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City's Rezoning Effort Won't Meet Demand From Population Surge, Study Says

By DNAinfo Staff on March 22, 2010 5:21pm  | Updated on March 23, 2010 8:29am

The city's effort to rezone New York neighborhoods, like the Midtown business district, has only slightly increased overall residential development capacity.
The city's effort to rezone New York neighborhoods, like the Midtown business district, has only slightly increased overall residential development capacity.
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By Jon Schuppe

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

MANHATTAN — The Bloomberg administration’s massive effort to rezone New York neighborhoods has only slightly increased the city’s overall residential development capacity, raising doubts that it will have enough room for an expected population surge, a New York University study says.

The report, released Monday by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, billed itself as the first to analyze the “cumulative impact” of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s aggressive campaign to change building rules on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

Those changes include the expansion of the Midtown business district, the development around the High Line in Chelsea and plans to revitalize the area of 125th Street in Harlem. Last October, the administration celebrated its 100th rezoning.

The Furman Center report addressed about three-quarters of those rezonings, which occurred between 2003 and 2007.

Over that four-year period, the city changed the building rules for 188,000 lots across all five boroughs. The vast majority, 63 percent, didn’t see their building capacities altered in any significant way, the report said. About a quarter were made less friendly to residential development, and 14 percent were rezoned to allow more residential construction, the report continued.

That 14 percent of the so-called “upzonings” increased the total amount of space available for residential development by 1.7 percent, or about 100 million square feet.

But the city needs much more than that, the report stated.

Furman Center faculty director Vicki Been said in a statement that “it remains unclear whether we are on track for creating enough new residential capacity to accommodate the 1 million new New Yorkers that are expected to live in the City by 2030.”

City officials have said that they are looking at many other ways to make room for the surge.

The report also looked at how well the Bloomberg administration had addressed its goal of increasing residential development near mass-transit. The “vast majority” of the new residential space was added in areas within a half-mile walk of a subway or train, the report said.

The report also analyzed the socioeconomic characteristics of rezoned neighborhoods, finding that “upzoned” lots tended to be in places with a higher proportion of black and Hispanic residents.

Rachaele Raynoff, a spokeswoman for the Department of City Planning, said the full story of the rezoning campaign could not be told through an academic report. Each rezoning was done through collaboration with local residents and officials, and with respect to each neighborhood’s needs, she said.

On the question of race, Raynoff referred to the statement City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden made to the New York Times that the process was “color blind.”

“We respond to communities where the threat is the greatest to the neighborhood fabric,” Burden told the paper. “We upzone where it’s sustainable, and where reinvestment is needed.”