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Big CITY
A new city rezoning plan aims to remove barriers to housing structure and expand progress to all neighborhoods in the city.
By Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly observation on the politics, culture and life of New York City.
For decades now, progress in solving New York’s housing crisis has stagnated amid the contest between two dominant visions: one that would have the city build up and up and up as if it were Hong Kong, and another that would privilege intimate scale — in some parts of the city meaning the charming traditions of European urbanism and in other parts, farther from the center, meaning the traditions of Levittown. Binary solutions nearly always present a trap. But last month the city took a historic step toward breaking out of it. After 175 community board meetings and two public hearings, each of which unfolded over nearly 15 hours, the City Council passed the most extensive set of zoning changes in more than 60 years.
The 1961 zoning solution radically altered the city’s contours in a way that was described in educational research as reflecting “an existing building form. ” Famously labyrinthine, those codes, in their simplest form, prioritized high-rise work buildings over housing as the city’s population declined. The new regulations, billed as the City of Yes for Housing Opportunities, fly in the face of arcane restrictions that have long stifled access to housing at a time of staggering demand, and have given the impression that largely New Yorkers go unnoticed, a vast majority of whom don’t. It delves into the wackiest corners of plan-making and politics.
The City of Yes does not decisively end (and does not attempt to end) the housing emergencies in the city, which according to policymakers would require 500,000 more housing units. But this is an important new approach, one that diverts attention from the existing paradigm, where the answer turns out to be systematically and tenaciously building glass towers in the high-density neighborhoods of Manhattan, northern Brooklyn or on the Queens waterfront and make a percentage of them “affordable. ” a term subject to interpretation. Time and time again, this style is intended to provoke fierce opposition online, as has been the case with the proposed projects in front of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and in Gowanus, which developed over the years and the mountains of litigation.
The guiding principle behind City of Yes is to distribute the responsibility of creating housing more evenly, essentially extending it to every neighborhood in the city. Say you are a homeowner with an underused backyard. Under certain conditions, you can now build or repurpose a structure of up to 800 square feet to rent out long term (Airbnb use is not approved) or generously hand over to your aging parents. The crux of the plan, though, is an emphasis on modest structures of five or six stories rather than 30.
The purpose is to address what urban planners call the “missing link,” the void of a secure taste of housing that cities across the country are now seeking to fill. Zoning adjustments do not dictate where or how many homes should be built; they open (or exclude) possibilities. In this case, they open a catalog of opportunities to facilitate development; Converting workplace buildings into apartment buildings in the city, something long proposed as a way to create housing, is now much simpler.
According to calculations through the town’s making plans department, City of Yes will create more affordable, low-income housing over the next 15 years than any of the town’s other inclusionary housing systems since their inception in the mid-1980s. The plan extra encourages progression of all types of housing through relaxing – and in some puts getting rid of – the expensive requirement that a sure number of parking spaces be allocated to new apartment complexes. It’s a requirement that town planners and warring parties of the car have complained about for decades.
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