In “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind,” Larson points to sustainability as one major issue that New York faces today. New York’s population is rapidly growing, and a key question is how to accommodate that kind of growth, while keeping a healthy standard of living for its inhabitants. Larson discusses the various strategies and plans that Mayor Bloomberg employed to address these problems. Bloomberg used rezoning as a tool to adjust where and how people lived in New York City to fit in with what he thought would be most efficient, while stimulating the city’s economy. Rezoning was a way of reshaping the city passively- it created the framework for what could be built and where, and the idea was that “the market” or private investors or corporations would come along and develop where they wanted to. When incentives for developers to add public spaces were included with zoning, this was taken advantage of. Even with all the regulation that went on with zoning, developers were still able to get around them, and to build what they wanted where they wanted to build it.
Zoning as a way to provide for affordable housing is still used today. In fact, just this week, Mayor de Blasio got changes to the zoning code passed. The new rules change zoning requirements across the city and require that developers create affordable housing along with other projects, instead of simply incentivizing it.
What I found so interesting about the discussion of zoning in Larson’s work and also about the new rules de Blasio is trying to implement are all the politics involved. Especially in Larson’s discussion of Bloomberg-era rezoning, it seems like so many of the decisions made were made out of political and economical self-interest. The fact that a large amount the downzoning under Bloomberg took place in neighborhoods where Bloomberg was trying to gain political influence is crazy! And this is just one example of how the communities chosen to be downzoned or rezoned was not quite equitable or, at the very least, random.
With de Blasio’s rules, there are many council members who voted against the bill because they didn’t feel it required enough affordable housing to be developed, or because the housing that would be developed wasn’t affordable enough. (De Blasio, in defending the changes, pointed out that while the mandated affordable housing was extremely important, what would really boost low income housing is the 8.2 billion dollars in subsidies that would be spent on low income housing over the next ten years as part of this plan.) It just goes to show that in politics, you can’t make everyone happy. Even though most would agree that the new rules are a step in the right direction, it seems like the same political and legal restrictions that come with the democratic and capitalist processes that existed under Bloomberg continue to be relevant.
Larson, Scott. Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Print.
