Referring to Coney Island, the NY Post reported today that Kansas Fried Chicken king Horace Bullard said "the city has waited far too long to rezone the district – putting boardwalk property owners such as himself at risk as they face a declining economy, and potentially setting back future redevelopment many years." The city is stalling because, for good reasons, it does not want to accept mega-developer and current primary property owner Joseph Sitt's plan for yet more condos in a high-traffic entertainment area served by eight subway tracks. But this begs the question — if the city knows what it wants, why doesn't the current C7 zoning, mapped there and nowhere else, already reflect this? Why wasn’t this the case years ago, so that any prospective property buyer would have known what they were getting into up front, and could have just gone ahead and built?
Let's give some examples. The current zoning, dating back to 1961, requires far more parking than a location where one would prefer most people to arrive by transit should be forced to provide. The current zoning, in an effort to preserve an amusement zone, prohibits hotels. A seaside entertainment and resort area without hotels? Blackpool, the Coney Island of England which has retained its vitality, has plenty of them.
After the condo proposal was shot down, Sitt shifted his proposal to hotels, but to allow them to be built the city will have to go through a review process that will last for 12 to 18 months. Meanwhile, financing for development projects like this is suddenly gone, gone gone. If anything is going to happen now, I wouldn't be surprised if (while raising taxes cutting funding for the schools and the Administration for Children's services again) the city ends up deeply subsidizing development that until the subsidies are approved was prohibited.
If the zoning is obsolete, why didn't the staff of the Department of City Planning propose to change it? Because the staff of the Department of City Planning has learned that trying to do anything without huge numbers of people screaming for it (or a developer buying property cheap, cutting a deal and then getting an upzoning) is an exercise in frustration. Almost certainly, any proposal (and I mean any proposal) would have been bashed by grandstanding sleazebag pols. So why bother? And if fact, while on the staff of the Department of City Planning I asked the then-director of its Brooklyn Office why the screwed up zoning was being kept in place rather than fixed, given that a future opportunity might be missed? She told me that it would be a waste of Department resources to try to do something when there was no political outcry to do something and no one looking to invest. That's why she was smart enough to be the director. So a process to change the zoning started very late in the game — and will finish when the game is already over.
I had a similar question about Long Island City in the early 1990s. The city released a report saying it wanted a portion of that area to become an office district. So why not change the zoning to ALLOW office buildings to be built? Because the vacancy rate was high, no one is looking to build, so it wasn't worth the cost, effort, and abuse associated with changing the zoning. Well, next thing you know it’s the late 1990s and office rents are soaring and driving businesses out of the city, so the Department of City Planning began the excruciatingly long process of changing the zoning. If finished just in time for the recession earlier in this deacade, and nothing was built.
More and more examples. The city spent years studying the Arverne urban renewal area, and finally reached a redevelopment deal with Forest City Ratner– just after the 1987 stock market crash. It ended up letting Forest City out of the deal, and nothing happened there for more than a decade. The Department updated the zoning for North Park Slope but didn't bother with South Park Slope. Who would bother to build there? Then building went wild, so it rushed through a rezoning of South Park Slope but didn't bother with Sunset Park. Who would ever build there? Until people in Sunset Park started screaming for a rezoning. Perhaps because had the Department of City Planning proposed a rezoning before people started screaming, they would have been screaming in opposition. So why bother?
Not that the developers and large-scale business interests are in favor of sensible rules set out in advance and applying to everyone. In a symposium I attended once, the head of the New York City Partnership suggested helping the city’s economic ocmpetitiveness by changing laws to allow political deals to be cut faster. And Mr. Sitt certainly would have paid more for the Coney Island property if the rules had been set out in advance.
Nothing I have said thus far is intended to imply that when rules ARE set out in advance, they are ever complied with by people with political pull. Not here. My neighborhood, Windsor Terrace, was studied and rezoned in 1989. Since then just about every development site has been built on. What share of the units actually followed the R5B rules? In the case of one building I asked the Department to look into, the developer filed one set of plans and built something else. The building is long since open and occupied.
Watch what happens in Coney Island in future years. All I can say is I don't want any more of my taxes going to something that could have happened by itself. I'm sick of the "if we're for it let's subsidize it, but if we aren't subsiding it we're against it, and if there is no deal why bother" attitude toward economic development. Sorry Mr. Bullard, you and Sitt are hosed but I don’t want to help salvage your investment on my dime. But don’t blame me. If I had my way zoning that reflected what the city planned for would have been in place ten years ago.