Zoning and housing in focus (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)

Zoning is often discussed like it’s an occult force with mystical powers. I’ve spent decades overseeing New York City’s zoning, and I promise, it’s not magic. It’s an important planning tool to direct where the housing, jobs, and other facilities the city needs can be added, but its mystique can obscure important realities. 

The misuse of zoning, often driven by good intentions, is a major cause of the structural housing shortage that drives up housing prices for everyone, fuels gentrification pressure, drives some New Yorkers to leave the city, and leaves others inadequately housed or homeless. Decisions that look like they should move us forward push us backward. I call this phenomenon Illusionary Zoning.

Here is a field guide to common species of Illusionary Zoning, and how government decision-makers can better use zoning with other tools to alleviate our housing crisis. 

Exclusionary Zoning in Disguise
It’s easy to blame the suburbs for anemic housing production. We’re all familiar with exclusionary zoning that allows only large, single-family homes – banning lower-cost housing and walling out newcomers, the working class, and people of color. 

New York City is more dense and diverse, but often has zoning that makes it look like new housing can be built, when in fact it can’t. 

Less than one-sixth of New York City’s land is zoned explicitly for single-family homes only – less than most other cities, and certainly less than the suburbs. But over half the city lies within lower-density residential districts, many of which subtly prohibit multi-unit buildings through requirements for parking or yards or other controls.

Other neighborhoods have “shrink-wrapped” existing buildings with highly restrictive rules created over the years to prevent changes that would be “out of character.”

Both approaches effectively freeze current conditions in place, allowing new housing only as a costly minor exception. 

Because of these rules, it’s impossible to replicate the existing two-family homes or garden apartments found in low-density neighborhoods like Riverdale or Bayside, and there are portions of the Upper East and Upper West Sides and Greenwich Village where the number of homes is actually declining. 

It’s not that people don’t want to build housing; it’s that they’re not allowed to. 

Many people who want to live in these neighborhoods find they can’t, so they look to the next neighborhood, where prices are somewhat lower – a recipe for gentrification. But for all the attention to battling the problems created by gentrification, somehow the well-heeled neighborhood nearby that has quietly prevented new housing escapes scrutiny for its role in this process.

Do you remember how decades ago, as artists, students, and professionals moved to Williamsburg and housing prices rose dramatically, there was a popular outcry about the need to build more housing in Greenwich Village? Neither do I. 

It’s a feat worthy of an illusionist.

Transactional Zoning
The process of changing zoning for a site can take years and add $50,000 or more to the price of an apartment. If all new housing – even just the insufficient amount built today – required a rezoning, it would require 10 times the city agency staff, Community Board meetings, and thick environmental review documents. There’s simply no way to produce enough housing with a process this burdensome. 

Nonetheless, in the common practice of Transactional Zoning, only land controlled by the owner who is applying gets rezoned. Neighboring sites are left to each pursue their own approvals, even if grouping them would be beneficial and more efficient. This gives local officials an opportunity to pressure each developer to address community priorities. But shaping one development comes at the cost of making building more costly on every other site. This is a pyrrhic victory that compounds the shortage of housing. 

Strings-Attached Zoning
New York City has long been a leader in the creative use of zoning to advance other public goals such as affordability and open space. But when zoning focuses too much on other objectives, it can boomerang and undermine its core purpose.

Recent research from Seattle illustrates how a “strings attached” approach can backfire. Housing density was increased in several areas while adding a requirement for affordable housing, but without properly assessing the feasibility of building under these rules. As a result, the result was the opposite of what was intended: not only was the desired affordable housing not built, but housing production dipped in intended growth areas, and was pushed to surrounding areas. 

Ignoring feasibility can produce the same effect as traditional exclusionary zoning. For instance, high parking requirements for new housing don’t produce lots of housing with large parking lots; they mostly stop housing from being built, because providing all that parking is too costly or physically impossible. 

Wishful Zoning
Sometimes we know enough to avoid Strings-Attached Zoning but do it anyway, because it sounds like such a good idea. 

New York City’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program requires 20 to 30 percent of units to be affordable when land is upzoned. This is often less affordable housing than neighborhoods desire. But the 2015 financial feasibility assessment for MIH found that even these levels of affordability relied on the availability of a tax incentive like the recently-expired 421-a program. 

Many of the same people who want to increase affordability in rezonings are hostile to replacing the expired 421-a program. But mapping MIH without a 421-a replacement is Wishful Zoning – on paper, it sounds like more housing and more affordability, but in practice we’ll get neither. Achieving better housing outcomes requires more than wishful thinking. 

Hungry Hungry Hippos Zoning
Sometimes a rezoning proposed for a privately-financed new building, which would require no direct public subsidy, faces rejection unless more units are made affordable. This can be accomplished by publicly-subsidizing additional affordable units. 

Problem solved? Well, it’s really more sleight of hand. 

Housing subsidies are available in fixed annual amounts set by legislatures in budgets. In a typical year in New York, all these dollars are committed to projects. So giving more funding to one project means less is available for another. 

When a privately-financed development in Manhattan or western Queens is compelled to use public funding, it may look like a decision-maker has created more affordability. But they’ve really taken it away from some unspecified building in, say, the South Bronx or Central Brooklyn. 

And because zoning proposals are typically seen as local matters, no one speaks up for the other neighborhoods that would quietly lose affordability. 

Shattering the Illusions
So what can we do with zoning to help deliver the housing we need? 

We can ease restrictive zoning and other regulations where people want to live – not just neighborhood by neighborhood, but across the board. This means allowing not just somewhat larger mixed-income buildings near transit, but also accessory dwelling units and other forms of “gentle density” in lower-density areas. Enabling a bit more housing everywhere counteracts the concentration of market pressure that we see in the vicious cycle of exclusion and gentrification. 

We need to reduce the procedural and administrative burdens we place on new housing. This doesn’t mean there should be carte blanche for any building anywhere. But every home we force through a yearslong process takes us a step further from meeting our urgent housing needs.

Finally, when reviewing rezoning proposals and ideas to improve them, we need the City Planning Commission, City Council, and others to leaven local considerations with questions about the broader implications of decisions: Will this help create more housing overall? Will this increase the amount of affordable housing built in the city, or just shift resources from one community to another? 

Until we do these things, we should harbor no illusions that we’re fixing our housing crisis.

***
Howard Slatkin is Executive Director of Citizens Housing & Planning Council and formerly Deputy Executive Director of Strategic Planning for the NYC Department of City Planning. On Twitter @hslatkin & @chpcny.