Passing For Knowledge

In March of 2008 Boston implemented a new zoning ordinance limiting the number of “full-time undergraduate” students allowed to live in an off-campus housing unit. Leases prior the the passing of the zoning amendment weren’t grandfathered in — they had about six months to comply, and even had to file a declaration that they were in violation and were going to rectify the situation (see page 2).

What exactly did the amendment entail? (more…)

Sunset Park, one of the last great working-class neighborhoods in New York City, has been thrown into a quiet firestorm. Not too many people know what’s going on, and some of those who are cognizant of it are perhaps a little too “forward” in their approach.

What’s all the ruckus about? Well, there’s a rezoning set to occur. (more…)

My old employers (internship) over at the BEH look like they’re on to something with this study:

Advocates for New Urbanism or “active living” often identify zoning as a policy strategy to make cities more walkable. Because zoning regulates both building size and land use, changes in zoning can affect both population density and the availability of shops and restaurants within a walkable distance. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s sustainability plan, PlaNYC, advocates rezoning city neighborhoods to allow higher-density development near subway stops, allowing more New Yorkers to use public transit instead of private automobiles.

However, zoning change can be a politically complicated process. Some communities resist “upzoning” because of concern about gentrification and displacement of low-income families, or about the loss of a distinctive neighborhood character. In fact, population growth in New York City has been accompanied by a wave of “downzoning,” in which neighborhoods seek to limit new, higher-density development.

With summer high school interns Alexa Nichols and Carolyn Ruvkun, BEH is studying zoning change in New York City between 2003 and 2007, with a focus on the more extensive rezonings required to go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) application process. Using ULURP applications as well as parcel-level data on zoning characteristics, this project will show whether recent zoning change has made the city more or less walkable.

But I’m not so sure they are. (more…)

By way of introduction: A historical perspective on development

Boston's North End is perhaps most similar to Manhattan's West Village (Jacobs's "home turf") with its winding streets and historic buildings, and has been the target of 15 years of gentrification.

“Why in the world are you down in the North End…[T]hat’s a slum,” Flower Power-era planner/activist Jane Jacobs’s friend said to her. “It doesn’t seem like a slum to me,” she retorted. Jacobs was a visionary who attacked the “bird’s eye view” planning consensus. A generation of planners had fallen into the trap of judging neighborhoods only in terms of spatial utilization and density figures, and re-envisioning them with “appropriate” numbers. It’s easy for a city planning commission to then approve a plan, even if it completely relocates thousands of people, as long as it looks good in diagrams. This “top-down” method of planning views culturally-rich neighborhoods with diverse uses as eyesores, steamrolls them, and places a lovely park, apartment complex, highway, or convention center (complete with above-ground parking lot, naturally) in their place.

Yet Jacobs lived in a different time. Her solution was a push toward “organic” neighborhoods (like the West Village in Manhattan). Her audience was the planning audience – technocrats and developers – and not so much the communities themselves. While she longed for planners to get a true, on-the-ground, feel of a neighborhood, this doesn’t directly enfranchise the community members in the planning process. Jacobs’s irrelevance to the modern day is that she assumes a sort of “respect” for the communities’ wishes will be kept if the planners got a feel for what they wanted. But this isn’t a strong enough approach, especially after an overall trend of 50 years toward deregulation in development. (more…)