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Unified Bulk
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MR. WOLLMAN: We have a lot to do this morning. I'm Henry Wollman. I'm the director of the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute at Baruch College, and on behalf of the institute and Baruch College, we welcome you very much to this event which has been in the planning for a while, and it could not have happened without the cooperation of Department of City Planning and Joseph Rose, and I think it will prove to be an interesting morning.
There are some ground rules, mainly about speakers sticking to their schedule which are imperative if we are to accomplish everything that we want to do, and I am the sort of now hard bitten task master of keeping people on schedule, and we'll talk about that more in just a few moments.
I'd like to begin by introducing the new president of Baruch College, Ned Regan, who is of course no stranger to almost everyone in this room as the former New York State Controller, Erie County executive and chairman of the municipal assistance corporation for New York City.
Ned has forsworn me from making an extended introduction, and I will obey his rules as I had better, but I do want to say that I think he is a symptom of resurgence of the city university and exemplifies the resurgence the city university about which we read something about in the New York Times this week and is an absolute sort of personification of the role, the public role, the private roles, that the city university aspires to play and will play in the life of New York in the coming decade. Thank you.
MR. REGAN
MR. REGAN: What a beautiful day to talk about the city, University CUNY and Baruch in the context of New York City, Henry. I share those thoughts, and I think everybody else in this room does. I want to think Henry and Bill Newman, Joe Rose and all the others that have made this possible and thank the few of you that realize that I was stressed out Friday and won't embarrass me too much, all you fancy dudes out there, but let me just quickly say two things about what you're doing.
I have to relate it to what I know about obviously and hope that it strikes a cord or two with you. In going through the material I spotted obviously two words. One was neighborhood and the other was economy. We're in what I think New York City -- Joe, would call us a neighborhood, but when I've checked the maps, I go way back, we were called at one point Rose Hill. That's what we were, but we're kind of pieces of neighborhoods, and I don't like that.
Across the street is going this marvelous, marvelous building, a very unique academic structure, unique in all the country and certainly unique in New York City, and I wanted to try to create a neighborhood campus feel that when you got near us, you realized that you were you walking into a mixed environment of campus and neighborhood, one where ideas were exchanged and bagels were sold all at the same time with the general feeling of synergy to this whole thing.
We have a neighborhood feeling in this sense and everybody is to blame and nobody is to blame but across the street on the wall of the building on 25th Street near Third Avenue there's going to go up a plaque that at one point -- we allowed preservation groups to role us. It's not their fault, it's our fault, but that's what happened. We got a plaque that celebrates this neighborhood which never existed and it cost you as taxpayers $800,000 and four people a day will see it if they don't mind their coffee getting cold on the back way from the deli. That's it.
And what we are here -- and that's a problem, a minor, teeny problem which we're going to cure and I'll tell you in one sentence and then conclude on the more important topic of the economy.
What we are here is first one block away you is another Baruch facility which will remain, which is our major classroom in addition to this marvelous library of space, is the site of the very first institution for higher education for kids of modest means in the United States of America and the guy that did it in 1847 he said why have to quote him accurately, the sons of 15 years later, it was the daughters too the sons of Menatoy [phonetic] take their place next to the sons of wealthy to learn and move on into the economy and culture of this country and created something called a free academy and that was the very first. Then came the Moral Act, the Land Grant Colleges and the great Michigans and Wisconsins, the North Carolinas and SUNYs and CUNYs of this country and there it all was. Teaching, by the way, the arts and classics for 15 years because even the land grant colleges remain vocational in nature for 15 years before anyone duplicated for the sons and daughters of the Menatoy [phonetic] and that's what we are. That's what this neighborhood is, so what do I do? Well, I'll go look at that plaque once and then try to get it out of my mind, but I've called up the dean Ranalli but at CCNY and said get us a team of students who will give somebody to the lead and somebody at the end and come down here from your great institution and create for us a plan for a neighborhood and we'll pick the winner and then we'll go to war and you'll just hope you're around by then (pointing).
There's going to be some changes here and then we're going to do it. I don't know how that's done. That's your job. That's Joe's job. That's your discipline and it's not mine, but we're going to do in five years here, it will take that long. I'm from government, so I know. It will take that long, but we're going to create a neighborhood here of a great campus, wonderful students, of commercial enterprises, people that can walk in here and walk out, know they've been into a community of learning but a community, a mixture of poor and rich and great businesses and little delis all at the same time, so to the extent that what you're doing today bears on that kind of thing, please go to it.
I only know of one city in the country that preserved their neighborhoods and that was Boston and that was at terrible racial animosity expense, but they still got them and they still cling to them and they don't let any government at any time interfere with the neighborhoods.
It's of course costing you federal taxpayers $13 billion to build a four-mile tunnel under these neighborhoods because the neighborhoods wouldn't let them go on the surface, but so what. They've got livability and the quality of life there which is preserved by zoning and preserved by smart people like Joe Rose.
Let me conclude with just a notion on the economy. We graduate 2,000 students a year in the business disciplines and they go out into New York City. I like to think of Baruch as kind of like the but for test, but for Baruch. These 99 percent kids, first in their family to go to college, well motivated, well motivated from the New York City high schools go out into but for Baruch they wouldn't get the chance of a business education that they get here and get a chance and get that career ladder into the economy of this city, but they get it here and why this is so exciting is because where we are located in terms of Silicon Alley and Wall Street and the great midtown district and of course, now Park Avenue South. That's what this name ought to be in this neighborhood. Park Avenue South is just burgeoning.
Anyone who knows who's involved with building there just knows what's going on which we think is terrific and we're cheek by jowl with all this excitement.
Question? What is it about zoning that enhances or preserves the idea that this city, greatest city in the world is built -- I'm using the word idea in a different context now -- where ideas are just exchanged. You get something. You go into the deli and you bump into somebody or go into a restaurant and something just goes click and it's just the last thing you needed to take you forward.
What is it about the zoning, about how we live and work in New York that does this like no other city does. Leneen [phonetic] of terrible fame said once that power lay in the streets. He abused it, but ideas lay in the streets of this town and what you do in terms of zoning and building, development enhances and preserves, preserves and then enhanced this idea that makes this city the most exciting place in this area, the most exciting place in the world and a wonderful opportunity for each year several thousand of our students that go and partake and participate and grow into the culture.
You ask do things they would have otherwise not done were it not for New York City and I would like to think as having indicated we're if not for Baruch.
That's my take on a limited slice of what you're doing. It's not professional, but it does speak to some deeply felt concerns about the quality of life and you effect that every single day in everything you do. Thank you for being here. Welcome and Henry, it's all yours. Thank you very much.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: Thank you, Ned. Just a few grounds rules about the morning. We will try to stay and we will succeed in staying very much on time. Some of you may wish to take notes. I do say to you that the book on the Unified Bulk Program will be available at lunch on the seats of each of you, so you don't have to worry so much about taking such careful notes. It presents a compendium of different materials on Unified Bulk as they have appeared from various city institutions as well as the press, as well as a particular case study which the institute itself commissioned to deal with development implications in the outer boroughs from the proposal, so this will be available.
The institute as part of the city university takes no position on the proposal in any formal way, but I think I would be remiss in not pressing some personal feelings about what Joe Rose and his staff and the department have put forward. And before introducing Joe, I'd just like to say one or two things about that from my own perspective as both a past architect and a present real estate developer.
First of all, the ambition of the document is extraordinary. We have all lived in our lifetimes in a world in which city planning, in which city agencies have looked at the minutiae of the fabric of the city, whether by intent or by design or by default. Here was the attempt at looking at the city as a whole, of taking on the zoning resolution out of doing something which would have great consequence and engage great ideas about what the city can be.
Clearly there were two ideas which for me at least said at the heart of what Joe and his staff were about. One was engaging the issue of growth. What shall the growth of the city as a whole be? What is the proper rate and pace of it and most of all that unaskable, unanswerable, never to be talked about question, are there absolute limits to what the growth of this city can be given its infrastructure, given its geography, given its population, given the nature of what density means to successful or unsuccessful cities.
There was another idea, though, that was equally startling in a way for New York City maybe not for other cities, but for New York City certainly that Joe introduced which was that the word design would come out of the bag and that design and effect should play a role.
Design is perhaps a word that deals with quality of life and what the meaning of quality of life in this urban context is and that it's not simply although the most perhaps most subjective of all issues, it is not one which is not amenable to rational discussion and hopefully some organized communal discourse and decision making.
We have to be grateful I think to this proposal that it brought both the issues of growth and design to the fore. Then I think we have to be grateful that there was the courage on the part of the commission, on the part of the department to take on -- how shall I say it in the most polite way -- the most powerful vested interests in this community. After all, real estate is no child's play in New York. It is the stuff and fabric of everyday life. The dollars, the power are there and this proposal looks at it and looks at it from the point of view from not only what is best for the development community -- after all their well-being not an insignificant interest in all of our lives, but what is best for the city as a whole for all of us.
And finally, I think the thing that the proposal did which in a way for me underlies all of these previous few items and I don't know if Ms. Baruch is here because she's a champion of the idea of the impact of ethics on every day life and the importance of it within the business school and the business environment as Baruch teachers, but the document is ambitious in raising the underlying issues about what is just in the future of this city.
What is the role of government? What shall the nature of deliberation be about issues as complex as the ones that the proposal puts forth and the open nature of so much of the discussion and deliberation is in fact a model I think of what discourse can be in this city regardless of which side you come out on in this proposal.
For all of these things I think we have to be grateful to Joe Rose, to the department, to his extraordinary staff -- many of whom are here, some of whom you will hear -- and to those members of the city council who have been good enough to come this morning to listen to this, and I urge you to join with me at least in these sentiments about what has been accomplished by this proposal.
Joseph B. Rose is chairman of the City Planning Commission and director of the Department of City Planning. He was appointed to the position by Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani on January 29, 1994.
As chairman of the 13 member commission, Mr. Rose manages the city charter, expanded responsibilities of the commission which include approving all zoning and land exchanges, city franchises and concessions, urban renewal plans, landmarks and disposition of city-owned property.
The Commission is charged with planning for the orderly growth, improvement and future development of the city. The City Planning Commission includes seven members who are appointed by the mayor and one each by the five borough presidents and the public advocate.
Mr. Rose is also the director of the Department of City Planning Mayoral Agency responsible for long-term strategic planning concerns that have broad implications for the city.
The City Planning Department facilities economic development and coordinates its activities with relevant city agencies such as the Department of Transportation, Housing Preservation and Development and the Department of Environmental Protection.
Please welcome Joseph Rose.
MR. ROSE
MR. ROSE: Thank you. Good morning. I'll try to be brief and get us rigidly adhered to the schedule that's been laid out. First of all, I think Ned Regan, President Regan, appropriately touched on a couple of themes that I want to return to for those of you who still have the endurance to still be here at lunch. I will touch on the issues of neighborhood and economic growth and the incredible strength and revitalization of the city that's going on right now and how these issues interact with each other and how they do so hopefully within the context of a successful regulatory framework, but I want to jump in right now to the topic on hand which is the Unified Bulk Zoning Proposal.
I want to thank Henry and the Newman Institute and Baruch for staging this forum this morning, because it's a very crucial time. We expect to vote on this proposal at the planning commission next month. We have gone through an exhaustive process. We have spoken with a wide range and interacted and taken counsel from a very wide range of participants.
We still have some issues to address and resolve, and this is a very good moment to be taking both a step back and also jumping into the details and hearing both forcing us to state again clearly what it is we're doing, why we're doing it and hear the comments and the praise and criticism and refining the proposal as it heads towards what we hope will ultimately be adoption by the Planning Commission and City Council.
But just quickly before we turn to the staff of the Department of City Planning, the drafters of the proposal, I want to discuss what we're doing and why we're doing it in broad strokes.
A year and a half ago I gave a speech at city hall that deliberately, consciously opened what I called the Pandora's Box of zoning reform. It wasn't without a sense that this was in the context of the politics and the process and the bureaucracy of New York City something that was scary, something that would be controversial, that people would have strong reactions to, but I stated very clearly that this was necessary because the zoning resolution is in crisis.
It's in crisis and it's not unusual for people to describe X or Y or Z, and you create a lot of passion and people try to get attention by saying something is in crisis, so the first question, why is it a big deal that the zoning resolution is in crisis and the answer is because the zoning resolution in New York City embodies our values about the environment. It embodies our outlook towards the future and our whole notion of growth.
We are not a city that master plans. There are many us who believe we are not a city who can master plan. We redevelop within the context of our own borders. We are a built city by the standards of the U.S. We've been around for a very long time. We don't annex new territory and then decide okay, here's where this will go, here's where that will go. We redevelop within the borders, within the context of our own borders, within our built environment, and the document that controls that is the zoning resolution.
So it's not just another set of municipal regulations. It's not just the building code. It's not just of the park regulations. It's not -- not that those aren't important, but it is not a casual document. It is the essence of our outlook towards both the present, our neighborhoods where we live, where we work and also how we're going to change and evolve in the future.
So it's not to have something that important in terms of our relationship to our environment be in crisis is a very serious problem, so why is it in crisis? The first is that this 900 and approximately 80 page document is at this stage of the game largely incoherent.
People do not understand it. Even the people -- even the few people who are purported to understand it don't understand it and those of us -- I've had to come and partially become one of those people and it's one of more depending on the kind of day you're having it can be either distressing or amusing to see people who are purported experts to grovel with an attempt to try and pose some meaning on things that are at this point have for all practical purposes lost any context with what the rules are supposed to regulate.
The second thing is the regulations are inconsistent. Similar pieces of property in similar locations have wildly different things that are permitted to happen on adjoining lots. There's no rationale. There's no discernible rationale in terms of why some things are allowed and some things are unallowed, so we have an unintelligible, inconsistent document governing how neighborhoods grow, how the city exists.
One of consequences of this condition is that -- because it's so incoherent and inconsistent and no one understands what it says and requires so many kinds of interpretation and filtering and debate back and forth about what a particular sentence means and how it refers back to some other provision 600 pages away in the text, is we've created a culture and a process and a system that rewards manipulators and schemers at the expense of people who simply want to come and find out what the rules are and do what they're allowed to do. And often the question is asked what can I do here, and people try to give a straightforward answer but that's not the way a vast number of people play the game.
You come in. You start having a few meetings. You say well, can this mean that and next thing you know, you have a secret handshake and a secret club. It's a constrained world. It's not a healthy way in which the most important city in the world, the command center of the global economy should conduct business. It's not healthy from an economy perspective.
It's not healthy from a wide variety of perspectives and creates among other things a cynicism, a lack of public confidence in the legitimacy of the regulations and the legitimacy of the approach towards the redevelopment of the city of New York and that is at the end of day one I think the central reasons why the resolution is in crisis and why reform is absolutely necessary and that's because if such an important document lacks a sense of legitimacy, lacks confidence, is the subject of the such cynicism and such in a sense that it really is the province of a small group of connected people as opposed to a real legitimate -- not blueprint, but legitimate -- set of parameters of how the city is to redevelop, then we've undermined the political legitimacy of the core values of the document and what zoning has to be for New York, which is change, which is
growth, which is reinvestment.
If we don't have a set of rules that allow for growth, allow for change, allow for the production of housing and commercial space that's so necessary for the city to continue to play the role that it has, then we are I guess by default but also to some degree consciously creating a series of skirmishes, neighborhood battles, the sort of zero sum briante [phonetic] development growth, no growth battle, that at the end of the day the city can't afford because change and growth are critical to the city of New York to play its role both locally and regionally and nationally and globally as well.
So the reason for opening Pandora's Box is because would can't afford not to and at this point after 45 years of working with a document that we now have little less -- 43 years, the fact is, it's broken.
The car -- there's no more quick fixes that can make this thing work. We need to do a significant overhaul.
The other problem in addition to the fact that it's inconsistent, it's incoherent, it lacks legitimacy, is that it also embodies the zoning resolution as it currently exists to the extent that one can decipher what it says and how provisions work and embodies a very rigid ideological vision adopted in 1961 formulated throughout the 1950s of an urban renewal aesthetic that really is intolerant of any other vision and very much at odds with the way that much of the city is built and valued and protected in terms -- and conceived of in terms of its neighborhoods, and to have such a rigid vision that doesn't allow for what -- for that matter -- the private sector, neighborhoods, the public sector wants to do, has created a situation that has led to some of these kinds of manipulations and interpretations and the process that has led to the lack of legitimacy.
So we consciously opened the box in order to address problems that we feel -- and Henry described in his introduction what my charter responsibilities are. To allow for the orderly growth and development for the city, we felt it was absolutely necessary to take this on.
One of the final things I said in the speech, I went into the other provisions as well that aren't the topic of today's discussion, but I said clearly I know this will be controversial, know that we have a couple of different modes of responding to innovative or significant proposals in the city and especially addressing the development issue. One is to be constructive, to be cooperative, to work things out at the end of the day.
I mean, this is a city built on compromise, on a combination of initiative and achieving results. We also have and this is after several decades and various versions of this had business we have a very destructive zero some way where reference is at pitch battles with each other. There is a noncooperative approach and everyone has their turf and it's either anti-growth or no regulations, no development and that's a very unproductive, dangerous place for the city to go and I made it clear.
If this is a process that gets high jacked, I would not -- I said I will not let this process get high jacked by people who are fundamentally hostile to the notion of change, hostile to the notion of growth, hostile to the understanding of the flexibility that is necessary within the context of the city's economy, and I have to say that my fear -- I mean, I think it was a legitimate fear, but I have been impressed that -- many of the sources who I was afraid would take the willingness to take on some of these problems that I laid about before which is inconsistency and a hostile aesthetic vision, would be -- would try to go too far.
Instead the response has been by and large very enthusiastic, both from working with the community boards, with the civic groups, with the professional associations. There really has been I think the kind of conductive, positive outlook, really making the proposal that I think had a lot of merit, and I'll try to go into and I'll try to wrap up, but get that -- get the best possible proposal we can within a modest and moderate agenda, not trying to forestall growth, not trying to create uniformity or restrict the ability to do the things that the city needs to do.
There has been at the same time some criticism which I will put into three categories. One is the well-deserved but the legitimate necessary, inevitable corrections, comments, suggestions that we at any time -- we take on a project of this scale in terms of reforming something so central to the built environment in the city, there will be mistakes we make. There will be issues that need to be refined and addressed and we have had -- as someone who spent 20 years in the legal use regulatory process, I believe in the integrity of that process.
I believe at least in the possibility of the integrity of that process, and we have had a very constructive interaction and the proposal has benefitted from the comments of the community boards, the comments of the real estate board, the comments of the professional associations, the AIA, APA, Municipal Arts Society, the institutions that have raised issues about how their expansion needs and program needs to be accommodated within a general set of regulations, so that's one category; constructive suggestions that have really delved into the essence of what we're doing and try to make it better.
Second issue, second category I guess, would go into this general philosophical criticism and I mean, I don't know what to say about that other than that I don't recall which Shaving [phonetic] play has the scene and Paul, you may remember, but the two patagonists are hurling advectives at each other and they're coming up with the worst possible insults they can address at each other and finally one trumps the other by saying critic. And there are a couple of critics who failed to delve into the essence of what this proposal is and simply created -- used the zoning proposal as a vehicle for amusing them or whatever it is they chose to amuse and presented a very distorted picture of what we're actually doing. So we're happy to get into that subsequently. But the good news is we don't have to spend a whole lot of time on that issue.
The third set of responses that we've had and we take seriously and we refer it as something that necessarily both politically and also in terms of interests of the city in terms of something we need to address are concerns raised by the real estate industry or at least some in the real estate industry about what the affects of this proposal will be on the capacity of the city to grow, on the private market, on development, and we were having a very cooperative series of discussions of dialogue on this back and forth, as I said, including some of the kind of technical issues that are affected and then I guess not talks but the dialogue changed into a sense that we were doing something that had -- that might be very destructive and really was the whole notion of imposing limits was something that wasn't really valid and the problem -- we were perplexed at this at first because we really had tried and we think we succeeded in crafting a document that balanced, that it was reasonable, that gave serious thought to how to make sure we didn't have an adverse affect on housing production.
We worked within the context of both flexibility, architecturally and economically and related to the character of the growth orientation of the city of New York. It turned out that that -- what I think a lot of problems stemmed from is a misunderstanding of the way the current zoning works, so in order to understand the changes, you need to understand what we have now and that is something that says, as I said since nobody does, the sense of what the difference was between what we are proposing and what is currently allowed is something that unfortunately takes a vast amount of time to understand.
Now, as a result of all of criticism I after seven years as the chairman of the Planning Commission had to do what I had up till now allowed myself to not have to do which was understand the intricacies of zoning resolution. I unfortunately had to become something of an expert on tight factor zoning and open space ratios and the difference between an R7 A and R7 B in ways I hoped I would never have to do, and one of the things and purposes of this proposal was to not make me have to understand every minuet distinction.
Now in responding to some of the criticisms that have been raised and the concerns and the political problems, I've had to delve in and understand just what it is, what the heinous thing is we've been accused of doing, which means I have to go and understand what the current rules are and what the changes are.
The good news is that after this exhaustive process, I like our proposal even more than when we proposed it, but it's something that I think at the end of the day while there are some open issues that still need to be addressed, that when one genuinely understands what the current regulations are, and I think some of the presentations this morning will highlight this and what the affects are compared to what the current situation is, that we're not as far apart from reaching a successful balancing of the various interests involved than it looks.
So what are we doing? I'll say very quickly before I turn this over to our staff, there are five basic principles of what we're trying to do. One is to come up with a document that is as simple as it can be given the wide varieties of the things that have to be accommodated within the built environment of the city of New York.
You shouldn't have to be one of a handful of specialists in order to understand the basic parameters of what can and cannot get done on your land, on the property next door, in your neighborhood. Reasonably intelligent people prepared to devote a certain amount of time to understand the rules should be able to do so, number one, an intelligible set of regulations.
Number two is a set of regulations that work, that retain the fundamental New York City orientation towards as of right development. As of right development means you don't have to come in and go into a long political process any time you want to do something.
This is a city of more than seven and a half million people, millions of housing units. We can't afford -- and our political system no matter who's running it, no matter how efficient we make it, cannot take the vast amount of interactions and activities that go on in the city of New York and put them into the political process. The system would break down. Things that needed to get done wouldn't get done, so maintaining a fundamental as of right set of regulations that allow for some flexibility.
The third is whatever we allow has to be economically viable. We can't just create something that looks good on paper or fits some illogical vision of ourselves and doesn't translate into economically viable commercial buildings, affordable housing. If we create a set of rules that doesn't work in the marketplace in terms of costs, in terms of economic viability, then we have failed.
The fourth principle is that there should be some relationship between the character of a neighborhood and how it's regulated pursuant to the zoning regulations in 1961. The zoning imposed the same ideological aesthetic straightjacket on every neighborhood in the city of New York.
If there was one vision, it was a tower in the park vision. If there was nothing in the zoning resolution of 1961 that said oh, you may be a row house neighborhood in Brooklyn and here you may be in an area that should have co-op city or here is difference between midtown Manhattan and a small -- low density neighborhood in another part of town, so it's a relationship between what the zoning allows and what the character of those neighborhoods that are being regulated is a fundamental part of this.
And the final principle is that there needs to be complete flexibility but not through the kind of back door negotiations and hand dealing that goes on in the bureaucracy, a public kind of flexibility. If you want to do something different because we know whatever regulations we come up with there will be conditions that do not allow -- that don't fit within the box, whatever that box is, and we need to have what every other place in the country has, which is a publicly legitimate way of getting to do something different.
Right now we don't have that vehicle because there's this very rigid, ideological vision and the result is in order to do something different, because the world is such that it demands often if not on occasion something different, that the only way to get to that process is to go through the back door, to slither around with these interpretations. That's not healthy. It undermines the legitimacy and at the end of the day it jeopardizes the capacity of the city to grow.
So that's what we're doing. I will turn the microphone over now to the principal drafters of the regulations within the Department of City Planning, and I should just say in closing that having spent decades on community boards, public -- not for profit advocate and various aspects of the land use regulatory enterprise, I knew about the planning commission. I did not have an appreciation for just how dedicated, impressive, sophisticated and enlightened a group of people we had at the department -- the city has the good fortune to have at the high reaching ranks of the department of the city planning who really have been an invaluable team in being able to tackle these issues.
So with that I'd like to turn the podium over to Sandy Hornick who's our deputy executive director of our department and the director of strategic planning.
Henry, you're going to formally introduce Sandy. Thank you.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: We'd like to move on to the first part of the morning which is the clarification and explanation of the proposal. I'm wondering if I can invite Sandy Hornick, Eric
Kober and David Karnovsky to join us here.
Sandy Hornick has worked as a planner with New York's Department of City Planning for 25 years, including six years of zoning director and currently serves as deputy executive director for strategic planning. At City Planning he played a key role in preparing the city planning commission 1992 report shaping the city's future and the 1994, 1999 mayor's strategic policy statements and numerous reports of the Department of City Planning.
He played significant roles in the development of the city's land use policies including it's lost policy contextual zoning and the comprehensible waterfront plan and the waterfront zoning and has authorized a number of articles on planning issues.
Please welcome Sandy Hornick.
MR. HORNICK
MR. HORNICK: Good morning. Can somebody lower the lights? I have just say few pictures to spice up the whole subject. I'm going to begin this with a little background. I'm a history buff, and I understand what we're doing and unified both. It's helpful to me to turn on
the machine, technically advanced. Thank you.
The history, the background of the Unified Bulk Program really goes back to the 1950s when the conceptual ideas behind the current zoning bulk were in place. Back then the city for the first time at least since the consolidation in 1898 was confronted with a loss population, a loss of demonetization to suburbs.
What they sought to do was to radically redesign the city as sort of an urban suburb. They were going to dramatically (inaudible) density and the zoning and by the way (inaudbile) the density in the city by 80 percent in 1961, but they also had a physical vision that was different and that physical vision loosely based on this drawing that you see right here which had actually appeared in the 1961 materials that preceded it.
This is Raven Wood Houses in Astoria, Queens, and what they thought is the way to compete with the suburbs was to take large areas of the city, clear them and build and lower density in cities that had been previously built, tall slender towers surrounded by open space.
Some of these are some of the best houses in still desirable neighborhoods with long waiting lists, where the other models Thinson Town [phonetic] had a long waiting list and 40 years later still has a long waiting list 50 years after this was done.
To help create the large sites, they also had urban renewal which was use of government power, of condemnation to clear land and create large spots. The zoning was designed to work very much together with that in the sense that it rewarded you for building taller and thinner and punished you for building shorter and squatter. I'll give you more floor space to do it.
These buildings began to appear first in the mid 1960s as a grace period and once they began almost immediately people began to complain about them and it began to be a different view and that view has become that may be the that looks just like the Raven Wood Houses in its entirety is not a very exciting place to be, but that cities where particularly in the urban centers where the buildings relate to the street, where there's activity, where there's eyes on the street and so on have a positive value.
And in fact New York epitomizes this and probably one of the reasons it is one of the most dynamic cities in the western world.
As I said, from the mid 60s on we became increasingly aware of the controversies over those older -- the newer type building and from the 1960s on we banned to fix the zoning.
Originally people thought about this, thought the fixes were local, that there was a particular problem in a particular neighborhood and that it was just in this one neighborhood, that we really don't need a tower and plaza opposite Fifth Avenue in Central Park, so they began doing special zoning districts in a handful of special cases and eventually they produced 33 current special zoning districts as it spread from neighborhood to neighborhood.
As more and more places came up, we came up with other solutions, infield zoning, special districts, limited height districts, special permits and so on. More and more rules were added because these developments kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and more of the diseases that I think all bureaucrats suffer from is the belief that they have to solve the problem themselves, so each one found their own solution creating -- producing this incredibly unduly vex of regulations.
I guess I'm one of those people that Joe described as supposedly an expert, and I can assure you that I often find some of the issues mystifying. I'm also the only person ever to weigh these more than 17 pounds and I'm convinced that I'm going to suffer some physical injury in light of that (inaudible).
The average citizen or property owner for whom zoning is not a full-time job has very little hope of ever understanding what's in it. This is a good as a (inaudible) consultant but not much good for anyone else.
Not surprisingly, sometimes these lead to uncomfortable results and surprising results. This is a theoretic block in an R 7. This is the type of thing you might see on the lower east side or upper Manhattan, and we've run three different development sites here and what's interesting about it is not that one block would look like this, but depending on what the conditions are on the block next to you, you can get anything from a six to a ten to a 19 story building next to you.
The zoning is not very easy to predict to produce if someone really chose to, it might be (inaudible). In recent years the commission has moved away from the sort of one spot fits all zoning for very specific locations and did two things. One, it did contextual zoning which more or less buildings should copy the format of the existing city, most of which was built before the 1960 zoning ordinance or it should do something else in the very tall buildings because it was towers use something called tower on base which I'll return to in a second, but one of the things that happened, contextual zoning is appropriate in some places.
I'll use West End Avenue as an example of a consistent street in line with Park Avenue, but there are a lot other places in the city built over wide periods of time that are not uniform, and I dare say come back to this again and we really don't want all of the city look like
one shape and one form.
The flip side of that is that when buildings like this get built, this is on the upper east side or this, this is in Park Slope, these are the rare, I do mean rare, buildings built under particular (inaudible).
The public reaction to that, the public surprise in having these things next to them, produces a reaction which says -- demands of the political process a solution that is either going to be down zoning, contextual zoning, whether it's appropriate or not or land marking, something that will prevent future development.
And as Joe mentioned, we very strongly believe there is not -- the city doesn't suffer from the surplus of excessive zoning but rather, needs development to continually upgrade its housing and so on and not what because of a rise in population and I'll touch on that a little more.
So what are we trying to do with the Unified Bulk Program? Well, first of all, in the heart of the city we have had the current rules remain in effect, the liberal rules with no height limits, in the central business districts creation of a new central business district in Long Island City and the zoning in addition of a central business district in downtown Brooklyn.
Part of the change in Unified Bulk has to do with the neighborhoods touched on earlier. It's really to recognize that most of the city's neighborhoods have prevailing characters. Unlike what some of architect critics said, it recognizes that the city's neighborhoods are diverse and the city benefits from renovation.
Even if the program -- and it's interesting because a number of you told me in writing and some people talked about it, keep referring to it as a uniformed program going to promote a uniform architecture or uniformed something. It's a unified program. (inaudible) was we mean we unified is the regulations unlike today where we've got 40 years of previous rules conflict with each other. It is a unified set of rules that we hope will be coherent together.
So what is the heart of this for the city's neighborhoods? Probably the thing that get the most attention is the fact that in introducing height limits in communities which do not have height limits. Why height limits? Height limits in the proposal is more coherent and easier to understand than the current rules. It is still going to be about a zoning resolution complicated text. It's a complicated city.
The height limits provide certainty that all parties can understand. They reflect the general character of the neighborhoods. They provide some limits on issues like zoning, lot mergers and development rights, transfers and mechanical space and other so forth moments people have been concerned about while being marginal to accommodate all the (inaudible) allowing some to be scooped up from other properties and to help preserve those buildings or to preserve some open spaces that are important and also to allow design subsequent.
How will these height limits work? Each district basically will have two height limits, standard height limit and a district height, and I'm not going to go through each one of them.
This is standard in say an R 6 district. It produces a six-story district. 97 percent or 98 percent of all development in the last 20 years in R 6 districts complies with this or less, and it is one that when built in these communities are generally not controversial.
In the same districts, it will be a set of conditions and we have an alternate taller building and these are not architects, so they're just, you know, presume people will make them look better than we have here, but an alternative outlet would be that a taller building be built but not as tall as you can build them today with those intricacies and only under very specified set of conditions.
Why not a -- why couldn't you get a much taller building in an R 7 district and the truth of the matter is in most situations these buildings won't be any taller than this in any event because there's only so much floor area for R 7 district which allows less than one-third of the floor area than you would get in a high density Manhattan district I mentioned. All right.
So one question that ultimately is going to be is how often should you go with the standard of how much should that be the motto and how much should an alternative envelope be available and how flexible should that envelope be.
In the high density districts, the overall height of the buildings is not going to change the current count on the base rules. I won't go into exactly what they are because they're pretty complicated. Pretty much cap height of the height of the building at 360 feet today and this proposal has a 360 height limit in those high density Manhattan based residential neighborhoods, but what it does is it removes certain restrictions that result in lower foot ceiling heights, in essence, lower foot ceiling heights on lower floors and (inaudible) changes to it that approved by the commission would allow for more of a slender 25 percent terraces (inaudible) have recommended that would allow more the slender terrace characteristic of the Empire State Building and so on.
Last but not least and I will just mention this very, very briefly, these rules can be guides, that there should be a way out of these rules, and Joe talked about the need to do this and we are continually hearing from architects who are when they design something they are typically from outside the city confronted with the fact that they can't build what they want to build because the constraints of the 1961 proposal would not allow you to do it, and there is no legitimate way, public way, to say that something else should be allowed; so that's the gist of the proposal and we're trying to be brief, so I'll stop here.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: I'd like to now introduce Eric Kober, who has been Director of Housing, Economic and Infrastructure Planning at the department since 1986. He has a Master's degrees in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School in Princeton and in economics from the Sterns School of Business at NYU.
Mr. Kober's responsibilities include tracking demographics and economic indicators, analyzing transit and conducting studies particularly in how these trends affect land use and infrastructure needs.
He also advises the planning director of the City Planning Commission in land use, housing economic development and infrastructure policies.
Please welcome Eric Kober.
MR. KOBER
MR. KOBER: Can you kill the lights again? I'm going to talk a little bit very briefly because I've been asked to talk fast about the impact of the Unified Bulk Program on housing and economic development in the city.
As Sandy mentioned -- it was very good the way it was before. Thank you. As Sandy mentioned, most of the new housing city conforms to Unified Bulk program prototypes and this is because the prototypes and the housing prototypes go back to the contextual zoning of the 1980s that housing prototypes were built in recognition of economics of housing construction and the kinds of housing which are more economically efficient to build, and I think I just lost my carousel.
The Unified Bulk Program, however, would remove some of the very obscure but meaningful impediments to housing design which are built into the 1961 zoning which is height factors, open space ratios, zoning room counts and light area set asides, and these are all designed to promote the town and park prototype on cleared renewal sites, but what they do on the typical sites is as Sandy alluded to, they interfere with the design and development of housing in unpredictable and unexpected ways that really have no underlying purpose except make it difficult to achieve the economic additional building.
The way in which the city's housing tested form with the Unified Bulk prototypes can be gathered by looking at some data. I'll just throw out some brief numbers on housing construction in New York City.
New York City issued permits for 12,400 new housing units in 1999 which was the best year for new housing permits since 1989 as the city's economy recovered.
There were 3,800 permits in Manhattan and 8,600 all the others in the other boroughs. Almost all the Manhattan permits were in buildings of five or more units, not surprisingly; however outside of Manhattan, only 2,600 of the permits were buildings with five or more units. The rest were built one to four units, really small buildings.
About 1,500 of the 2,600 units in buildings of five or more units were in Brooklyn and many people don't realize it, but if you're familiar with Williamsburg, you know where those buildings of five or more units are being built. There's a huge submarket serving the Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg which produced a new volume of new housing in recent years and that's why so many new apartment buildings have been built in Brooklyn.
In Manhattan most new housing construction takes place in the community district south of 96th Street, that is, the high-end luxury housing, most of it in the town and base configuration that Sandy talked about. There's also been a number of new publicly assisted developments in upper Manhattan in recent years.
Some of you may be familiar with Renaissance Plaza, for example, at 116th Street. These are buildings that were built either under the contextual zoning regulations which were unchanged in the Unified Bulk Program. They would
otherwise conform with the Unified Bulk program.
In the other boroughs, most construction is in one- to four-family buildings and this reflects the economics of housing construction. One- to four-family buildings are less costly to build because they do not require elevators or common areas such as lobbies, stairwells and hallways. Lighter construction materials can be used because it is not necessary to support the weight of multiple upper floors.
Now, though less costly to build, these buildings actually are more marketable. This is what the public who is buying or renting new housing in the boroughs outside of Manhattan actually wants and return the projector back on I'll show some slides.
This is in Park Slope in Brooklyn. These are three story row houses. They are kind of nice and as you go around the city, many different zoning districts but even in the R 6, R 7 zoning districts where apartment houses are permitted, you see three-story developments like this which are both economically efficient and very marketable. This certainly conforms within
the Unified Bulk Program prototypes.
As even more apartment buildings get built and this is a new apartment building on the lower east side which we kind of like and there's actually a facing building on the other side of the block, so it's one of those mid block sites in the R 7 district where they could have done a 19 story building which Sandy showed before, but instead they built these six-story buildings and they're just more economically efficient. They're less costly to build and don't need as many elevators and the construction is less costly and this is generally the favorite prototype even in the place where you could build the tower park building today and where you see the tower park buildings.
This is an example also of an R 7 district. This is in the west village. Usually it's the catch of views. It's not a question of affordability. It's a question that the apartments at the top of the building often can be sold or rented at very favorable rates and it's a matter of capturing views and there's nothing wrong with capturing views, you know, there's nothing -- people make money in the real estate business this way, but sometimes when people do this, they do it in the midst -- particularly outside of Manhattan -- they do it in the midst of -- (inaudible) and the consequence of this is that the public is understandably upset and changed the character of the neighborhood they've come to expect and often zoning changes are enacted that greatly reduce the ability even to do the kind of free form five, six, seven story buildings that would be more characteristic of development in the outer boroughs.
For example, this neighborhood was all zoned R 6, including the built houses that you see up front.
AUDIENCE
AUDIENCE: Where is it?
MR. KOBER
MR. KOBER : This is in Forest Hills, Queens. It's now zoned R 3A, which has FAR point six and this has happened often enough that we're really concerned about the notion that it's better to let that one building get built because then somebody gets to make a good profit on it and, you know, let the contextual ideas come later because it harms actually the amount of construction
activity in the city.
Just briefly to talk about nonresidential prototypes and most of the office development that takes place in the city takes place either in Manhattan or lower -- midtown Manhattan, lower Manhattan business districts, both of which have special zoning districts which are not affected by the proposal. They're the same.
There are high density commercial areas met outside of midtown and downtown. There are some on the perimeter of midtown and downtown and there's some in downtown Brooklyn.
Downtown Brooklyn is going to get its own special district which has very generous 495 foot height limit and accommodates continued development of the very sizable buildings and we're studying critical areas of downtown Brooklyn which are now zoned at relatively low densities to determine whether it might be possible to expand the boundaries of the high density commercial area but within the existing high density commercial areas some of the obsolete like front setback areas and sky exposure areas will be eliminated and a special district will be created with a very significant height limit to reinvent commercial development.
Where we have an EIS in preparation to create a special district in Long Island city, another major potential business area of the city that can do the same thing in the city's current four business districts which you may not realize is Flushing.
Downtown Flushing we're also going to have special regulations which accommodate again commercial development at the densities which are rather -- lower than they are in downtown Brooklyn or in midtown and lower Manhattan, but again, there will be special height limits to make sure that the continued development of that is a -- that area is a satellite business district to be accommodated.
This prototype what we're looking at is 10 or 12 FAR with a plaza -- district on the periphery of midtown. This is a site on the periphery of midtown which would get a 495 foot height limit.
As you can see, it continues to accommodate this 10 to 12 FAR regulation, a very sizable office building. There was a slide that I'm going to reverse to because we got out of sequence. This is another office building. This is a local office building. This happens also to be in Park Slope in Brooklyn and in the local business districts and the regional business districts outside of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, Unified Bulk promotes a community office building prototype similar to this.
The idea is to good get rid of the provisions that from the '61 zoning this promotes buildings pushed back from the street and try to get a building that accommodates certain floor areas economically efficient and has a large floor space and accommodates ground floor retail that promotes street life and makes the city a better place to live.
At this point I'll stop and we'll turn it over to David. You can turn the projector off.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: Thank you. I'd like to now welcome David Karnovsky, the general counsel of the Department of City Planning. Prior to joining City Planning, Mr. Karnovsky served as chief of the legal counsel division office of the corporation counsel and a special counsel to the deputy mayor for operations. A 1982 graduate of Harvard Law School, he has worked in New York City government since 1987. Please welcome David Karnovsky.
MR. KARNOVSKY
MR. KARNOVSKY: I'm a lawyer, so there are no slides. One of the stated goals of the Unified Bulk Program is that the zoning resolution should contain the simplest regulations compatible with the city's planning objectives. Now you may laugh. You should have laughed at the thought that the words simple and zoning coexist in the same sentence.
Indeed, the resolution is one of the most confusing and opaque documents a man can hold. It's full of arcane mathematical formulas, curves and pros, vague terms and definitions, and exceptions and errors and omissions.
Unlike Sandy and Eric, I come at this issue as a relative neophyte. I have been the counsel to the department for only the last 20 months, but prior to that I worked for ten years as part of the corporation counsel's office that deals with legislation, state, federal and local; so I know something about legislation and I have to say, I've never seen anything quite like the zoning resolution.
Now, perhaps a tax lawyer steeped in the Internal Revenue Code and internal revenue rulings would feel more comfortable with the resolution having an affinity for it, but something is wrong when communities, regulators, even developers don't have a clear sense of what is or is not permitted at a particular location.
I think as Chairman Rose said, that those who are witnesses to the result of all these interpreted gymnastics can fairly question whether the resolution remains a coherent expression of land use policy.
Well, how did we get to this point? I think as Sandy indicated, the answer has partly to do with the fact that the zoning resolution is a document that wore with itself. The basic shape of the document was established in 1961 with the urban renewal tower and the park aesthetic.
That '61 resolution was soon perceived as alien to New York city's built fabric and what happened over the next four decades is that hundreds of zoning amendments were enacted in a variety of ways to address some of the problems of the '61 resolution and the result of all of these efforts has been to make the resolution unduly complicated, inconsistent, ambiguous and not the least, very difficult to enforce.
Another reason we've gotten to this point has got to do with the nature of the zoning itself. The resolution is not a constitution; it's not a charter. It's not authorizing legislation. It doesn't merely establish a general framework for zoning, rather, it's a working document that prescribes in detail the use bulk and density regulations applicable to every part of New York City except for parks and sometimes with debate cemeteries and for that reason, it's examined, interpreted, applied and sometimes ignored day in and day out by architects, engineers and lawyers throughout the city and it's constantly being tested against the peculiarities of a particular site and peculiarities of a particular development and the results put a lot of stress and strain on the document as the interpreters stretch, squeeze, pull to make it work.
And that takes place at various levels of government, at the City Planning Department to be sure, but also at the five borough offices and the Manhattan headquarters for the department of buildings or standards and appeals and to a lesser extent the environment control board and in the courts.
I think the result is there are really two zoning resolutions; one that you can buy in the book store at city planning and the one that's set forth in 40 years of memos, letters, technical bulletins and other miscellaneous of the various agencies.
Some people have called this the hidden zoning resolution and that name is that I think because only a small group of people have a real command of it, and there are some people in the zoning business whose most valuable assets is their filing cabinets, that is, cabinets full of these miscellaneous rulings, opinions, letters and other past interpretations.
I was reminded recently of this in a phone conversation with a zoning lawyer. I said that section such and such clearly said X, and he said but don't you know about the old department building memo that say that X means says Y? I'll fax it to you. I guess that's what it means to be the new kid on the block, but at least now I have the memo in my filing cabinet.
The development of this hidden zoning resolution is perhaps inevitable after 40 years, but no one can claim that the situation is healthy and all of this was demonstrated in the Trump litigation. Whatever you may think in the merits of the project or the merits of that litigation, I don't think anyone can claim that it's a healthy situation when the question whether a 900 foot building can be built is so unclear that it has to be resolved by the courts.
So how does Unified Bulk make zoning simple? Well, it doesn't, but simplicity is a relative concept and Unified Bulk does go a great way, great distance to clearing away some cobwebs and eliminating some opportunities for interpretative gymnastics and it does so if for no other reason that it eliminates the number of pages in that 17 pound resolution.
Beyond that, the use of height limits sweeps away complex systems of sky exposures, height plains, height factors, open space ratios as well as several other mathematically based formulas including the pack and bulk requirement for tower on the base development, formulas that in many cases are only indirect and perfect and sort of disguised after it's to controlled height and in the very complex and confusing area of split lock rules which govern circumstances under which bulk can be transferred across zoning district lines.
The Unified Bulk text does something truly radical. Rather than leaving to interpretation this question of whether and under what circumstances those zoning districts can be considered comparable for use of these bulk transfers, it uses a chart to tell us just which districts are comparable, so the mysteries of split lock will now be accessible to anyone who can read a chart.
There are other ways in which Unified Bulk makes life simpler. They haven't received as much attention as the areas I have just described. For example, it eliminates the anachronistic of zoning counts with a simpler set of dwelling unit limits.
Did you know that by dividing your bedroom into two when you have a newborn baby you may be violating zoning room count regulations? I won't report you, but that would not be true under unified building.
I also wanted to say a couple of things about the proposed special permit to authorize modification of building heights and other bulk regulations based on a series of findings, including that the building is of superior design.
I've been asked how can you grant waivers on some kind of beauty contest. And agree, this attempt to introduce design excellence into the resolution is an innovative concept, but I think that Unified Bulk introduces the concept of design excellence into the resolution in a way that is both consistent with legal requirements and mindful that in general, government should
only play a limited role with regard to design.
Other jurisdictions have established mandatory design controls on development with very mixed results. By contrast this proposal seeks to foster innovative design through a voluntary set of basic systems.
Is there legal authority for introducing these kinds of design considerations into the zoning? Well, we've come a long way since 1905 when a New Jersey court striking down a billboard ordinance said the following: Aesthetic considerations are a matter of luxury and indulgence rather than of necessity, and it is necessity alone which justifies the exercise of the police power.
The modern view is very different and is well expressed in the classic statement by Justice Douglas. The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive. The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that a community should be beautiful.
Now, there are limits of how far you can go with this. Assume for a moment a hypothetical amendment to the zoning resolution under which no building permit could be issued for a new building unless an architectural review board determined that the proposed construction was for an exceptional design.
An amendment of that kind would raise a host of legal concerns ranging from constitutional issues of free expression and due process to the very fundamental question of whether it's really a police power purpose to demand a design excellence, and the New York courts have been very clear that aesthetic regulation must, and I quote, bear on the economic, social and cultural patterns of the community and district and they warn against the dangers of arbitrarily imposing a standard of beauty on the community.
Now, clearly architecturally distinguished buildings are a social good, but it is highly improbable that any legislation to mandate superior design can meet legal requirements but that of course, is not what this proposal does.
It has no impact on as of right development. It doesn't set up the City of New York as a kind of fashion business czar. Instead it makes the very simple point that if you want the privilege of waiving or modifying the height or other development regulation, you better have a better product.
It recognizes that the grant of zoning waivers is not cost free and that in the cost benefit equation the design merits of the building that seeks to use those waivers is a valid form of consideration.
So you ask, well how are we going to define what makes a design excellent. To a large extent, my answer is that to define upfront the specific design features that make a building exceptional, excellent, whatever word you want to use, would defeat the very purpose of the permit which is to encourage diversity of outstanding architecture.
Perhaps it would be more fruitful for us to focus on the process by which these judgments are made to be sure that they are made carefully, openly and fairly. At a minimum, of course, we have to follow the selective notice, public hearing and common proceedings of the Hewlett process which involves the boards, community boards, borough president planning commission and city council.
Is there something more that would make a more informed deliberate process and our proposal was to create a panel of architects and design professionals to advise the actors in the Hewlett process in the design issues. There may well be other ways to approach this issue, but I'd suggest that rather than attack our advisory panel as a kind of star chamber or as a committee of comity hall tracks [phonetic] as some suggested, we should instead put our minds to putting constructive ways to introduce design excellence into the restoration. Thanks.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: With that base, I thank information and presentation about the proposal and we'll move on now to look at the issues for the city as represented by two of its leading organizations.
It gives me pleasure to introduce Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society. Kent was welcomed back as president of MAS in New York in January of 1999. Previously he had served the society as its president from 1983 to 1985 and for most of us represented the sense of what the Municipal Arts Society could mean for the city. From 1995 to 1997 he was president of the New York state Historical Association and was the historical associate advice chairman from 1993 to 1995.
In 1998 Mr. Barwick became director of the waterfront project now known as the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, the null created project organized by a coalition of leading New York and New Jersey foundations which was originally housed at the Rockefeller's Fund. Mr. Barwick continues to serve as director of the project which is now under the auspices of the Municipal Arts Society.
From 1978 to 1983 he was chairman of the New York City's Landmark Preservations Commission and in 1977 was administrator of the Adopt a Station Program to improve New York City subways.
From 1981 through 1987 he served as an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and was its northeast regional chairman from 1988 to 1990. Please welcome Kent Barwick.
MR. BARWICK
MR. BARWICK: I've been meaning to get that resume changed and show you the wisdom of Joe's good sense in learning something about the zoning resolution, so one day if Sandy retires or goes to the bench, it would be something important me to do.
My assignment we're going to have some slides here to say something about the issues for the city. We're lucky to live in the most dynamic city on the face of the earth today probably as a memory of man. We're as exciting and new with a population that's as ever changing this year than we were at the end of the 19th century.
I think the issue for the city is how to fashion a set of controls to govern its growth that are respectful for its built conditions but are also respectful of preserving another important tradition which is architectural and commercial ambition.
This is a city that has made us great by its exceptions like the Guggenheim, the Chrysler Building, perhaps even soon to be under water Frank Gary [phonetic] in lower Manhattan and I think we all want it that way. We don't want this to be museums of the 19th century.
So the job of a good city planning commission, good mayor, is to try to construct a way to balance these, to balance the tensions between the dynamic and the predictable and the bankable. We're a city that's been meek in shutting out small investors by having a development process so complex that only those with very, very deep pockets can survive the (inaudible) owners processes, so the Municipal Arts Society is very proud to have been responsible for introducing zoning into the city of New York rather like boasting the naval architecture of the Titanic.
Father of the tax code, but because I think it would be hard to get many people who would think that was a great introduction, but everybody in this room is here thanks to Baruch for sponsoring this. I think it's exactly (inaudible) having this discussion. Everybody is now very comfortable.
We are -- what's in the Unified Bulk and what isn't and I think there's a growing sophistication about it that I think this conference comes along at exactly the right moment.
It's traditional in these events to begin by praising Mayor Guiliani and Joe Rose for taking on this job and I'm going to save that praise until the end. And now it seems to me that we were deeply concerned, I think, like many in this audience and in the city, we bought the intent and eloquently stated by the chairman of the three terrific staff people who have just spoken making a simpler resolution and willing to deliver better results on average and leave the door open for exceptions, and we thought it would be useful and what we've done is what I'll now show you is that I asked Michael Cortler [phonetic] who some of you know.
I asked Michael Cortler through environment simulation center to actually go out and we asked borough presidents and neighborhood reaches, for examples, for sites they'd like to see remodeled and we remodeled some sites and I thought we'd take you through those sites and tell you traditionally telling you what I'm going to tell you, telling you what I told you that in general you find evidence that the intent of Unified Bulk Program -- our support and your support it demonstrates there are some issues that are not being addressed and that is the case in one case where the situation is made worse -- (inaudible).
Let's see if this all works. We're supposed to be doing these side by side. We're looking here will be looking at a site just north of Frederick Douglas Circle between 112th and 113th Street. It's R 72. Under the current zoning -- and we'll be with that in a minute. Here we are. Under the current zoning on this site likely get a 14 story building with a large amount of open space on the side street devoted to the required parking.
On the right you'll see the aerial view of this same site as it would be developed we think under the Unified Bulk, essentially a six story building with parking placed beneath the structure on the side street.
Let's look at this from street level. I think here I think a street that needs the test that we've spoken about a few moments ago, configuration is looking like it fit it comfortably with that neighborhood.
Here's a very dramatic example. This is the lower west side. This is a full block known as Varick, Vandam, Spring and Hudson zoned M one six. Under the current zoning on the left, it's possible using the bonuses that are available to construct a building that is over 170 feet high and on the right is the consequence of the proposing the Unified Bulk regulations, building much more closely reach to the full brackets of this neighborhood.
This is probably the good moment to announce that Mr. Karnovsky's presentation was just terrific in spirit and a good sense of it. I think most people in New York realize that the right building on this site is neither of the buildings on this screen. That 700 foot building is a monster in that particular neighborhood and that the building on the right doubly (inaudible) and this seems to be one of those places where it's good that there's a special permit process and it would be wonderful to see terrific members of international design community that's centered in New York have a crack with a good developer doing this thing.
The illustration we're showing you is an office hotel combination which we don't think is unlikely on this site, so this would be a good example of a place where we'd like to see somebody go to the trouble of designing a superior building and presenting it.
One of the assets that we have as a city is we're not only a financial capital, communications capital, fashion capital, food capital of the world, but we have the greatest collection of designers ever resembled on the face of the earth in this city and sadly is little touched by the ---this is a good place to put the work.
The city should call upon the architectural community to participate on the advisory role in this process (inaudible) just
spoke about go out to Flushing.
Current zoning just showed these yesterday at the city planning. I think we have the arithmetic wrong, but in effect we're not sure that that's true, but in effect, the current zoning on the left and the new zoning is on the right and this is revision under the Unified Bulk makes it possible when there's a building that's sort of out of scale with the neighborhood, this is awful out of -- R 6 site and this particular case the current zoning allows a mid block tower is much taller than the present allows something to build a building within ten feet (inaudible).
Nobody can remember street hidden zoning resolution, how the building in this area ever got approved. The building is unpopular and how it ever got approved but because it's there (inaudible) we think that's silly. We think the qualities of this block are better protected by eliminating this provision, and we mean to be in the context of our broad support for this resolution to be saying to the commissioner's city planning commission we think this is a (inaudible).
Finally, I apologize for the slide on the right. It's no better. This is a site that demonstrates a big problem that we're not pretending to address in the resolution and this is a problem of community facilities. We're looking at 132nd Street in central Harlem, and it is zoned R 72. And under the current zoning there are three major (inaudible) here theoretically not necessarily but just for purposes of illustration you see that you're not getting the results that we'd like on this side street and under the proposed state in the slide that shows the blue, you're not getting much of an improvement.
This is -- the city planning commission is not advertised in solving this problem. In fact, they have been very frank with everybody saying they haven't. I think this illustrates what I think I'd like the main point to be.
It's terrific to gather every 50 years to redo the zoning, but that's absurd. In a city that changes, basic economy changes, population changes, new technology makes things possible, it's silly to be shackled with zoning resolutions that can't be changed regularly and the prerequisites are really in this program. That is making the zoning resolution for ordinary people can understand.
I have nothing against the ten or eleven people in this city that make a substantial living decoding the zoning resolution. There will always be a place for them, but I think it helps all of us elected officials, community board people, investors as Joe has spoken to, make it predictable and understandable to use these tools rather than to brand-new tools of computers, old fashion tools, paper boxes to figure out what kind of results we're getting and then make changes.
We're deeply concerned about the consequence of the present city policy on industry and the subject we're studying. We're very glad for the work they've done on the waterfront, but the opportunities are so great for work in the city we suspect that there needs to be free -- let work take advantage of these extraordinary growth opportunities that exist for us and we reclaim these long neglected and impacted lands, so it seems to me that in the search for the perfect there's a danger that we may not recognize the value of this program and the balance that I spoke about between tensions.
Is this the perfect balance we've brought forward today? Well, of course not. Does anybody think Al Gore is FDR? Is there public anywhere who thinks there's a possible resemblance between George Bush and Abraham Lincoln? Yet we commit ourselves to choosing a leader that will have in his hands the future (inaudible) is they're so timid of changing (inaudible) it's hard to recognize that this isn't perfect.
It hasn't been presented as being perfect. It's I think the consequence of which revealed in these slides and the ones that were shown suggest that this is a package that is worth support. Thank you very much.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: In the book that we have prepared, the comments of the Municipal Arts Society previously to this as some of the slides that you have shown, that Kent has just shown as well as some of the drawings from city planning commission are all contained in particular chapters.
I'd like to now welcome Frank Braconi, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, non-profit policy research organization concerned with the physical and economic development of the city.
Frank has written numerous support articles dealing with housing community, development and the urban environment. He teaches urban economics at NYU Real Estate Institute at Hunter College. He holds a Master's Degree in economics from NYU and is completing his doctoral studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and perhaps more than anyone else has made the Citizens Housing and Planning Council a very valuable and effective voice for housing and planning issues within the city.
Please welcome Frank Braconi.
MR. BRACONI
MR. BRACONI: I would put down I had a few predecessors who had something to do with CH as well. And I think it's -- I have no slides for you today, no graphics, but it's very convenient following Kent because I can just refer you to his slides and they will serve very well.
In fact, Kent's comments are very consistent with the ones I would like to make although I would like to take a slightly different point of view, slightly different perspective and look at the Unified Bulk document not so much as a zoning document but as a planning document and look at the underlying planning rationale that's here and basically I think it's something that's been missed.
We hear a lack of planning has gone so long in this city that when we see planning, we don't recognize it for what it is, and I think the Unified Bulk proposal is first and foremost a planning document.
Now, if we look at the proposal just in terms of its individual specific provisions, we can kind of total up which provisions are favorable to development, the which provisions that are negative to development or more restrictive to development and get some kind of tally and go through the 600 some pages and kind of keep score and maybe mark them off with some kind of slash marks and finally at the end of the day, well, it's plus two or negative three or whatever the tally is.
I think that's a very wrong way to look at it. We have to look at the overall strategic idea of it and what it's trying to accomplish in terms of long term spacial development of city and how that looks in terms of whether it's favorable to development or negative to development.
Now, I think when we ask that question by the way, the answer that are an emphatic yes. It would be favorable to the long-term development to the city, sustainable to the city. Our land use strategy, not just specifics of the zoning resolution, but the overall land use strategy of New York City, is woefully obsolete and out of sync and that's what we really have to look towards.
Does this document going to forward some kind of modernization of that policy or isn't it. I think before in order to answer that question, we have to look at what has gone on in New York City in the '90s and what has become apparent in the '90s but has kind of long-term structural trends that have been going on in the city for a long time and the economic basis of the
city that Kent referred to briefly.
New York basically peaked as an industrial city in 1940. It's been in 50 years of industrial decline, continuous industrial decline. It's taken a long time and caused a lot of hardship, but that process is almost complete. The city's industrial base is just about gone. I think industrial manufactures form is less than 5 percent of all employment in the city now, and at the same time during that 50 years you had a modern sector of the economy, a service sector, commercial sector, finance sector, communication, et cetera. It was always communications, et cetera.
It was always there certainly throughout the 20th century and it was growing throughout the 20th century. What the decline to the industrial sector offset overshadows the increases in the more advanced service sector for many years sometime in the 1990s those lines appeared to have crossed.
There was not much left to lose in the industrial sector, yet the conditions, world wide conditions, global conditions, were favorable to the further growth of the service sector in New York City, so beginning in the 90s I think you're beginning to see a new economy and new growth spurt in New York City and the question is how are we going to deal with that growth spurt. How are we going do deal with those development pressures.
I don't think what you're watching now is a simply a business cycle. I think you're looking at a long-term structural cycle that is favorable to the city's growth, its development and its economy and how are we going to cope with that.
Are we going do have a zoning resolution that can handle that? Now, let me also throw some numbers at you from some slides in terms of the kind of facts we're now seeing during the 90s or culminating in the '90s in the city's spacial geographic and social geography.
One of the key aspects of what the new economy is producing in the city is a growth a professional class, highly compensated professional class of workers. That's -- yes, it is us. Some research that CPHC recently did we took a current population survey, looked at the wage premium for different categories of workers in New York City relative to the rest of the country, adjusting for demographics, adjusting for citizenship, for age, gender just trying to isolate out the premium that a highly educated person gets in terms of New York City gets in terms of their wages.
In 1992 it was $5,000 premium for a person with a college education or more in New York City compared to everywhere else in the country. In 1997 it was $10,000 more. That premium, that New York City premium to highly educated workers doubled in five years. That's a remarkable change.
Perhaps even more remarkable set of data recently done by the independent budget office New York City's independent budget office, they looked at the transit income in New York City, whose earning it in New York City over the last 15 years or so.
In 1987, 28 percent of all income in New York City was earned by households that earned at least $125,000. That's 28 percent. By 1997 ten years later 41 percent was earned by those households. That is an astounding change in the income distribution in the city in such a short time.
These are the kind of changes in our social composition that the new economy is bringing forward, but implications as they have the zoning and land use policy and it has very profound implications for it. First question I ask is where those people live, that burgeoning professional class, where we all live. I'll give you some answers on that.
My colleague Elaine Teribeo [phonetic] and I recently looked at this question. 1960, 20 percent of high wage family high income families in New York City lived in Manhattan, 20 percent. By 1990, 30 percent lived in Manhattan. We've also analyzed some data from 1990 age that's now available BHS which is now available. Those trends continued it looks like probably about 35 percent by 1995 of high income families live in Manhattan.
If you take all households not just families because families is kind of biased of that borough type households, if you look at for instance nonfamily households which is basically singles and unrelated individuals living together and look at high income nonfamily households, 62 percent of them live in Manhattan not south of 96th Street or in the two community boards of west Brooklyn that border of river. 62 percent.
What is that producing in the demand for land and land values and in housing values in the city. We all see it every day actually in our communities and in the newspaper articles.
Another set of data from the 1999 HVS what we looked at is we looked at the unrelated regulated housing market as a better indicator than the overall housing markets of where the -- pressures are. We looked at the change from 1996 to 1999, segregated the city into three income groups, community boards through income medium income and high income.
The average rent in the unregulated sector in low income community boards increased 7 and a half percent. In middle income neighborhoods 13 percent, in high income 27 percent. This is the market pressure that we're reading about in the New York Times, but it's not happening all over the city. It's happening in ten community boards. That's what's pulling it all up.
So what does that mean for the overall spacial geographics for the city? What it means is we're getting a lopsided development pattern with the new economy. We're getting over development in some areas and no development in others.
What I believe the Unified Bulk proposal is saying is that is not a sustainable development pattern, that that development pattern has to be fanned out if it's going to be sustained in the long run and facilitate the further growth of the city's economy.
People tend to focus on how many housing units we're producing in a year, and the trends of downward trend throughout the 20th century has focused on and remained, et cetera.
Let's pick 5,000 units as new housing units per year as an adequate amount or suitable goal to the city in the next ten years, 25,000 a year, that's 250 in a decade. Where are we going to put them? No one ever seems to ask that. Is the plan to put 250,000 housing units in lower Manhattan in the next ten years? Does anyone really think that's a politically feasible goal or even a physically feasible goal for that matter? We have to have someplace to put those units if we're going to create them.
In fact, if we don't have someplace to put them, they're not going to be created and core Manhattan is not the only place -- it's not going to accommodate them all.
Again, if the development is going to be sustained, it has to be more even and more balanced than we've seen in the '90s and I think that's what Unified Bulk is getting at. I think in the long run with the kind of economic pressure we're seeing in the city in the 90s in the new economy, if we don't start to create more neighborhoods that people want to live in, we're going to end up with no neighborhoods that people want to live in because you're going to have over development in some and no development in the others and nobody is going to want to live in any of them and this kind of economic resurgence that
we're now seeing is going to be choked off.
Now quickly, because I'm running out of time, I want to relate this back to you, Unified Bulk. How does Unified Bulk Program address something. Quickly the way I see it first I think by setting some parameters on the type of development you can have in Manhattan where the development pressure is.
Specific provisions, height limits, the rent restrictions on zoning lot merges, indirect or in some kind of restrictions on density bonuses, et cetera.
Secondly, I think it's making a statement about what is the best of New York. What is the urban -- what is the urban form that is attracting that new urban professional class back to the city, trying to identify what it is and I think that's where the contextual provisions come in.
Clearly when you look at the neighborhoods that are favored in the cities, they are primarily contextual neighborhoods that have some kind of cohesive form to them, and I think this proposal is trying to expand that urban form
to a larger area of the city.
Third, I think by beginning the process of coming to grips with community facilities, we saw that in Kent's last slide. Think about it. When the zoning resolution was passed in 1961, there was no such thing as Medicaid or Medicare. 30 percent of high school graduates went to high school, now 70 percent do.
We have to come to terms with the institutional needs of the city, of our population and of our communities and how those institutions are affecting the communities and the quality of life, deal with the parking, deal with the bulk and the other issues.
Now, I think it's very important also to realize Unified Bulk proposal is only beginning in all those areas especially in the last one, community facilities, as Kent indicated. It takes some tentative steps in the direction of coming to grips with these issues, balancing the economic needs of the city with respect to the service center and the non-profit sector and the environmental affects that those facilities produce.
In the long run let me just go through a couple of the issues which I was asked to talk explicitly about. What are the long-term issues that we want to get and that this provides a framework for us to start on so we can start to address these.
I think one, the issue of automobiles and transportation, how do automobiles fit into our transportation structure in the long run. Where do we put them when we're not driving them is a very important question.
Secondly, the balance between the economic benefits of the environmental impacts of the community facilities uses questions of mixed use districts and they're all limited in the modern economy as the border of work and home life begins to meld.
Mixed use buildings for that matter some -- most importantly, updating our zoning map. It's been 40 years really since the zoning map has experienced any substantial change and in that time our economy has been entirely been remade. Social geography has been reoutlined. The city has been totally remade.
We need to bring into sync the zoning map which says where things are supposed to be and the reality of where they are and where they need to go. We haven't done that at all. It's been almost a tabu issue to deal with map changes. If you're going to get them, though, you're going to get communities to agree to those map changes that are necessary. You have to give them some security about what they're bargaining for. What are we trading off here or else the status quo is going to be preferred if there's no surefire predictability about what they're trading for and what they're negotiating for and that's why I think the Unified Bulk proposal provides such an important framework.
If we are going forward in the next 20 years and make the city more liveable and make it more prosperous, we have to start moving on some of these issues. If we quiver on some of the details or let some of the quivers about some of the details stop us from going forward in that long-term reform, I think it's eventually going to come back and haunt us in a very serious way. Thank you very much.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: Thank you, Frank. We'd now like to ask Michael Sillerman and Bruce Fowle to join us here as we begin part three of the morning.
We divided part three into two parts. First Michael and Bruce talking about the implications of Unified Bulk on development in Manhattan to be followed after a very short break to give you a chance to stretch, maybe get a cup of coffee and by Richard Roberts and Mark Ginsberg talking about implications outside of Manhattan.
Michael Sillerman is a partner of Roseman & Colin and chairman of the Land Use and Growing Practice, group of the real estate department.
Mr. Sillerman regularly represents a variety of major developers and institutions including commercial banks, medical institutions, schools, museums and religious organizations in New York City's Land Use Review and Landmark Procedures.
Mr. Sillerman is chairman of the Landmark Committee and Advice Chair of Planning and Zoning Committee of the Real Estate Board of New York and is also a member of the Committee on Historic Preservation and Land Conservation in the real property section of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
Thank you for welcoming Michael Sillerman.
MR. SILLERMAN
MR. SILLERMAN: Thank you. I've been asked to address the legal and development issues that will be the consequences of the adoption of the Unified Bulk and to discuss what systems will be affected by Unified Bulk and whether it's clear in terms of how much its criteria will be applied.
I come at it with certain premises that I think are required for realistic evaluation of Unified Bulk. First that land is scarce in New York and expensive rezoning is slow and often difficult to achieve a consensus upon and this city planning administration should be complemented in getting ahead of the curve in some instances on that, for example, the Chelsea rezoning to allow mixed use, one of the rare examples of where the art activities came in and started changing the neighborhood and city planning got it. And finally that it is difficult and undesirable to clear occupied housing or to redevelop community facility sites.
We're the big picture here that one of our priority issues is that the supplied housing in New York has not kept pace with population growth. Our population has grown from 1981 to 1999 as a recent New York Times article pointed out by 350,000, but the supply of rental housing only grew by 442,000 units in that period and last year I think we were very happy that we got 10,000 units which is far short of the 25,000 that Frank mentioned and really should be a number that's 30 to 40,000.
The Unified Bulk at this point is very much a work in progress. It has raised a number of issues for the development community and for a number of non-profit institutions which have led them to conclude that in its present form, it's very problematic; but these are issues that are potentially fixable and solvable.
For our purposes today, though, what I'd like to observe is an analytic, what I think Unified Bulk says and what it does are in some instances two very different things.
The report concludes, and I'm quoting, that in the context of the overall development in the city and the distribution of the development among the city's high, medium and low density zoning districts is quote, development neutral.
It also says that the same amount of development that could be accommodated on a given site in the future without the action could be accommodated in the future with the action in the same location. Now, in saying that, it notes two exceptions and those exceptions are really the major issue or one of the major issues. It says with the exception of the imposition of height limits and with the exception of more restrictive split lot rules, so that if you say development neutral means can you build the same amount at the same cost on an as of right basis, it is decidedly not in its present form for the reasons that I'll explain.
It also really is a profoundly radical document which replaces an old ideology of sort of Corbuzy [phonetic]. I didn't know tower in the park, but an idealogy which also allowed a very varied building forms to be built because you could also do a height and setback building, a height and -- alternative height and setback building, you could do a housing quality building.
With a new varied prescriptive doctrine one size fits all contexualism which legislates a building form with very few alternatives and there are both issues of economics and both the kind of urbanism you get and analysts like an Ada Louise Huxtable have raised issues about the extent to which this promotes conformity in a kind narrow and reactionary and she actually said dangerous kind of trend, so I think in its present form the Unified Bulk has significant and problematic ramifications for the economics of building, for building quality housing production, the preservation of existing building stock and for the development of the community facilities, and I want to make three points about that.
First, it potentially changes development economics in important ways primarily by imposing closed envelopes and height limits and restricting the transfer of floor area across district boundaries, and you need to -- it's important to understand the importance of air rights to housing development and commercial development in New York.
Land is typically a third to almost a half of development costs and I asked Jerry Hanes [phonetic] to give me a list of recent projects that were developed and we looked at the percentage of footprint versus air rights and the projects like the Impala, the Chatum, the Sashill, [phonetic] Chartwell House Saint Agnus site, the related Random House project, and it ranged from 6 percent to 55 percent, but it was often in the higher range of that.
If you think of the typical site that city planning analyzes in EIS where you have a 200 foot block front with 10,000 into the footprint and you have four story air rights parcels, that's really saying that -- and it's a 10 FAR zone, so you have five to six FAR. You have something like 40, 50, 60 thousand feet that you can develop from those air rights parcels, and the ability to get that is very important because it averages down your land costs.
It gives you a project of the different scale. Obviously it gives you a better building. It gives you your best views and your most valuable units at the top, but it also relieves the pressure to clear the site and you know that's one thing in the whole air rights discussion and I think we haven't looked at it, but to the extent that air rights is really a preservation technique for landmarks for occupied housing, for community facilities and we focus entirely on the tall tower that you get --
END OF TAPE.
Uniform set of slashes going across a site and which would it be more pleasing? Is it better logistically and do you get more light in there on the street, so there are the features in the proposed zoning like the 33 percent tower coverage would restrict ability to do air rights and that has been pointed out and the revised proposal allows in turn five along with the amount of tower coverage that would change that effect, but the other place that it happens is these very aggressively low height limits, and I don't see how it can be concluded that you can build the same amount of floor area on the same site under the proposed zoning because the way height factor zoning works, you take into account the open space and the entire site and you don't have a fixed envelope so that if you had a site where a landmark church that was one or two stories high and it had a hundred thousand feet of air rights to use and you could sell it to your neighborhood in a height factor R 8 site, that institution could develop a 24 story building, say, and use the 100,000 feet of air rights.
In the proposed zoning where the height limit is 140 feet, it's 14 stories, you're not going to be able to use that and actually, the EIS does concede that, that for community facilities with existing buildings on the site, they may not be able to use that bulk and actually it concludes that there's not a development impact because you might be able to get a special permit to use it, but there is a certain kind of almost schizophrenia about whether we want as of right zoning or whether we want discretionary, so we say we should have that. We say that we don't like negotiated zoning, but then we have this example or we have Kent's example of the Hudson Square site where there is development desire down there.
So well, what's the answer? This should be a discretionary process. Obviously the split lot rules are proposed to be changed and everyone professes a great amount of mystery about these. I actually don't think they're as complex from a layman's point of view as everybody makes them out except when you look at the actual does a C what go into a C (inaudible), but the concept is simply saying that if a block could be all R 10, then you control the development that you get with the height and setback envelope, and if there are different commercial districts on the block or if you had -- why should there be less transfer among those districts if there's higher commercial zoning on the avenues than there is in mid block, than there would be in if it was a pure R 10, and we're changing this.
And actually, as I was coming over here, I noticed that one of the examples of split lot was the Baruch building across the street which is a combination of a C52 which is 10 -- is ten residential community facility and commercial but the mid block is C63 which is a nonresidential but a ten community facility.
Now, when I looked on the chart, the chart does not say that you can transfer between a C 5 2 and a C 6 3, and I don't know whether that was the intention or whether that was just another one of the hidden treasures in this 500 page document, but that's what happens as we analyze and that's another point I'll get to, but so to the extent that you can't realistically use your air rights or transfer them across district boundaries, that is effectively a change in development economics.
It's effectively a downzoning and there are other things that potentially make buildings more expensive to develop to the extent that you have to have streetwalls on two streets and you have to build two buildings on each side of the through lines instead of one on one side or in the middle, eliminating residential plazas, making things that are formally as of right into processes.
Obviously, changed development economics and some of these things are particularly difficult for community facilities because these as it's been pointed out these fixed height limits for buildings that have higher floor to floor heights -- and the AIA has gone into this -- presents a problem.
It is also a kind of irony because the effects on these are more in some ways emerging districts than in the mature ones because this doesn't affect midtown or downtown but Hudson Square or the Madison Square Garden area commercially or the middle density districts and Manhattan now north of 96th Street or on the lower east side or lower boroughs is something that the developers who work in that area have raised an issue to me, to the city about.
The second point is the Unified Bulk has been very disruptive to the orderly development process because we're in a period where we don't know when it's going to be adopted and there isn't a clear commitment to a grace period or to grandfathering, and if you talk to the active architects, you know, they're saying I have some projects where I could make it work either way but I don't know which one to develop, so what should I do now?
And the second affect is that the hidden treasure, one I just mentioned with Baruch, when you look at this document because all of these things interrelate, each time you look at it, there are some issues that come out and the department has been very responsive where there hasn't been an intention technically to have an effect to say we'll work with you to cure it. But when a document is that long, it's hard to catch all of them, so it would be very helpful at the point at which a consensus is reached that there is some period of time to either number one, to make sure it all works and number two, to have some kind of transition period.
The third issue which is really more of Bruce's issue, but I think there's a concern for builders about the lack of diversity and the lack of quality of the built form that we're going to get, and I think there's a kind of irony again that just when we're getting some very exciting and innovative architecture like the Louis Vuitton building on 57th Street that we're mandating this very prescriptive built form and that street which Michael pointed out, the AIA, proposal, look at midtown which does allow diversity right on 57th Street. You get very different buildings.
You get the Pay Frank Williams [phonetic], Four Seasons and you get the Platt Bargnell [phonetic] Building and then you get this Louis Vuitton Building and think of what that was like to go into the borough superintendent with those facets and say how do you measure streetwall continuity.
Well, you remove that issue with the Unified Bulk, but could you remove certain kinds of opportunities just at the time as Paul Goldberger pointed out in the New Yorker the other day and I'm sure we'll talk about it in his talks, the towers and the skyscrapers that we're building are not a simple form anymore, and there's a technology that allows for very varied things to do and that certainly for a builder or community facility we'd like the opportunity to do that and not just in the central core of midtown or downtown Manhattan, so I think that's an issue. Thank you.
MR. WOLLMAN
MR. WOLLMAN: Bruce Fowle is a founding principal and a principal in charge of design of Fox & Fowler Architects. He created the fiscal basis of the firm's design and sets the direction for the design in each of its architectural projects. His work has been widely published and includes numerous award-winning projects from private residences to cultural institutions and high-rise multi-use complexes.
Among Mr. Fowle's best known projects are the Condanas Building [phonetic] and four time (inaudible) the American top museum, the addition and renovation to the historic Spence School, the Embassy Suites Times Square Hotel. The highly acclaimed Bausch and Lomb headquarters in Winter Garden, Rochester, New York was completed in 1996.
Current work includes the 39 story Royder's Building at 3 Times Square, renovation of the King Bridge Armory and the Roosevelt Avenue subway station. He is a former vice president of the AIA New York chapter and currently serves as chairman of the AIA New York Zoning and Urban Design Committee. Mr. Fowle received the AIA 1994 Harry B. Rutkins award for his contribution toward the innovative rezoning the upper east side avenues and continues to lend his expertise to the shaping of the zoning and urban design initiatives throughout the city.
Please welcome Bruce Fowle.
MR. FOWLE
MR. FOWLE: Thank you, Henry. Leave the lights for just a minute, please. Speaking primarily on behalf of AIA, as Co-chairman Mark Ginsberg of the AIA zone design committee, it has been -- the AIA has supported this proposal from the beginning for all the reasons that Joe mentioned earlier in terms of pragmatics of the existing document and with the approval processes and so forth.
We had many concerns about the form giving aspects of it and we have been greatly encouraged by numerous discussions with Joe and his committee, many of whom are here, in working through some of these issues, and they have indicated that a lot of these concerns are going to be addressed in the final document.
We also see this document as very -- as not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a good foundation from which we can build and continue to change. As Kent said earlier, this is something that should be ongoing dialogue and let's not wait 50 years. Let's wait at the most maybe ten years and perhaps maybe even mandate some kind of review on some sort of cycle like that.
I think what frustrates us the most is a lack of vision of what we're doing here. We're talking about zoning. We're not talking about planning, and we don't really have a vision of what the built form of New York wants to be.
We're also concerned about quality of life and the kinds of -- we're talking about formulas for shaping buildings and reducing zoning lot mergers and so forth, and we're thinking from the outside; but are we really thinking from the inside? What kind of building stock are we going to have?
New York has some of the worst housing anywhere in the world and a lot of the massing, the low rise massing that we're talking about is not going to improve that. It can only make it worse.
Another concern is have we really found the balance between predictability and creativity, flexibility which is an issue that has already been addressed and predictability in the neighborhoods but are we really relating this to the neighborhoods. Are we being sensitive to the community scale and character.
Design, of course, is a primary issue and we're still wondering whether the formula that's been proposed of having this design review committee is really the right way to go. It certainly is better than not having it at all, but we're not convinced that we're with all the predictability and uniformity that is coming out of this proposal that we're balancing that properly or sufficiently with the options of flexibility and creativity.
The last primary issue that we have is a community facility which has been addressed and we know that the city planning is working on that and we are waiting for the concrete proposal as to how they wish to handle that because of the variety of conditions from individuals, small school additions to major campuses and so forth.
Now, to try to talk about everything the AIA has discussed in ten minutes is pretty tough, so since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'd like to start with some slides. Since my charge is to talk about Manhattan, I'll just start out with a little bit of the history and looking at a building like this reminds us that most of Manhattan was built as most cities in the world were built at pedestrian scale, no elevators. Everything was walked up and everything from institutions to town houses, row houses were all at a very low individual scale.
Each had its own sense of identity and character, and we're losing that, and I'd say south of 96th Street the bulk of Manhattan has now transformed into larger, less human scale buildings, and it's something that we have to face.
Of course, the early high-rises in any city around the world and a hundred years ago was the church spire, and we all know that has long given way to the commercial high-rise.
Once the elevator was invented, we started going up, and this is one of the finest examples of at one point the highest building in the world. It was still a straight streetwall building with a cap, but it followed very, very strong architectural formulas with the base shaft and cap work light on the top.
Then we started saying, well, the high-rise on the side streets were basically one-sided buildings or had one facade that was developed. The other three sides are really what we call scar tissues. You can see where actually signage put on the scar tissue is signage and it's simply painted over which I know is also something being addressed, and in the background you see one of the real early towers, kind of in the first spirit the church spires, but limited to the what is called the 45 percent rule, which as is this building which is very different from the rules that we're talking about today because this was a maximum of 25 percent of a site and in those days there weren't zoning law mergers, so it was actually 25 percent of the actual footprint of the building.
Now we're talking about between 25 and 30, 33 percent minimum of a zoning lot merger site which might be a whole block or a third of a block or something like that. But you can see the spirit of New York really evolved out of these towers.
Another thing that's unique about them that you don't see so much anymore is that they're what we call towers in the round, windows on all sides, architectural development on all sides. They don't back up to the lot lines and have windowless land facades.
Deco period started to come in. This was of course in the 30s, 20s, 30s, West Side Towers, very majestic, something which we cannot do today and really prewall buildings really culminated with the Rockefeller Center which may be the best of large development, large urban developments, anywhere in the world.
A lot of the neighborhoods started to create uniformity, such as Park Avenue and the beauty of Park Avenue was that because they had only this frontal facades to deal with, the developers and architects really put their money and energy into developing those facades, so we have a lot of texture, three dimensionality, balcony projections, ornamentations, cornices, which are no longer legal. Facades were beautifully scaled, beautiful developed mid-rise buildings.
And then after the war, we started to get this kind of mass development which is characterless, no humane qualities to it, very little light and air and so forth. And then along came East Vanderal [phonetic] who in a very underscale building maybe not built to the maximum allowable development made a jewel of a building that was setback from a plaza and everybody said well, this is heaven. Let's change everything to make this the way we build from here, which is really the genesis of the 1961 zoning.
So that produced a lot of things like sidewalk widening, so this building on the left is really setback a little bit. You can see a little scar tissue next to it.
Massive slabs like this which is totally out of character with the existing infrastructure of the kind of tenement scale buildings on the avenues. Total discontinuity in streetwall scale, character. Sidewalk widenings which sometimes work -- and