(Economic) Heart Trouble
More than 30 years after its last major zoning change, the economic heart of New York City merits a checkup. According to City planners, the prognosis for East Midtown is not good: an aging office stock, a congested pedestrian network, global competition, and the lack of new office development threaten to undermine the economic competitiveness of the City. The cure, proposed by the Bloomberg Administration, is a rezoning of 78 blocks of … <Read More>
Banking group claimed proposed limitations on widths of new ground floor storefronts along Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and Columbus Avenue unfairly discriminate against banks. On June 21, 2012, the City Council’s Land Use Committee approved the Department of City Planning’s Upper West Side Neighborhood Retail Streets proposal. The proposal would establish two Special Enhanced Commercial Districts in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and establish limits on the widths of new and expanding ground floor retail stores, … <Read More>
City Planning Commission certified 140-block Bed-Stuy North Rezoning and 90-block West Harlem Rezoning: included in the Brooklyn proposal is a text amendment that would also apply Citywide and to areas of the Bronx. At City Planning Commission’s review session on May 7, 2012, the Commission certified the Department of City Planning’s contextual rezoning proposal for the northern half of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The Bedford-Stuyvesant North Rezoning plan would impact a 140-block area generally bounded … <Read More>
Two sites on Staten Island’s North Shore are currently used as parking lots for ferry terminal and baseball stadium. On August 11, 2011, the City’s Economic Development Corporation issued a request for expressions of interest for the disposition and redevelopment of two waterfront parcels totaling more than fourteen acres near the St. George Ferry Terminals in St. George, Staten Island. A 7.4-acre parcel (the North Site) abuts the Richmond County Bank Ballpark to the … <Read More>
Multi-building project will create 415 rental units along Coney Island’s boardwalk. On September 8, 2011, the City Council approved John Catsimatidis’s proposed 415- unit, mixed-use project on two vacant parcels on the western end of Riegelmann Boardwalk in Coney Island. The project site consists of an eastern and western parcel separated by West 36th Street and bounded by Surf Avenue to the north, the boardwalk to the south, West 35th Street to the east, and … <Read More>
Small rezoning would facilitate expansion of Woodrow Plaza shopping center. On June 29, 2011, the City Council approved Ottavio and Leonello Savo’s proposed expansion of the Woodrow Plaza shopping center at the corner of Woodrow Road and Rossville Avenue in Staten Island. Woodrow Plaza was built in the early 1980s and includes two, one-story buildings and a surface parking lot accessible from Rossville and Alverson Avenues. The project site consists of two wooded, vacant lots … <Read More>