A New New York: Reimagining our commercial core
In Part 3 of our New New York Series, we consider the reality that some landlords will need to rethink their underutilized office buildings.
NYC’s Central Business Districts (CBDs) in midtown and downtown Manhattan, LIC, and downtown Brooklyn feature over 500m square feet of office, representing more than 25% of the country’s office space. Pre-pandemic, millions of workers commuted to these districts daily. Now, even as workplaces are allowed to reopen, only a tiny fraction has returned. With new waves of coronavirus predicted through the winter, a full return-to-office is unlikely before mid-2021, if ever again. In the intervening year, new remote work habits will be forged that are likely to become permanent for many, presaging depressed office demand for the long term.
It would be a mistake to view this drop in demand as uniform. It’s likely that some buildings will register barely a dip, while others will see near-total vacancy. Better spaces — well-ventilated, brighter, more flexible, greener, with more outdoor space, more room for social distancing, and well-capitalized tenants — are likely to be OK post-pandemic. For the rest, NYC should be proactive about encouraging their transformation into residential and other commercial uses.
With this in mind, Envelope diagnoses some of the ways in which today’s zoning code is a hindrance to rapid repurposing, and offers suggestions for the way forward.
NYC Zoning is incredibly sophisticated… but also hilariously outdated.
The NYC Zoning Resolution Index of Uses has been largely unrevised since 1961. 1961! Much has changed in the last six decades — people no longer smoke indoors and the percentage of women in the workforce has nearly doubled — but the manufacture of jute, oakum, and sisal are still prominent in the Index. 3D printing isn’t mentioned at all, and neither are vertical farming nor cannabis distribution, in spite of their potential utility to homebound New Yorkers’ during the pandemic. In 1961, the City might not have imagined needing space for fake-meat-making, or DNA sequencing, or lamb cloning, or Juicero, but here we are.
Zoning currently separates manufacturing from residential and office, but it doesn’t need to.
A caricature of manufacturing — with ugly buildings, belching smokestacks, barbed wire, rumbling trucks, and heaps of slag — likely prompted the original creators of NYC zoning to create entire districts that segregate industrial use from urban denizens. In the intervening decades, however, manufacturing technology, artisanal demand, and building design techniques have evolved. There are now plenty of industrial companies that could be quite compatible with traditional office and residential uses, and appropriate for the CBDs.
For example, Use Group 17, light manufacturing, is not currently permitted in any of the City’s CBD’s. Uses within this use group include the manufacture of cosmetics and toiletries, beverages, and clothing. With the proper scale, modern (cleaner, quieter) equipment, and spaces designed to mitigate any negative effects on their neighbors, these industries could find themselves a happy home in underutilized office buildings, couple manufacturing space with showroom or retail space, and integrate seamlessly into the district.
Other Uses that aren’t CBD-permitted, but should be, include R&D lab space, co-packing, medical, meal kit assembly/ghost kitchens, low-energy vertical farming, cannabis distribution (CBD in the CBD!), and more.
How can Zoning evolve to capture the opportunity?
NYC City Planning could update zoning to specify new allowable industries, and update the document every year as others crop up. But maybe the City should go a step further? Instead of specifying allowable uses, the City could focus on regulating the performance of the establishment and how it impacts its neighbors. The mom-and-pop cosmetics company that makes organic soap in a kitchen to sell on Etsy has an entirely different harm-score than a mass-production factory for P&G. Banning cosmetics manufacture altogether solves the problem but misses the opportunity. Instead, the City could ban the negative externalities — setting stringent limits on vibrations, odor, noise, waste, pollution, related truck traffic, etc. By regulating the bad stuff, instead of trying to specify the good, the City will encourage tenant and building innovation; allow more rapid repurposing of vacant buildings; and steer NYC toward a modern future. The goal should be to turn NYC’s CBDs into mixed-use hubs where makerspaces and laboratories flourish alongside traditional office and residential, allowing NYC to build on its existing reputation as a center for artisanal goods, and modern manufacturing.
Mixed use communities — where people live near where they work, shop, and play — will make a more sustainable, decentralized City of Villages. Just as we encourage the City to bring more commercial uses to the neighborhoods, we also encourage it to bring more residential and manufacturing uses to its CBDs. Zoning is a tool that can be rewritten relatively quickly to support this goal and help pave the way toward a brighter future for the city. NYC should think proactively about the 15-Minute City of the future and take steps now to make it happen.
