In “Five Boroughs. One City. No Plan” written by Jarrett Murphy, it is amazing how New York City has already gone through 9,400 blocks of rezoning process. The head of the Department of City Planning, Amanda Burden, 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.” Yet this immense amount of rezoning is disturbing since it changes the regulations surrounding the use of land, the size of buildings, and the distance between each building. Knowing that rezoning is to prepare for the expanding New York’s population, it still affects current residents and urban planners of the present day. Projection of the future is blinding people of the side effects that rezoning would cause today.
For example, some of the policies for rezoning sometimes go haywire. Areas that were supposed to get downzoned were instead becoming denser. The author mentioned in the article that there seem to have certain pattern in which the areas that got downzoned were mostly white and wealthy neighborhood. Therefore, rezoning may not necessarily be good for the current neighborhood but benefits developers who play God and decide who gets what.
Furthermore, the fact that the zoning was being done to accommodate the developers’ visions of how the city should be growing seems to contain a lot of risks. God forbid, if their visions were not realized, the results may be unpredictable and cause the residents of the specific rezoned neighborhoods to suffer. This is another way in which rezoning can fail when estimations are made for future populations and lifestyles, not for the current ones. I was surprised to learn that New York City started the trend of citywide zoning regulations in 1916, which specified what could be built on every square foot of the city. For example, the “wedding cake” rule stated that “builders had to set back the upper floors, so that building looked like cake layers stacked one atop another.” This is a more human-friendly style of building for it allows maximum exposure to sunlight for each building. However as time progressed, the “wedding cake” rule does not fit into the contemporary trend of modern skyscrapers, thus changed the rule forever.
The city should have researched about past success of the same fashion of rezoning in other metropolitan areas before taking its own step, but when I think about what risk-takers New Yorkers are, I guess it does not really come up as a surprise. Manhattan could have been less dense had the city made more detailed zoning regulations that include more research of other cities. This could have saved the city from many issues sprouted from the overarching density that have become today. In the words of the article, “New York has never taken a comprehensive approach to planning.” It has always been a scheme to revamp the city’s real estate without actual concern to build an organic, sustainable neighborhood, thus explains why rezoning usually takes a long time because no extensive planning ever took place.
Though being the all-time inherent pioneer and risk-taker of the States, New York City still have much to learn in order to concoct a concrete plan for the future. A idea taken into action is certainly a plus, but a brilliant idea sloppily executed is not something to be proud of. The uncertain future loom before the city.
