From left: Council member Gail Brewer, a Duane Reade and Bank of America on the Upper West Side and REBNY President Steven SpinolaTired of chain drugstores and banks replacing mom-and-pop shops on the Upper West Side, City Council member Gail Brewer has been trying to implement zoning laws that would restrict larger stores from moving into the area, the New York Post reported. She said the trend is compromising retail variety for residents of the area.

Brewer has been meeting with the Department of City Planning to devise legislation that works towards that goal, including laws that set a minimum number of stores per block and maximum amount of ground-floor frontage along key Upper West Side corridors. [more]

Clockwise from top left: Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Fourth Avenue corridor and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz will formally present his plan to significantly expand on a recent bid by the Department of City Planning to rezone Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, the New York Post reported.

Markowitz wants to encourage retail development along a seven-mile stretch of Fourth Avenue from Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill to the Atlantic Ocean in Bay Ridge. City Planning’s proposal was to start at Atlantic Avenue and continue 56 blocks south to 24th Street in South Slope. Both rezoning would ban new apartments and parking lots on the ground-floor of new construction projects, and demand that half of ground-floor space be committed to retail. [more]

From left: City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, Deputy Mayor Robert Steel and Paul Selver, co-chair of the land use department at law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & FrankelThe Bloomberg administration on Dec. 12 will unveil a set of 20 new “green” zoning guidelines aimed at removing obstacles to sustainable building practices, city officials said.

“This is the most comprehensive effort to sweep away impediments to green buildings in our zoning,” City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden told The Real Deal on break at “Zoning the City,” a day-long conference sponsored by the agency, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute of Baruch College, convened to address the future of zoning in the city.

She and Robert Steel, New York’s deputy mayor for economic development, who first announced the planned guidelines, declined to give specifics to the crowd of real estate pros, academics and city planning experts. [more]

City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden

Two city agencies — the City Planning Department and Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications — have launched a new Web application called ZoLa that allows New York City residents to find zoning and land use information pertaining to a particular property or a wider geographic area, dating back to 2002.
 
The system, available to anyone via the planning commission’s website, is useful to consumers with an interest in restrictions on a certain building, or changes to land use being considered for their neighborhood. It lets users enter an address to quickly determine ownership, landmark status, zoning information and land uses of a property and its surrounding streets. It will also show the City Council member who represents that area.
[more]

From left: 437 Washington Street (source: PropertyShark) and a rendering of the Romanoff building to come

A demolition permit was filed this week for 437 West 13th Street, the Greenwich Village Society of Historical Preservation reported on its blog, paving the way for construction of the controversial 10-story, 175-foot office tower planned by Romanoff Equities adjacent to the High Line.

Romanoff has been battling with City Planning to maximize the size of the glassy tower, initially filing plans for a 250-foot with the expectation of a zoning variance that would clear the way for the building to exceed zoning regulations by 66 percent. Romanoff claimed that because the High Line ran through the property, it would need to build larger to recoup its investment. [more]

From left: the Eventi Hotel and the Ace Hotel (credit: PropertyShark)

The small, up-and-coming businesses that once thrived along the stretch between Madison Square Park and Herald Square, are becoming endangered by residential development, according to the New York Times.

Two decades ago the area was filled with vacant lots and rundown buildings. That old building stock offered start-ups, dentists, architects and other small tenants cheap rents.

But with rampant development in the area, which includes glassy condominiums, trendy hotels and razed lots readied for future construction, those small tenants fear their office space may no longer be so cheap. [more]

Following the rezoning of the southern section of Bedford Stuyvesant in 2007, the Department of City Planning intends to rezone 140 blocks of the northern part of the neighborhood. The plans were revealed last night at a local community board meeting, according to Brownstoner.

The boundaries of the rezoning will be from Quincy to Flushing, and Classon Avenue to Broadway. Developments will be limited to seven stories in some areas with avenues and wide streets, and to 10 on Myrtle Avenue. The plan includes incentives for affordable housing. Gaps in commercial overlays will also be filled. [more]

Edison Properties has made it known why it was leading the city’s drive to land a new zoning designation for the old Fur District just south of Penn Station. The developer plans to build a 407-unit residential tower at 249 West 28th Street, according to the Observer. As The Real Deal previously reported, City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden wants to create a new designation and apply it to the area to encourage growth and development around the neighborhood’s Class B and C office space.  [more]

City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden sent the proposal for a new zoning designation, to be used first for part of the old Fur District in an effort to encourage growth of the area’s Class B and C office space, for public review. Edison Properties wants to use the designation to develop the area bounded by West 28th and 30th streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues. The neighborhood has affordable office space that could attract new media, architectural firms, creative arts and other emerging businesses but lacks retail and residencies necessary for a thriving, mixed-use 24/7 neighborhood, according to Burden. TRD Comments

The city has launched its public review process for a preservationist-friendly rezoning of a 31-block swath of Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill that would discourage out-of-scale building and prevent commercial development from intruding onto residential blocks in the neighborhood, City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden announced today. The proposal covers the mostly rowhouse-filled blocks bounded by Atlantic Avenue to the north, Fourth Avenue to the east, Warren and Wyckoff streets to the south and Court Street to the west, Burden said. TRD [more]