In some ways, New York is an organism that grows, decays, molts, and morphs of its own accord, nudged by social forces that nobody can control. In others, though, the city’s map is a game board strewn with immense, often incompatible ambitions and governed by rules that only initiates grasp1. ULURP. FAR. MIH. CBA: These arcane acronyms form part of the vocabulary of those who would tear chunks of your neighborhood down and rebuild it as they see fit. You can use them all in a sentence, as in: The uniform land use review process (ULURP) will almost certainly result in a higher floor-area ratio (FAR), thanks in part to mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH), although the details of a community benefits agreement (CBA) have yet to be hammered out. The rules governing what can and can’t get built are complex enough — and the process for changing them is tortuous enough — that they favor developers with money, patience, and an adequate supply of lawyers. And so, in each part of the city targeted for megaprojects or large-scale rezoning, whenever some bespoke-suited real-estate guy shows up with a slide show, a sales pitch, and an inside track to City Hall, residents react with suspicion.
That urge to drive away private developers, and replace their clout and capital with public funds, is profoundly self-destructive, especially as the city’s budget withers before our eyes. Reflexive rejection is tragic because low-income areas need robust and thoughtful development. Take Bronx Point, a complex in the crook of waterfront land where the 148th Street Bridge meets the Major Deegan Expressway. The plans for the first phase are promising: 540 rent-regulated apartments rising above a permanent home for the Universal Hip-Hop Museum, a food hall, and a small park. “It will probably be the gateway to more development,” says Ron Moelis, the CEO of L & M Development, which is building Bronx Point. “But now there’s a conversation about creating opportunities for the local community, and the hip-hop museum is an attraction that people in the Bronx can embrace.” The developers got their approvals and subsidies in 2017 and hope to begin construction later this year. I wonder if the project would get torpedoed if it were just getting started today.
The public-review process has a ritual, theatrical quality: months of persuasion, rejection, and mutual accusations of bad faith, frequently followed by a lawsuit. One side tries to eke out as many square feet out as possible, the other tries to knock the number down, or else extract concessions: a public plaza with benches, say, or some leftover space for a community center. Neighborhood groups sometimes try to undercut that dynamic by offering up their own plans, but those usually get dismissed as parochial and impractical.
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- 1. “You’re going to get widespread opposition if a rezoning is seen as something being done to a community rather than for a community,” says Barika Williams, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. She supports the Gowanus plan, partly because of its aggressive affordable-housing quotas and partly because it’s the rare rezoning that targets a relatively white and affluent neighborhood. De Blasio is also making a late-inning push to pack thousands more apartments into Soho and Noho, but the most sweeping affordable-housing proposals tend to concentrate where need is high, density low, and land is cheap, which is to say in low-income neighborhoods. That, says Williams, is a recipe for rejection. “If you’ve watched ten years of development that isn’t supportive of your community, that’s ten years of mistrust. Eventually you get into a bad place where people don’t believe in any kind of development.”