2009: Shrink-wrapping NYC
A blog post by Rick Hills on downzoning
Shrink-Wrapping NYC: How Neighborhood Activists Are Strangling a City. Rick Hills, Prawfsblog, November 2009. Based on data subsequently published as How Have Recent Rezonings Affected the City’s Ability to Grow?, Vicki Been and Simon McDonnell, Furman Center, March 2010.
I think of the YIMBY movement as starting around 2014 in the Bay Area. So it’s interesting to look back at this blog post from 2009, before YIMBY ideas were widespread, describing increasingly restrictive land use in New York City.
If one focuses on square footage in areas that are cheapest for building - so-called "soft sites" developed at 50% or less of their zoned capacity - then the actual gains in land for housing seem to be remarkably trivial: The net gain on soft sites amounts to roughly 25 million square feet. Apparently, down-zonings of soft sites simply canceled out much of the Bloomberg Administration's upzonings. Given that the City is predicting a million new residents by 2030, this inability to enlarge the zoning envelope is disturbing: If a popular and pro-business mayor could not ram more residential uses through a city council, then what can one expect from a politically wounded lame-duck mayor facing a recalcitrant council backed by the usual array of NIMBY neighbors?
The essential problem of political economy is that neighbors tend to rally to preserve the neighborhood status quo even when that status quo is pernicious for the city as a whole. Thus, neighbors are "shrink-wrapping" New York City by slowly drawing the zoning "envelope" to be co-extensive with existing uses. Historic districts are the extreme form of such shrink-wrapping, but ordinary zoning can accomplish the same end just so long as the zoning envelope destroys "soft districts" by making the permissible height, bulk, set-backs, lot coverage, etc, co-extensive with the dimensions of existing structures.
My nearby Carroll Gardens neighborhood is a case in point: The area's brownstones have extra-deep (more than 33') front yards as a result of the 1846 layout of the parcels. Under the City's old zoning rules, the resulting setbacks justify extra-high buildings (because the setback lets in more sunlight to the center of the streets). But the residents naturally would like lower densities, so they pressured the city to stop extra-tall buildings that are "incompatible" with existing uses. Whatever the merits of this aesthetic preference, the City's re-zoning managed to destroy some soft sites at which the supply of housing could be expanded. As usual, the city's planning department gave no thought to whether the costs of this aesthetic benefit in terms of lost housing exceeded the gains of greater architectural consistency. Thus does the tyranny of small decisions and parochial neighbors gradually strangle a great city.
More
Jake Anbinder on the 1970s shift to local control, using New York City as a case study.
The 1970s anti-growth pivot in Vancouver: A Brief History of Vancouver Planning & Development Regimes (February 2023) and Metro Vancouver Planning Regimes (June 2023), by Jens von Bergmann and Nathan Lauster.