L&L Holdings Chairman David Levinson and 425 Park Avenue
L&L Holdings will have to wait until 2015 before it can begin developing Park Avenue’s first new office tower in more than 30 years. According to the New York Post, that could be a blessing. The Bloomberg administration has begun pushing a rezoning of office buildings in the Grand Central area that would lift restrictions on new buildings. [more]
Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem
One of City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden‘s first rezonings, the 44-block stretch from 110th to 124th Streets and Morningside Park to Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, has had mixed results, the New York Times reported.
While the business strip along Frederick Douglass Boulevard has seen an influx of stores — such as Patisserie des Ambassades, a West African bakery, Levain, a cookie shop and Lido, an Italian restaurant — of late, a number of chain stores have also come to the area. [more]
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]
The city’s fashion industry generates $9 billion in total wages and contributes $1.7 billion in annual tax revenue, a new report by the Municipal Art Society on the Garment District shows, but it’s losing steam thanks to high rents and competition in manufacturing in other countries, particularly Asia.
“New York risks losing it all unless we focus on our core strengths and learn from our competitors; implement smart strategies; find efficiencies in the existing systems; invest in the human and physical infrastructure; and pool the intellectual, creative and financial resources of all the district’s key constituencies,” said Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society. “If we do that successfully, the future of our fashion industry can serve as a model for job creation efforts across the U.S.” – Katherine Clarke [more]
The New York State Supreme Court appellate division issued a decision yesterday stating that the city can proceed with the 2009 rezoning of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, Crain’s reported.
The city rezoned a 128-block area in Sunset Park in 2009, putting 50-foot height limits on side streets, but allowing for taller residential projects on Fourth and Seventh avenues. Opponents of the changes — residences, churches and the non-profit Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association — said that the rezoning would displace the area’s low-income families, and filed in New York State Supreme Court against the city’s Planning Department, claiming that the department had not conducted environmental reviews required for zoning changes.
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The City Council today approved the rezoning of Sunnyside and Woodside, which aims to protect the lower-density character of those neighborhoods while allowing for a moderate increase in residential and commercial density along main corridors, according to the Department of City Planning. Encompassing about 130 city blocks, the zoning area had been unchanged since 1961. With the neighborhood growing and becoming more diverse, the current zoning can result in unpredictable building types leading to out-of-character construction, according to the Department of City Planning. – Miranda Neubauer [more]
New attractions and a rezoning are on deck for the village of Southampton as the community vies for the kind of foot traffic its rival Hamptons towns enjoy, according to the Wall Street Journal. The village was hit with two major setbacks recently as the Saks Fifth Avenue store shuttered and the Parrish Art Museum announced it would move to the neighboring village of Water Mill. But new plans are calling for a rezoning of Southampton’s business district and a transformation of the Parrish building into a mixed-use cultural center. [more]
City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden has announced a rezoning proposal for 181 blocks in the Williamsbridge and Baychester neighborhoods in the north Bronx to encourage development and still protect lower density blocks from out-of-character buildings.
The proposed area is bound by the Bronx River and Shoelace Park to the west, the New England Thruway to the east, 233rd Street to the north and East Gun Hill Road, Lurting Avenue, Givan Avenue, and Hammersley Avenue to the south.
The rezoning, City Planning said, would “channel moderate new growth opportunities to wide corridors with better access to transit that can accommodate future growth, including White Plains Road and East Gun Hill Road.” --Katherine Clarke [more]
Members of a Chelsea community board have unanimously voted in favor of a plan to re-zone the blocks surrounding the Fashion Institute of Technology at Seventh Avenue and West 27th Street, according to DNAinfo, despite concerns that new zoning conditions might mark an end for existing commercial and office spaces in the area.
The new designation, to span West 28th, 29th and 30th streets between Seventh and Eighth avenues, would loosen regulations for new residential units. Developers would be allowed to turn any building smaller than 50,000 square feet into residential space. [more]
From the 2011 Data Book: Rezoning activity was relatively light in New York City in 2010 (see chart below) compared to the years of the real estate
boom earlier in the decade, when many community activists clamored to have their blocks “downzoned” to hold
off encroaching development. Gone too were major new
initiatives from the Bloomberg administration, which has
rezoned about one quarter of the city since 2002. Pundits say
to expect a revived land-use and development agenda from the
third-term Bloomberg in 2011. See a summary of the city’s major rezonings below and click the link at the top of the page, or here, to purchase a copy of the 2011 Data Book. TRD
