Class 5. September 25. Layers of regulation 1: current and proposed rezoning
Methods: zoning law, ULURP process, standing of different parties in process.
(Friday, September 27: site visit related to rezoning)
Expert: Sandy Hornick, former director of zoning for the NYC Department of City Planning
Readings or applications:
Keith D. Revell, “Conceiving the New Metropolis,” and “City Planning versus the Law,” introduction and chapter 5 in Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Marci Reaven, “Neighborhood Activism in Planning for New York City, 1945–1975,” Journal of Urban History, first published online April 28, 2017; forthcoming in print (2020).
DCP infographic on ULURP
DCP Zoning commitments map: http://morr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=e53a9d13cad442829c5db6c7bc1b16d8
Abigail Savitch-Lew, “Will Rezoning Cause or Resist Displacement? Data Paints an Incomplete Picture,” City Limits (January 10, 2017):
Review these resources:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/gowanus/gowanus-framework.page
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/applicants/scoping-documents.page#gowanus
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/gowanus/gowanus-updates.page#navigation
Wish I could be there in class this week for the discussion with Sandy Hornick. I will be in Singapore for a family visit with my partner, so hopefully I can return with some interesting observations about urban development in the Singaporean context at the class session on October 2!
These readings describe the complex web of stakeholders and political decision-making bottled up in zoning. New York City’s history of a united governance structure emerging from the 1898 consolidated laid the groundwork for complications that still plague us today. “Uncoordinated growth” and the tension between public good, private property, and individual rights running high (Revell, 3).
This theme of private property rights in development and the responsibility for good planning that makes sense for the city as a whole was a common thread that ran though my reading of Revell and the meeting with Dave Briggs yesterday. Indeed, in the 1920’s the concerns over whose interests must be represented in zoning were already apparent: parallel to today’s debates, developers and other interests in urban life “forget that zoning must relate to the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of the community. They confuse it with private restrictions” (Revell 214). In my understanding, this directly connects to the nuances around the Canal clean up that Dave brought up yesterday: the Gowanus is a EPA superfund site, but “why now?” As Revell points out, New York “inherited…a civic culture of privatism embedded in their institutions of collection decision making” (Revell, 4). The “voluntary over compulsory commitments to the public welfare” (Revell, 5) has been present for the last century: “government with the consent of the governed, rather than government by the people directly” (Revell 8). Is it more appropriate today, as made evident by the debates in Gowanus, to describe the situation as: development with (or without) the consent of the governed, rather than government directing development by and for the people directly?
The dynamics of private interests and public good came through In our continued discussion of Brad Lander in his final term and his plans to run for comptroller. Regarding this point, I was also struck by the line in Revell: “Comptrollers…discerned and then tried to manage the reciprocal relationships between private real estate values and the city’s capacity to fund subways and schools” (Revell, 11). Clearly this issue of funding infrastructure while pushing development is not new. How can we push our representatives to prioritize infrastructure to support development, rather than the “build it and then we’ll figure it out” model that Dave scoffed at yesterday? As the Savitch article also presents in the discussion of affordability in up-zoned neighborhoods, the solutions around housing prices as its bundled up in rezoning also lacks the critical consensus Briggs described as ever fleeting.
PS: Thinking back to last semester’s inquiry on LIC, thought this article was interesting, with developers issuing a call to “put the community first” in plans that rally around the momentum the Amazon deal (even though it failed) brought to the table. https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2019/09/18/vision-comes-into-focus-for-long-island-city-waterfront-and-halted-amazon-site-1194965
While reading Reaven’s article about the coordination between the City and the Cooper Square Committee (CSC) in the redevelopment of the section of Manhattan between 3rd and 2nd ave and 9th street and Delancey street, I couldn’t help but think about our conversation with David Briggs and the work he is spearheading with the Gowanus by Design team. To what extent are they working in tandem with the city? Have their visions of Gowanus been taken into consideration? Or is the plan largely dictated by the de Blasio administration’s housing plan? From our conversations, it seems like David is in very close conversation with all the various stakeholders involved in the redevelopment of Gowanus but it is unclear to what extent his expertise and advocacy efforts are impacting the final plan for Gowanus.
This weekend, before doing the readings assigned for this week, I walked around the Lower East Side and the East Village. My husband and I wanted to check out the new Essex Street Market and we were surprised (mostly because we hadn’t walked around the LES in a while) by the proliferation of tall and large glass modern buildings that were propping up around Delancey street close to the Williamsburg Bridge. Just as Savitch-Lew reports in her City Limits piece, we wondered if the increase in the supply of housing (most of which is luxury housing) would actually work to lower the cost of the overall market for housing in the neighborhood and drive down overall rents? Or would it just expand the luxury market, drive up costs all around and cause even more displacement from the LES? I understand the logic of increasing supply in order to drive the price of the market down, but this seems like an artificial way to distort the market and could actually lead to the unintended consequence of driving the overall market price point up – especially since the units being developed are responding to a consumer preference for luxury units, which does not seem to fit with a mixed-income neighborhood.
Finally, I absolutely loved the chapters from Revell’s Building Gotham, mostly because I’m a New York City history fiend. It’s fascinating to learn about the origins of multi-stakeholder engagement in city politics and the role that experts played in passing the first zoning law. While today rezoning ordinances are often justified on the basis of neighborhood revitalization, increased housing and/or economic development, it was interesting to learn that the zoning law was argued and justified on the basis of health. Given that the Gowanus Canal is a toxic waste site, it’s clear that health conditions are now overlooked in the implementation of zoning.
Revell and Reaven narrate a very interesting process of local state formation, along the dimensions of bureaucratization and participatory democratization.
A standard, critical, position is that bureaucracy – in which I include expertise – and democracy are separate and antithetical institutions. Bureaucracy, rule by the bureau, subverts democracy by confining it within hierarchically-imposed rational plans, while democracy, rule by the people, seeks to escape from such confines.
Revel and Reaven – not unlike the classics of such as Wilson and Weber – usefully complicate this sort of all-to-neat juxtaposition. Revel argues that the rise of the public bureaucracy in New York City was not primarily in tension with democracy. It was in tension with an existing, “intermediate” set of often already hierarchical and exclusive political, legal, and economic institutions – the political machine, courts, corporations, and property owners – that positively resisted being bent to the public interest, itself a quasi-democratic notion. Reaven – elaborated somewhat – describes how the state-building achievements of an earlier generation, specifically in the area of zoning, led by Edward Bassett, provided a foundation on which later participatory democratic efforts could find traction.
Walter Thabit, for instance, of the Cooper Square Committee, doesn’t want democracy to overcome the bureaucracy, he wants to marry them.
I wonder about whether the very existence of the Cooper Square Committee isn’t ultimately dependent upon the bureaucracy. There is, of course, the perhaps trivial point that the bureaucracy underwrites the coming together of the Cooper Square Committee, by laws that regulate social relations and associations and impart to them a measure of trust and protection from others. There is also the fact that the Cooper Square Committee emerges in response to the actions of the bureaucracy, the publication of its developmental intentions, the fact that it has the power to zone and plan and that this provides a point around which to mobilize.
There is also, perhaps, and this is what really interests me, the way in which the bureaucratization of the City of New York has by the 1960s produced the demise of that other great institution, Tammany Hall. In South Africa, for instance, participatory exercises are almost universally subordinated to the logic of machine politics, where political bosses quickly swamp them with clients, bringing into their patronage any material distributions that they might control. Where something independent like the Cooper Square Committee emerges, its key members are quickly bought off with jobs or contracts or dissuaded by threats.
Which I suppose ends things with a question. Would that have happened to something like the Cooper Square Committee in New York in 1880?
Guys I spent the last three hours typing to the blog, pressed post comment, and it all disappeared. So I’m going to do it in very brief form now.
Bureaucracy, rule by the bureau, is in a standard, critical account understood to be antithetical to democracy, to rule by the people. Simply put, bureaucracy seeks to hierarchically-confine democracy within rational plans, while democracy cannot abide by such plans.
Revell and Reaven usefully complicate that all-to-neat juxtaposition. Revell argues that bureaucratization in New York City didn’t happen in opposition to democracy, but to a constellation of often hierarchical and exclusive political, legal, and economic institutions, such as the political machines, the courts, corporations, and private property owners. Zoning, fundamental to urban planning, emerged by taking power away from the courts and property owners.
Reaven shows – somewhat elaborated – how the rise of an urban planning bureaucracy provided a container in which participatory democracy could emerge and to some extent flourish. The Cooper Square Committee, that is, emerges in response to a distributive practice, first institutionalized by such as Edward Bassett, around which people can develop common purposes and mobilize. Walter Thadbit, who in his discourse appears often to be responding directly to the likes of Edward Bassett, doesn’t aim for participation to overcome the bureaucracy, he wants to marry them, in a partnership.
There is another way in which this works that interests me a great deal. In South Africa, the Cooper Square Committee would probably not have emerged at all. Associations like it pose a threat to the patronage resources of powerful, Tammany-like city bosses. When they come about, their leaders are quickly bought off and divided by offers of jobs and contracts and the making of threats and violence. Participatory fora, such as legislated ward committees and participation requirements in zoning and other legislation, work reasonably well in more affluent, whiter areas but where they would matter more they are quickly subordinated to the logic of machine politics, swamped by a boss’s clientele, its distributions brought into his or her patronage.
The South African left, often complaining at the lack of participatory opportunities, largely ignores these contextual realities.
In New York City, a process of bureaucratization, made by people like Bassett, had by the 1960s played an important part in the demise of Tammany Hall. The Cooper Square Committee, in Reaven’s account, seems remarkably free of political depredations. It is almost as if it arose in the void left by Tammany.
The two main readings this week may be viewed as telling stories of planning in its rise and then its transformation. Revell covers the early-20th century story, the rise of planning as part of a larger “civic culture of expertise” arriving to help the newly-formed Greater New York face enormous citywide and regional problems by asserting the broader public interest (supposedly more dispassionately analyzed and served by less/non-parochial experts armed with skills rather than localist attachments and outlooks). Reaven continues the story of planning after its entry into the corridors of urban power. By the mid-20th century, it is firmly entrenched in the decision making processes of city remaking. The story of the Lower East Side neighborhood activist group CSC, originally formed to meet renewal project that would bulldoze through the local area dubbed Cooper Square by Robert Moses, but then continuing on, using the language and tools of planning, to develop and then (after many changes) execute a plan that is animated by a substantive social justice vision may be read as either a midcourse correction of the position of planning and expertise in city remaking or a more critical attack of its anti-localist assumptions.
Insofar as the first story suggests that planning by experts is the triumph of reason and technical knowledge overcoming locally embedded, private interests standing in the way of broader public interests, the second story seems to be a reversal of fortunes – the local reasserting its primacy. In the terms of the earlier vision of planning it would appear to be a step backwards: serving the public interest may mean the overriding of some or all local interests – the persuasive example is the expert foresight to zone for a future factory district near residential districts; no residential community want factories immediately next to it. But CSC’s experience suggest a different reading: a correction of a misguided vision of the public interest, and the localist perspective can serve the broader goals of urban justice when the dominant city planning machinery has gone off the rails in support of a clearance and renewal regime that is marked by racial and other blind spots.