5 Challenges to de Blasio's Promise of Inclusive Planning

A report published in 2009 and reprinted in 2011 by the New York Department of State makes some interesting observations about zoning and its role in urban planning. For one, “zoning should be adopted in accordance with a comprehensive plan,” which should form its “back bone.” Zoning, the report makes clear, should be driven by a concern for “public health, safety, morals or general welfare.”

Under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, there was clearly a disconnect between zoning and planning. Although the mayor rezoned much of the city, there was rarely a comprehensive plan and often scant community input.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed to follow up on his campaign promise of bringing the planning process closer to the community. The chair of the powerful City Planning Commission, Carl Weisbrod, has pledged “ground up” and “comprehensive” planning.

With this promise in mind, Weisbrod has hired more staff, leafleted neighborhoods about potential rezonings and held “visioning sessions” at town-hall events where community members are asked for their input.

But urban planners who spoke with City Limits aren’t exactly convinced. And a number of residents in areas of the South Bronx targeted for rezoning, as well as in East New York, are also skeptical. That's partly because the conversations begin with the de Blasio team earmarking areas for development, leading some to feel the die has already been cast. But City Planning also labors under a heavy blanket of distrust because of what occurred on Bloomberg's watch.

Planners we spoke with noted five ways in which community planning could be a tough thing for New York City to deliver:

1. Comprehensive community planning takes a lot of time 

True planning, says Tom Angotti, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, is a long and tedious task that can take years. Portland, Ore., recently completed a comprehensive, inclusive planning process that took three years. So a true effort along these lines could be a difficult fit with the mayor's plan to build 80,000 units of affordable housing in 10 years. Ronald Shiffman, a veteran urban planner and professor of planning at the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center, feels the mayor should not have imposed a specific timeline to achieve his affordable housing goals.

2. Comprehensive community planning takes resources

In 1986, around the time the city was ramping up to fulfill then-Mayor Ed Koch's 10-year housing plan, the Department of City Planning had a staff of 397. Today, in a city that is a million people larger, it has a headcount of 265.

The lack of funding affects not only City Planning but also the community boards that are supposed to represent neighborhood interests in the city's Uniform Land Use Review Process, or ULURP. The City Charter says City Planning is supposed to “provide community boards with such staff assistance and other professional and technical assistance as may be necessary to permit such boards to perform their planning duties and responsibilities.” But that's rarely the case.

3. Comprehensive community planning takes more than zoning

Weisbrod’s office tweeted that "Rezoning is a tool, not a goal, for quality, ground-up neighborhood development.” City Planning argues that it is now treating rezoning as a means, not an end, to improving neighborhoods.

But Shiffman is skeptical that City Planning has moved on from the single-minded focus on rezoning that has characterized its performance over the decades and which, he says, “grows out the department's unchecked responsiveness to private sector initiated development and their avoidance of community-based planning." 

At an October summit at the Municipal Arts Society titled “Building a City for All New Yorkers,” Weisbrod tried to allay community fears, promising a planning approach that involves more than just community input and increased density. One key feature of the new regime is closer coordination between Planning's work and the city's capital budget—which in theory means that the necessary schools, roads, parks and other infrastructure will be in place when neighborhoods begin to get more dense under the mayor's housing agenda.

“For the city, this is a significant departure from decades of what have been, essentially, bilateral negotiations between OMB and the city’s capital agencies, with limited coordination among them as to where investments are being made," Weisbrod told the crowd.

That's "All very good," according to Angotti, who notes that "DCP once played a central role in the budget process and this was taken away during the fiscal crisis” of the 1970s. “But,” Angotti warned, “this doesn’t necessarily translate to greater access by communities. What’s really needed is to unpack the inordinate power wielded by the bean-counters in the OMB—a power which the mayors bow to.”

4. Comprehensive community planning begins in the community

Eve Baron, an expert in community development, advises taking a wait-and-see approach to the new administration. But she notes that a salient feature of a true community-based plan is that it's “first and foremost one that originates in the community. Not government meeting the community, but the community reaching out,” she said. “The community knows its proprieties,” she added.

The de Blasio administration's designation of target neighborhoods for development mean the impetus for the discussions around Jerome Ave. in the Bronx, in East New York, in Flushing and elsewhere came from City Hall, not the neighborhoods themselves.

City planners, Shiffman said, “Need to step back and engage community boards and the rich number of community development organizations. I don’t believe that’s going on anywhere yet.”

A truly community-based plan, Shiffman says, looks at issues crucial to community preservation, such as maintaining local housing stock and engaging all members of the community in face to face dialogue.

In its Jerome Ave. study, City Planning has said it “intends for the neighborhood study to reflect the community’s vision for the neighborhood, and the agency will strive for local ownership of the study’s goals and vision in partnership with city agencies.”

City Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson, who represents the area around Jerome Ave., told City Limits she will ask the City Council to reject the rezoning if that is the community’s wish.

But Angotti believes communities will be placed in a position where they can't really say no: “They say, ‘Well look, development is going to happen anyway. If we revised the rezoning, you will be able to have some say in how it occurs, where it occurs and by the way, you will be able to get affordable housing through inclusionary zoning.'”

5. Community planning hasn't delivered in New York City in the past

Angotti said the city has a “tradition of community-based planning” and even has a legal mechanism to permit it: the 197-a plan.

The 197-a tool was created by a revision of the City Charter to give communities greater input in the planning process. Over a dozen 197-a plans have been adopted since 1992, the last one in 2009, to develop the Sunset Park waterfront.

But the mechanism has its flaws. For one thing, final approval for whatever draft emerges rests with the City Council, where Shiffman says real-estate developers may wield power. 

What's more, Angotti adds, “Not many people do them anymore because the City Planning Commission doesn’t really recognize them and dismisses them as advisory.”

The 2002 Greenpoint 197-a plan was hailed as a success by City Planning, but was “drastically modified as part of the mayor’s plan to rezone areas [in 2005],” Shiffman said.

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City Planning is aware of the tremendous distrust it faces, and has taken steps to address it. When residents near Jerome Ave. raised an eyebrow at Planning's decision to dub the area “Cromwell-Jerome,” a designation that locals had never heard of, the city scrapped the name. The department has also held a Spanish-language info session in East New York—a modest step, but a novel one—and hosted walking tours in the Jerome Ave. area. Planning says it is working with community boards to make their Annual Statement of Needs documents more effective. The planning process, one official said, will be “something that gets designed to meet the needs of each community. We're not beginning the project with a preconceived sense of the outcome.” 

Amid all the distrust left over from the Bloomberg administration, City Planning's challenge is to balance community desires with the citywide need for more housing. “We really do have to do both of those. We are responsible for the well-being of the city and the city has a housing need. Everybody has to do their part,” the Planning official said.

Given those stakes, the official continued, when City Planning and a community sit down and talk frankly “It's not like 'Kumbaya.' It's really a meaningful exchange.”