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]

Democratic mayoral candidate and current city Comptroller William Thompson told the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce today that, if elected, he would reinforce existing zoning laws for manufacturers, protecting them from “real estate speculators who offer only short-term leases,” as a means of encouraging financial recovery. Noting that the securities industry accounted for 25 percent of city wages in 2007, Thompson emphasized the need for New York to diversify the types of businesses it houses and encourage the growth of smaller commercial outlets in the city. Thompson also pledged to help the fashion industry, saying that he would work with labor unions to dedicate one million square feet of space in non-profit buildings for garment manufacturing. “Imagine if we had used the millions of dollars we spent on Yankees Stadium on efforts like this,” Thompson said. “Instead of creating part-time jobs like ushers and concession workers, we would have created many more full-time, good-paying jobs.”