Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden

From the December issue: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the city’s comprehensive “Zoning Resolution,” which dictated what types of development could go where.

The rules have undergone changes since taking effect in 1961, but in many ways, they continue to reflect the concerns of a prior era — when the automobile was king, manufacturing a steady source of employment and the Internet a far-off dream.

“We are occupying a social realm that’s different than [what] we constructed 50 years ago,” developer Jonathan Rose, founder of the eponymous real estate firm, said at a conference last month organized by the Department of City Planning, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute of Baruch College. 

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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]

The Department of City Planning will hold a conference this fall in hopes of finding a way to simplify the 1,500-page zoning resolution, whose current complexity apparently stifles developers and architects. According to the Wall Street Journal, urban planners find the current document so confusing that they’re discouraged from development, and a recent court ruling forced the city to rewrite hundreds of sections because of the imprecise meanings of the words “development” and “building.” In fact, earlier this year, City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden organized the publication of a 168-page handbook, with cartoon illustrations, to explain some of the law’s intricacies. Comments

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