November 19, 2024
By John Massengale, AIA CNU
NY DAILY NEWS
"The future of New York’s neighborhoods is being decided behind closed doors. Mayor Adams, the New York City Planning Commission and Big Real Estate have presented the third, final, and most consequential part of their plan to change New York City’s zoning — brilliantly branded the City of Yes — to the City Council.
The Council held a long, contentious public hearing and will have a committee vote this week. But in light of other developments, including their own counterproposal called the City for All, the Council should postpone the discussion until after the next mayoral election.
The City for All is the Council’s response to the 1,386 pages of zoning changes proposed in the third part of the City of Yes, which they correctly say lacks 'complementary housing investments and policies that confront the housing issues facing New Yorkers and their neighborhoods.'
We hear that the Council is now negotiating an agreement with the Adams administration, extracting promises for the City for All in return for concessions on the City of Yes. The Real Estate Board of New York will undoubtedly be involved in those backroom discussions, but the public won’t. That’s no way to make so many consequential decisions about the future of New York. New York introduced the first zoning in the country in 1916. In 1961, the city radically revised its zoning. Changes that only occur every 50 or 60 years should not be hurried, but the power and influence behind the City of Yes is rushing the plan through while they have a mayor who supports it. The citizens of New York have little knowledge of the process and no say in it. Here are additional reasons for slowing down:
When the current chair of the Planning Commission, Dan Garodnick, was a City Council member, he delayed the approval for the Commission’s East Midtown Rezoning, saying it was too important to rush just because Mayor Mike Bloomberg wanted to complete it before he left office.
All New York politicians are preoccupied with the reelection of President Donald J. Trump this month, wondering what that will mean for New York. Adams is under indictment. Trump may pardon him, which would cause more confusion.
Few people have heard of the City for All. For those who have, it is little more than a press release and a three-page outline. New Yorkers deserve to know more. The City of Yes and the City for All should be a unified vision with public input.
Approving or modifying the historic changes proposed in the City of Yes is a complicated decision that will change the city for decades. Before the City Council announced the City for All plan, hundreds of residents, preservation groups, housing groups, and nonprofit institutions turned out to testify about problems they saw in the City of Yes.
Each individual and group got two minutes to speak — hardly enough time. I submitted written testimony and published the first three essays in a continuing series. Thirty-five of New York’s 59 Community Boards voted not to accept the City of Yes as proposed. You would never guess that from the coverage in New York’s major media, which have presented the City of Yes as an unmitigated good.
Despite the way in which the Adams administration and the City Planning Commission market the City of Yes as a tool for affordable housing, the City Council is right when they say that the City of Yes will not produce the affordable housing New York needs.
A new study from the group Village Preservation shows that the history of New York neighborhoods with high levels of the new market-driven housing construction proposed by the City of Yes overwhelmingly become more white and less Black and Hispanic. Before making such drastic changes to New York, we should have a better understanding of how the City of Yes and the City for All can be combined in a single vision for a more livable city with more affordable housing.
A growing, Brooklyn-based movement called “the Right to the City” says the public deserves more. An urban geographer at the City University named David Harvey, one of the leading voices in the movement, says the question of what kind of city we want to live in cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, or what type of life we desire."
Massengale, an architect and urban designer, is the author of “Street Design, The Secret to Great Cities and Towns” and “New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890-1915.”