At a conference this month celebrating the 1961 Zoning Resolution, Deputy Mayor Robert Steel announced the city's 50th birthday gift to its 3,500-page zoning code: a set of "green zoning" proposals that would encourage energy-efficient construction, retrofits and installation of solar panels and green roofs.
Green is good. But the idea whose time has truly come after half a century is performance zoning rather than regulating on the basis of outdated categories.
The city's current zoning code divides the city into residential, commercial and industrial areas -- and lists all the uses permissible in each type of district. The list of "retail or service establishments" allowed in commercial zones begins with antique stores and ends with "watch or clock stores or repair shops" -- mentioning millinery shops, photographic studios, record stores, telegraphic offices and typewriter stores along the way.
It's hopelessly outdated. In zoning world, computer stores -- let alone mobile phone stores -- don't exist. (The closest the code gets is to recognize "depositories for storage of office records, microfilm or computer tapes, or for data processing" among the types of large retail establishments.)
By prescribing exactly what uses are allowed, zoning essentially outlaws uses not yet named or thought of. Without intending to, this suppresses innovation and economic evolution.
At the very least, uses should be ruled out of a district rather than having to be ruled in. For example, permissible retail or service establishments could be defined as stores other than those selling and repairing firearms.
But we must think bigger, finally doing a gut rehab of the code that orients it around the kind of city we want rather than the types of buildings that go in it.
Mixing together a variety of uses -- residential, business, entertainment, education, worship, retail, light manufacturing and more -- is one of the delights of city life. Urbanist Jane Jacobs identified diversity of uses as crucial to a city's vitality and economy. Over the past decade, Chairwoman Amanda Burden and her City Planning staff have developed many zoning tools to advance the city's economy and environment, but surely Burden's greatest contribution as planning director has been to recognize the importance of mixed use and encourage it.
Performance zoning would eliminate use labels altogether, replacing them with the realization that an establishment's impact on its neighbors -- noise, pollution, traffic -- is what really matters.
One example: Right now, zoning regulations allow a Y to be built virtually anywhere "as of right" -- no special approvals needed. Whether Mens' or Womens', Christian or Hebrew, a Y is a nonprofit community center.
On the other hand, every Equinox Fitness Club must have a special permit from the city's Board of Standards & Appeals to open in commercial or industrial districts -- and must renew it every 10 years. The rules ban "adult physical culture establishments" such as Equinox from residential districts entirely. The distinction makes no sense. Similarly, university business schools are allowed in areas zoned for two- and three-family houses, but "business colleges" must get a permit.
There are thousands of other examples of how byzantine, arbitrary and maddening our code is.
It's also anti-competitive. Perhaps most important for the city is to build on its strengths as an intellectual and creative capital. Overhauling use zoning would allow entrepreneurs and dress designers -- along with accountants and artists -- to work at home. Today, work activities are absent from all residential use lists.
New York all but invented zoning with its original 1916 code. Fifty years ago, it mapped out the 20th century city. It's time to reinvent zoning again.
Cohen is New York director for the Regional Plan Association.
To build a 21st Century New York City, Bloomberg Must Totally Rethink the Way Zoning Works
