Capital, Zoning, and Comprehensive Planning
New Pathways for New York
New York City doesn’t know how to plan. Many of the fiercest debates happening in our city today are about rezonings, or changes to a neighborhood’s zoning codes that have the potential to create new housing, displace long-time residents, facilitate the creation of new amenities, and accelerate gentrification. But rezoning, especially as both Mayors Bloomberg and deBlasio pursued it, isn’t planning. Planning is, or at least should be, focused on ensuring that cities have equitable distributions of resources like housing, schools, and healthcare facilities across neighborhoods, while also guaranteeing cities are resilient to the increasing threat of climate change. On the other hand, rezoning constitutes changes to the zoning code, which are often shaped by development interests, speculation, and the desires of the private sector. New York City has spent the past century using zoning as planning, something that has had devastating impacts on the working class, communities of color, and marginalized people living in the five boroughs. For example, if you look at the mass majority of neighborhoods that have faced major rezonings in the past ten years, including Williamsburg, East New York, Jerome Avenue, and Inwood, the nefarious impact of private capital in rezoning is clear. Each of these rezoned areas share something in common – they are communities of color actively threatened by gentrification and rapid displacement. This issue isn’t just theoretical – rezonings have had real impacts on working class New Yorkers. In the five years following the massive 2005 Williamsburg rezoning, nearly a quarter of the neighborhood’s Latinx population was displaced, and the neighborhood rapidly transformed from a diverse, working class community into an upscale hipster haven.
Yet what happened in Williamsburg wasn’t an accident – rezonings have repeatedly been used by the city government to raise property values and attract capital. As a result, New York City works in coalition with major real estate developers to transform neighborhoods for profit, allowing developers to make millions off of real estate deals, while incentivizing landlords to hike rents. This phenomenon, which scholar Sam Stein calls the real estate state, ensures that speculative real estate capital has immense control over our lives, making it hard to fight for the livable neighborhoods we all deserve. Under our current system of zoning and rezoning, developers will only invest in neighborhoods where they know they will make profits, leading to a problematic link between capital investment in vital resources and real estate speculation in neighborhoods across our city. The concessions community groups have won from developers are often weak – programs like Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, which require developers benefiting from a rezoning to set aside a certain percentage of units as affordable, do not address the needs of the poorest New Yorkers, often creating “unaffordable affordable housing units” that aren’t accessible to the majority of neighborhood residents.
The real estate state ensures that everyday people are excluded from making decisions about zoning – the City Planning Commission, the body with the first binding vote in New York’s land use process, has historically consisted primarily of those involved with real estate, finance, and capital. Leah Goodridge, the most visionary, left-wing member of the body, has consistently drawn attention to the central role the City Planning Commission has played in greenlighting projects funded and boosted by the real estate state with little discussion about equity or affordability, let alone the harmful role that capital plays in shaping our cities. Furthermore, our current system of zoning puts housing organizers in a challenging position – it forces us to fight individual rezonings that have the potential to displace our neighbors from their homes instead of creating new systems that allow all New Yorkers to survive and thrive.
Clearly, there are a myriad of issues with this system – its disjointedness, focus on creating profit for the real estate industry, its lack of truly democratic participation, and its sole focus on zoning as the solution to the challenges our city faces. But there is a solution, comprehensive planning, which progressive planners have been pushing for years, that is finally gaining some real momentum in Brooklyn. Comprehensive planning allows planners to present an integrated vision for the future of a city by ensuring that equity, fair distribution of resources, climate justice, and other community identified needs are being addressed. It actively reflects that housing is connected to healthcare, climate resilience is connected to education, and jobs are connected to transit – it sees all of the resources that make a city livable as symbiotic with one another. Furthermore, comprehensive planning presents a vision for a city as a whole – it presses that both resources and housing development need to be shared equitably across all neighborhoods of a city, instead of being heavily concentrated in certain regions.
Most importantly, at least for socialist planners like myself, a strong, enforceable comprehensive plan has the potential to pave the road to a citywide strategy to plan New York around people instead of real estate and finance capital. As a global capital of both real estate and finance, New York’s history and infrastructure have been shaped by the desires of the wealthy and powerful, not the people. A comprehensive plan could change that by accommodating for expansive investments in infrastructure in many working class communities that have been left behind by the city, such as transit improvements or new public schools. A comprehensive plan could push for stringent tenant protections, housing for the homeless, community health clinics, and affordable fresh food accessible to all of our neighbors. Furthermore, the development of a citywide comprehensive plan will be vital to equitably distributing social housing development in New York City, something that is only becoming more important as calls for deepening investments in community land trusts, limited equity co-ops, and other forms of permanently affordable, decommodified, democratically controlled housing continues to grow. Lastly, comprehensive planning could help to place planning power back in the hands of communities, especially when community members are empowered to identify their own needs and centered throughout the planning process. We can plan for a city for the working class, not capital, especially when we look at New York City holistically, and not just neighborhood by neighborhood, or resource by resource. We can plan to meet all of our neighbors’ needs.
Despite all of this, New York City doesn’t have a comprehensive plan – it remains the only major American city that entirely lacks one. And many of the institutions in the city’s planning ecosystem, including the City Planning Commission, are supposed to be enforcing a comprehensive plan that doesn’t exist. But finally, in 2022, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso has put forth a pathway to the generation of a comprehensive plan for the borough, a step in the right direction. Reynoso, a long time critic of neighborhood rezonings and the role they have played in exclusively upzoning Black and brown neighborhoods, has committed to creating a comprehensive plan committed to the integration of healthcare and housing. His comprehensive plan, which is currently undergoing a public engagement process, is being influenced by a wide range of community organizations, input Reynoso hopes to use to craft a plan that will shape his decision making on ULURP projects in the future. In talking about his vision for a comprehensive plan in Brooklyn, Reynoso has emphasized that all neighborhoods have to play a role in providing affordable housing, not just communities like East New York or Downtown Brooklyn, which have been hotspots of development over the past 10 years. Reynoso’s integration of healthcare into his comprehensive plan also shows his understanding of the symbiotic relationships between the different resources people need in a city – housing and healthcare are deeply connected resources that the city must plan for in concert with one another.
Reynoso’s comprehensive plan is a massive step in the right direction for New York. As longtime planner and progressive leader Tom Angotti has argued for decades, a community centered comprehensive plan has legitimate potential to move the needle away from capital and towards everyday people. But the mechanics of Reynoso’s plan remain unclear – how will the borough president, generally an advocate of building more housing, lessen the grip that the real estate state has on Brooklyn, perhaps the borough that has faced the most substantial amount of gentrification in the past few decades. Furthermore, Reynoso has not yet indicated that his comprehensive plan will actively encourage and accommodate the construction of social housing, or developments that are independent from the commodification pressures of the private market and are governed by residents, not a landlord. As calls for the establishment of a social housing authority at the state level become louder, actively planning for a citywide (or at least boroughwide) social housing development strategy in concert with transit, educational, healthcare, and environmental considerations, is vital to ensuring New York begins to liberate itself from the bind of speculative real estate capital. It remains to be seen if this comprehensive planning initiative will fully embrace the self-identified needs of community members, especially individuals living in places like Bushwick, East New York, and Brownsville, that have faced violent divestment at the hands of the city over the past century. A successful comprehensive plan will center the people left at the margins by discriminatory zoning policies and the seemingly limitless power of real estate capital – and we need to see Reynoso’s full plan to accomplish this.
We know zoning has been a poor substitute for a comprehensive plan – it has centered real estate capital, not people. And Antonio Reynoso’s comprehensive plan undeniably pushes our city, and more specifically, Brooklyn, in a stronger direction. However, it remains to be seen if Reynoso’s comprehensive planning initiative will do enough to push New York away from the grips of capital. A comprehensive plan that more explicitly rejects the increasingly dominant role capital plays will do more to make New York a palace for the people, not the wealthy.