According to the article Five Boroughs. One City. No Plan written by Jarrett Murphy, New York City has gone through 9,400 blocks of rezoning process. Amanda Burden, who is the head of the Department of City Planning, believes that rezoning “are setting the conditions for sustainable, transit-oriented growth and are signed to accommodate a population of 9 million New Yorkers projected by 2030.” Some parts of the city were heavily occupied, for example downtown and midtown Manhattan, while other parts of city were quiet vacant, lack of livable conditions.

I do agree that there should be different policies for different neighborhood. However, as this article pointed out that sometimes these policies raised public questions. Areas that were supposed to get downzoned were instead becoming denser. As Jarrett Murphy pointed out in this article, there seem to have certain pattern in which the area that got downzoned were mostly white and wealthy neighborhood. I think that the process of zoning may not necessarily good for the neighborhood, but sometimes benefits developers.

Since 1916, there were regulations on what can be built in the city.  For example, the old “wedding cake” rule, which states that “builders had to set back the upper floors, so that building looked like cake layers stacked one atop another,” I think this is definitely a great way to construct skyscrapers because it allows more sunlight passing through the city. However as time progressed, the desire of building modern style of skyscraper may not fit into this “wedding cake” rule. It’s not surprising to me that the zoning resolution has been constantly changing.

My favorite part of this article is when Eve Baron was describing what planning is all about; he says “Planning is about more than the physical.” Neighborhoods that are livable should include schools, day care center, medical centers and other public facilities that make up basic elements of a community. The whole process of zoning started with government regulating what can and can’t be built. It was the private market that decides what gets built, but the problem is that these private real estate market only focuses on constructing apartment buildings and can’t satisfy what a neighborhood’s actual needs.

In order to build a neighborhood with all those transportation infrastructure, parks and health center, there should be a comprehensive plan. However, “New York has never taken a comprehensive approach to planning.” It seems like the whole project was only focused on real estate development without actually thinking about what really makes a good neighborhood to live in. This is why the process of rezoning in New York City usually takes a long time because there is no cohesive plan for building the city.