A New New York: City of Villages
In Episode 2 of our New New York series, we take a closer look at the specifics of zoning that can pave the way for NYC to become a 15-minute city.
Many New Yorkers live in residential neighborhoods and commute 50 minutes each way, in lockstep, morning and evening, to and from Manhattan’s Central Business Districts (CBDs) in midtown and downtown. They leave their homes largely vacant during the workday, and leave their offices largely vacant as they move back home across the city. This beautiful GIF by Justin Fung shows the daily “heartbeat” effect on the population of Manhattan.
The mass-movements model was already cracking under its own weight before the pandemic. Subways were slowing, congestion was growing, highways were crumbling, air and noise pollution were rising. In the pandemic, the model has broken entirely, as citizen health is jeopardized with each subway ride to work. New York needs to reduce its mass movements, radically and quickly.
What can the City do to help reduce demand for intra-borough travel?
For starters, NYC can encourage a redistribution of workspaces, allowing satellite offices to flow into the neighborhoods.
Our friends at Corigin made a similar argument for the suburbs, which have a newfound glow for remote-friendly office work. Now consider the pre-industrial nature of NYC itself, and how the five boroughs are home to over 300 neighborhoods that actually function more like villages. Most have at least one major commercial street, most have schools and churches and shops and bakeries and groceries and doctors’ offices and day care centers. Most also now have struggling or vacant storefront space, with more to come, as the pandemic wreaks havoc on small businesses throughout the city.
Imagine if Goldman Sachs, for one, needing to pay thousands of extra dollars per employee on top of already very pricey office space, were to abandon the majority of its office near World Trade Center, and take over much cheaper, vacant retail and other ground- or parlor floors in the neighborhoods where its employees live. These could be transformed into breezy, flexible workspaces with conference rooms, video-conference booths, event spaces, and hot-desks for when remote workers want to be anywhere but home. Employees would then frequent neighborhood restaurants, shops, gyms, and service providers during lunch and breaks, stimulating their local economy.
This could happen today, to an extent. NYC Zoning features commercial overlays that allow for retail, office, and other commercial uses at the base of buildings along primary commercial streets in otherwise residential zones.
Expand commercial overlays to encourage workspace development in residential neighborhoods.
But NYC can do more, and must, if hundreds of thousands of employees are to be redistributed back to their neighborhoods. The Department of City Planning (DCP) can expand existing commercial overlays to include every avenue and the short end of nearly every block in mid and high-density residential districts (R6 and up). This should be done in concert with a reduction in street parking to free up curb space for cargo delivery, trash receptacles, outdoor cafe seating, and other activity that may result from new commercial spaces. (Side note: community facilities are already permitted in residential districts, which means that schools have the all-clear to occupy the base of residential buildings, reduce density and return safely in September).
With this approach, residential neighborhoods would hum with commercial activity during the day; the city would reduce its carbon footprint; and many workers would be able to bike or walk to work in minutes, hopping back home as-needed to handle family or household matters. DCP should monitor commercial density in these neighborhoods carefully, identifying main street areas suitable for future upzoning to create extra commercial capacity, if required.
But what, then, would companies headquartered in the CBDs do with all their unused office space?
Allow more flexible use of existing CBDs via Section 15.
The city’s massive CBDs have hundreds of millions of square feet of now largely-underutilized office space. NYC needs to make commercial zoning more flexible, quickly, so it becomes less onerous for landlords to repurpose existing office buildings to residential, light manufacturing or makerspace, vertical farming, R+D hubs, medical facilities, or other uses more relevant for the moment.
In addition to modernizing the NYC Zoning Resolution’s Index of Uses (which we’ve discussed here), DCP should focus on dramatically expanding Section 15. Section 15 smooths the way for commercial to residential conversions by relieving the stringency of yard, light and air, and location of use requirements. However, today it only applies to older buildings and only in certain sections of the city. With an enormous drop in office demand, and the need for massive repurposing, DCP should promptly and proactively expand Section 15 throughout the city’s commercial districts.
These are relatively simple regulatory moves, with precedent, so legal challenges would be minimized. DCP can — and should — make them today to encourage a more evenly distributed, green, and family-friendly City of Villages.
