 Mayor Michael Bloomberg's development plan will remake neighborhoods like Long Island City, Throgs Neck, and downtown Jamaica. Articles in this Feature: |
New York has the most extensive housing program of any city in the nation. If you add up what all the other municipalities in the nation do on housing, it does not even come close to what New York City does. In addition the Bloomberg administration has set out a five-year plan to build 65,000 homes.
Building on these things, the New York City Department of City Planning is implementing redevelopment strategies across the city that will create new commercial office and housing development.
Our first priority is to restore and enhance lower Manhattan and to create the kind of amenities that will transform the third largest business district, that was devastated in the terrorist attacks of 2001, into a desirable place to live and work.
We will also implement the Hudson Yards plan. This will transform an underused area on the west side of Manhattan characterized by rail yards, parking, and one-story buildings into a new central business district with 26 million square feet of office space. In addition, we will build 14,000 new apartments, 3,000 of which will be affordable, as well as parkland and an extension of the 7-subway line. A key aspect of this is the expansion of the Jacob Javits convention center and stadium for convention events as well as New York Jets football games.
We will strengthen regional business districts like Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, Downtown Flushing, and Jamaica, Queens.
We are facilitating housing production. We are doing this in part through a series of rezonings throughout the city in places like Greenpoint/Williamsburg, West Chelsea, East Harlem, Harlem, Park Slope, and North Corona.
We also must work to protect New York's neighborhood character. As the city's population has grown, housing production has surged. In many ways that is a good thing, but in some places, it is not because the new housing being built dramatically changes the neighborhoods landscape. When you build further from mass transit, car ownership increases which creates traffic and parking problems. So we are doing rezoning to help ensure that neighborhoods do not have a density of housing that they cannot handle.
Finally, we are working to retrain jobs and create an environment to attract new jobs.
Sandy Hornick is the director of strategic planning at the Department of City Planning
