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| Yana Paskova for The New York Times |
NY TIMES
The New York City Council passed sweeping changes to the zoning code on Tuesday, compelling private developers to build low-cost rental units and handing Mayor Bill de Blasio a victory on the centerpiece of his efforts to blunt neighborhood gentrification.
The passage of the proposals capped more than two years of behind-the-scenes planning and organizing by the de Blasio administration, which developed a coalition of unions, business organizations, developers and groups representing older residents while wooing skeptical members of the Council.
In the end, the mayor’s plan, which changes zoning requirements across the city, survived opposition from community boards and building trades unions, as well as from New Yorkers concerned that the changes would encourage the very transformation of low-income areas they were meant to head off.
Negotiations with the Council on the major points of the plan, which was made final last week, ensured the inclusion of units affordable to more lower-income residents — including those making 40 percent of the area median income or less — in new developments that benefit from zoning changes, a major concern in poor communities where the mayor’s plan is likely to spur development. The deal, which also includes neighborhood-specific changes to the zoning codes and the creation of housing for older adults, assured the plan’s passage on Tuesday.
City officials compared the adopted proposals to those in other cities, noting that New York’s plan went further by including mandatory creation of below-market rental units that are permanent and reach residents making well under the area median income of $86,300 for a family of four. The Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, called it a “landmark plan.”
Under New York’s plan, developers benefiting from rezonings for either residential growth or greater height and density are, for the first time, required to include units for those with earnings below the median income. The decision about what level of affordability to apply to a given development — between 40 percent and 80 percent of the median income — is to be determined by the local council member. The plan also provides for the creation of units for those making 115 percent of the median income, provided a portion be for those earning much less. The set-asides range from 20 percent to 30 percent of all of the new units.
Though the ultimate effect on the city will most likely not be seen for years, the de Blasio administration has already identified seven areas planned for rezonings that would fall under the new rules, including East New York, Brooklyn; Bay Street on Staten Island; parts of Flushing and Long Island City in Queens; Jerome Avenue in the Bronx; and East Harlem and Inwood in Manhattan.
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| ALEC TABAK/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
HARRY SIEGEL, DAILY NEWS
As Mayor de Blasio’s approval ratings cratered last year, New Yorkers waited to see if he’d ever manage to get out of his own way.
When you effectively become mayor by winning a primary you’d been all but counted out of just weeks earlier, you’re due for a few weeks or even months of Smartest Guy In The Room Syndrome. But two years of unforced errors — most recently including clumsy, nakedly political and utterly unsuccessful bids to ban the carriage horses and put the brakes on Uber, along with his stature-diminishing attempts to offer himself as a national progressive icon — is really pushing it.
Still, critics who breathlessly branded him a one-term mayor should admit: The city’s fundamentals — low crime, cranes everywhere, record crowds and swollen tax coffers — have held up in de Blasio’s New York. And while white voters in particular remain skeptical, his public opinion numbers have rebounded enough that fellow Democrats at least have put down the 2017 primary lines of attack they’d started field-testing last year.
Speaking of fundamentals, though, the chronic conditions that were sapping New York City’s vitality when de Blasio took office are still doing so. You could even call it a tale of two cities — a tale that, it turns out, defies cheap slogans and quick fixes.
The New York City Housing Authority, our city within our city housing a population about the size of Miami’s, remains a moldy, deteriorating mess.
Street homelessness is up, the shelter system is an overcrowded disaster and the seriously mentally ill still aren’t getting the help they and the rest of us need them to receive.
The city’s public hospital system, the care provider of last resort, is hemorrhaging money.
And Rikers Island, despite a prisoner population less than half its peak two decades ago, is a dysfunctional if not downright dystopian place.
There are two through-lines connecting these problems.
First, that these are systems that deal with the neediest among us, and that are overburdened, underfunded and overlooked by too many of the New Yorkers who don’t depend on or encounter them — even as every New Yorker senses in their peripheral vision, as they see more panhandlers and mentally ill people on their streets and trains, how these problems interlock.
Second, these are systems that festered under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who largely got a political pass for them. De Blasio, in part because of the grandiloquent promises he made when running for mayor, does not.
The truth is that these are things a mayor can’t do alone. That the feds have largely abandoned their financial commitments to. That Gov. Cuomo has little interest in helping de Blasio claim credit for fixing.
But in shining a light on the “other” New York, and blaming Bloomberg for its troubles, de Blasio has taken political responsibility for its wellbeing.
And having done so, he’s been getting pummeled by left-right combinations, both from New Yorkers who just want orderly streets and the “bad old days” kept at bay and from those who want the miracle cures — to keep failed hospitals open, make NYCHA’s aging buildings decent places to live again, city jails places that treat every inmate with basic human decency — de Blasio suggested he could provide but has yet to deliver.
for the most part, he’s taken ownership of the intractable problems of the neediest New Yorkers — not the many of us who’ve felt like bystanders to or casualties of the city’s prosperity, but the group economically below that. The ones who need outside help, temporarily or for years, to stand up their own lives and who are often unable to access or even resistant to accepting that help.
The ones who aren’t exactly a potent voting bloc. And who the rest of us are at the mercy of in public spaces if they don’t either find the help they need or end up jailed in lieu of it, but are instead just left to their own devices.
Standing up for those New Yorkers is to de Blasio’s credit. The question now is what he does to actually improve their lives.