkable: a massive, heavily financed, technically complex project in the heart of Manhattan would always be built by union workers. The building trades’ union density has since declined, however, and Hudson Yards’ developers decided that their project might be big enough to break the unions. For a while, the various building trades locals held out and refused to make individual deals with the developer. Then one broke ....