New York Plans

Completed in 1915, the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway is so big that it sparked the desire for fixed codes that would shape the New York’s skyline for years to come. A 40 storey extrusion of a whole city block. Appalled by the overshadowing over their land, nearby land landowners campaigned for zoning restrictions on building height and setbacks. New York’s first zoning resolution was introduced in 1916.

The irony is not lost on the planning team that the building is now the location of the New York City Department of City Planning. I visited the building and the planning team for my first meeting of a travel scholarshiparound North America and Europe. My scholarship involves visiting cities where community groups, developers, planners, architects, business and urban entrepreneurs are developing creative solutions to the housing crisis. The crisis is global, but at at a city scale a variety of local solutions are being tried and tested, the research will document some of them.

New York’s housing crisis is well known, with many reports of sky high rents, unaffordable house prices, a lack of new affordable housing and high levels of homelessness. City Hall was a good place to start the research to gain a better understanding of how the city plans for housing growth and affordability.

We discussed large projects happening in the city including Hudsons Yards, Sunnyside Yard, Brooklyn Navy Yard and Domino Sugar Factory. These are all very large neighbourhood developments that are changing the face of New York and delivering significant new housing.

Soon after Mayor de Blasio inauguration in 2014, he introduced an ambitious affordable housing strategy that includes major rezonings, citywide rent freezes, new development on the housing authority land and mandatory inclusionary zoning. The last is something that other cities in America already do, but is new for New York. The introduction of mandatory zoning means that when an area or neighbourhood is rezoned, a fixed percentage of the housing is required to be affordable housing. Because their planning legislation is legally binding, unlike in the UK, this is something that can’t be diluted through viability negotiations. Consequently, the cost is reflected in the land value.

It was interesting to chat about New York’s housing growth plans in the context of its zonal planning system, a system that is very different to the discretionary planning used in the UK. Zonal plans are legal binding and include ‘as of right’ development. This means someone looking to alter or construct a building that is within the zoning code will not require any discretionary action from the City (probably sounds ideal to a lot of UK architects that moan about the discretion of UK planning authorities). Rather they apply for a building permit and can then go ahead and build. This is similar to the UK’s permitted development rights but on a much larger scale.

The city government has developed ZoLa (zoning and land use application) which is built entirely on open data and is open source. The zoning resolution sets out the legally binding code and is incredibly long and dry. Consequently the city has produced a new handbook (pictured below) which is much more visual with diagrams explaining what can and can’t be done in the zoning code for each neighbourhood.

Zoning feels like a blunt instrument that can become overly cumbersome and fall prey to unintended consequences. However I think there are several benefits of using this approach compared to the UK’s discretionary approach. Firstly, a single code for the whole city removes the need for the repeated design guidance that you find across the UK and London and shortens the time for the majority of applications to build. But more importantly, the legally binding nature of their codes mean that planning can more easily be strategic and influential over the land market, something that is lacking in the UK.

Another interesting difference between the UK’s approach to that in New York is the regulation of design. There is no design review in New York for developments on public land, so all private sector developments do not go through a design review process. When I spoke with both planners and developers, it was clearly felt that it was not the role of the planing authority to be expressing views on design. This, in collaboration with the zoning codes mean that as long as your are within the legal parameters of development, architects have a lot more design freedom than in the UK.

I was told that the overwhelming feeling in New York is a sense that their code is too complex, layered with years of changes and various interests. One city that is trying to simplify their code is Los Angeles, where I will be visiting in a couple of weeks to explore this further.