Amanda Burden, Chairperson of the NY City Planning Commission, boasts that since 2002, the city has completed a record 94 rezonings for the most sweeping revision of land use regulations throughout the city’s five boroughs since the Zoning Resolution was rewritten in 1961.This massive rezoning effort supports the development priorities of the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in 2007 introduced PlaNYC2030, a long-term plan to incorporate almost one million more residents by the year 2030.
But the city’s rezoning frenzy highlights two fundamental problems with its approach to our neighborhoods. One is that the zoning is not based on any comprehensive review of community needs and priorities or any long-range planning. In other words, it’s zoning without a plan.
The second and related problem is that while the rezonings are mainly creating short-term opportunities for real estate development in neighborhoods where there is intense speculation, the city’s planners falsely promote them as preservation-oriented to neighborhood groups, community boards and the public at large. In the endless succession of community meetings that go into the rezonings, the city’s zoning experts often manage to obscure matters with colorful slide presentations and discourses on technical details. In other words, they’re scams.
The principle culprit in this professional land use swindle is the Department of City Planning (DCP), the agency that Amanda Burden directs and that provides the staff for the 13-person City Planning Commission that she chairs. The Planning Commission is the official policy-making body but it relies heavily on recommendations by the DCP staff, and is dominated by mayoral appointees (7 out of 13).
Zoning without a Plan
DCP is the custodian of the city’s zoning but for most of its recent history has rarely done any comprehensive planning for and with the city’s neighborhoods. Its zoning policies are thus not based on any broader study of economic and social conditions or neighborhood needs and problems. It might more appropriately be called the Department of Zoning or, better yet, the Department of Real Estate.
Zoning is a regulatory scheme for controlling the built environment, the physical shell that contains our vibrant human communities. Zoning is not the same as planning and should be based on planning. But DCP treats the Zoning Resolution itself as the plan for the city. This is a narrow-minded philosophy because it focuses only on the physical dimensions of buildings and plots of land. It leaves out the needs of the people who live, work and pass through our neighborhoods. It doesn’t address public places, how people actually relate to the land and one another, and the needs and problems that arise from these relations. There is no place in zoning for the flora and fauna, the natural environment within which we live. While these may be mentioned in the large and cumbersome environmental impact statements that accompany rezonings, that too is an obscure realm that has little to do with real long-term environmental and health issues.
Community planning, as distinct from zoning, looks at all of these things and lays out visions for the long-term future. There are well over 70 community plans in New York City, many more plans than DCP has done, and while 10 of them have been officially approved the city has done little to promote and implement them. In several instances, such as Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, DCP has undermined them with its rezoning scams. The scams come in four major varieties and in many instances they are all used at once: the affordable housing, building height, mixed use and waterfront access scams.
The Affordable Housing Scam
In lower-income neighborhoods facing gentrification, DCP has upzoned (that is, increased development opportunities) in ways that encourage the influx of new residents with higher incomes. This creates a ripple effect that jacks up land values and rents, forcing out people living in public and privately-owned affordable housing. This is not a scenario favored by the activists working to stabilize the neighborhood so that the people who have struggled to improve it can afford to stay. So to sell the rezoning, the city latched on to and co-opted an idea that first came from the neighborhoods – inclusionary zoning – and twisted it around to serve the interests of the developers.
Here’s how the city’s inclusionary zoning scam works. In designated areas ripe for development, the city changes the zoning to allow more development but offers to the potential future developers the option of getting a bonus of an additional 20% in floor area if they agree to make 20% of the units affordable to people with low- and moderate-incomes. DCP’s public relations campaigns give the impression that if their rezoning passes, affordable housing will get developed. The problem is that:
a) Inclusionary zoning is strictly voluntary, at the discretion of the developer. When housing advocates proposed inclusionary zoning, they pointed out that where it has been successful it was required of all developers everywhere in the municipality. When it is required, then it can’t favor one neighborhood over others. Most importantly, however, if it’s voluntary, it may never get built. In today’s real estate market, it is likely that many of the units promised will not get built.
b) Affordable housing is normally built with public subsidies – that’s right, it doesn’t really cost the developer, in fact they can make money on it – and these subsidies are limited, especially in hard times when the demand for affordable housing goes up and available subsidies go down. Thus, there is no guarantee the affordable housing will get built even if the developer is interested in taking the option.
c) The affordable housing is often not affordable. The zoning requires that 20% of the units be affordable to households making up to 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI), which is a federal index based on household data for New York City and a portion of the metropolitan region. Invariably, the AMI is much higher than the median income for city neighborhoods that are facing gentrification pressures. For example, the median income in Harlem is half the AMI, and the recently-approved 125th Streetrezoning would produce units affordable to only 5% of Harlem households – that is, if they ever get built.
The Building Height Scam. In neighborhoods dominated by low- to mid-rise building, DCP’s upzonings to promote new development face legitimate concerns by residents that new development will be out of scale and tower over existing buildings. DCP thus invented the myth that a rezoning, even when it increases the amount of building space that is permitted, puts a cap on building heights and replaces zoning that has no height cap. In such cases the new zoning is contextual zoning which, unlike the previous zoning, does indeed have an explicit height cap and other provisions that promote a more contextual building form. But the older non-contextual zoning also had an implicit height cap that in practice kept tall buildings from being built. Whether it’s the older or contextual zoning, developers can only build so high because the amount of floor area they can build is limited. The permitted floor area is controlled by the FAR – floor area ratio.
Thus, the height of buildings is always limited by the amount of floor area that can be built. If the new zoning permits more floor area it may encourage property owners to demolish smaller buildings and build taller ones. So even with a height limit a rezoned area can end up with taller buildings!
This is exactly what happened with the recent rezoning of 125th Street in Harlem. Portions of this major thoroughfare had 1-3 story commercial buildings before the rezoning because property owners didn’t have enough excess FAR to make it profitable for them to expand. Now they can be replaced with 20-story buildings.
The Mixed-Use Scam. In neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg that have had rich mixtures of industry, commerce and housing, rezoning schemes that spark new development face opposition from people who believe that mixed use should be preserved and industry should not be forced out to build bedroom communities. Greenpoint and Williamsburg spent over 12 years preparing their neighborhood plans that proposed to preserve mixed use. Not long after these plans were approved by the City Planning Commission and City Council, DCP came out with a proposal to rezone large swaths of industrially-zoned land to residential and mixed use. The problem is that the new mixed use zones allow for both residential and industrial uses to compete with one another. But in a hot land market like Greenpoint and Williamsburg, no developer in their right mind would build for industrial tenants when they can sell or rent residential property for ten times the price. In effect, DCP’s mixed use zoning was a back-door residential rezoning.
The Waterfront Access Scam. When rezoning waterfront property, DCP faces the legitimate concerns of neighborhoods that new development will block public access to the waterfront. According to waterfront zoning, all residential and commercial developers on the waterfront must provide a public promenade and preserve access corridors to the waterfront. DCP uses these provisions as part of their campaigns to sell upzoning for new development on the waterfront, claiming that the only way to get public access is to have new residential or commercial development. The options of creating public parks or placing waterfront land in some sort of trust are never broached. Even worse, DCP claims that the new development has to be high-rise and sufficiently upscale so that developers can afford to build the public access. But the more high-rise and luxury the new development the more likely it is that the public promenade will become an exclusive back yard for the residents in the luxury towers.
DCP used the waterfront access scam in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where new buildings going up are indeed becoming exclusive enclaves. A new public waterfront park in Williamsburg that was proposed by residents and promised when the neighborhood was rezoned has not been built. This neighborhood, hit by the inclusionary zoning, building height, mixed use and waterfront access scams, had the central vision of its hard-fought community plan undermined by zoning: the vision was to have a mixed-use low- to mid-rise waterfront and not rows of luxury housing.
History will determine whether the optimistic growth scenario behind DCP’s rezonings and the mayor’s 2030 plan will survive the current burst in the real estate bubble. But neighborhoods throughout the city will nonetheless have to live for some time with the zoning in place. This is a good time, however, for the city to re-think its approach to both community planning and city-wide planning, starting with the real needs and priorities of its residents and workers instead of the amount of floor area that can be built. It is also a good time to shift the focus of development from lower-income neighborhoods that have experienced intense displacement pressures to the many low-density outlying neighborhoods that were down-zoned by DCP.
Tom Angotti is the director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. He is the author of the book “New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate” (MIT Press, 2008)
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