Building the Skyline

The Birth & Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers

by Jason Barr 3 Comments

Robert Moses and the Zoning of New York (Part I): Killing the Master Plan

Jason M. Barr               February 28, 2023

Author’s Note: This blog post is the first in a series that brings to light Robert Moses’ forgotten role in New York zoning and planning history.

Gotham is suffering from a housing affordability crisis. One reason stems from its stringent zoning regulations, which limit the number of units on each property. Despite the perception that New York is a high-rise city, this is simply not true. Outside of Manhattan, New York is decidedly low-rise, with two-thirds of its properties mandated by law to be one- or two-family homes.

To her credit, Governor Kathy Hochul intends to introduce legislation requiring New York and other cities to upzone neighborhoods around mass transit lines. Her plan is for New York State to add 800,000 new units in the next decade. Mayor Eric Adams has offered the goal of 500,000 new units for Gotham. The fact that upzonings are a key element of Hochul’s plan shows how important zoning is and how it has limited New York’s housing growth.

Planning through Zoning

Reformers who initiated zoning in 1916 aimed to limit the negative “externalities,” such as shadows and traffic congestion, and reduce urban density for its own sake. They were eager to engage in visionary-oriented master planning but felt they could not legally do so without violating sacred property rights. Planning would have to come later.

A Master Plan of Land Use was finally offered to the public in 1941 by the newly formed City Planning Commission. The plan, however, was quickly shot down. Whether it would have been good for New York today is debatable, but its defeat also meant the defeat of master planning as a tool. Rather, New York would rely on zoning instead.

The result was increasing restrictions, as the “law of motion” of zoning is inherently “downward” in residential neighborhoods, where the Nimbyists tend to outnumber the Yimbyists. The idea in the 20th century that restrictive zoning would someday create a housing affordability crisis in the 21st century was not on anyone’s mind. Instead, the pervasive belief was that density was bad and must be limited. While urbanist Jane Jacobs would spearhead the reversal of this thought in the 1960s, New York remains a victim of its past.

Moses on the Mount

In the history of how we got here, few realize the role that Robert Moses played. This was in large part because his actions regarding zoning were more in the “negative” category—things that were not done because of his protest (or his failures). History unfolds when leaders make decisions at crossroads in time. A left turn instead of a right one or vice versa means that our present could have turned out very differently.

Moses was like a tollbooth, and nothing got through without his blessing. And when he wouldn’t let someone pass, they went in another direction. In the period from 1938 to 1941, Moses saw himself as the guardian of New York’s middle path and he felt his role was to lay down the law: New York will not cave into its far-left impulses. The City should build infrastructure and parks, and even allow for some restrictive residential zoning, but there will be no over-arching Master Plan that imposes Utopia on Gotham.

The Master Builder

When we think about Robert Moses, a handful of popular narratives circulate. First is that of the “Master Builder.” In his four-decade career, Moses built and built and built, and created modern New York. He cleared old neighborhoods for highways, bridges, urban renewal projects, and public housing. He built scores of parks and oversaw the construction of two World’s Fairs.

Then there’s the narrative about his battle with Jane Jacobs—a David versus Goliath tale about the people versus their meddling government. A rag-tag group of residents, led by Jacobs, “took down” the indomitable Moses to block his building of an elevated highway through Greenwich Village.

Finally, there’s the narrative about his anti-democratic methods. As Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he was not directly beholden to leaders or voters and could not be checked by the democratic process. Rather, his power stemmed from the almighty nickel. The toll fares pouring in from his bridges and tunnels were the agency’s to keep, and Moses plowed them back into other massive projects.

The Caro Effect

In 1974, Robert Caro published his masterpiece biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The book has had a tremendous role in defining Moses’ legacy. Caro stresses Moses’ hubris and overreach—the man who became drunk by power and rammed his projects through without considering the harm. Caro cites Moses’ love of the quip, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. ”

But less known—and even forgotten—was that Moses was a member of the City Planning Commission from 1942 to 1960, and, before that, Moses was a key voice regarding New York’s planning decisions. Reading Caro’s book one comes away with the notion that Moses’ impact on zoning and urban planning was minimal, if at all.

From a storytelling perspective, this makes sense. Residents were displaced to make way for public housing and “slum clearance.” Traffic congestion emerged immediately upon opening the highways. The Cross Bronx Expressway ripped apart communities in the South Bronx. It’s no wonder that Moses’ role in the mundane world of zoning codes and land use has been forgotten. It doesn’t make for good copy.

Moses v. Tugwell. On the left is the Master Builder, Robert Moses. On the right is the Master Planner, Rexford Tugwell. Politically speaking, however, Moses was on the right and Tugwell on the left.

La Guardia Takes the Helm

Moses’ influence in New York’s zoning history began in the mid-1930s. The Great Depression and the corruption scandal of Roaring Twenties Mayor James “Jimmy” Walker led to the election of Fiorello La Guardia as mayor in November 1933. La Guardia was a reform-minded congressman from East Harlem, and he brought to City Hall his zeal for change. He wanted to eliminate the power of the Tammany Hall Democratic Machine and have the government play a more active role in aiding residents.

In the sphere of city planning, two of his actions were pivotal. The first was that immediately upon taking office, La Guardia brought in Moses as Commissioner of the Parks Department, which then paved the way for the “Power Broker” to dominate city construction for the next quarter century.

Moses gained prominence in Governor Al Smith’s administration in the 1920s. Originally hired to aid the governor in reorganizing the state government, Moses was then given the chance to build parks. In this role, he created the Jones Beach Park system on Long Island, along with parkways to deliver people to them.

La Guardia was eager for Moses to replicate his success within the city, and he was not disappointed. Within weeks of his appointment, funds from the Federal government began pouring in and thousands of employed workers were put to the tasks of creating parks and public swimming pools.

Moses was also a master of public relations. All his projects were accompanied by glossy pamphlets, charts, and maps extolling their virtues. They were distributed to the press and politicians, and they fueled Moses’ desire to engender the goodwill necessary to keep his building operations in constant motion. They also reflected what people wanted to see. Through the slick, “utopian” renderings, New Yorkers could be confident their city was being cleaned up and modernized.

The Birth of the City Planning Commission

The second element of La Guardia’s program was that of charter reform. La Guardia aimed to centralize power in the mayor’s office as New York City had operated more like a federation of boroughs. The borough presidents had relatively strong powers through the Board of Estimate, a “legislative” body made up of the five borough presidents, the mayor, the president of the Board of Aldermen, and the city comptroller. Since the Board voted on important budgetary and governance issues, borough presidents would engage in horse trading to promote their agendas, and, as a result, the Board was often parochial in its outlook.

In 1936, the electorate voted for a new charter. Though it kept the Board of Estimate intact, one of the key provisions was the formation of the City Planning Commission (CPC), whose six members were appointed by the mayor. The CPC had a three-fold mandate. The first was as the “guardian” of the city maps. As such, it was directly involved in the rezoning and remapping of city streets and lots. Second, it was charged with the creation of a Master Plan of the city’s land use, transportation routes, and other municipal services. Third, it was to produce a capital expenditures budget and a five-year capital expenditure program for the investments in the city’s infrastructure.

Ultimately, the CPC, however, had to answer to the Board of Estimate. But to give the CPC power, major policies that it adopted would become law unless vetoed by three-quarters of the Board of Estimate.

Moses Says No

It was widely expected that Robert Moses would be the new CPC Chairman. But he declined. At the time, in 1937, he simply told the New York Times, “I’d rather do what I’m doing.” However, in a speech in 1939, he divulged more details:

[W]hen the Charter went into effect the Mayor asked me to be Chairman of the Planning Commission and I talked to my friends on the Charter Commission about it. The point of the story is that no two of them agreed on the functions of the Planning Commission, although all of them were insistent that it was a vitally important body. The conversation became so confusing that it occurred to me that we might get somewhere by means of a practical analogy, simile, or metaphor, and I asked what function the Planning Commission played in the city government on the theory that the city government was an automobile. One of my distinguished charter friends said that the Planning Commission was the steering wheel; another said it was the brakes. They all agreed that it was not the engine or the carburetor. After thinking it all over I decided that moving from an administrative position into the Planning Commission would be trading the substance for the shadow. (Emphasis added.)

The designated powers of the CPC were not only too vague, but were also hidden from view, and Moses would like to keep the spotlight on him. He was, after all, the hero who delivered parks to the people.

Brain-Truster-on-Hudson

When his man declined, La Guardia searched for someone who had both the gravitas to lead the Commission and could also, in theory, adhere to the mayor’s wishes. That man, La Guardia felt, was Rexford Tugwell.

Born in Sincalirville, New York in 1891, Tugwell earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He became an economics professor and taught at Columbia University in the 1920s. In 1933, he joined the Roosevelt administration in two capacities. First was as a member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” a group of intellectuals who gave advice to the president. Second, he served in various positions in the Department of Agriculture.

In April 1935, Tugwell started up the Resettlement Administration (RA), within the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The RA sought to relocate struggling rural households to newly-built communities in order to provide urban opportunities. The RA initiated the construction of so-called Greenbelt Cities. They were modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s concepts, as espoused in his 1898 book Garden Cities of To-morrow, where large greenbelts enclosed low-densities towns.

“Rex the Red”

Tugwell was a controversial figure and was labeled by his enemies as a “Rex the Red,” and he was nudged out of the Roosevelt administration in 1936. As planning historian Mark Gelfand writes,

No political figure of the 1930s was more closely identified with planning than Rexford Tugwell….Tugwell shared little of the American public’s faith in the market place as the impartial maker of decisions, either economic or political. The marketplace had been outmoded by the new machine age; society could no longer be run efficiently or justly on the principles of individualism and competition. Both businessmen and politicians, he insisted, thrived on uncertainty, whereas liberty, equality, and security in the modern world depended on exactitude and control.

Tugwell believed that government should—and will—someday have a “Fourth Power,” a group of planners and social scientists that employ their sharp minds to surgically remove the pathologies of capitalism.  As a devotee of the economist Thorsten Veblen, he saw planning as a process where technocrats organize the economy in the way a conductor leads an orchestra.

Urban Planning Philosophy

His philosophy about urban planning, typical of the day, was an offshoot of his broader planning philosophy and was to follow a specific roadmap:

Step I: Conduct a detailed survey of all aspects of the city’s economy, demographics, land uses, and transportation.

Step II: Project what all these elements are likely to be, with and without planning.

Step III: Produce a Master Plan that creates the ideal city in several decades hence.

Step IV: Implement the program.

In short, the urban planning philosophy of the mid-twentieth century can be summarized by: Measure, Project, Arrange.

For Tugwell, the Plan was to be made by those who knew better—the academics, social scientists, and planners—and implemented as a form of noblesse oblige to protect the hoi polloi from the unfettered greediness of capitalists and real estate speculators. Tugwell’s ideal city would be dominated by single-family houses and decentralized employment centers as some version of Garden City Gotham.

La Guardia and Tugwell

To La Guardia, Tugwell had certain advantages. One was his connection to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Tugwell had the ear of the president and was connected to members of his administration. La Guardia harbored ambitions to power at the Federal level, thinking he might even run for president during the 1940 election. When World War II broke out, he was angling to be named Secretary of War.

And Tugwell, like La Guardia, was a reformer. They both disliked hyper-density and sought to clean up the slums and create a modern city. However, Tugwell, unlike La Guardia and Moses, lacked the “transactional” personality required for the job. La Guardia and Moses played the game of realpolitik—as opportunities for reform arose, they took them. When the Federal Government was doling out money for housing, the City built housing. When the Federal Government was paying for workers to build infrastructure, the City built airports and highways.

Dressing Down

La Guardia also had little tolerance for academic arrogance. For example, in August 1939, he sent Tugwell a “dressing down” letter for the way he ran hearings:

It is my desire that hereafter all hearings of the Planning Commission be held in your own offices and also that these hearings follow the procedure of conferences rather than inquiries or judicial proceedings. By that I mean that the members should sit around a table on the same level with officials who appear before them to “confer on the Capital Outlay Budget.” I have already detected the psychological effect on your Commission of being elevated and assuming a judicial as well as an inquisitorial attitude. Please cut it out. I don’t know exactly what it is but just a few feet of elevation brings an individual or a group of individuals into what they seem to think is e loftier atmosphere. They get a bench psychosis, a superiority complex, which always affects judgment in the reverse ratio of the degree of such complex. This has been disappointingly noticeable in your Commission of late.

Tugwell’s vision also included regulating aesthetics, and La Guardia wanted Tugwell to know that that was not his job:

An employee of your Commission…informed the Housing Authority that all plans had to be submitted to the Commission and they would pass upon the architectural detail. This is not the functional power of the Commission. I have instructed the Authority to submit no plans to your Commission whatsoever. All the Commission is entitled to know is the location, the general layout and the density of population…..

The very life, existence and continuance of the Planning Commission depend upon whether it takes a common sense attitude or whether it becomes a busybody, interfering with the functions of other agencies of government; whether it sticks to facts or whether it indulges in fantasy; whether it acts as practical men or constitutes itself into the barefooted Isadora Duncans, dancing on the lawn chasing Will-o’-the wisps.”

Nonetheless, while La Guardia and Tugwell did not always see eye to eye, they met regularly and shared a common concern that the city needed better planning. Ultimately, however, as I will discuss below, La Guardia failed to go to bat for Tugwell’s major initiatives. They were simply too controversial, even for the reformed-minded “Little Flower.”

Moses and Tugwell

Arguably, more important for Tugwell and his planning visions was Robert Moses. The result of their clashes meant that Tugwell’s three-year stint at the CPC would be stormy, at best. In fact, his run-ins with Moses would prove pivotal for New York’s long run zoning and planning history.

Tugwell had his agenda, and Moses had his, and the two would increasingly come to blows. When they shared a common interest, they would work together. When their interests diverged, Moses would have the upper hand.

Scolding Moses

Through their letters, we can get a glimpse into their relationship. A typical exchange, for example, took place in July 1939, when Moses scolded Tugwell about his road building plans. Offering opinions that foreshadowed the bigger battles to come, Moses barked,

Dear Rex:…I must say that I was disappointed at the lack of clarity of this [highways] plan. You will recall that I suggested that if your staff had preliminary ideas about these matters they should be kept in the form of memoranda for your files, and should not be scheduled for hearings as part of the master plan. As the matter stands you are putting those of us who have worked for many years on this arterial problem and who are with you in principle, in the position of opposing you.

Poinsettias

Yet at Christmas time, Moses strategically sent Tugwell poinsettias, compliments of the Parks Department, and a note with a pleasing tone:

Dear Rex: The Park [sic] Department is happy to present you with this Christmas plant. I recall gratefully the helpful and pleasant relationship with your office during the past year. Best wishes for the holiday season for the new year.

Tugwell responded graciously:

Dear Bob: The poinsettias are beautiful and I am happy to have them. The Park [sic] Department is to be congratulated on raising such wonderful plants. They brighten up my office and are a grateful reminder of that friendly and pleasant relationship between us which you mention in your note. This relationship, I hope will always continue.

The Master Plan. City Planning Commissioner Chairman Rexford Tugwell tried to order New York according to his notion of the “good city.” He aimed to make one-third of New York into a vast greenbelt by the 1960s.

Moses in the Middle

Tugwell, however, provided a convenient foil for Moses. The Great Depression created an opening for those on the left to test out their theories. Moses, on the other hand, rose to power with a more focused ambition.

As a young man trying to build parks, he ran headlong into the rich and powerful on Long Island who tried to stop him from building parkways on their lands. Through cleverness and grit, he learned how to beat them at their own game and became known as the “best bill drafter in Albany.”

When he came to the Big Apple, he applied this philosophy locally: Get legislation and money and build quickly; then move on to the next project. With the arrival of Tugwell, Moses began giving public lectures and writing about his opinion of the Planning Commissioner and his ilk. In short, he didn’t like their views. Part of this might have been personal. Tugwell was a busybody interfering in Moses’ plans. But it ran deeper than that. To Moses, government should not impose visions of the “good city” on the citizenry—that smacked of communism.

In a 1939 speech, he provided his philosophy:

I like to believe that I am a forward-looking conservative, that is, a person who recognizes the law of change, wants to keep abreast of the times and to anticipate the future to the extent that it can be visualized, but who wants to hold on to what is good and what has proven its worth before jumping to something new just because it is new. Such a person does not believe in revolutions in human nature nor in cure-alls, nor in the possibility of accomplishing anything really worthwhile in human progress without immense and sustained effort over a considerable period of time.

Ironically, forgotten today in all the debates about Moses was that in Depression-era New York, Moses was, politically speaking, dab smack in the middle. To the left of him were the likes of Tugwell. To the right of him were the laissez-faire-ists who believed that the government that governed the least governed the best. This group would also come to include Jane Jacobs both in her battles with Moses about Greenwich Village in the 1950s and in her writings about cities in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. They wanted planners of all stripes—both the Tugwells and Moseses—to leave their plans to themselves.

The Standpatters

In a 1940 speech, Moses also attacked those on the right of him as naïve:

The ulta conservative group consists of standpatters who believe that the present slums are good enough for those who live in them….These critics assert that plenty of good people have come out of the slums, that only the shiftless stay in them, and that anyway it is no business of the government to substitute palaces for tenement houses and to fix rents according to what people can pay rather than on the basis of carrying charges.

In this respect, Moses’ power was built on a foundation of taking the middle position between the two extremes. He believed that government ought to be a force for good, but that it should not go so far as to allow, as he put it, the “honest fanatic” to “destroy present investments on the theory that no one has a right to own or maintain a building which is unfit for living.”

The Battle to Rezone New York

As Tugwell began to take concrete actions at the CPC in 1939, it was not clear if Moses would be a friend or foe. Ironically, when it came to his rezoning ideas, Moses was a friend. But not even Moses as “Oz—the Great and Powerful” could hold back the tide of anger from Tugwell’s signature proposal.

Initially, Tugwell felt that he should not push through a complete re-writing of the zoning codes until after he released his Master Plan on Land Use, which was to be formally announced in late 1940. In the meantime, he aimed to create intermediate reforms.

Two of the provisions concern us here. First was the idea of so-called non-conforming uses. When the original 1916 Zoning Resolution was enacted, it grandfathered in all properties that did not conform to the new rules. For example, if there was a factory in a district zoned for residential use, it was allowed to remain. The assumption was these nonconforming uses would simply melt away over time. A quarter-century later, however, this was not so. And to this, Tugwell could not abide.

A Bad Sign

To initiate reform, Tugwell picked advertising signs and billboards as his target. He proposed that billboards in certain zones would need to be removed after one year. Additionally, billboards were to be banned from within 200 feet of parkways. This was something dear to Moses’ heart, and he went to bat for Tugwell on the billboards issue.

However, the real estate community, especially those who profited from billboard advertising, along with those who saw the issue as a Trojan Horse for wider enforcement of non-conforming uses attacked it fiercely. Tugwell tried to placate them by extending the elimination period to two years. But alas the Board of Estimate unanimously rejected it. Not even La Guardia supported it. The Board of Estimate, however, left in the parkway provision.

A FAR is Born

The second feature of Tugwell’s zoning plan was the addition of two novel elements to help downzone New York. First was the introduction of zones that only permitted single-family housing. Before 1939, the zoning resolution only limited bulk through setbacks, general uses (residential, commercial, and unrestricted), and lot coverage. But here was the first time in the city’s history that all but single-family homes were banned in some districts. In fact, single-family zoning became a reality in the Feildston neighborhood first in the Bronx on November 17, 1939, and was subsequently embedded in the resolution.

Relatedly was the first introduction in U.S. history of the floor area ratio (FAR) as a zoning tool. In two newly created districts, not only did the original 1916 rules apply, but there were also FAR caps. The FAR limits how much building area can be provided on the lot as a multiple to the lot size. For example, an FAR of one on a 2500 square foot lot, means a building can be one floor with 2500 square feet or two floors with 1250 square feet each. In the “F-1” districts, the FAR was set at 0.75, while in the “E” districts, the FAR was set at 1.9.

The Long-Run Impacts of Tugwell’s Rezonings

While Tugwell lost the battle over non-conforming uses, the CPC established the precedent that some districts could be reserved exclusively for single-family houses and established the FAR as a zoning tool.  Moses was silent on these provisions. Likely he saw them as benign, specifically as they related to his program of road building. Downzoned districts of single-family homes or garden apartments were more conducive to automobile usage and encouraged the clearing out of dense tenement districts.

There are some ironies with Moses’ silence on these changes, which we shall discuss in more detail in future posts. But first was that Moses in 1944 would offer his own comprehensive zoning plan, which was a further downzoning. His plan was ultimately defeated, however. And second, after World War II, the CPC would promote the FAR as a planning tool and Moses would become increasingly antagonistic toward it. He was opposed to abandoning the basic 1916 framework. For this reason, even though New York City “invented” the FAR its full-scale implementation would have to wait till Moses was out of power.

Praise be to Robert Moses! This the first two paragraphs of an article printed in the New York Times, on March 20, 1938. It was typical of the kudos New Yorker’s gave to him during the Great Depression.

The Master Plan

While Tugwell’s zoning proposal had mixed success, the defeat of his Master Plan was the last straw. Tugwell certainly had forewarnings from Moses about his position.  In May 1940, Tugwell complained in his diary:

Found Moses had written LaG. bitter letter attacking Commission for “long-haired planning.” All this is attempt to prevent work on the Master Plan which would limit, perhaps, his work in some way. … Mayor undoubtedly showed me the letter in a friendly way, though he does not mind a little hard feeling among commissioners. He’d rather they didn’t get together too much.

Dear Bob

After this meeting, Tugwell couldn’t resist the urge to write to Moses.

Dear Bob: I can’t think of anything in our relations during the past two years or more which would lead you to feel that I do not or would not accept your judgment about most planning issues in the city.

There cannot, I think, be any question that I have a mandate to make a master plan. On nothing else is the charter so specific. What kind of master plan is another question. I have hoped that you would give me help on that. Instead you seem to prefer to question the whole activity here developed to master plan work. You have even questioned my judgement as to the division of work in my own department—and done it repeatedly.

I do not want to work up a grievance. I merely want to ask you again if you will not give up your attacks on all master plan work and tell me clearly what it is that you do not like in our proposals. They have been put forward modestly. They were submitted to you even in advance of hearings. None of us here thinks our judgment better than yours. On the contrary we want to embody yours in the plan.….

I hope our relations will not continue to degenerate. If they do, it will not be because I have not tried to make them improve. That, indeed, is the reason for this letter.

Dear Rex

Moses wasn’t going to back down. The next day he fired off his response:

Dear Rex: The last thing I am looking for is a quarrel with you, and it seems to me that there is no reason why we cannot continue to get along amicably and with mutual benefit.

On the other hand, we do have one fundamental difference of opinion. This has to do with the long range planning and the interpretation of Section 197 of the Charter….

There is no compulsion upon your or your associates to prepare a comprehensive far-reaching long range Master Plan. Nobody can make you do it and my hunch is that there are plenty of people who will stop you if you try it, and that in the process you will wreck the Planning Commission and lot of constructive work which might otherwise be done….

If you attempt to go beyond these boundaries and seriously consider distance objectives you will bring your Commission and the administration which it must serve into disrepute, and what’s more you won’t get away with it….

There are so many things on which we can all cooperate, and so much enthusiasm and public support for these things that is seems crazy for you to launch highly controversial, long range plans which many of us, in and out of the city administration, would be compelled to oppose.

Tugwell Undeterred

In early December, the plan for land use was formally released. It was a brief document with five pages of explanatory text and three maps. The first maps showed the land uses and roads at present. And, as the New York Times reported, the second map showed “where the next generation may expect to work and live after slums have been eliminated.” And the third map “foresees the city of the future, probably the third generation from now, when current trends have finally responded to the present foresight of the planners and to the guidance imposed by zoning legislation and public works.”  A key element of the Master Plan was that in several decades hence, one-third of New York was to be comprised of a vast greenbelt (an idea that British planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie would put forth for Greater London in his 1944 plan).

Seeing Tugwell step on his turf, Moses ripped him in a letter dated December 10, 1940:

[The Master Plan of Land Use] represents the kind of Ivory Tower, theoretical planning which dresses up revolutionary ideas in obscure and newly invented phrases such as “greenbelts” and “recentralization.” It ignores the city’s government and financial structure, and contemplates an entirely new character along radically different lines…

No one in this city has greater enthusiasm for the expansion of parks and recreation areas than I have.…Actual accomplishments in New York City since 1934…were brought about by people who labored day and night for limited objectives in the face of great difficulties. These accomplishments were not brought about by itinerant carpet bag experts splashing a ten league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.

I recommend that you file the “Master Plan of Land Use” and forget it. The city won’t stand for it when its implications become apparent. Everything worthwhile in this direction be accomplished by the reasonable use of your zoning powers.

The Hearings

Moses reiterated these statements at the public hearings of the City Planning Commission on December 11. In his personal diary, Tugwell bemoaned not only Moses’ behavior but also the other commissioners, who did not have the nerve cutoff opponents. Tugwell felt his commissioners “like a lot of sheep they shivered in the storm and asked for more by ‘continuing’ the hearings.” Tugwell asked them to take the leap and they hesitated. La Guardia was also silent.

The controversy and the indecision of the commissioners meant that formal approval of the Master Plan was going to have to wait until after city elections in November of 1941. In the meantime, Tugwell’s opponents sharpened their attacks. One business leader, echoing Moses, stated in the New York Times in February 1941 that the Master Plan “was so radical and revolutionary that they will tend to undermine present basic real estate values in the City of New York, without any substantial compensating benefits.”

Moses gets the Last Laugh

By the summer of 1941, Tugwell had had enough. He was offered the chance to become the Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico and soon after became the island’s governor. He tried his best in the rough and tumble politics of New York City, but, in the end, was unable to win in the arena.

With Tugwell gone, La Guardia once again offered Moses a seat on the City Planning Commission. This time he accepted, though not the chairmanship. Moses now knew what the CPC was capable of and he wanted to be sure that the “Tugwellians” didn’t have any more chances. In early 1942, the CPC formally voted to scrap Tugwell’s Master Plan of Land Use, with Moses declaring, “Green belts are dead.”

Moses on the Inside

While we can’t blame Tugwell’s failure solely on Moses, he did give voice to the collective zeitgeist about city planning in Depression-era New York: It was the city’s job to build infrastructure, clear unsanitary slums, build parks, and get people back to work; it was not to risk the future of New York on pie-in-the-sky ideas that ran counter to Gotham’s laissez-faire spirit.

As a member of the CPC, for the next 20 years, Moses would work from the inside. City planning would now be based on his vision of “short-haired conservatism.” And soon enough, just as World War II was ending, Moses would introduce his own comprehensive zoning reform. This will be the subject of the next blog post.

 

Notes on sources can be found here.

by Jason Barr 7 Comments

Left Hand Meet the Right Hand: New York’s Failure to Implement Transit-Oriented Development

Jason M. Barr          January 17, 2023

Gotham has a housing affordability problem. Gotham has a transit problem. There’s a simple solution to help both. Given New York’s decentralized governance structure, however, the right hand—transit—doesn’t speak to the left hand—city planning. The result: vast resources are needlessly wasted. It’s high time Transit and Planning became friends (or more!).

The Housing Problem

Simply put, housing supply has been unable to keep up with the demand to live, work, and play in the Big Apple. The result: many New Yorkers can’t make ends meet.  In 2021, more than half of the city’s renters—nearly one million households—were rent burdened, in that they paid more than 30% of their incomes toward rent; one-third were severely rent burdened, paying more than half of their income for rent. Only 30% of New Yorkers earn enough to have a “living wage”—the minimum amount to pay for food, clothing, housing, health care, child care, transportation, and taxes.

The vacancy rate for apartments that rent for less than $1,500 per month is below 1%. In essence, it is virtually impossible for low-income New Yorkers to find affordable housing. Governor Hochul is pushing for 800,000 new units statewide in the next decade. If the City wants to hit its target, it had better rethink its housing strategy.

The Subway Problem

When the Covid Pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, the platforms became ghost towns. Ridership was a mere 7% of what it had been just a couple of months earlier, and today it’s up to about 70% of pre-Pandemic levels. But even before Covid, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) struggled to balance its books.

The number of straphangers in the 21st century is far from the peak in the late 1940s. Fewer riders and expensive maintenance and operating costs spell financial trouble. Even though the MTA’s recent budget includes a 5.5% fare hike, the subway would cease to function without government subsidies and dedicated tax revenues.

And yet, transit riders and city advocates are scratching their heads. What’s to be done to get ridership back up? There remains too much competition from automobiles, but politicians are not interested in reducing car dependence. Drivers vote, and they don’t like their tolls going up.

But the answer is in plain sight: The MTA and the City Planning Commission should be united in a mission to create a large-scale transit-oriented-development (TOD) program.

Anti-useful-transit-oriented (AUTO) zoning (AUTOZone). This map shows that outside of Manhattan 92% all of buildings in Gotham within one kilometer (0.62 miles) of a subway stop are three stories or less. Sources: here.

Housing Gotham

When you put building height and zoning maps together with the subway map, you can see how much land is “wasted.” To keep things simple, let’s zoom in on that part of New York within one kilometer (0.62 miles) of a subway station (see the figure above). The typical person would need to walk about 10-15 minutes to catch a train, a reasonable distance to focus on transit-oriented zoning.

Low-rise Gotham

A look at the buildings reveals a shocking fact: Outside of Manhattan, 63% of all properties within one kilometer (1KM) of a subway have two stories or less, while 92% are three stories or less. (Data sources and calculations are here.)

Turning to zoning, the City regulates building density by placing caps on the so-called Floor Area Ratio (FAR), which limits the total floor area relative to the lot size. A maximum allowable FAR of one, for example, means that a property owner can build a one-story building on the whole lot or a two-story structure on half the lot. A FAR of one limits the property to either a one-story office or retail or a one- or two-family home.

Outside of Manhattan, there are two million housing units within one kilometer of a subway stop. 63% have a maximum allowable FAR of 1.35 or less. In other words, nearly two-thirds of properties are required—by law—to be one or two-family homes. To build a typical apartment building with ten stories requires a FAR of at least 6.

Zoned Out

Also, within the 1KM zone, many structures were built before the FAR caps were imposed in 1961 and are currently above the maximum allowable FAR (since they were grandfathered). Tearing down a building, in this case, to build a new one, is uneconomic because the developer would need to produce less floor space than what’s there now. 56% of residential structures are either overbuilt or within 25% of the allowable maximum, a de facto limit, given all the hurdles to redevelopment.

In short, the vast majority of residential structures within walking distance are three stories or less and are legally required to stay that way. What’s a good phrase for this? How about anti-useful-transit-oriented (AUTO) zoning (AUTOZone)?

Wasted on 242nd Street. This is a typical example of how New York does not do transited-oriented development. Adjacent to the last stop on the 1 train is a string of one-story retail buildings. These lots should contain mixed-use mid-rise apartment buildings.

What Would Real TOD Look Like?

How many more units and subway riders could Gotham have if it adopted a relatively modest version of transit-oriented zoning? Here are a few examples.

Case I

Let’s exclude Manhattan and say the City upzones all residential properties to a maximum FAR of 4 if within one kilometer of a subway stop. If an existing building has a residential FAR above 4, it keeps that value.[1]

Under this scenario, if fully built out New York city could build about 4 million net new units, and with few buildings taller than ten stories (calculations and assumptions here). As a side note, Mayor Adam’s best projection for office-to-residential conversions is 20,000 new units.

The average building would have 14 units versus 4.7 now—hardly mammoth skyscrapers. With a relatively modest increase in zoning caps, Gotham could get an enormous number of units and new straphangers. Based on my estimates, a 10% increase in the population within a one-kilometer (0.62 miles) radius of a subway stop increases ridership at that stop by 7%. Given those four million new units, that’s a new population of about 10 million people!

Case II

Well, maybe you say that a maximum FAR of 4 is too high. Let’s repeat the exercise with a cap of 3 (excluding Manhattan) or the current FAR on the property, whichever is higher. This scenario gets us a net increase in units of 2.8 million units, with a corresponding population increase of seven million residents.

Case III

Perhaps you say it’s better to have a sliding scale, with higher FAR caps closer to the stops and diminishing further away. Let’s say we go with a maximum FAR of 6 for, say, 0 to 200 meters (0.12 miles), 4 for 200 to 500 meters (0.31 miles), and 3 for 500 to 1000 meters (0.62 miles). The results get us back to something similar to Case I, with a net increase of some 4 million units and a net increase in the population of 10 million.

The Bigger Picture

Under these scenarios, based on relatively modest changes in the FAR restrictions, we can potentially get tremendous increases in housing units and transit riders. Ironically, we are not talking about Manhattan-like densities. Instead, these exercises show the need to replace the many one- and two- family homes with low- and mid-rise apartment buildings. The scenario numbers are so high because we are talking about vast quantities of urban space throughout the four boroughs—75 square miles of developable land (excluding streets and parks). By forcing most of the city to be three stories or less makes, vast acreage goes wasted; the result is unaffordable housing and an underutilized subway system.

Zoned Out in Brooklyn. This map shows that about 90% of Brooklyn buildings within one kilometer (0.62 miles) of a subway stop is mandated by law to be low rise or is prohibited to have housing by keeping the maximum allowable residential FARs less than 2.5. Note that a typical Brooklyn brownstone has an FAR of 3. Sources: here

Getting to TOD

I suggest two possible strategies for getting to transit-oriented development. One is relatively “easy” in that it follows the standard approaches used by the City over the last few decades—it’s the “carrot” approach of incentivizing developers but not having any “sticks” to punish inaction. The second would be more controversial but is not without precedent.

The “Carrot” Approach

The first approach is to systematically upzone for more housing in neighborhoods within either 0.5 miles or 1 kilometer of a subway stop. The upzoning can be done strategically to encourage relatively more units at particularly underutilized stops.

The upzonings must be generous enough to incentivize the construction of apartment buildings. FARs of at least four near the subway lines are likely necessary. A more flexible air rights market can help redistribute FAR more efficiently to where it is needed.

The upzonings would also come with generous construction or tax subsidies. This type of program would be similar to New York’s recently-lapsed 421a program, which gave large tax breaks to developers, generally with strings attached to provide a certain amount of affordable units.

The “True Friends” Strategy

Another strategy is arguably more controversial and would run into greater resistance. But it could be more helpful to the MTA’s long run financial position (and reduce its dependence on taxes and subsidies). This approach would be like the Hong Kong model, where the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corp. owns the land around all its transit stops. Between the sale of development rights, income from rents and ridership, the MTR operates without any state subsidies and runs at a profit!

In the case of New York, the process would need to unfold like the current Penn Station Revitalization plan. The state declares particular lots as “blighted” and takes ownership through the eminent domain process (after compensating the owners). The designated agency sells the development rights.

Regarding the TOD for the subway, officials would create Special TOD Zones. The land in condemned and brought under the ownership of the MTA, which sells the development rights through long-term ground leases. As the property owner, the MTA gets the land lease revenue to help run the subway system.

Creative zoning can also allow the MTA to develop property on the elevated lines themselves, say above or inside the stations to provide more retail and other services. Similarly, in underground stations, where practical, the MTA can expand the subterranean space for mini-malls or other forms of commercial space. Much of this would make sense if it had a “captured audience” from denser neighborhoods.

A TOF (Transit-Oriented Future)?

The good news is that Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams have recently begun discussing the need to address the housing affordability problem and the role that transit-oriented development can play. However, so far, no substantive policy proposals have been put forward, and it’s likely that, without meaningful reform, Nimby Nation will block significant growth in New York’s housing stock.

As I have discussed elsewhere, policies for change require both carrots—incentives and payouts—and sticks—punishments for inaction. However, real progress will only occur when those seeking to prevent change come to see change as being in their economic and political interest. 

The way to do this is to create strong inducements for a pro-housing and TOD environment. Examples include:

Political leaders must realize that the status quo is no longer sufficient to handle our current problems. They require new leadership, governance, and policies. The success of New York’s vast subway system is being thwarted by its stringent zoning regime. It’s high time that Transit and Planning became friends (or more!) and that Gotham’s leaders kindle the relationship.

 

—

[1] Note for this and the remaining exercises, I treat Staten Island the same as the other outer boroughs in terms of FAR changes.

by Jason Barr 7 Comments

Welcome to the FAR Dome: By How Much is Gotham Allowed to Grow?

Jason M. Barr            January 31, 2022

[Note this post is the fourth installment in on-going series on the history of the floor area ratio (FAR) and modern zoning. The rest of the series can be found here.]

Housing affordability is a major concern for New Yorkers. Gotham’s renaissance in the 21st century has drawn in more residents, workers, and tourists, paying top dollar for scarce housing. On the supply side, there is a suite of “frictions” that slow down the creation of new housing to match this demand. These include the high cost of land and construction, the difficulty in acquiring sites and tearing down old structures, and the rise of “NIMBYism” (“not in my backyard”), where residents engage in lawsuits or have their Community Boards lobby to stop more housing. The city’s zoning codes likely also play a role.

YIMBY Versus NIMBY

To most people, zoning—the rules that dictate what landowners can (or cannot) do with their properties—is an arcane subject. Yet, for a small group of initiates, it is a subject of great passion. The battles between the YIMBYists (“Yes, in my backyard”) and NIMBYists are fundamentally about whether these regulations should become more permissive, such as allowing high-rise towers on low-rise blocks or permitting single-family homeowners to subdivide their dwellings.[i]

YIMBYists see loosening the zoning rules as the “low hanging fruit” for affordable housing. While NIMBYists see restrictive zoning as protection against what they perceive as a range of evils that would otherwise be inflicted upon them, including gentrification, the loss of historical landmarks, and more traffic congestion.

Though some of these fears are valid, one fact is clear: a city can’t dig its way out of a housing affordability problem. The more restrictions imposed and the more it says “no!” the deeper the hole gets. Residents might say, “Construction is fine as long as it’s not in my neighborhood.” But when every community says that we have a problem. No one wants to be left holding the “hot potato.” And the debate about where more housing should go rages on.

However, reforming the zoning rules has traditionally been the third rail of housing politics (though there has been some recent talk about pro-housing policies from Governor Hochul and Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). No mayor since 1960 has been able to effect wholescale zoning reform. This begs the question: How have the zoning rules changed over the decades, and is zoning really to blame for the city’s affordability problems?

Crunching the Numbers

To this end, I crunched the numbers. I will detail my findings below but suffice it to say, the role of zoning on New York’s housing market shows some surprising and seemingly contradictory facts. On the one hand, the theoretical maximum population that the city could hold—in terms of housing units—has increased from about 11.9 million in 1961 to 16.6 million today—an increase of 1.4 billion square feet (130 km2) of residential space.[ii] From this perspective, one could say that changes in the zoning codes have allowed the city—in theory—to nearly double its current population of 8.8 million.

On the other hand, only a handful of areas have seen a practical loosening of the rules, primarily in the old manufacturing and commercial centers. The rest has remained relatively static.  In fact, only seven out of 59 Community Districts are responsible for 55% of the total net increase in allowable residential floor area. And 25% comes just from Lower Manhattan and Midtown.

For that matter, much of New York is already built out past the current maximum allowable floor area. 39% of residential properties now are at or exceed the current permissible floor area because they were grandfathered under older regulations.

Before we turn to the specific findings, let’s first review the rules and their history.

Order from Chaos: Since 1916, New York City has attempted to create a more ordered city through zoning.

Zoning in the 21st Century

Today, there are two key components to zoning (though hundreds of specific rules and regulations). The first dictates each property’s use: residential, commercial, or manufacturing. Some properties in commercial districts allow for mixed uses, such as ground-floor retail in an apartment building. And in other cases, property owners can choose their uses. But the vast majority of properties require only one use, especially in residential neighborhoods.

The idea is that by separating structure types, residents are protected against harm that businesses or industries might impose, be it traffic congestion, noise, or air pollution (i.e.,  negative externalities.)

The FAR Dome

The second method by which zoning regulates buildings in New York is limiting the so-called Floor Area Ratio (FAR). The FAR is given as a multiple which indicates the amount of floor area relative to the size of the lot and thus dictates the total amount of building space that can be provided.

This limit essentially places New York under a hypothetical dome that caps the total amount of building space when added up for each property. As we shall see below, this dome was created by design–by planners during the Great Depression who intended to keep New York from becoming ever denser.

The Empire State Building

To give some examples of the FAR, let’s take the case of the Empire State Building. It has 102 floors with 2.8 million square feet of space (260,129 m2). The lot is 91,351 square feet (8,487 m2), giving it an actual built FAR of 31 (2.8 million/91,351). However, if the building owner decided to tear it down and create a new office skyscraper, the “base” allowable FAR is only 15. The developer can get another 3 by providing a plaza and perhaps buying some air rights that might get it back to 31. But suffice it say, under current zoning rules, a rebuilding of the Empire State Building would have to overcome many zoning hurdles and would likely not be possible “as of right.”

Douglaston, Queens

If we travel to the city’s suburban areas, we can look at the FARs there. For example, let’s take the super-leafy neighborhood of Douglaston, Queens. A randomly chosen house built in 1925 has an actual FAR of 0.3 (2,427 ft2 on an 8,000 ft2 property), while the law allows a maximum of 0.5. In theory, the owner of this house could tear down the property and build a 4,000 square foot (372 m2) “McMansion.” The fact that this current home is “underzoned” suggests that zoning, in and of itself, may not be the sole friction to neighborhood densification.

Downzoned New York. The Community Districts in red lost allowable floor area between 1961 and 2021, despite having subway access. Source: here.

A Brief History of New York City Zoning

But how did the city get to the FAR as its primary way to limit density? The short answer is that it was a decades-long process to limit city growth.

1916: Envelopes and Wedding Cakes

Starting in 1913, New York began to consider the idea of zoning, which did not exist at the time. As discussed in more detail in another post, reformers were horrified by what they thought of as a suite of urban ills tied to the free market in real estate: “slums”—created by greedy landlords—were overcrowded vectors of disease, vice, and poverty; skyscraper districts were over-congested canyons, where ego-building was destroying the property values of innocent landlords next door. Apartment buildings were being constructed out in the suburbs, where free-standing, single-family housing ought to be.

The result was the 1916 Zoning Resolution which created three sets of maps. The first established the so-called setback rules. As a building went taller, the upper floors had to be set back from the street based on a formula. In Downtown and Midtown, the rules incentivized the so-called Wedding Cake style of building. The second set of maps dictated commercial, residential, or unrestricted use. The last set dictated allowable lot coverage, ensuring open space around each building.

The Disappointments of the Roaring Twenties

To planners, however, the real estate boom of the Roaring Twenties was a disaster. Midtown and Downton saw the rise of the new crop of record-breakers. The Bronx and Brooklyn saw neighborhood after neighborhood give way to apartment buildings. And inner-city slums remained. The problems of density seemed just as bad after zoning as before.

In 1934, a report published by the New York City housing authority estimated that if fully built out, New York could hold 77 million residents and 343 million workers. These figures were then used as propaganda to change the rules.

The Great Depression gave voice to a new generation of reformers. World War I had demonstrated to many the power of government planning and, along with the Garden City movement, allowed planners to work toward downzoning the city in the name of “Better Living through Planning.” Out of this zeitgeist emerged the current regulations.

1935: The Birth of the Floor Area Ratio

In the public consciousness, 1961 saw the birth of the FAR when New York adopted it citywide. But this is not true. While I have detailed the story elsewhere, let me summarize. In 1935, Robert D. Kohn, architect and planner, with help from the architect and technocrat Frederick Ackerman, wrote a report for the City Club of New York, urging the floor area ratio to limit building bulk.

Kohn’s document was studied by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s administration (with funding support from the Works Progress Administration), which created its own report, “Zoning for the City of New York,” written by Theodore T. McCrosky in 1938.

This report set the blueprint for modern zoning. Instead of three sets of maps—one for use, height setbacks, and lot coverage—McCrosky proposed one set of maps, with use districts and FAR limits combined. From there, the idea of the floor area ratio spread throughout the United States and beyond in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, a quarter-century after it was introduced, it returned to Gotham and went into effect in December 1961.

Rezoned Gotham. This maps shows which Community Districts (CDs) lost allowable residential floor area, gained modest amounts, and had significant upzonings. Most of the large upzonings were in a semi-circle running from lower Manhattan and along the East and Harlem Rivers. Source: here.

Post 1961

The original zoning maps issued back then have continued to evolve. The rules are not wholly static, and adaptations reflect changing realities. Here, I itemize a few of the most important alterations.

Air Rights

One of the earliest discoveries about floor area ratio limits was that it made “air” a valuable commodity. While the city created a FAR dome, the “shape” of the dome could depend to some degree on the private market. Let’s say you have an old office building with a FAR of 5, but you are allowed to have a taller building with a FAR of 10.

If you so desire, you can sell the unused airspace to your neighbor for a negotiated price. The neighbor gets to build taller, and you are compensated to keep your building at the lower density. The total FAR of the block does not change. Planning officials recognized the right to sell unused development rights in the 1970s, and this market has been an important part of zoning ever since. I will have more to say about “air rights” in a future post.

Mixed-Use Zones

In 1991, the city classified some neighborhoods as mixed-used, particularly in districts that formerly had significant office or loft space that could be readily converted to housing. The lot owner has the right to choose between the older zoning designation (say manufacturing) or residential. Today about 3,900 properties (0.5%) are zoned for mixed-use. This has been particularly important in Lower Manhattan, where aging skyscrapers have been converted to apartments.

Landmarked Neighborhoods

The demolition of the old Penn Station in 1963 gave rise to the preservation movement in New York and the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Individual buildings can be declared landmarks, and their facades cannot be altered. Whole neighborhoods have also been designated historic districts. Within them, owners cannot tear down these structures even if their current FARs are less than the allowable maximum. Today, 3.6% of properties are in a historic district throughout the five boroughs. For Manhattan, that number is 27% (though only on 11% of its developable land).

Contextual Zoning

In 1987, the Quality Housing Program was established, which sought to promote architecture in line with the historic urban fabric by including street wall provisions and maximum building heights. The goal was to have new buildings mirror the older ones. The use of the FAR (particularly with FAR bonuses for plazas) promoted tower-in-the-park development. By the 1980s, many felt it was bad urbanism.

Today, 39% of properties have some contextual zoning regulations. The contextual rules, however, often make achieving the maximum allowable FAR difficult, if not impossible, since they might require height limits or other architectural features that would limit the possible building space. It’s likely another source of “frictions” for providing new housing, and it’s a topic I hope to return to in the future. In my analysis below, I do not consider the impact of contextual zoning on the maximum allowable FAR, and thus my values for 2021 might overstate the theoretical maximum.[iii]

Rezonings

As New York’s economy and neighborhoods continue to evolve, some old zoning designations are no longer relevant or helpful. For this reason, large parcels or neighborhoods can undergo large-scale rezonings.

This can take place in one of two ways. The first is on the initiative of the property owner. In 1975, the city created the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), allowing private developers to petition to change a property to a use that the developer prefers. The ULURP process is often drawn out since many players are involved. Whether it’s good or bad for the housing market is left for another discussion. But suffice to say, it’s been used to convert old industrial sites to residential and commercial land.

Second, rezonings can be initiated by the city government, which works toward changing the maps in particular communities. Most recently, this has taken place around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and in the SoHo and NoHo neighborhoods in Manhattan. In 2010, NYU’s Furman Center looked at the city’s neighborhoods rezonings under Mayor Bloomberg and found that the number of upzonings more or less matched the number of downzonings, so the net increase in allowable floor area was slight.

Sixty Years of the Floor Area Ratio: What Has Changed?

Economists debate to what degree zoning creates frictions in the housing market. To provide evidence, I have performed an analysis that compares the 1961 zoning maps to those of today. Here, I investigate the following questions: How have residential floor area ratios changed over the years, and what do these changes say about the city’s ability to grow its housing stock? More details on data sources, preparation, and analysis can be found here.

Maximum Capacity

For 1961, I estimate that if the city had been fully built out, it could have had 7.6 billion square feet (710 km2) of total building space, with a maximum of 4.8 billion square feet (442 km2), or 62%, for residential.

Assuming a citywide average of 400 square feet (37 m2) per person, the residential population was capped at a theoretical maximum of 11.9 million.[iv] In 1960, the city’s population was only 7.8 million. The 1961 rules, however, represented a sizeable downzoning from the 1916 codes, which had a theoretical maximum population of 55 million around that time.

What has happened since 1961? Today, if built to maximum capacity, the city could hold up to 8.2 billion square feet (762 km2) with 6.5 billion square feet (604 km2), or 78%, for residential, which could contain a theoretical maximum population of 16.2 million people.

Overbuilt New York. This map shows the properties where the current residential floor area exceeds the maximum allowable under the current zoning rules (or are in historic districts). These properties constitute 39% of New York’s residential buildings. Source: PLUTO file.

Uneven New York: A Tale of Two Cities

It would seem, on the surface, that the city’s zoning rules are not a direct barrier to building more housing. The total theoretical maximum permissible residential building space has grown by 36% over six decades. However, when one drills down a bit and looks across New York’s neighborhoods, one sees a tale of two cities.

Across the 59 Community Districts (CDs), eleven (19%) lost allowable floor area either through downzoning or historic district creation. More striking is that all these Community Districts also have subway lines running through them. That means, by design or accident, New York has reduced the transit-oriented city.

Because of the difficulty in assembling lots, the costs of new construction, and the time it takes to shepherd the process to completion, one would surmise that the maximum allowable floor area should increase by a relatively generous amount to “compensate” the developers for the high costs of new construction.

Let’s use the admittingly arbitrary number of 25% for the assumed threshold for allowable floor area growth that would presumably incentivize more construction (the actual number is left for future research).  The data reveal that nearly 60% of the CDs had allowable FAR growth (or decline) of less than 25%. On the other hand, maximum allowable floor area growth of greater than 50% has occurred in only 20% of the Community Districts.

In summary, an analysis of upzonings and downzonings shows that 11% of Community Districts have reduced the total amount of allowable residential space—i.e., they have been downzoned and cannot densify. 60% of CDs have either been downzoned or have seen limited growth in allowable residential building space. Only 20% of neighborhoods have seen significant jumps in allowable housing, mostly in the central neighborhoods, like lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. In fact, five CDs are responsible for 50% of the total increase in the maximum allowable residential floor area.

Overbuilt Gotham

As discussed above, the zoning rules dictate the maximum allowable Floor Area Ratio (FAR). But ultimately, whether higher FARs incentivize more construction depends on the buildings that already exist. Many residential structures were completed before the 1961 codes, with 71% of the city’s residential buildings built before 1951.

So, if a developer is going to tear down an older structure to build a denser one, the allowable FAR needs to be sufficiently higher than the current one. However, we see a hurdle to new construction once we compare today’s maximum allowable FARs to the actual built FARs.

Currently, 39% of the city’s residential buildings are above their respective allowable FARs, and 63% are above or within 25%. In other words, for nearly two out of every three residential buildings, it is either impossible or uneconomic to tear the building down to increase housing availability.

The distribution of the “extra FAR,” especially in the outer boroughs, is nearly random, making the problem worse. 50% of the city’s properties with extra FAR are on lots of 2,500 square feet (25’ x 100’, 232 m2) or less. To effectively use that extra FAR requires buying up neighboring properties to make the economics more favorable. In sum, only 54% of the city’s residential buildings have extra FAR, and at least half of those are on small lots.

Policies

The question of this post has been to what degree does zoning, especially limits on the floor area ratio, create barriers to new housing construction that could reduce the affordability crisis? The analysis shows that, while the theoretical maximum of allowable residential FAR has grown 36% in sixty years, many neighborhoods have either been downzoned or not seen meaningful gains that encourage construction. In fact, it appears to that increases in allowable FAR growth have occurred mostly in Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and gentrifying neighborhoods.

For that matter, nearly half of the city’s rental stock falls under the rent stabilization program, which caps rent increases. Rent stabilization remains in effect when the citywide housing vacancy rate is below 5%. But, because rent stabilization itself reduces vacancy and prevents densification, it helps to perpetuate itself. Thus, the government needs to incentivize new construction throughout the five boroughs so that the program melts away.

While I have discussed policies in other posts, the results here suggest a few more ideas. Upzonings in non-central neighborhoods need to be meaningful in that the increases in allowable FAR should be at least 25-30% more than what is currently built. There are thousands of pre-War five-story apartment buildings with built FARs between 4 and 5, while their allowable FARs are 4 or less. For these lots to provide more units, their allowable FARs need to be, say, in the 6 – 7 range, so that 10-story structures can rise in their place.

Furthermore, today there are about 175,000 detached single-family dwellings (23% of all residential structures)—each with one housing unit. If the zoning rules were changed to allow for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) or subdivisions to two-family homes, this could, in theory, double the housing provided by these units.

Lastly, the city needs to incentivize the merging of lots. One way to do this is to provide a zoning bonus based on the size of the combined lot. So, if a developer buys two adjacent lots and combines them, she will get additional floor area greater than the FAR of the individual lots (say the two lots each have a FAR of 3, the combined lot could have a FAR of 5).

The Future?

Two facts about Gotham are apparent. First, wholescale zoning reform has been off the table for six decades. Second, the city has a housing affordability problem. Though a thorough rethinking of the rules is needed—they were created when urban density was seen as an unmitigated disaster—we are going to have the current framework for some time to come.

Since this is the case, it is necessary to see how the zoning regulations are blocking new construction. Housing affordability will only become real when housing supply across the city outstrips demand. Changes in the zoning rules can help realize that reality.

 

Keep reading other posts on the history of the Floor Area Ratio and NYC Real Estate here.

—

[i] The debates about the rezoning of the Gowanus Canal and SoHo and NoHo neighborhoods show how fierce this debate can get.

[ii] To calculate the maximum population, I estimate the total residential floor area for 1961 and 2021 and then divide by 400 the average building space per person in the city.

[iii] I also ignore the possibility that developers can get FAR bonuses for providing plazas or other amenities. These bonuses tend to be allowed only in central districts with the greatest density.

[iv] I took the total residential floor area in 2021 and divided it by the population, which gave 400 square feet per capita. For simplicity, I assumed this number for 1961, which, from what I can tell, was probably about the same back then as well.

by Jason Barr 1 Comment

The Birth and Growth of Modern Zoning (Part III): FAR and Wide

Jason M. Barr (@JasonBarrRU)      November 1, 2021

If you ask someone familiar with New York City real estate about the birth of modern zoning, they’ll point to 1961, the year the city implemented the floor area ratio (FAR) as the primary method to control building density. Sixty years later, the FAR is still going strong and, arguably, is the most popular planning tool globally.

The FAR rules give the maximum allowable building area relative to the size of the lot. FARs are frequently set to less than one in suburban districts, forcing landowners to build single-family homes. In central areas, the base residential FAR can be as high as 10 or 12, allowing for high-rises. Central Paris, for example, is a FAR 3 town. By capping the FAR, cities implicitly dictate how many people can live or work in each neighborhood.

The Great Depression

Indeed, the FAR was created in New York. However, its conception emerged two and half decades before 1961, during the Great Depression. It circulated within Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s administration, and, in 1940, the FAR was incorporated into revisions of the 1916 zoning codes to limit density in leafy, residential neighborhoods.

During the 1940s, the idea of capping FARs percolated in planning circles, spreading outward from New York like ripples in a pond. Planners had become convinced that the first generation of zoning codes, which radiated out of New York in 1916, was inadequate and unable to check the evils of urban density. The FAR had a certain simplicity and gave planners a degree of control that they could not get from other regulations. By the late 1940s, it was known FAR and wide. The irony is that New York was two decades late to its own party.

How did the FAR spread across the country? And why did New York dither as the world began to embrace it? To answer these questions, we must go back to 1935, while the Great Depression held the nation in its grip.

Robert D. Kohn and the Birth of the FAR

The story begins with the Regional Planning Association of American (RPAA). During its heyday in the 1920s, it was an informal group of architects, planners, and writers, troubled by the ills of urban life. It aimed to make cities more healthful by promoting deconcentration and decentralization.  RPAA members were inspired by their British counterparts, mostly notably Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, and Thomas Adams, who spearheaded the Garden City movement in the U.K.

In 1935, architect, reformer, and RPAA member Robert D. Kohn (1870-1953) led a housing committee at the City Club of New York, an organization devoted to promoting enlightened local policies. Kohn’s committee was established to weigh in on zoning reform. And it is Robert Kohn, more than any other individual, who was responsible for creating the floor area ratio. Kohn’s committee drafted a memo promoting the FAR to control housing density—the first time this idea appeared in print. The document also asked City Club President, Richard S. Childs, to push Mayor La Guardia to take up the mantle of zoning reform.

Kohn was assisted by architect, and City Club and RPAA member, Frederick L. Ackerman (1878–1950), who, in 1934, became the first Technical Director of New York City Housing (NYCHA). From there, he issued reports (screeds, really) on the evils of the free market and the inadequacy of the current zoning regulations. In a 1934 NYCHA report, co-written by William F. R. Ballard, he estimated that if the city was fully built out under the 1916 codes, it would have a resident population of 77 million and a daytime working population of 350 million.

No matter that these numbers were never realistically obtainable (New York’s population in 1930 was 6.9 million), they were cited in report and after report to motivate people to take zoning reform more seriously.

The Joint Committee

Child’s letter to La Guardia produced results. A new joint committee was formed with members of the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning and the City Club, which continued to recommend the implementation of FAR controls. This report was followed by yet another in 1938, entitled “Zoning for the City of New York,” by the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning with funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The FAR was able to make headway during the Depression because President Roosevelt’s administration was funding research that allowed planners the chance to study and promote what they had been thinking about for some time. As this report indicates,

This investigation logically carried the work [of the joint committee] one step further, resulting in drafting the skeleton framework for a new zoning resolution. This framework carried out the general thinking of the committee, and introduced some modifications and refinements of detail…..It is now generally accepted opinion that the time has come for New York City to overhaul its zoning structure and bring it up to date.

The report was written by Theodore T. McCrosky (1902-1968), who was one of the pivotal spreaders of FAR. It might not be too much of a stretch to say that he was the Johnny Appleseed of modern zoning. Given his key role, why has he all been forgotten in planning history? (He does not even have a Wikipedia page, for example, though the New York Times did publish his obituary). We’ll come back to this below.

Theodore McCrosky

McCrosky was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska, and graduated with a civil engineering degree from Yale University in 1923. After graduate work at Louvain University, he taught at Yale and worked in traffic engineering and city planning. In 1928, he was hired by the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs as an assistant to the general director of plans and surveys, Thomas Adams—one of the world’s foremost Garden City planners. As described in an earlier post, Adams and Robert Whitten promoted FAR-like planning in their writings, especially in the widely influential Regional Plan. Adams and Whitten were the godfathers of the FAR (godFARthers?).

In 1929, McCrosky traveled to Nanjing to advise Kuomintang officials on a master plan for what was to be the new capital of China. When he returned stateside, he became planning director for the City of Yonkers.

FAR Montage. Examples of housing in New York City with different floor area ratios (FARs). Upper left: FAR 5.0, lower left: FAR 0.5, middle: FAR 16.9, upper right: FAR 3.3, lower right: FAR 1.0.

Zoning for the City of New York

By 1938, McCrosky was back in New York, where he was hired by the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning to write the report. It would set the blueprint for modern zoning, not only by introducing the FAR for comprehensive building bulk limits but also by introducing the kinds of zoning maps that we have today.

In 1916, the enacted zoning codes were specified in three separate maps—one for height setbacks, another for open space requirements, and a third for use (residential, commercial, or unrestricted). McCrosky’s report combined them into the now-standard method of placing all three within each zone (in addition to FAR requirements, sunlight provisions, and all sorts of other regulations).

For example, the R1 district was for “single-family detached dwellings and its accessory buildings.” The maximum FAR was to be set at 0.65. The R2 district was for similar uses as R1 but with a maximum allowable FAR at 0.8. All told, the report offered nine residential zones, three business districts, and an industrial zone. In hindsight, it was quite conservative. Today, in New York, there are ten main residential districts, eight commercial districts, and three for manufacturing. And each category has one or more subcategories. By my count, there are about 170 different zoning areas.

The Civil Servant

Following his stint with the Mayor’s Committee, McCrosky became the first director of the Master Planning division in the newly formed City Planning Commission (see below). By 1938, McCrosky was a rising star. In 1940, the New York Times reported that

Theodore T. McCrosky of 32 Washington Square West was rated first in competitive examinations for the posts of city planning director at $6,000 and associate city planner at $5,000, according to an announcement yesterday by the Municipal Civil Service Commission….Following Mr. McCrosky, whose rating was 92.90 per cent, the list for associate city planner carries F. Dodd McHugh as second, with 85.93….Mr. McHugh also placed second in the test for city planning director.

However, just as he was basking in his magna cum lauds, McCrosky packed up his bags and headed to the Windy City to take over as the executive director of the Chicago Plan Commission. We will return to McCrosky (and McHugh) later.

Rexford Tugwell and the City Planning Commission

In 1933, Congressman Fiorello La Guardia (1882-1947) was elected as the 99th mayor of the City of New York. He ran on a fusion ticket of Republicans and good government parties after the fall of mayor Jimmy Walker (1881-1946). Walker, a member of the notorious Democratic Club, Tammy Hall, was popular while Gotham was booming in the Roaring Twenties, but then a corruption scandal forced him from office. La Guardia was determined to reform New York’s government to root out corruption and provide an expansive set of services and programs to relieve suffering from the Great Depression.

In this vein, La Guardia spearheaded the creation of a new city charter that would centralize decision-making in his office. Historically, power was decentralized through the city’s Board of Estimate, comprised of the five borough presidents, the mayor, the comptroller, and the Board of Alderman president.

Birth of the CPC

The new charter, adopted in November 1936, left the basic governmental organization intact but provided changes to reduce corruption, create new offices and divisions, and establish a civil service. The charter contained a provision for establishing a City Planning Commission (CPC), which had responsibility for zoning, producing a master plan, and preparing capital expenditures and budgets. To give teeth to the CPC, the charter indicated that CPC decisions were considered final unless a three-fourths majority of the Board of Estimate overturned them.

The Department of City Planning (DCP) was also formed to provide research and do the heavy lifting of the Commission. It was headed by the chairman of the City Planning Commission and staffed with engineers, architects, and experts. Both the Commission and the Department began functioning in 1938.

The Master Planner

La Guardia eventually picked the controversial figure of Rexford G. Tugwell (1891-1979) as the first chairman of the CPC. Tugwell studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. in economics. He taught at Columbia University from 1920 to 1932, and wrote widely on the need for economic planning. As historian Mark Gelfand writes,

No political figure of the 1930s was more closely identified with planning than Rexford Tugwell. Although allegations by his conservative opponents that Tugwell was a communist were unfair, defenders of the traditional American way of life were correct in concluding that the former Columbia University professor was not one of their own. Tugwell shared little of the American public’s faith in the market place as the impartial maker of decisions, either economic or political. The market place had been outmoded by the new machine age; society could no longer be run efficiently or justly on the principles of individualism and competition. Both businessmen and politicians, he insisted, thrived on uncertainty, whereas liberty, equality, and security in the modern world depended on exactitude and control. “Planning,” Tugwell told the American Economic Association early in the decade, “is a process of predicting and making it come true.”

In 1932, Tugwell was selected by President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his New Deal “Brain Trust.” After a stint in the Department of Agriculture in 1935, he was given a chance to create and direct the Resettlement Administration (RA) to aid struggling farmers.

The Resettlement Administration

One important component of the RA was its suburban resettlement program, which sought to relocate poor farmers to newly built “greenbelt towns” outside city centers, where they could find employment in other sectors. Initially, Tugwell hoped to build 25 greenbelt communities, but only three were completed (Greenbelt, MD; Greenhills, OH; and Greendale, WI).

To aid with his plans, Tugwell turned to New York architect and RPAA member Clarence Stein. During the 1920s, Stein worked with Kohn and Ackerman to develop America’s first Garden Cities, Sunnyside, Queens, and Radburn, New Jersey. By the time Tugwell arrived in New York, he was steeped in the RPAA’s ideas to de-densify cities.

FAR Example. This drawing shows three ways to build a structure, all with an FAR of 2. Source: NYC DCP.

Tugwell’s New York

Tugwell’s role in New York planning history merits a longer discussion. And I will have more to say in a future post about his stint in the Big Apple, but suffice it say, it was short and marked by defeat. Tugwell arrived in New York in 1938 and left for Puerto Rico in 1941, where he became the island’s governor. He was basically chased out of town, with his tail between his legs, by New York master builder and power broker Robert Moses, who held a dim view of Tugwell’s masterplan. (I will also return to Moses’ role in New York’s planning and zoning history in a future post.)

Tugwell tried to tackle zoning reform in 1939. His signature policy was to ban large billboards and flashing signs from retail districts. The proposal also stated that current signs in violation would not be grandfathered and had to be removed. The business community, landlords, and advertisers didn’t like this plan and were vocal in their protest. They were joined by those who saw this small non-conforming use rule as a slippery slope to greater regulation. Ultimately their objection led to the proposal’s defeat.

Nonetheless, amended zoning codes passed in June 1940. It had tweaks to the extant 1916 regulations and included FAR caps in newly created suburban zones. These additions were meant as a toehold into more extensive reforms, but the real work was to follow the implementation of a master plan. In the statement to the 1940 Zoning Proposal, the CPC claimed,

After careful consideration, it appears that more fundamental revision may be indicated upon completion of the basic Master Plan studies upon which the Commission and the Department of City Planning are now engaged. As the same time there would appear to be no good reason for denying to the residents of this City the advantages to be gained through such zoning provisions as are enjoyed elsewhere, are desirable in the City, and not inconsistent with the structure of the present Resolution….

Finally, there is introduced an entirely new principle of bulk limitation, designed to keep the bulk of buildings in these districts within reasonable limits, at the same time affording a maximum of leeway for individuality of design and arrangement. This bulk limitation is expressed in terms of the permissible area of floor space in the building in proportion to the area of the plot. For example, the 1.6 ratio permitted in F area districts is such as to permit the usual six-story apartment building, but if the height were increased, it would be necessary to decrease the coverage proportionally….The regulation is framed in terms of floor area, rather than cubic contents of building, because the latter would put a premium on low ceilings.

The Master Plan

Released in the fall of 1940, the proposed master plan had the ambition of flipping one-third of New York City into green space by 1990. As Gelfand writes, this was too much for Robert Moses whose

disdain for “do-gooders” also extended to their espousal of planning. Years of bargaining and compromising with governors, mayors, legislators, bankers, lawyers, property owners, engineers, and countless other groups had taught Moses that society was composed of too many disparate interests for any comprehensive, long-range master plan to be conceived and executed. A free society could plan, but only for limited objectives within a short time frame. Any “long-haired, ivory-tower” approach to planning was either not feasible or based on undemocratic premises. A master of the broker type of political universe he had inherited and helped form, Moses had sworn holy war on those “fanatic[al] and irresponsible” exponents of economic and political experimentation “who were quite ready to blow up the entire laboratory in order to insure a fair test of their latest invention.”

February 13, 1942, the City Planning Commission formally voted to scrap the master plan.

 Tugwell and Ludlow in Puerto Rico

After New York, Tugwell had a chance, as governor of Puerto Rico, to implement his ideas with a much freer hand. In 1942, he set up the Junta de Planificación, Urbanización y Zonificación de Puerto Rico—the Planning, Urbanization and Zoning Board—which hired William H. Ludlow as consultant.

William Ludlow

Ludlow is one of those hidden people in planning history. All we have left today is the footprints of his writings. I can find no obituary at his death; he has no Wikipedia page; and apparently has no biographies. Rather, he seems to have been a studious and serious soldier for the planning and zoning cause and did little to attract attention to himself. But from the digital gossamer, we can trace out bits of his actions.

In 1954, the Hartford Courant printed an obituary of Ludlow’s father, William Orr Ludlow, a well-known New York City architect. It mentions that Ludlow was survived by his family, including his planner son, William H. The Rockland County Journal-News in 1935 announced a wedding between Miss Wilma Chitterling of West Orange, New Jersey, and William H. Ludlow of Madison, New Jersey, also a Princeton University alumni. As for the newlyweds, “Following a brief motor trip in New York State, Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow will reside in Washington, where Mr. Ludlow is engaged in planning and research for the Resettlement Administration,” headed by Tugwell. At the RA, he contributed to several reports, and also worked with Clarence Stein.

Ludlow in New York

After about seven years in DC, Ludlow moved back to New York. He was hired to write a report for the Citizen’s Housing Council (CHC) of New York. The organization promoted affordable and safe housing (and claimed Frederick Ackerman among its membership). Ludlow’s 1944 CHC report, “Population Densities for New York City: A Technical Study of Urban Population Densities in Relation to City Planning,” set about defining and measuring population and building density throughout New York. The floor area ratio plays a key role.

Ludlow’s introduction begins with the “Ackerman Fact” that the city could hold 77 million residents if fully built out. He then discusses the need for “adequate density controls,” followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of the floor area ratio. Pro: “Relatively easily computed for single buildings, projects or small areas….Allows for flexibility of design. Can be applied to non-residential space.”  Cons: “Does not allow for differences in room and apartment sizes. If used for regulation, it may tend to result in minimum room sizes in new projects.” The report concludes that northern Manhattan and parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn should have residential FARs capped at 2.1, and the rest of the outer boroughs capped at 1.2.

The following year, Ludlow published two papers in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, specifically mentioning his work on the FAR for density control. Here, we can see that the ideas first developed in New York in the 1930s were increasingly part of the planners’ toolkit. And as such, they begin to appear in academic journals read by the planning profession.

Ludlow in Puerto Rico

After Tugwell established the Junta, Ludlow was hired as a planning consultant to work on developing zoning codes. They were implemented in San Juan in 1946 and contained FAR provisions. San Juan was thus the first city within U.S. territory to implement the FAR outside of New York.

The Spread of the FAR Stateside

Besides Ludlow, other planners from New York spread the FAR “good news” to the rest of mainland U.S., primarily through their reports and journal publications. For example, a year after Ludlow’s article about New York, F. Dodd McHugh published his research on Gotham in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, where, for example, he measures the relationship between population densities and floor area ratios.

Francis Dodd McHugh (1907-1978) studied architecture and planning at Cornell and Harvard Universities. As mentioned above, he worked for the Department of City Planning, New York City, and was City Planning Director from 1941 to 1946. After his public service, McHugh joined with McCrosky as planning consultants that were hired by many municipalities around to offer new zoning plans.

The 1950s

By the end of the 1940s, the FAR was common knowledge. A 1948 report by the American Public Health Association entitled “Planning the Neighborhood,” confirms that this to be true:

The measurement of building bulk in term of ‘floor area ratios’ has been found so useful as a density control that it being applied increasingly by planners both in the United States and Britain.

And by the 1950s, the FAR began its exponential spread into the zoning codes across America. Initial discussions showed up in Chicago in 1951, in San Francisco in 1952, and in Boston in 1953. By 1958, the FAR was so widely used across the country that no one seemed to remember its origins. In 1958, the American Society of Planning Officials admitted, “Just when the floor area ratio bulk control first appeared in a zoning ordinance is not certain.” (Answer:  New York, 1940.)

Chicago 1957

Chicago’s example is interesting because, as America’s second city, it beat New York to the punch, though that fact seems to be lost in our understanding of the FAR’s history. Exactly how it got to Chicago is not wholly known. The evidence suggests that even though McCrosky was director of the Chicago Plan Commission in 1941-42, following his seminal 1938 report, he did not spread the FAR there.

Rather, by the 1950s, it was in the ether winds blowing across the heartland. It appears in a report for the Chicago Plan Commission in 1951. Like the New York reports that preceded it, contained a detailed study of residential densities across the Windy City. The report cites its definition of the FAR from the 1948 “Planning the Neighborhood” study.

Under the leadership of local freight shipping magnate turned planner Henry F. Chaddick, Chicago began the process of creating a new zoning resolution. In October 1955, the city embraced the FAR, and the new zoning resolution was implemented in 1957. From there, FAR caps spread throughout Illinois.

McCroksy as Johnny Appleseed?

Returning to McCrosky, after World War II, he became the executive director of the Greater Boston Development Committee. But then, starting in 1948, in his private consulting practice with F. Dodd McHugh, he spread the FAR across America.

In 1952, McCrosky and McHugh were hired by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission to provide blueprints for rezoning the city, which included FAR cap provisions. Like New York, Philly appears to have dithered for a decade until 1962, when the FAR was formally implemented. By the end of the 1950s, McCrosky could boast of his influence.  In a court deposition, he revealed:

Well, among others, we prepared zoning ordinances for Yonkers, New York for Ossining village, for North Pelham, all of Westchester County; for Derby in Connecticut, for West Orange and Somerville and Manville, Jefferson Township and a good many other municipalities in New Jersey.

The Cast: Some of the Key Players in New York Zoning History. Clockwise from top left: Thomas Adams, Theodore McCrosky, Fiorello La Guardia, Rexford Tugwell, Robert Moses, and Jame Felt.

Why Did New York City Dither?

If New York invented the FAR, why did it take two decades to adopt it citywide? The short answer is strong opposition and divided leadership. The two-decade delay was not for lack of trying, but a new proposal was defeated each time. Eventually, a comprehensive rezoning was shepherded into law in 1960 by the widely-respected Planning Commissioner, James Felt (1903-1971).

Born in the Lowest East Side, Felt was a third-generation real estate man. After studying at the University of Pennsylvania, he returned to New York and established a firm, dealing in management, land assembly, and relocation of evicted tenants. His company, for example, amassed the land for Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, two huge residential projects in Manhattan built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company after World War II.

His New York Times obituary quoted Donald Elliot, the then chairman of the CPC, saying that Mr. Felt was “the father of modern zoning, as a result of his achievement in effecting the 1961 zoning resolution, the first change in the city’s zoning laws since 1907.”

Evidently, the Times was willing to take him at his word. But the two facts are not true. The city’s first zoning laws were enacted in 1916, not 1907, and, as discussed above, he was not the father of modern zoning (though the Times article helped perpetuate that myth). When Felt took over the reins of the CPC, the FAR and modern zoning were already decades old. His contribution was to effectuate what the city had struggled to accomplish for many years.

Zoning After Tugwell

After Tugwell left Gotham in 1940, Robert Moses was appointed a commissioner to the CPC.  Moses proposed a citywide rezoning in 1944. His plan was based on reforming the 1916 zoning codes rather than the systematic use of the FAR. The key element was to reduce bulk by making setback and open area rules stricter.

Interestingly, Irving V. A. Huie, a fellow member of the Commission, offered a FAR-based proposal, but Moses and the other commissioners rejected it. Despite opposition from the real estate community, the Board of Estimate passed Moses’ plan. However, the courts declared it illegal on a technicality related to the Board of Estimate’s voting procedure. The law, as handed down by Moses, was rejected.

The Harrison, Ballard & Allen Report

Then in 1948, the CPC Chairman Robert F. Wagner Jr, hired Harrison, Ballard and Allen (HB&A) as consultants to create a blueprint for a new zoning resolution. This report is interesting in a few respects. First, it is still circulated widely among New York planners (and is posted on the DCP website), and this gives the (false) impression that it was the first time in New York history that the FAR was part of any government-sanctioned report.

Secondly, one of the report’s authors William Ballard, who became CPC chairman from 1963 to 1966, was a protégée and co-author of Frederick Ackerman, who was intimately involved with the early conception of the FAR (which was used in guiding NYCHA housing projects at least as early as 1940). As discussed in another post, Ackerman was an avowed technocrat and believed that the perfect society could be designed by the technically oriented master planner. Ballard, as such, was there as the creation.

But the HB&A report, which uses the FAR as the central density-controlling feature, makes no mention of the FAR’s 15-year history. Why this might be, at this point, is subject to guesswork. One theory is that when the report was released, the FAR was so universal that no need was felt to mention its origins. Planners across the country already took it for granted. A second theory is that the authors wanted it to seem like it was their contribution rather than those who came before them. Regardless, today, the conventional wisdom is to give credit to the HB&A report for introducing the idea, and the focus on it has helped to erase knowledge of the roles played by the founders, including Kohn, Ackerman, Tugwell, McCrosky, McHugh, and Ludlow.

Ironically, despite the perceptions as it being pivotal, the HB&A report ultimately failed to be enacted. The plan, released in April 1951, had both supporters and detractors. One key opponent was…wait for it…Robert Moses. Between the opposition from within and without, the plan eventually died. Or as Stanislaw J. Makielski put it in his 1966 Ph.D. dissertation on the politics of zoning reform, “The Commission had been defeated by a strongly organized resistance and its own unwillingness to do battle for the HB&A plan.”

The Vorhees, Walker, Smith & Smith Report

Finally, when James Felt took the helm at the CPC, he hired yet another consulting firm in 1956 to offer a new zoning plan. Released in 1959, it was in a similar spirit to the HB&A report in that it relied on the FAR to reduce the city’s density. After public feedback, Felt and the CPC were able to revise the proposal and rebut the naysayers to get sufficient buy-in. Moses, again, was opposed to it, but he eventually switched to a “yes” vote after pressure from Felt.

In December 1960, New York City formally adopted the floor area ratio as the main tool to limit building bulk, and the law was to go into effect in December 1961. It represented a major downzoning, with a maximum population of 12 million, compared to Felt’s estimate of 55 million under the 1916 codes as they were written in 1956.

Triumph of the FAR

While the FAR’s originators, including Robert Kohn and Frederick Ackerman, were off the scene by 1960, they were the true fathers modern zoning. They were carried by the spirit of the age, which saw cities as messy, unhealthy, and exploitative. They came to believe in a technocratic ethic: that they could develop formulas to fine-tune the city like a sophisticated clock. Once they understood the key mathematical rules, they could adjust the city to their preferences and create order by design. These formulas, including the floor area ratio, were not value free.

Planners could not as easily control people or household sizes, but they could control building sizes and densities. As a result, they created vast swaths of urban land with very low maximum floor area ratios. These FAR caps were meant to check the “greediness” of developers who might have otherwise catered to the demand for apartment living. The FAR founders felt that the city should look more like the ideal Garden City as laid out by Ebenezer Howard and his “apostles.”

By the 1960s, with the publication of Jane Jacob’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the failures of public housing, slum clearance, and urban renewal, the belief in better living through technocracy and planning began to get pushback. Nonetheless, cities across the country could not shake their reliance on the FAR. Once implemented, it became an “absorbing state” because it was the one planning policy left from the technocratic heyday that allowed planners some modicum of control (and had great support from Nimbyists seeking to stop changes in their neighborhoods). For good or for bad, the FAR remains triumphant.

In next post, we take up how the FAR left America and spread to the rest of the world.

Continue reading Part I of this blog series on the birth of modern zoning during the 1920s here and Part II on the Great Depression here.

Buy the Book

Building the Skyline can be purchased through Amazon or Oxford University Press.

Credits

The New Amsterdam map on this page was sourced here, and the atlas image is from the 1891 Atlas of City of New York by GW Bromley & Co.

Website by
SQUAREWATER

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial